Robert Stewart, 1st Marquess of Londonderry (27 September 1739 – 6 April 1821), was a County Down landowner, Irish Volunteer, and member of the Irish Parliament who, exceptionally for an Ulster Scot and Presbyterian, rose within the ranks of Ireland's "Anglican Ascendancy." His success was fuelled by wealth acquired through judicious marriages, and by the advancing political career of his son, Viscount Castlereagh (an architect of the Acts of Union, and British Foreign Secretary). In 1798 he gained notoriety for refusing to intercede on behalf of James Porter, his local Presbyterian minister, executed outside the Stewart demesne as a rebel.
Birth and origins
Robert was born on 27 September 1739, at Mount Stewart, the eldest son of Alexander Stewart and his wife Mary Cowan. His father was an alderman of Derry in 1760, and his grandfather, Colonel William Stewart, had commanded one of the two companies of Protestant soldiers that Derry admitted within its walls when Mountjoy was sent there by Tyrconnell before the start of the siege. Robert's mother was a daughter of John Cowan, also an alderman of that same town. His parents had married on 30 June 1737 in Dublin.
{|
!align="left"|Robert listed among his siblings
|-
|He appears among his siblings as the second child:
- Anne (1738–1781)
- Robert (1739–1821)
- William (1741–1742)
- Francis (born 1742)
- John (1744–1762)
- Alexander (1746–1831), married Mary Moore, the 3rd daughter of the 1st Marquess of Drogheda
- Mary (born 1747), died young
|}
Cowan inheritance
Within three months of his parents' marriage in 1737, Robert's mother inherited the fortune her half-brother, Robert Cowan, had acquired in service to the East India Company as Governor of Bombay. The legacy allowed Alexander Stewart to retire from the linen trade and buy into the landed gentry. In 1743 he purchased sixty townlands and a large estate from the Colville family at Newtownards and Comber in County Down.
Education and first marriage
Robert Stewart was brought up a Calvinist, and was sent by his father under the care of a tutor to the University of Geneva, where he studied literature. He thus avoided the "temptations of Oxford and similar academic strongholds of the Established Church" to which, as the son landed gentry, he might naturally have been drawn.
On his return from the continent, he courted Lady Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway (whose niece, Mary Moore, married Robert's brother Alexander in 1791). Lady Sarah Frances Seymour-Conway's father, Francis Seymour-Conway, 1st Marquess of Hertford, owned considerable property in the neighbourhood of Lisburn, and in 1765 was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Robert Stewart attended the viceregal court in Dublin, where he successfully pressed his suit. The marriage took place in the Chapel Royal of Dublin Castle, and Lord Hertford housed the new couple in the city.
This political triumph over the interests of an Ascendancy family which had hitherto returned both county members to the Irish House of Commons formed the prelude of a long period of rivalry. Robert Stewart's initial success was largely due to popular sympathy with John Wilkes and the discontented American colonists, and to the growing feelings in favour of constitutional and parliamentary reform which found expression in the Volunteer movement.
He proved a consistent antagonist of the administration, invariably voting and sometimes speaking for the Opposition in the House. His early political conduct won the approval of his constituents. A dinner at which they entertained in Belfast was marked by toasts "liberal in quality as in quantity", including to "The memory of John Hampden" (who had led parliamentary opposition to Charles I), and to "All those who would rather die in jack-boots than live in wooden shoes".
After his father died in April 1781, moved to the family seat, Mount Stewart, near Newtownards (where in the park he completed the Temple of the Winds). On 17 September 1782 he was sworn in as Irish Privy Councillor.
That very same month as Colonel Stewart he was elected president of the second Ulster (overwhelmingly Presbyterian) Volunteer Convention in Dungannon.
Anticipating a "grand national convention" called for Dublin in November, it notably failed to broaden the front against the Ascendancy. Resolutions in support of Catholic enfranchisement were rejected.
In the general election of October Stewart stood again for County Down but the Ascendancy families triumphed, one seat taken by Arthur Hill, the son of the Earl of Downshire, the other by Lord Bangor's son, Edward Ward. Stewart unsuccessfully challenged the returns at the bar of the House of Commons claiming irregularities. Downshire's influence was able to procure the dismissal of his petition with costs".
At the Dublin convention, Stewart was appointed chairman of the committee "for the receiving and digesting plans of reform". But the convention tactic did not succeed as in 1782, when the massed ranks of the Volunteers had helped secure Irish legislative independence. The digested bill, presented by Henry Flood, which would have abolished the proprietary boroughs (with which their Ascendancy rivals, but not the Stewarts, were endowed) and extended the vote to a broader class of Protestant freeholders was rejected. Having accepted defeat in America, Britain could again spare troops for Ireland, and neither parliament nor Dublin Castle would again be intimidated.
Although he believed that the demands of Dissenters for greater representation should have been met so as to dissuade them from pushing Catholic claims along with their own, Stewart joined his friend, president of the convention, the Earl of Charlemont in urging the Volunteers to receive their rebuff quietly.
Ascendant peer
In 1789 Robert Stewart was created Baron Londonderry in the Peerage of Ireland. Unable as a peer to himself avenge his defeat in 1783, for general election of 1790 he took his eldest son, Robert, out of Cambridge University to run for the county. Still able to persuade Down's Forty-shilling freeholders that the Stewarts were the friends of reform, the younger Stewart did so successfully albeit at considerable expense to his father.
thumb|right|alt=A coat of arms showing quartered Stewart-Cowan escutcheon, supporters, coronet and crest.|The arms of Robert Stewart, Earl of Londonderry The Stewart arms are quartered with the Cowan saltires.
Stewart deserted Presbyterianism for the Established Church, at what point is unclear but likely in advance of his elevation in 1795 to Viscount Castlereagh and the following year to Earl of Londonderry. His eldest son, now Viscount Castlereagh, also quietly converted to Anglicanism and was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland to serve under Lady Frances's brother, Earl Camden, the Lord Lieutenant. Londonderry's second son, Charles, meanwhile kept the family present in the Irish Commons as member for Thomastown borough, County Kilkenny. Banking on these new establishment connections, and alarmed by the evident disaffection of their tenantry, Stewart reached an accommodation with the Hills: the families in future would divide the two county seats in Down, each returning a nominee to the parliament in Dublin unopposed.
Following a theft of gunpowder and grapeshot in Donaghdee, on 26 September 1796, Londonderry summoned his tenants to Mount Stewart to compel them to swear as oath of allegiance. To the extent that he and his sons were prepared to consider reform, including further rights for Catholics, it was now to be within the more secure context of a union with Great Britain. When in 1799 the parliament in Dublin rejected the bill for the Union they fought to have it re-presented.
With the bill's final passage, in 1801, Londonderry become one of the 28 original Irish representative peers in the new United Kingdom parliament at Westminster. In 1816, thanks to the advancing career of Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary, he was further elevated to Marquess of Londonderry. He thus achieved the rare feat of rising from a "Dissenting" (Presbyterian) commoner into the highest ranks of the Irish aristocracy.
1798, the execution of James Porter
During their three-day "Republic" in Ards and north Down, 10–13 June 1798, the United Irish insurgents briefly occupied Mount Stewart. In August, the wife of the local Presbyterian minister, James Porter, appeared at the house with her seven children where they overwhelmed Lady Londonderry and young sister, then dying of tuberculosis, with a plea for his life. One of the children was later to recount that when Londonderry discovered his wife composing a letter to General Nugent, he insisted she add a postscript: "L does not allow me to interfere in Mr Porter's case. I cannot, therefore, and beg not to be mentioned. I only send the letter to gratify the humour", i.e. to placate the distraught Mrs Porter to whom, with a smile that filed her with "much horror", Londonderry then handed the letter.
Londonderry was himself present at the court martial, which had accepted dubious testimony to the minister's presence among the rebels, and was to see the sentence executed. Porter was hanged in sight both of his own meeting house at Greyabbey and of his family home (with Stewart tenants reportedly defying their landlord's wish that they attend).
Londonderry was content that other offenders should be allowed exile. David Bailie Warden who commanded north Down rebels in the field; the Reverend Thomas Ledlie Birch, a United Irish firebrand who rallied with the rebels after the Battle of Saintfield; and William Sinclair who joined the tenantry in swearing loyalty before Londonderry yet served on the rebel Committee of Public Safety, were all permitted passage to the United States.
Porter's offence may have been his popular satire of the local landed interest, Billy Bluff, in which the master of Mount Stewart is clearly recognisable as the inarticulate tyrant "Lord Mountmumble". Porter had been aware that Billy Bluff might not go unpunished, acknowledging in its preface: "I am in danger of being hanged or put in gaol, perhaps both". made bold to identify herself as a "republican countess".
Local tradition has it that Mrs. Porter waylaid his lordship's carriage, in a vain hope of prevailing by a further direct entreaty, but Londonderry bade the coachman "drive on." The sentence, however, was mitigated by remission of the order for quartering. During food shortages in 1800 and 1801, Londonderry at his own expense imported provisions into the stricken districts.
Death, succession, and timeline
Lord Londonderry died on 6 April 1821 at Mount Stewart, County Down, and was buried at the Newtownards Priory, where his father already had been laid to rest. He was succeeded briefly as the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry by his eldest son Robert (Castlereagh) who took his own life the following year.
{|
!colspan=3|Timeline
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!align="left"|Age!!align="left"|Date!!align="left"|Event
|-
|0||1739, 27 Sep||Born at Mount Stewart
|-
|||1816, 13 Jan||Created Marquess of Londonderry