Valentine Lawless

Valentine Brown Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry (19 August 1773 – 28 October 1853), was an Irish politician and landowner. He lived in Lyons, under Lyons Hill Ardclough County Kildare. He is perhaps best remembered for his celebrated lawsuit for adultery against Sir John Piers.

Lawless was born in Merrion Square in Dublin. His father, Nicholas Lawless, emigrated to France where he purchased an estate at Rouen. Later, Nicholas Lawless returned home and converted from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland. A wool merchant and banker, Nicholas Lawless was created a baronet in 1776 and elevated to the peerage as Baron Cloncurry in 1789.

Mystery surrounds Lawless's involvement in the 1798 Rebellion and 1803 rebellions designed to establish an independent republic in Ireland. He has been cited as chief organiser of the United Irish Movement in London, but downplayed this aspect of his life in his later writings when the democracy movement had long been suppressed. He is believed to have joined the United Irishmen in 1793, shortly before his father, a wool-merchant turned banker and the first Lord Cloncurry, took charge of Lyons House. Valentine was imprisoned in June 1798 on suspicion of treason in London, released, re-arrested and held in the Tower of London until March 1801. Lawless’s agent Thomas Braughall was also arrested and he was asked to subscribe to the defence of James O'Coigly, a United Irish leader hanged in London in 1798.

On his release Lawless went to Paris and then Rome. He was there during Robert Emmet's rebellion and is believed by Emmet’s biographer Ruan O’Donnell to have been a member of the new Republican Government in waiting. Lawless used his time to purchase works of art being sold off by Italian nobles under pressure from Napoleon's oppressive taxation, and sent four shiploads to Ireland for the refurbishment of Lyons House. They included a statue of Venus excavated at Ostia and three pillars from the palace of Nero originally looted from Egypt, but other artefacts were lost when the third shipment sank off Wicklow Head.

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