FERRALL, Daniel Henry (1788-1853), of Beechwood, co. Roscommon

An associate of Lord Byron’s at Cambridge, Ferrall was described as a ‘wild Irishman’, and is said to have kept a bear along with Byron at Trinity College.1T. Moore, The Life of Lord Byron, with his Letters and Journals (1855), i. 104-5; Daily News, 8 June 1849. In 1823 he succeeded his bachelor uncle John Ferrall (or Farrell), who had acquired ‘very large’ tracts of land which were scattered throughout county Roscommon and extended into county Sligo.2The Jurist, viii (1863), 919-20; D. Norton, Landlords, Tenants, and Famine: The Business of an Irish Land Agency in the 1840s (2006), 85, 88. For the administration of Ferrall’s finances and estates, see chapters 5 & 6.

During the early 1840s Ferrall resided at Beechwood, a few miles outside Roscommon town, and was one of the largest landowners in the county. He had been viewed as one of the county’s ‘pure Whigs’, until the government’s refusal to appoint him as high sheriff caused a temporary estrangement from the party.3The Times, 7 June 1841. Ferrall owned the impoverished holdings of the Grange Lyster district in the barony of Athlone, and at the 1841 general election came forward for this notoriously corrupt borough as a supporter of ‘all the broad and comprehensive measures’ then being contemplated by the Melbourne administration.4Norton, Landlords, Tenants, and Famine, 86, 100; Freeman’s Journal, 29 June 1841. A Catholic Liberal, although one who did not ‘seriously entertain the idea of Repeal’, Ferrall was considered ‘an excellent man for Athlone’, and thus superseded the unpopular nominee of Daniel O’Connell as the ‘choice of the radicals’.5J. Lenehan, Politics and Society in Athlone 1830-1885. A Rotten Borough (1999), 27; C. Fitzsimon to D. O’Connell, 31 May 1841, O’Connell Correspondence, ed. M.R. O’Connell, vii. 79-80; The Times, 10 June 1841.

A spendthrift, Farrell was not regarded as a sound candidate by the agents who managed his estates, one of whom intimated to a colleague: ‘Bad as he is while in Ireland he would be far worse in London’.6Norton, Landlords, Tenants, and Famine, 86. In the event, however, Ferrall was defeated by a connection of the marquis of Waterford after the votes of the greater part of his supporters were rejected at the polls.7Freeman’s Journal, 13 July 1841; Lenehan, Politics and Society in Athlone, 27-8. Any relief that Ferrall’s agent’s may have felt at this result was short-lived, as he was seated on petition after a scrutiny in June 1842.8PP 1842 (548), v. 1.

Whatever time Ferrall did spend in London as an MP, little of it appears to have been passed at Westminster, and he is known to have voted in only one division, in favour of the secret ballot, 21 June 1842. This appears to have been the sum of his contribution to parliamentary business before he was unseated on a counter-petition brought by his opponent and his agents found guilty of treating at the 1841 general election, 21 Mar. 1843.9CJ, xcviii. 133-4, 138; Morning Post, 18, 22 Mar. 1843; The Times, 25 Mar. 1843. Due to the circumstances of his return, Ferrall does not appear in Dod’s parliamentary companion. When a new writ was issued for Athlone, doubts were expressed as to the legality of Ferrall standing at the by-election, so he brought his influence and, so it was subsequently alleged, a number of bribes to bear in favour of an English Liberal, John Collett, who was returned for the borough in April 1843.10Freeman’s Journal, 3 Apr. 1843; Lenehan, Politics and Society in Athlone, 30-1.

By this time, however, Ferrall was in ‘serious financial trouble’, having incurred a number of heavy debts. Although his vast estates were worth £9,000 per annum, he was ‘not financially liquid’ as he held his land under a deed of trust against which there were many claimants. By the mid-1840s his net annual income was not much more than £600, and he did not therefore play any further part in politics, noting only that the imprisonment of Daniel O’Connell in 1844 had ‘increased the confidence of the capitalists’ in Irish securities.11Norton, Landlords, Tenants, and Famine, 87-8, 92. Having spent several years in an unsuccessful attempt to mortgage his estates and thus clear his personal debts, Ferrall left Ireland for Liverpool in February 1846 under the name of ‘Fenton’. Faced with legal action from his London financiers he fled to France at the end of 1848 and settled in Paris, where he is reported to have died on 1 April 1853.12Ibid., 93-8; Freeman’s Journal, 20 Apr. 1853. His passing went virtually unremarked, and his famine-struck estates devolved upon his three surviving sisters, each of whom had married into local gentry families.13The Jurist, viii (1863), 919-20. Beechwood was inherited by his nephew, Daniel Irwin, and other lands went to the Taaffe, Conmee and Nolan families: Norton, Landlords, Tenants, and Famine, 98; ‘Estate: Ferrall (Co. Roscommon)’: NUI Galway Landed Estates Database’: http://www.landedestates.ie.