STOCK, Joseph (1787-1855), of 4 Upper Temple Street, Dublin

Born in co. Dublin, Stock was one of fifteen siblings and half-siblings from the two marriages of his father, whose first wife (Stock’s mother) was the sister of William Newcome (1729-1800), Protestant archbishop of Armagh.2W.E.H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, v (1898), 42. Stock’s mother died in 1805 and his father subsequently married Mary Obins, widow of Rev. Michael Obins, of Drumcliffe, co. Sligo: P.B. Eustace (ed.), Registry of Deeds, Dublin: Abstracts of Wills, ii, 1746-1785 (1984), 183. Stock’s grandfather was a Dublin hosier and city sheriff (1772), and his father, the Protestant bishop of Killala, was an accomplished classical scholar and the biographer of Bishop George Berkeley. During his father’s first visitation to his diocese in co. Mayo, he and his family were taken prisoner by the French army during its intervention in Ireland in August 1798.3J. Kelly, ‘Stock, Joseph (1740-1813)’, Oxford DNB, lii. 820-1. See his A Narrative of what passed at Killala, and the Parts adjacent, during the French Invasion, in the Summer of 1798 (1800).

A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, Stock became a doctor of civil law in 1815, took silk in 1835, and was appointed a serjeant-at-law in 1840. A staunch Whig, he attended a meeting at the Coburg Gardens, Dublin to express public confidence in the Irish administration, 15 May 1837. As a Liberal candidate, he finished a poor third behind two Conservatives in the contest for Dublin University, 4 Aug. 1837, and was outspoken in his criticism of the Conservatives’ petition against the return of Daniel O’Connell and Robert Hutton for the city.4Morning Chronicle, 18 May, 29 July, 19 Sept. 1837; The Times, 13 Nov. 1837. He was appointed to the committee of O’Connell’s Central Registration Board, 23 Apr. 1838, and, with O’Connell’s backing, was returned unopposed for Cashel in July 1838, after which he made a public rebuttal of charges of corruption against the borough.5Freeman’s Journal, 24 Apr., 9 May 1838, and see his letter to the editor of The Standard, reproduced ibid., 18 Oct. 1838. That September, having been passed over for the lucrative position of commissioner to the Ecclesiastical Board, he was appointed to the Tithe Commission and made a judge of the Irish admiralty court.6The Times, 5 Dec. 1837; Hull Packet, 22 Dec. 1837; The Examiner, 9 Sept. 1838. Stock subsequently voiced considerable support for reform of the ecclesiastical courts: Hansard, 21 Mar. 1839, vol. 45, c. 756; 9 Feb. 1843, vol. 66, cc. 329-30. In 1840, alarmed at Liberal apathy on the question, he contributed to the eventual defeat of Lord Stanley’s Irish registration bill, a measure he denounced as ‘penal in its character’ and ‘a clear violation of the Irish Reform Bill’. He alleged that the ‘concealed but real object’ of the bill was the disfranchisement of ‘a very considerable portion’ of the existing electors. By subverting the existing system of registration it would, he argued, have not only impeded claimants to the franchise, but would also have made the tenure of successful applicants ‘hazardous and uncertain’.7Hansard, 26 Mar. 1840, vol. 53, c. 100; 19 June 1840, vol. 54, cc. 1336-7; Freeman’s Journal, 17 Oct. 1840.

Stock was warm in his praise for the Whig ministry, particularly the contributions made by Lord John Russell and Lord Morpeth.8He attended a grand banquet for Morpeth in Dublin, 14 Sept. 1841, and spoke at the public meeting supporting his return for the city, 3 Jan. 1842: Freeman’s Journal, 15 Sept. 1841, 4 Jan. 1842. He was considered as an asset to the Irish Whigs, being consulted (along with John O’Connell) about his views on Irish matters by Lord Normanby at the Home Office, 2 Apr. 1841.9Freeman’s Journal, 17 Oct. 1840; Morning Chronicle, 3 Apr. 1841. He was returned unopposed at that year’s general election, his personal acquaintance with O’Connell, who thought Stock possessed ‘the truest and sincerest patriotism’, ensuring that a repeal challenge was not forthcoming.10Freeman’s Journal, 25 May 1841. Though Stock was not a repealer, O’Connell then hoped it ‘would require very little more’ to convert him to the cause: D. O’Connell to J. O’Connell, 26 (& 28) May 1841, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, vii. 74-6. Stock subsequently ingratiated himself with his constituents, and, haven given the expected aid to local charities when first returned in 1838, duly made a further generous donation to relieve the destitute poor of the town in November 1841.11Freeman’s Journal, 18 Oct. 1838, 30 Nov. 1841. Up to this time, his performance in parliament was characterised as having voted both ‘with the government against the enemies of Ireland’, and ‘with Ireland against the government, whenever their interests clashed’. The following year, however, he was criticised by the Irish Liberal press for not being sufficiently vocal in criticising the Conservatives’ legal administration of Ireland.12Freeman’s Journal, 2 June 1841, 22 June 1842. Nevertheless, O’Connell clearly trusted Stock, who he had known ‘in the very worst of times – when every liberal Protestant barrister in the Hall was an object of persecution’, and yet had asserted ‘with moderation, but perfect firmness … clear and honest opinions in favour of civil and religious liberty’.13D. O’Connell to J. O’Connell, 29 May 1841, reproduced in Freeman’s Journal, 1 June 1841.

Stock was an advocate of the benefits to Ireland of the development of steam navigation between Europe and America and was a member of the deputation on communication links between Ireland and England that waited on the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, 25 June 1842.14Freeman’s Journal, 17 Oct. 1840, 29 June 1842. He attended a meeting at Charlemont House, 18 Jan. 1844, at which, under the guidance of the duke of Leinster, parliamentary petitions on Irish church grievances, the state of the representation, and the country’s undue taxation burden were considered.15Freeman’s Journal, 19 Jan. 1844; Belfast News-letter, 23 Jan. 1844; North Wales Chronicle, 23 Jan. 1844. He also became involved in the debate on the state prosecution of O’Connell in February 1844, when he defended the reputation of the Irish attorney general, Thomas Berry Cusack Smith, but suggested that he was not ‘the fittest instrument’ for carrying the Conservatives’ plans for Ireland into execution.16Hansard, 2 Feb. 1844, vol. 72, cc. 193-4.

Though Stock appeared sympathetic to ‘the spirit of democracy’ which had arisen in England during the Chartist agitation, he was absent from the division on Sharman Crawford’s motion on parliamentary reform, 21 Apr. 1842.17Freeman’s Journal, 4 Jan. 1842; Hansard, 21 Apr. 1842, vol. 62, cc. 907-82. As a free trader, Stock supported the motion on corn importation, 26 Mar. 1844, and voted in the minority on the sugar duties bill, 10 June 1844.18Caledonian Mercury, 24 June 1844. In February 1845, he sat on the select committee on the library of House of Commons and supported the Maynooth grant, 19 Apr. 1845.19PP 1845 (610) xii. 465. Unusually for an Irish MP, Stock concerned himself chiefly with English legislation. Having witnessed the beneficial effects produced by similar legislation in Ireland, Stock assisted William Hutt in introducing a foreigners’ naturalisation bill in February 1843.20PP 1843 (50) ii. 709; Hansard, 8 Mar. 1843, vol. 67, c. 437. The measure was designed to grant some of the rights and privileges of British subjects to foreign residents, and he took an active part on the select committee on the laws affecting aliens that March. In May 1844 he introduced, again with Hutt, a bill to amend those laws.21PP 1843 (307) v. 145; PP 1844 (329) i. 1; PP 1844 (447) i. 7. A month earlier he had brought in a bill to amend the laws relating to Irish church temporalities and, with Howard Elphinstone, prepared a measure to facilitate appeals to the Court of Arches (a court of the Church of England).22PP 1844 (185) i. 137; PP 1844 (52) i. 25.

Stock regretfully announced his resignation after dissenting with his constituents over the paramountcy of the repeal question in November 1845 and took the Chiltern Hundreds, 22 Jan. 1846.23Freeman’s Journal, 5 Nov. 1845; Hansard, 22 Jan. 1846, vol. 83, c. 51. This, the otherwise anti-Whig Thomas Francis Meagher argued, was ‘a gross injustice’, given O’Connell’s subsequent failure to put up a repealer against Sheil at Dungarvan. Meagher even paid tribute to Stock as ‘a man of sound ability and stern integrity’ against whom ‘there was never uttered a complaint by his constituents.’24Freeman’s Journal, 14 July 1846.

Stock performed the duties as a judge of assize on the Munster circuit from 1846, where he was remembered as ‘patient and laborious’ though ‘not very capable’, and resigned his serjeancy, for reasons unknown, in June 1851.25Freeman’s Journal, 8 July 1846; J.R. O’Flanagan, The Irish Bar; comprising anecdotes, bon-mots, and biographical sketches of the bench and bar of Ireland (1879), 399; Northern Star, 7 June 1851; A.R. Hart, A History of the King’s Serjeants at Law in Ireland (2000), 110. He was a member of the Royal Dublin Society and, in 1839, joined the management committee of the Royal Irish Art Union, which sought to encourage the fine arts by purchasing the work of living artists. He died at his residence in Dublin in October 1855, and his extensive law library was auctioned on 3 December.26PP 1845 (612) vii. 1 [340-2]; Freeman’s Journal, 1 Nov. 1855, 29 Nov. 1855.