Richard Samuel Guinness

Richard Samuel Guinness (7 June 1797 – 27 August 1857) was an Irish lawyer and a Member of Parliament.

Parents

Richard was the son of Richard Guinness (1755-1829), a Dublin barrister and judge, and his wife Mary Darley, descended from a well-known Dublin house-building family. He was a great-nephew of the brewer Arthur Guinness.

His elder brother Robert Rundell Guinness (1789-1857) founded the Guinness Mahon merchant bank in 1836.

Career

Richard was called to the bar at the King's Inns in Dublin and practised as a barrister.[1] He had a banking partnership with his elder brother Robert that ended in the 1830s. He then worked as a land agent, trading as "R. Guinness & Co.", but found it difficult in the aftermath of the Irish famine of the 1840s.

His election as MP for the Kinsale division ended abruptly in early 1848. On a petition by the losing Liberal candidate, WH Watson, a select committee found that Richard's agents' generous hospitality in providing free drinks for the electorate of Kinsale in Kiley's public house amounted to bribery. While Richard was personally exonerated, his election was voided. The committee comprised 3 hostile Liberal MPs and 2 fellow conservatives.[2] At the next election the Liberal Benjamin Hawes took the seat by just 3 votes.

Marriage

On 25 November 1833 in France,[3] Richard married Katherine Frances Jenkinson, a daughter of Sir Charles Jenkinson, 10th Baronet and his wife Katherine Campbell, a daughter of Walter Campbell of Shawfield. Sir Charles was a cousin of Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister in 1812–27.[4]

They lived at and rebuilt Deepwell House, Blackrock, Dublin.[5] They had a home at 17 Sillwood Place, Brighton, Sussex, and 4 Park Place in St James's, London.[6]

They had 8 children, including:

In parliament

Richard represented 2 divisions in the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland:

Richard died in 1857 aged 60.[8] His net estate at death was just £100.[9][10]

Notes
  1. Burke, J. A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage of the British Empire (1839, Colburn, London p.645.
  2. EPPI file on Watson's petition, accessed 1 Sept 2014
  3. Page 123 of the 1833 Verdun marriage records "Marriages solemnized in the house of his excellency The British Ambassador at the Court of France"
  4. http://thepeerage.com/p3016.htm#i30160
  5. Deepwell in the Irish Independent, 27 May 2013
  6. Kinsale election enquiry 1848, question 4965
  7. online dates accessed 1 Sept 2014
  8. Mosley, Charles, editor. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes. Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003.
  9. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; accessed 12 Oct 2014
  10. Richard Samuel Guinness (1797–1857): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/55817
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