Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 43.djvu/414

 for trial at Philipstown assizes on a charge of high treason. He was found guilty by Sir Henry Lynch, but execution of sentence was deferred by the intervention of his friends. He was attainted by name in the parliament which sat in Dublin in May 1689, and his estate conferred on Colonel Oxburgh. He was liberated after the battle of the Boyne, and was shortly afterwards appointed a commissioner of array and high sheriff of the King's County. Returning to Parsonstown on 8 Aug. 1690, he was nearly killed in a skirmish with the Jacobites. During his temporary absence Birr Castle was attacked by Sarsfield, but soon afterwards relieved by General Douglas. His estate had suffered severely during the war, and he was granted 5,000'l'. compensation by the government, but the money was never paid him. He married Frances, youngest daughter and coheiress of William Savage, esq., of Rheban Castle, co. Kildare; and, dying in 1698, was succeeded by his eldest son, Sir William Parsons, who died on 17 March 1740.

 PARSONS, LAWRENCE, second  (1758–1841), eldest son of Sir William Parsons of Birr, and Mary, only daughter and heiress of John Clere of Kilburry, was born on 21 May 1758. He graduated B.A. of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1780, and in the same year published a pamphlet denouncing the Irish Mutiny Bill. 'Very poor and juvenile,' wrote Cooke to Eden (Auckland Corresp. i. 335), 'yet I remember this stroke, "The English Bill of Rights prohibits a perpetual Mutiny Bill; the Irish Bill of Rights is a perpetual Mutiny Bill."' In July 1782 he was elected one of the representatives of the university in parliament, in the place of Walter Hussey Burgh [q. v], created chief baron of the exchequer, He disclaimed party politics, but his intimacy with Henry Flood [q. v.], for whom he had a profound admiration, seems unquestionably to have coloured his political views. He followed him in the matter of the renunciation as opposed to simple repeal, advocated retrenchment by reducing the army, and cordially supported the volunteer bill for the reform of parliament. His friendship for Flood rendered him naturally hostile to Grattan, who, he insisted, had more than once sacrificed the public welfare to private pique, and on a notable occasion taunted him with having bungled every great public measure that he had ever undertaken (Parl. Register, ix. 255) Nevertheless he was a man of sturdy independence and sound judgment, and his political career fully justified Wolfe Tone's description of him 'as one of the very, very few honest men in the Irish House of Commons' (Autobiography, ed. O'Brien, i. 26). He opposed Pitt's commercial propositions (1785) from the beginning; but on the question of the regency (1789) he went with the minority, arguing strongly in favour of following the example of England. To do otherwise, he declared, would be 'only an assumption of a power which we never could put in practice, an idle gasconade which may alarm England and cannot by any possibility serve ourselves' (Parl Register, ix. 121). He was strongly opposed to any alteration in the method of collecting tithes, but supported the demand for a place and pension bill as the only adequate check on the system of parliamentary corruption practised by the crown (ib, x. 240-6, 344-8; cf., Hist. of Engl. vi. 459-61).

During the debate on the Catholic Relief Bill of 1793 he took a broad and statesmanlike view of the whole subject. The question of the extension of privileges to the catholics and the question of parliamentary reform were, in his opinion, intimately connected. To admit the catholics to some participation of the franchise he regarded as no longer a matter of choice, but of the most urgent and irresistible policy. The only doubt was on what terms it ought to be given. For himself he was convinced that the elective franchise should be given to no catholic who had not a freehold of twenty pounds a year, and that it should be accompanied by the admission of catholics into parliament (Parl. Register, xiii. 203-19;, Hist. of Engl. vi. 575-84). Having represented Dublin University from 1782 to 1790, he was returned, on the death of his father in 1791, for King's County, which he continued to represent in the Irish parliament till 1800, and afterwards in the imperial parliament till his elevation to the peerage in 1807. In 1794 he offered an ineffectual protest against Ireland being dragged by England into the war with France (, Life of H. Grattan, iv. 145). He professed to question the sincerity of Fitzwilliam's administration, but, having elicited from Grattan a promise that the measures advocated by him in opposition would find a place in the ministerial programme (Beresford Corresp. ii. 70), he offered government his cordial support. He was the first to notice the disquieting rumours in regard to Fitzwilliam's recall, and on 2 March 1795 moved for a short money bill (ib.