Carey Dillon, 5th Earl of Roscommon

Carey or Cary Dillon, 5th Earl of Roscommon (1627–1689) was an Irish nobleman and professional soldier of the seventeenth century. He held several Court offices under King Charles II and his successor King James II. After the Glorious Revolution he went over to the Williamite side, and was attainted as a traitor by James II's Irish Parliament in 1689, shortly before his death.

In his earlier days, he had been a friend of Samuel Pepys, who in his celebrated Diary followed with interest Dillon's abortive love affair with their mutual friend, the noted beauty Frances Butler.

Cary was a younger son of Robert Dillon, 2nd Earl of Roscommon (died 1642), by his third wife Anne Strode, daughter of Sir William Strode of Somerset. His mother, who died about 1650, was the widow of Henry Folliott, 1st Baron Folliott, by whom she had several children. As a younger son with his livelihood to earn in the war-torn Ireland of the 1640s and 1650s, a military career was an obvious choice for him: he was made a Captain by the age of seventeen. Although Samuel Pepys in the Great Diary always called him "Colonel Dillon" he was apparently only a Lieutenant until 1684, when he became a Major, and subsequently a Colonel.

His father in the 1630s had been a supporter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, the formidable and virtually all-powerful Lord Deputy of Ireland, as was his half-brother James Dillon, 3rd Earl of Roscommon, and a family tie between the Dillons and the Wentworths was created when James married Strafford's sister Elizabeth. During the English Civil War, both brothers were staunch Royalists: James, who died in 1649, was posthumously listed in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 as one of the ten leaders of the Royalist cause in Ireland who were excluded from pardon, and thus liable to forfeiture of their estates.

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