CHESTER, Henry (c.1776-1855), of Carstown House, Dunleer, Co. Louth

A Catholic ‘country gentleman of respectability’, Chester possessed ‘a good landed estate’ in counties Louth and Meath.1The Assembled Commons; or, parliamentary biographer (1838), 54. In 1883 the estate consisted of 2,412 acres: J. Bateman, The Great Landowners of Great Britain (4th edn., 1883), 86. He was descended from a junior branch of the Chester family of Chicheley Hall, Buckinghamshire, which had settled in Drogheda in the sixteenth century and subsequently purchased land in the region.2Burke’s Extinct Baronetcies (1844), 110-2. He resided in an early seventeenth-century house at Carstown, which was situated between Drogheda and Termonfeckin and had been acquired by his father from the earl of Derby.3J. Garry, ‘The Chester Estate Map 1856: Tenant Farms in Carstown, Newhouse, Milltown, Galroostown and Priorstown, County Louth’, Seanchas Ardmhacha: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society, xviii (1999/2000), 134-162. A long-serving member of the Louth grand jury, and a magistrate ‘on the popular side’, Chester enjoyed a relatively brief parliamentary career during which he largely supported the Whig ministry.

Chester had long been active in local politics when he became a member of the Louth Independent Club in 1826, which was established to register Catholic freeholders and ‘open’ the representation of the county.4Morning Chronicle, 3 July 1826, 28 Aug. 1828; HP Commons 1820-1832, iii. 835; J.B. Leslie, ‘History of Kilsaran Union of Parishes in the County of Louth’, Termonfeckin Historical Society Review, vi (2006), 7. His brother, John Chester, had been an active member of the Catholic Association, and Chester seconded a Liberal, Richard Montesquieu Bellew, for County Louth at the 1830 general election.5Morning Chronicle, 4, 19 Sept. 1828; Freeman’s Journal, 12 Aug. 1830. He was also present at repeal and anti-tithe meetings at Termonfeckin in March 1831 and February 1832 respectively.6Freeman’s Journal, 3 Mar. 1831; Leslie, ‘History of Kilsaran Union’, 5. He attended a county reform meeting at Dundalk in May 1832.7Freeman’s Journal, 23 May 1832. That August he threatened to resign from the bench in protest at the dismissal of a local constable by Sir John Harvey, the provincial inspector general of constabulary. He was, however, persuaded to retain his commission, and in December he chaired a meeting of independent electors at Dundalk at which the Liberal candidates for the county were selected.8Freeman’s Journal, 19 Dec. 1832; Morning Post, 27 Aug. 1832, quoting Drogheda Journal; Morning Chronicle, 10 Oct. 1832. At the general election he seconded the nomination of a moderate repealer, Thomas Fitzgerald, for County Louth.9Freeman’s Journal, 28 Dec. 1832.

At the 1835 general election Chester proposed the leading Irish Whig, Sir Patrick Bellew, for County Louth, and shortly after chairing a meeting of local Liberal MPs at Dundalk in January 1837, was appointed as high sheriff.10Belfast News-letter, 27 Jan. 1835; Freeman’s Journal, 13 Feb. 1837. The circumstances of his appointment were, however, controversial because his name had not been included on the list submitted to the viceroy, Lord Mulgrave.11Standard, 6 June 1838. He resigned the post in June 1837 in order to stand for County Louth at the general election, after Sir Patrick Bellew unexpectedly declined to seek re-election, and, as Bellew later recounted, ‘there was no other person to be got to represent the Liberal constituency’.12Morning Chronicle, 13 July 1837; Freeman’s Journal, 3 Aug. 1840. His place was taken by his nephew, Michael Chester, whose name had also been absent from the list returned to Dublin. The matter was subsequently investigated during a Lords select committee inquiry into the appointment of sheriffs in Ireland: Freeman’s Journal, 6, 11 Sept. 1838. Regarded as a man of ‘the most unquestionable rank’ and ‘good fortune’, Chester was unanimously endorsed by ‘Liberals of all shades’, and returned unopposed.13Morning Post, 3 July 1837; Freeman’s Journal, 14 Feb. 1855.

A silent member, Chester does not appear to have sat on any select committees or introduced any bills. His attendance in the Commons was intermittent, and he voted in only 95 divisions in his three sessions in parliament. He did not divide at all in the autumn session which followed his return, but recorded his first vote in support of Daniel O’Connell’s opposition to the Irish poor law bill, 9 Feb. 1838. He attended closely to the committee stage of this bill, and voted with O’Connell in several minorities over the following weeks. Although listed in one parliamentary guide as a ‘Whig’, he regularly voted ‘on the side of Liberal principles’, and twice divided in favour of the ballot, 15 Feb. 1838 & 18 June 1839.14R.B. Mosse, The Parliamentary Guide (1837), 147; Stenton, Who’s Who of British MPs, i. 75. He backed the ministry on the question of the rebellion in Canada, 7 Mar. 1838, and voted for Strickland’s motion to bring an early end to slave apprenticeships, 30 Mar. He was also on hand to back Irish reforms, voting in favour of the government’s resolution on Irish tithes, 15 May, the second reading of the Irish tithes bill, 22 June 1838, and the third reading of the Irish municipal corporations bill, 25 June. In December 1838 he backed a county petition calling upon Parliament to abolish Irish tithes and reform the country’s municipal corporations. He also joined O’Connell’s pro-repeal Precursor Society, and attended the public dinner given for the Liberator at Drogheda in January 1839.15Freeman’s Journal, 8 Dec. 1838; 19, 26 Jan. 1839.

Chester does not appear to have returned to Westminster until mid-April 1839, after which he backed the Whig ministry in a number of important divisions on matters such as the administration of Ireland, 19 Apr. 1839, the government of Jamaica, 6 May & 10, 19 June, the speakership, 27 May, and education, 20 June 1839. Returning early for the 1840 session, he joined other Whigs in opposing an annual grant of £30,000 to the prince consort, 27 Jan. 1840, and backed the ministry in the confidence motion, 31 Jan. 1840. He did not divide again until 8 May 1840 and, having voted against Lord Stanley’s Irish registration bill, 19 & 20 May, and against Villiers’s motion for a committee to consider the corn laws, 26 May, cast his last vote in the Commons on 29 May 1840, when he supported the ministry’s Canada bil.

By now Chester was regarded in his constituency as an ‘honest … useful and patriotic’ representative. On 14 July 1840 he took the Chiltern Hundreds, and in a brief address at the return of his successor, informed the electors that his declining health ‘prevented him from longer encountering the protracted nightly sittings in the House of Commons’.16CJ, xcv. 524; Freeman’s Journal, 7 July 1840, 3 Aug. 1840, 14 Feb. 1855.

Chester remained active in politics, however, chairing a dinner for the Irish chief secretary, Sir William Somerville, at Drogheda in September 1840, and at the 1841 general election proposing the re-adoption of Richard Montesquieu Bellew as a Liberal representative for the county and seconding his nomination.17Freeman’s Journal, 17 June, 14 July 1841. Although he does not appear to have joined the repeal movement, he was present at a meeting to protest against the exclusion of Catholic jurors at the state trial of Daniel O’Connell in January 1844. A benefactor to the local Catholic church, he was a generous donor to the Catholic Committee during the controversy over the ‘Papal aggression’ in 1851.18Freeman’s Journal, 12 Jan. 1844, 4 Aug. 1851. In 1845 he had donated one acre of land and £200 for the construction of a chapel in the parish of Sandpit, Termonfeckin: Ibid., 8 Dec. 1845.

Chester died at the ‘patriarchal age of 78’ at his residence in Kingstown, co. Dublin in February 1855, and was buried in Termonfeckin old graveyard.19Morning Chronicle, 19 Feb. 1855; Drogheda Independent, 3 Jan. 2003. Predeceased by his only son, Henry, who had died in Paris in November 1838,20Belfast News-letter, 20 Nov. 1838. he left one daughter, Henrietta, who inherited Carstown House and died unmarried in Belgrave Square, London in August 1913.21E. Walford, County Families of the United Kingdom (1860), 118; The Times, 11 Dec. 1913; Nat. Probate Calendar, Index of Wills, 1858-1966 (18 Nov. 1913).