Life
1743-1807; entered Army and served in American War; office in Irish Revenue
Dept., c.1775; Tralee MP and later for Gowaran, 1777-83; Portarlington
MP, 1783-90; Tralee, 1790-97; Old Leighlin, 1798-1800; professed in parliament
that the ‘the Revolution of 1782 [Legislative Independence] had brought
as many constitutional blessings to the kingdom, as the revolution of
1688’ (27 May 1782); created baronet, 1782; Chamberlain to Viceregal
Court, service to Govt. in connnection with Volunteer Convention, 1783;
celebrated master of the ‘Irish Bull’ and so characterised in
Barrington, Edgeworth, and Froude (‘on posterity’). RR DNB
DIB ODQ FDA
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Criticism
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies (1821), Vol.
II, pp.494-99; Field Day Anthology, gen. ed. Seamus Deane,
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, p.475.
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Notes
William
Carleton, Traits and Stories (1843 Edn.), ‘I know that
several of my readers may remind me of Sir Boyle Roche, whose bulls have
become not only notorious, but proverbial. it is well known, however,
that when he made them, they were studied bulls, resorted to principally
for the purpose of putting the government and opposition of the Irish
House of Commons into good humour with each other, which they never failed
to do - thereby, on more than one occasion, probably, preventing the effusion
of blood, and the loss of life, among men who frequently decided even
their political differences by the sword and pistol.’ (General Introduction,
p.ii.)
Maureen Wall, ‘The Making of Gardiner’s Relief Act, 1781-82’, in Catholic Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Gerard O’Brien (Geog. Publ. 1989), writes: Sir Boyle Roche, who one newspaper referred to during the Convention [of 1782] as ‘the pack-horse which the Castle has loaded with its lumber of division’, wrote to several prominent Catholics [in Feb. 1784, at the time of the appointment of Duke of Rutland as viceroy] saying that he was convinced that government would further ‘extend its indulgences’ to them if the heads of that body could be induced to present an address to the new lord lieutenant on arrival, ‘not only of loyalty to the king, but of attachment to the present constitution, without innovation.’ (See Freeman’s Journal, 22 Nov. 1783; England Life of O’Leary, 114 [sic]; here p.151.)
Sir Jonah Barrington relates anecdotes of Sir Boyle Roche in Personal
Memoirs or Rise and Fall; also that his ‘bovine remarks’
[Irish bull] are covered in ‘A Few of Sir Boyle Roche’s Best’,
in Patrick Kennedy, Modern Irish Ancedotes (n.d., 68-70). And note
that Barrington on Roche is quoted in Frank O’Connor, Book of
Ireland.
Son of Bull: Roche’s celebrated bull, ‘Why should we put ourselves out of the way to do anything for posterity, for what has posterity done for us?’, is a variant on a frequent solecism recorded several times in Oxford Dict. of Quotations [see index under posterity].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)