BERESFORD, John Henry de la Poer, earl of Tyrone (1844-1895), of Curraghmore, co. Waterford

Francis Bernard was born in London in 1810, the son and heir of James Bernard, 2^nd earl of Bandon, the dominant political figure in the neighbourhood of Bandon, County Cork.1HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 270. His grandfather and namesake was MP in the Irish parliament for Ennis 1778-83 and Bandon 1783-90, his great-grandfather, James Bernard, was MP for County Cork, 1781-90: E.M. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800, iii, (2002), 175-6, 177-8. Strongly opposed to Catholic emancipation, the family was derided by Liberal opponents as being ‘a fair specimen of what has been called the “fungus aristocracy of Ireland”’, their position having been founded in the eighteenth century ‘by means of protestant ascendancy and the potato root’.2Daily News, 13 Sept. 1849. His grandfather had been the Anglican archbishop of Cashel and a younger brother, Charles, was the bishop of Tuam. Very shortly after coming of age in January 1831, Francis was returned unopposed in succession to his father at Bandon. Having been returned again by the Conservative corporation against his father’s wishes on at the 1831 general election, he resigned that July.3HP Commons, 1820-32, iii. 703. At the 1832 general election Bernard was withdrawn as a candidate for Bandon by his father, after the electors expressed misgivings about ‘being represented by a mere titled cipher’, and made way for his uncle, William Smyth Bernard.4HP Commons, 1820-32, iv. 269; Daily News, 13 Sept. 1849. At the invitation of the Cork Conservative Society he instead contested County Cork, but having failed to secure the co-operation of the aristocratic Whig faction, the ‘slim, pale-faced, boyish looking’ young candidate made a miserable showing on the hustings. Bernard, it was reported, ‘thrust ‘his entire face into his hat’ from which he rapidly read his speech ‘while the thousands that were crammed together in the Court house … made the foundation shake with thundering, sneering, whistling, singing, shrieking, roaring, baying, braying, hurraing, mixed up, now and again, with tremendous peals of inextinguishable merriment at his lordship’s expense’.5Freeman’s Journal, 27 Dec. 1832. Unsurprisingly, he came third in the poll behind the repealers Feargus O’Connor and Garrett Standish Barry. He again failed to secure a county seat in 1835 when, perhaps bruised from his previous encounter with the voters of Cork, he remained in England during the election.6I. d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork 1812-1844 (1980), 216-7; P. Holohan, ‘Kinsale Borough and Cork County Parliamentary Elections 1832: Politics and Broadsheets’, JCHAS, vol. 109 (2004), 157-98 [173-4].

Acceptable to neither borough nor county electors, Bernard involved himself in the Protestant Association of Great Britain and actively supported the Wesleyan Missionary Society. His nomination for the position of high sheriff of Cork was successfully challenged on the ground that he was also the deputy grand master of the Orange Lodge of Ireland.7Belfast News-letter, 17 May 1836; Hull Packet, 4 May 1838; Examiner, 20 Dec. 1835. However, with his father’s political influence fully restored at Bandon, he was returned unopposed in a by-election for the borough in February 1842, and held the seat without opposition at the 1847 and 1852 general elections.8Belfast News-letter, 15 Feb. 1842; Morning Chronicle, 23 Feb. 1842; Freeman’s Journal, 10 July 1852.

In the House, Bernard did not join the ultra-Tory opposition to Peel’s trade policies in 1842-4.9He was absent for the divisions on sugar duties on 14 and 17 June 1844: The Times, 19 June 1844, and see D.R. Fisher, ‘Peel and the Conservative Party: The Sugar Crisis of 1844 Reconsidered’, HJ, xviii (1975), 279-302. Yet, in spite of fact that the prime minister was said to have repeatedly paid him ‘flattering attention, and gone out of his way to compliment him’, he did oppose the ministry over the Maynooth grant in 1845.10Daily News, 13 Sept. 1849; Hansard, 16 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 804-11; 24 Apr. 1845, vol. 79, cc. 1294-5; The Times, 18 May 1845. Shortly before leaving the Commons in 1856, he still maintained that ‘this great Sebastopol of the Church of Rome must be erased, and no longer be allowed to remain a standing menace to the Protestantism of England’. As an avowed protectionist, he also opposed the repeal of the corn laws and became a member of the National Club.11Hansard, 15 Apr. 1856, vol. 141, cc. 1069-73; J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain 1829-1860 (1991), 210-3. Nevertheless, he supported the Irish coercion bills of 1847 and 1856, and, alongside Disraeli, spoke in opposition to the Irish franchise bill in 1850, arguing that it would give the towns an undue influence over the county constituencies and, by reviving ‘the dying embers of faction and political disunion in Ireland’, deter English investment in that country.12Belfast News-letter, 18 Apr. 1843; The Times, 15 May, 13 June 1843; Hansard, 10 May 1850, vol. 110, cc. 1329-34; Freeman’s Journal, 13 May 1850. Unsurprisingly, he supported Russell’s ecclesiastical titles bill the following year, which he thought necessary to prevent the ‘Protestant constitution’ from being ‘subverted by the wily machinations of the Pope of Rome’.13Hansard, 19 May 1851, vol. 116, cc. 1135-7. He did, however, vote for David Urquhart’s motion criticising the government’s handling of the issue: Hansard, 9 May 1851, vol. 116, cc. 780-834.

Though not always a regular visitor to the division lobby,14He was absent from the third reading of the corn law bill in 1845 and took part in only 21 of 257 divisions in 1853 (567th place), and 59 of 198 in 1856: The Times, 18 May 1845; Daily News, 21 Sept. 1853; J.P. Gassiot & J.A. Roebuck, Third letter to J.A. Roebuck: with a full analysis of the divisions in the House of Commons during the last session of parliament (1857), 27. Viscount Bernard spoke in the Commons on more than fifty occasions. Characteristically, his first contribution concerned an assault upon a Protestant excursion party in Galway.15Hansard, 28 June 1842, vol. 64, cc. 701-2. Yet even the sternest critics of his ‘decidedly sectarian views’ recognized Bernard’s ‘many excellent personal qualities’ and regarded him as an effective Irish member. He was said to be ‘painstaking and diligent in the performance of his parliamentary duties’ and, while ‘neither eloquent nor brilliant’, his speeches were well regarded in spite of his ‘nasal intonations’ and a voice which displayed ‘the drawl of the convent--- mingled with a Cork accent’.16Daily News, 13 Sept. 1849.

The famine was a watershed in Bernard’s political career. He had long been sceptical about the efficacy of the Irish poor laws, and in 1843 he criticised the heavy burden they placed on poorer ratepayers, some of whom, he contended, ‘were themselves little better than the inmates of the workhouses’.17Hansard, 23 Mar. 1843, vol. 67, cc. 1400-2, and see ibid., 26 Apr. 1849, vol. 104, cc. 872-4. He highlighted the failures of the system during the famine, arguing for its temporary suspension and the provision instead of outdoor relief and public works.18Hansard, 20 Jan. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 188-90. In February 1847, he alerted the House to the ‘real condition of the Irish peasant’, then suffering famine ‘in its most shocking and appalling form’, though he ‘shrunk from narrating the details of what he witnessed from morning to night’.19Hansard, 1 Feb. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 654-62. At the same time, he defended Irish landlords against general accusations of ‘cruel and unfeeling conduct’ during the crisis and argued that, as a body, they were ‘of as untarnished private and unblemished public honour as the landlords of England’.20Hansard, 12 June 1846, vol. 87, cc. 397-402; 19 Feb. 1847, vol. 90, c. 285-; 8 Feb. 1847, vol. 89, c. 963. He was closely involved in local relief efforts and his statement at the great meeting of peers, MPs and gentry in Dublin in January 1847 that 5,000 people were recently thought to have died in the district of Cloyne alone was seized upon by the Liberal press as an indication of the seriousness of the crisis. A fierce critic of political economy, he argued that it was the first duty of the government ‘to provide for the starving’ and later pressed for treasury subsidies for distressed poor law unions, arguing that ‘the credit of the Empire should be guaranteed for the benefit of Ireland’.21Freeman’s Journal, 15, 16 Jan, 13 Sept. 1847; Hansard, 13 Feb. 1849, vol. 102, cc. 671-2. In spite of his concern over restrictions placed on Ireland’s food supply during the famine, the agricultural crisis and the subsequent stagnation of Irish trade reinforced Bernard’s belief in protectionism. In 1849, he publicly criticised what he regarded as the extinction of Irish manufacturing enterprise ‘by the jealous policy of England’, and urged the recapitalisation of the country in order that it might provide a convenient market for British goods.22Hansard, 2 Mar. 1849, vol. 103, c. 135; Freeman’s Journal, 17 Apr. 1849; Morning Chronicle, 17 Dec. 1849; Belfast News-letter, 18 Jan. 1850. By the early 1850s he was a Derbyite, opposing Villiers’ free trade resolution in November 1852 and supporting Disraeli’s budget that December.

As chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society of Ireland, Bernard promoted the cultivation of flax and the establishment of an agricultural museum, arguing that what the Irish most required was not university but industrial education and the inculcation of ‘improved modes of farming’.23Freeman’s Journal, 23, 28 July 1842; Hansard, 30 June 1845, vol. 81, cc. 1368-9. He was also an active member of the Church Education Society and a parliamentary advocate of ‘scriptural education’. He was a consistent critic of the national education system, which he regarded as ‘wrong in principle, and dishonest in practice’, and claimed that it had signally failed to provide the Irish with a uniform system of generalised education.24Morning Chronicle, 29 Mar. 1845; Hansard, 21 June 1849, vol. 106, cc. 689-91; PP 1854 (525) xv. 1.

As a practical man of business, and an ‘efficient advocate of local interests’, he played a creditable role as a constituency MP. He was an early advocate of railway communication in County Cork, and enthusiastically endorsed Lord George Bentinck’s ambitious Irish railways scheme of February 1847.25Hansard, 12 Feb. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 1288-96. The bill proposed treasury loans of up to £16,000,000 to Irish railway companies, repayable over thirty years: A. Macintyre, ‘Lord George Bentinck and the Protectionists: A Lost Cause?’, TRHS, Fifth Series, vol. 39 (1989), 141-65 [151]. Bernard was the chief promoter of the Cork and Bandon Railway and was concerned that the railway should be used to convey mail to Bandon. He also led a deputation to the prime minister to request a loan for the company in May 1849.26PP 1845 (577) xlvii. 1; PP 1854 (411) (411-I) xl. 1, 647; Hansard, 5 May 1856, vol. 141, c. 2030; Freeman’s Journal, 25 Mar. 1844, 4 May 1849. He sat on a number of committees to consider private bills regarding railways, bridges and waterworks and supported measures for the protection of Irish salmon fisheries and the provision of harbours and lighthouses on the south coast of Ireland. In 1842, he introduced an abortive bill for the lighting, cleaning and watching of Irish cities and towns.27Freeman’s Journal, 27 May 1846, 23 Oct. 1847; Liverpool Mercury, 27 Oct. 1854; Hansard, 21 Feb. 1849, vol. 102, c. 1076; 30 Apr. 1849, vol. 104, cc. 1011-2; PP 1849 (76) xlix. 395; PP 1842 (502) iii. 13.

Bernard succeeded as 3^rd earl of Bandon to an estate of more than 40,000 acres in 1856. As an Irish peer he could not sit for an Irish constituency, and not wishing to seek an English seat he withdrew from the Commons. His uncle, William Smyth Bernard, and his youngest brother, Henry Boyle Bernard, were to follow him as MPs for Bandon in the period 1857 to 1868. In August 1858 he entered the House of Lords as a representative Irish peer, where he was a leading defender of the Irish church and a fierce opponent of its disestablishment. He also addressed issues such as land tenure, parliamentary reform, Irish railways, and national education. Lord Bandon died at Castle Bernard in 1877 and was accorded a spectacular funeral.28The hearse was drawn by six black horses, followed by the earl’s coach, mounted constabulary, estate workmen, gardeners, and tenants on horse-back: W.E. Vaughan, Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland (1994), 5. He was succeeded by his son, James Francis (1850-1924), who unsuccessfully contested Bandon in 1874. A nephew, Percy Broderick Bernard (1844-1912), sat briefly for the seat in 1880.