POWER, John William (1816-1851), of Gurteen, co. Waterford of Newtown House, Tramore, co. Waterford

A Catholic commoner ‘of ample fortune and ancient lineage’, Power was the descendant of a branch of an eminent Irish family1He was de jure 17th baron Le Power and Coroghmore, being a descendant of Sir Robert de Poher, governor of Waterford, 1177, and joint governor of Ireland, 1179. Burke’s Irish Family Records (1976), 345. and ‘one of the largest landed proprietors in the south of Ireland’.2The Assembled Commons; or, parliamentary biographer (1838), 187; The Times, 15 May 1851. The Gurteen estate had been acquired from the Duke of Ormonde in 1678. B. Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, ii, (1863), 1219. In 1830, shortly after the death of his father, Power’s mother had married Richard Sheil MP. As the heir to a family of prominent Catholic landowners, Power was viewed as a prospective ‘patriotic’ MP and in 1834, though aged only 18, spoken of by Daniel O’Connell as possessing ‘the qualities which eminently qualify him to serve Ireland in Parliament’, there being no other man ‘possessed of greater enthusiasm in his country’s cause’.3The Times, 2 Dec. 1834. Upon coming of age in February 1837, he inherited a landed estate in County Waterford worth £11,000 per annum and a fortune of £90,000. His status as ‘the natural representative for Waterford’ led him to offer for a vacancy at Dungarvan just a few days afterwards.4Belfast News-letter, 16 May 1851. Under the wing of his charismatic step-father, ‘young master Power’ defeated a local repealer, John Matthew Galwey, on a platform of corporate reform and the assertion of Irish rights and interests within a union built upon equality between Great Britain and Ireland.5The Times, 13, 20 Feb. 1837. In spite of his firm belief in the rights of property, he was also a keen advocate of the ballot and argued, ‘The tenant must be secured from all evil consequences in the exercise of a sacred privilege, and his vote must be secret in order that it may be safe.’ At the 1837 general election, Power vacated Dungarvan in order to ‘have the gratification and the honour of representing his native county’ and was elected unopposed.6Freeman’s Journal, 16 Feb. 1837; Morning Chronicle, 13 July 1837.

Prior to his entering the Commons, questions had been raised about Power’s political affiliations. Conservative critics claimed that the ‘schoolboy’s address’ had ‘the support and countenance of Mr. O’Connell’. The Times, however, reported that Power went into Parliament ‘as a Whig, and not as an O’Connellite’, noting that the duke of Devonshire, the town’s patron, ‘would not listen to his pretensions, unless upon the stipulation that he was to be a supporter of the Whigs merely, and not a joint of the tail’.7The Times, 2, 7 Feb. 1837. Power is not known to have spoken in the House, but identified himself as ‘a Reformer’ and consistently backed the O’Connellites on issues such as the reform of municipal corporations, tithes and church appropriation, the Irish poor law, and Irish voter registration. He voted for the introduction of the ballot, 15 Feb. 1838, the abolition of church rates, and the education bill, 24 June 1839.8The Times, 26 June 1839. Power supported the Whig administration’s policies towards Canada and China and was in their divisions upon the election of Charles Shaw-Lefevre as speaker, 27 May 1839, and the confidence vote of 31 Jan. 1840.

In April 1840 Power, an owner of steeple chasers and one of ‘the most celebrated sporting characters’ in the south of Ireland, married the daughter of Sir John Power of Kilfane. That July he took the Chiltern Hundreds, it being said that he ‘preferred to figure on the turf to toiling in St. Stephen’s’.9Freeman’s Journal, 4 May, 4 Aug. 1840, 10 Nov., 17 Dec. 1841; Ipswich Journal, 17 May 1851; Daily News, 6 Nov. 1849. He was, however, a keen supporter of the National Repeal Association, and was one of the first magistrates to resign his commission (and deputy lieutenancy) over the government’s ‘unconstitutional’ dismissal of a number of magistrates known to be sympathetic to repeal.10Morning Chronicle, 10 June 1843; Freeman’s Journal, 26 Sept. 1843; K. Nowlan, The Politics of Repeal. A Study in the Relations between Great Britain and Ireland, 1841-50 (1965), 46-7. He was regarded as an ‘esteemed and excellent’ resident landlord and ‘an amiable man’, but it was thought that ‘his too confiding and generous disposition’ led him ‘into pecuniary embarrassments’. Having overestimated the extent of his financial difficulties, and ‘in a moment of mental aberration’, he shot himself dead with a pistol at his home in Gurteen.11The occasion of his suicide being the receipt of a solicitor’s letter announcing proceedings against him for having acted as security for a receiver under the Court of Chancery whose accounts exhibited defalcation to the amount of £10,000. Freeman’s Journal, 15 May 1851; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1851). Nevertheless, he left a property worth £9,000 per annum to his wife and eight surviving children, the eldest of whom, Edmond James De La Poer (1841-1915), sat as a Liberal for County Waterford, 1866-73.12Belfast News-letter, 14, 16 May 1851; Daily News, 15 May 1851; Gentleman’s Magazine, xxxvi (1851). In May 1863, a Royal Licence was granted for Power’s children to take the surname De La Poer. Burke’s Irish Family Records, 347. Power’s grandson, General Sir Hubert de la Poer Gough (1870-1963), would lead the Curragh Mutiny against home rule in 1914.