John Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany

John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (31 August 1853 – 16 January 1899) was an Anglo-Irish Conservative politician and peer.

Plunkett was the second son of Edward Plunkett, 16th Baron of Dunsany (1808–1889), and Lady Anne Constance Dutton (1816–1858). His elder brother, Hon. Randal Edward Sherborne Plunkett, predeceased him. John William Plunkett received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Trinity College, Dublin (1877). He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1878; M.A., 1881). He was Lieutenant R.N. Artillery Volunteers and a Conservative Party Member of Parliament for the Thornbury (or Southern) division of Gloucestershire from 1886 to 1892. He proved his right to vote at the elections of Representative Peers (Ireland) 1890 and Representative Peers (Ireland) 1893-99.

John William married on 3 April 1877, at St George's, Hanover Square, London, England, his second cousin, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Burton (later Ernle-Erle-Drax), the only daughter and heir to Colonel Francis Augustus Plunkett Burton, Coldstream Guards, by Sarah Frances Elizabeth, younger daughter and coheir of John Samuel Wanley Sawbridge-Erle-Drax, of Charborough Park, Dorset. Ernle Burton's paternal grandmother, the Hon. Anna Maria Plunkett, wife of Admiral James Ryder Burton, was a sister of her husband's paternal grandfather, Edward Wadding Plunkett, 13th Baron of Dunsany. In addition, Ernle, Lady Dunsany, was descended via her maternal line from James Drax, a young Englishman who, with a few hundred pounds, had sailed from the Port of London for Barbados in the late 1620s. There he had made a fortune developing sugar and slave-trading into a hugely profitable business. Just before the turn of the seventeenth century, the family returned to England and purchased an estate in Dorset. Lady Dunsany inherited Charborough Park in 1905. Her unusual Christian name, Ernle, was inherited from an ancestress, Elizabeth Ernle (1697–1759), wife of Henry Drax, Esq., who was the daughter and eventual heiress of Sir Edward Ernle, 3rd Baronet, P.C., M.P., (1673–1729) of Maddington, Wiltshire, by his wife, Frances (d. 1728) only daughter and heir of Lieutenant General Thomas Erle (1650–1720), of Charborough House, the source of a further barrel of her surname.

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