STAWELL, Sampson (1785-1849), of Kilbrittain Castle, co. Cork

The descendant of a branch of an ancient Devonshire family long settled in County Cork, Sampson Stawell was the eighth child of a family of eight brothers and two sisters. He was said to bear a strong resemblance to his father and namesake (1741-1819), who had prospered from milling flour and shipping oats to the south of England, and acquired a reputation as a political radical.2G.D. Stawell, A Quantock Family. The Stawells of Colhelstone and their descendants, the Barons Stalwell, and the Stawells of Devonshire and the County Cork (1910), 220; D. Dickson, Old World Colony. Cork and South Munster 1630-1830 (2005), 384, 434, 471, 635. He was a captain of the Kilbrittain Yeomanry from 1796, yet the level of his complicity in the 1798 rebellion remains unclear. Sampson joined the British army at the age of 15 in 1801 and served with the 12^th Lancers on the Walcheren expedition (1809), and in the Peninsula from 1811-14. He participated in the sieges of Ciudad-Rodrigo and Badajoz (1812), the capture of San Sebastian, and the battles of Vittoria and Nivelle (1813), for which he was decorated. While a junior captain, he assumed command of his regiment (as brevet-major) and brought it out of the field at Waterloo after its senior officers had all been killed. He was gazetted to command the regiment in June 1827.3Daily News, 27 Aug. 1849. He purchased the command for £6,000: Stawell, A Quantock Family, 223.

Stawell’s mother was a sister of Francis Bernard, 1^st earl Bandon, the arch-Conservative patron of Bandon Bridge, and Stawell was also cousin to Lords Riversdale and Doneraile. His grandfather and great-grandfather had sat in the Irish parliament for Kinsale.4Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1833), 162. Colonel Jonas Stawell (1658-1716) sat briefly in 1692-3, and his son, Jonas (1700-72), sat in 1745-60: E. Johnston-Liik, History of the Irish Parliament 1692-1800, vi (2002), 328-9. His father was selected as a parliamentary candidate for County Cork in 1791 but withdrew from the contest: Stawell, A Quantock Family, 220. Unlike the Bernards, the Stawells were Whigs and supporters of Catholic emancipation.5P. Holohan, ‘Kinsale Borough and Cork County Parliamentary Elections 1832: Politics and Broadsheets’, Journal of the Cork Archaeological & Historical Society, vol. 109 (2004), 157-98 [158, 184]. While commanding his regiment in Cork, Stawell accepted an invitation from the independent electors to stand for Bandon at the 1832 general election.6Freeman’s Journal, 13, 18 Sept. 1832. However, when his brother, James Ludlow Stawell, a friend of DanielO’Connell and a prominent campaigner for parliamentary reform, died on 30 October 1832, he took his place as the reform candidate for Kinsale and thus avoided a probable defeat at the hands of his cousin, William Smyth Bernard.7See Holohan, ‘Kinsale Borough’, 158-63; I. d’Alton, Protestant Society and Politics in Cork 1812-1844 (1980), 143; Freeman’s Journal, 17, 20 Nov. 1832. He issued an address in the Southern Reporter on 15 November in which he opposed corporate and other monopolies and, pragmatically, called for the reform rather than the abolition of tithes. Although he was subsequently categorised as a ‘conditional’ repealer, Stawell’s position was actually that of ‘a classic Irish whig’. Tolerant in religion and anxious to give full effect to recent parliamentary reform, he narrowly defeated his Conservative challenger.8Holohan, ‘Kinsale Borough’, 163-4, 187; Morning Chronicle, 28 Dec. 1832.

Stawell is only known to have spoken once in the House. In August 1834 he expressed regret at the rejection of the Irish church bill by the House of Lords, arguing that the measure ‘would have been a great advantage to the established church’.9Hansard, 14 Aug. 1834, vol. 25, c. 1251. He was appointed to select committees on the Carrickfergus and Limerick election petitions, the parliamentary acts relating to Derry bridge, and charges on the civil list.10PP 1833 (181) viii. 1; CJ, vol. 88 (1833) 385; PP 1833 (557) xvi. 367; CJ, vol. 88 (1833) 467. Despite his initial opposition to the Irish coercion bill of March 1833, he supported the ministry on its second reading thus drawing criticism from the O’Connellite press for glorying ‘in his opposition to the people’ and proclaiming his support for the measure ‘with a proud and strutting ostentation’.11Freeman’s Journal, 15 Mar. 1833. Stawell took a leave of absence for a fortnight on urgent business in August 1833: CJ, vol. 88 (1833), 664. That November he faced further criticism from O’Connell himself for ‘abjuring his addresses’ to constituents by ‘voting for every corrupt majority of Ministers’, and was accused of trampling ‘on his brother’s grave’.12Belfast News-letter, 12 Nov. 1833. Stawell responded by voting against O’Connell’s repeal motion in April 1834.

Prior to the 1835 general election O’Connell suggested to the electors of Kinsale that Stawell, though preferable to a Tory, had ‘not come up to their expectations’. Shortly afterwards, Stawell announced his retirement from Kinsale.13The Times, 2 Dec. 1834; Freeman’s Journal, 9 Jan. 1835. He returned to his military career and the command of his regiment, which he led for more than twenty years, and served for a time as the commandant of the garrison in Dublin.14Freeman’s Journal, 30 Sept. 1841. When Prince George of Cambridge (commander-in-chief of the British Army, 1856-95) served with the 12th Lancers in 1840-2, he was placed under Stawell’s instruction: Belfast News-letter, 7 Feb. 1840; Examiner, 25 Aug. 1849; Stawell, A Quantock Family, 224, 527-9. He did not, however, entirely abandon politics and in April 1849 addressed a public meeting at Bandon to draw attention to the distress then prevailing in west Cork, at which he called on the treasury to issue grants to alleviate distressed unions.15Freeman’s Journal, 16 Apr. 1849; Belfast News-letter, 17 Apr. 1849. Having declined to retire from the army on grounds of his age, Stawell died at the Dragon Hotel, Harrogate in August 1849. He was buried in the family vault at Rathclaren, where a monument was erected in his memory by his brother officers in the following year.16Glasgow Herald, 10 Sept. 1849; Morning Chronicle, 23 Aug. 1849, 15 Aug. 1850; Stawell, A Quantock Family, 136, 224.