LAWLESS, Hon. Cecil John (1821-1853), of Lyon’s Castle, co. Kildare

Descended from a wealthy Dublin trading family, Lawless was the second son of Valentine Browne Lawless, 2^nd baron Cloncurry, whose father had purchased estates in counties Kildare, Meath, Dublin and Limerick.1By 1883 the estates consisted of 12,487 acres: J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 97. Sir Nicholas Lawless, 1st baron Cloncurry, was a convert to Protestantism and represented Lifford in the Irish parliament (1776-89): E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800 (2002), v. 70-2. Cloncurry had once been a United Irishman and remained a critic of the Union, but in spite of supporting both the emancipation and anti-tithe campaigns, he enjoyed a fraught relationship with Daniel O’Connell.2R. Dunlop, rev. G. McCoy, ‘Lawless, Valentine Browne, second Baron Cloncurry’, Oxford DNB, xxxii. 785-6. Cloncurry had a son (d. 1825) and daughter by his first marriage to Elizabeth Georgiana Morgan, from whom he was divorced in 1811. His second wife had married into the Leeson family, and Cecil was therefore half-brother to the 4th earl of Milltown. Cecil was educated in England and, as the son of a prominent Liberal aristocrat, became a regular visitor to the viceregal court and was admitted a freeman of Dublin in January 1842.3Freeman’s Journal, 15 Mar. 1842; Morning Post, 12 Jan. 1842. An owner of racehorses and a gentleman of leisure, (in June 1843 he was apparently involved in a drunken fracas in Greenwich which, according to the magistrate who fined him, ‘occasioned a riot, which might have ended in loss of life’), he also became involved in a number of railway companies.4Morning Post, 27 June 1843; Morning Chronicle, 15 Sept. 1845. He was presented at court by Lord Foley, 24 Feb. 1847: J. Burke (ed.), The Patrician, iii (1847), 365.

Although his father withdrew from politics after the death of his wife in 1841, Lawless, as the son of ‘Ireland’s patriot peer’, was spoken of as a future repeal candidate for Kildare in 1844.5Freeman’s Journal, 11 Aug. 1846; Leicester Chronicle, 13 July 1844. He was thought to have penned several subsequent letters (under the signature of ‘A Celt’), which were said to have created a ‘sensation’ amongst repealers.6The Times, 24 July 1846. In 1846 Daniel O’Connell was manoeuvring to secure a candidate for the Clonmel by-election ‘who was both formally a Repealer and a friend to accommodation with the whigs’. At Lord Milltown’s suggestion he approached Lawless who, having ascertained from O’Connell that his party was committed to ‘hearty cooperation with the Whig ministry’, joined the Repeal Association in August 1846.7Freeman’s Journal, 11 Aug. 1846. Though Lawless was subsequently returned unopposed, the transaction was thought to have ‘bordered on the scandalous’, as critics complained that others had better claims on the constituency.8O. MacDonagh, The Emancipist. Daniel O’Connell 1830-1847 (1989), 298; T.M. Ray to D. O’Connell, 12 Oct. 1846, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, viii. 124-5; Freeman’s Journal, 22 July, 1 Aug. 1846. His decision to join the Association only after Young Ireland (whom he denounced for their ‘disastrous folly to refuse any good short of Repeal’) had been expelled, earned him the nickname ‘Artful Cecil’.

As the agricultural crisis in Ireland worsened, Lawless’s faith in the Whigs quickly evaporated. In December 1846 he argued for a ban on food exports from Ireland, the suspension of distillation from grain, ‘to prevent the converting of vast quantities of the people’s food into poison’, and the opening of the country’s ports to foreign provisions. His first contribution to parliamentary debate came in February 1847 when he criticised the Whigs for their tardiness in taking effective action to deal with the famine.9Freeman’s Journal, 29 Dec. 1846; Hansard, 2 Feb. 1847, vol. 89, cc. 722-3. After his father’s advice to the government on the issue had been ignored, he used his address at the 1847 general election to urge the impeachment of the prime minister, Lord John Russell, for his failure to deal with the famine, and expressed a preference for Sir Robert Peel’s return to the premiership.10Freeman’s Journal, 13 Aug. 1847; B. Walker, ‘Politicians, Elections and Catastrophe: The General Election of 1847’, Irish Political Studies, 22:1 (2007), 1-34 [21]. Opposing the government’s rate-in-aid bill in April 1849, he charged the ministry with consenting to open Ireland’s ports to food imports only ‘when such a measure was too late to be of effectual service’, and subsequently ‘contended that they were responsible for every life lost by that famine’.11Hansard, 3 Apr. 1849, vol. 104, cc. 235-6. Furthermore, he criticised the large-scale evictions that took place in the poor law union of Kilrush, county Clare, and called upon the government to bring forward ‘a large and comprehensive scheme’ to meet the situation.12Hansard, 8 June 1849, vol. 105, cc. 1292-3; 9 May 1849, vol. 105, cc. 170-1.

Described as having ‘a head that runs out behind like the point of a sugar loaf, hence a much receding forehead’, Lawless was regarded as a ‘pleasing speaker’ and a ‘consistent and useful’ member.13Freeman’s Journal, 21 Sept. 1852, 7 Nov. 1853. However, he served on only one minor committee, to consider private railway bills in 1848, and does not appear to have introduced any bills. He was not an assiduous attender, being absent from the divisions on Catholic relief and the Irish coercion bill in 1847-8, and participated in just 47 of the 219 divisions in the 1849 session. He did, however, oppose the government’s transportation bill, that year, calling for mercy to be exercised in recent treason cases, and suggested that its Irish poor relief bill suspend the ‘quarter acre’ clause of the Poor Law Extension Act (1847), which excluded smallholders from relief.14J. O’Shea, Prince of Swindlers: John Sadleir M.P., 1813-56 (1999), 198; Freeman’s Journal, 9 Dec. 1847, 12 May 1848; Hampshire Telegraph, 20 Oct. 1849; Hansard, 18 June 1849, vol. 106, cc. 416, 444-7; 25 June 1849, vol. 106, cc. 798-9, 830; 5 July 1849, vol. 106, c. 1344. Though estranged from the Whig government, which he accused of having ‘worked more mischief to Ireland than any of our former rulers since the terrible Union’, he nevertheless voted for its Irish franchise bill in 1850, favouring a lower (£6) qualification for borough voters.15W.J. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Contemporaries of Lord Cloncurry (1855), 600; Freeman’s Journal, 13 May 1850; Hansard, 3 May 1850, vol. 110, c. 1143.

Lawless consistently supported William Sharman Crawford’s tenant-right proposals, voting for his Irish landed property bill in 1847, and attending the Tipperary meeting of the Tenant League, 16 Oct. 1850.16Standard, 10 Oct. 1850; Freeman’s Journal, 17, 18 Oct. 1850. Having long been a Protestant critic of Ireland’s ‘unwieldly church establishment’, he spoke against the ecclesiastical titles bill in February 1851, accusing the government of attempting to stifle the Irish opposition to the measure. As the representative of a Catholic constituency, he urged a concordat between the British government and Rome, claiming that the ‘friendly and Christian feeling’ which had developed between different religious denominations as a result of the administration of famine relief had been sacrificed by Russell, with the result that ‘religious animosities which had been so destructive to the social peace of Ireland were already revived.’17Freeman’s Journal, 13 Aug. 1847, 14, 17 Feb., 12 May 1851; Hansard, 12 Feb. 1851, vol. 114, c. 502; 24 Mar. 1851, vol. 115, c. 492; 25 Mar. 1851, vol. 115, cc. 533-7; 20 June 1851, vol. 117, cc. 1035-7. He refused to support the government so long as they persisted with the titles bill, and voted with the ‘Irish Brigade’ against the Whigs on four questions of confidence in the session of 1851. He also supported the motion of censure against Lord Clarendon early in 1852, and attended meetings of the Irish Independent party in February and May 1852.18Hansard, 9 May 1851, vol. 116, c. 840; Freeman’s Journal, 13 Feb., 2 June 1851; J.H. Whyte, The Independent Irish Party, 1850-9 (1958), 178-9.

An active reformer, Lawless supported free trade, the ballot, and the removal of duties on newspapers and Jewish disabilities in 1852-3, but was absent from the division on Palmerston’s amendment to the local militia bill, which brought down the Russell ministry, 20 Feb. 1852. He soon expressed disappointment in Lord Derby’s ministry, arguing that the good intentions expressed by the Irish viceroy Lord Eglington were never likely to be acted upon. He strenuously opposed the Conservatives’ plan to introduce a coercion bill unaccompanied by remedial measures.19Hansard, 15 June 1852, vol. 122, cc. 780-1; 18 June 1852, vol. 122, cc. 972-4. He easily defeated a Conservative challenge at the 1852 general election, being returned as an independent Liberal. At the tenant-right conference that September, he pledged support for the Sharman Crawford’s bill and adhered to the resolution on independent Irish opposition.20Freeman’s Journal, 9 Sept. 1852; J. O’Shea, Priest, Politics and Society in Post-famine Ireland. A study of County Tipperary 1850-1891 (1983), 180-1. His brief hope that the Conservative administration would pursue ‘a fair policy’ towards Ireland soon evaporated, and he voted against Disraeli’s budget, 16 Dec. 1852.21Freeman’s Journal, 20 Dec. 1852.

Having defended John Sadleir and William Keogh for accepting office in the Aberdeen ministry in January 1853, he voted for Gladstone’s budget, 2 May 1853.22The Times, 21, 25 Jan. 1853. He did, however, move a subsequent amendment to exempt Ireland from the income tax, arguing that the country was ‘only in a state of convalescence, and not able to undergo such a heavy infliction so soon after the sufferings of the famine’.23Hansard, 5 May 1853, vol. 126, cc. 1168-71. He was, nonetheless, criticised in Ireland for this belated attempt to amend an unpopular measure which he had already supported, and his bid to recover his independent status succeeded only, according to the Freeman’s Journal, in exciting ‘derision and contempt’.24Freeman’s Journal, 5 Oct. 1853. The motion provoked a debate over whether a pact had been made to turn out the Derby ministry by the Irish MPs and the Whigs, on the understanding that Ireland would escape the income tax, see Hansard, 6 May 1853, vol. 126, cc. 1245-53.

On the question of education, Lawless, like his father, actively supported the national system and encouraged the establishment of agricultural schools. With regard to the Queen’s Colleges, he lamented the ‘misunderstanding’ between the government and the Catholic hierarchy, which made it unlikely that they would ‘be of the use he had hoped they would be’.25Hansard, 29 Mar. 1847, vol. 91, c. 582; 12 Dec. 1851, vol. 114, cc. 536-7. On the other hand, he largely supported the government’s defeat of Sharman Crawford’s tenant-right bill in 1853, and, already deeply distrusted by members of the Tenant League, faced the possibility of rejection by his constituents.26Freeman’s Journal, 5 Oct. 1853; O’Shea, Priest, Politics and Society, 183. Before any challenge could be mounted, however, Lawless died suddenly from a ‘violent inflammation of the brain’ at Cork, shortly after attending his father’s funeral in November 1853. He was buried alongside his father at Lyons, county Cork, and left no successor.27The Times, 7 Nov. 1853; Freeman’s Journal, 7 Nov. 1853. It was recorded that Lawless had ‘long entertained a presentiment that, sooner or later, he would die insane’: Fitzpatrick, Lord Cloncurry, 596.