the flight of Valentine Brown Lawless second Baron Cloncurry Irish politician landowner 1798 Rebellion 1803
Valentine Brown Lawless (19 August 1773 – 28 October 1853), the second Baron Cloncurry, was an Irish politician and landowner. He lived in Lyons, under Lyons Hill Ardclough County Kildare. 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 Untied Irish Movement in London, but downplayed this aspect fo 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 Nicholas Lawless, a wool-merchant turned banker who converted from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland and became 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. His memoir, published in 1849, claimed: "The independence of Ireland is sure to come at last - as sure as that the Roman Empire fell in pieces, or the North American provinces are now free states. When misfortune shall overtake England, or the lot common to empires as to individuals, can she lay the flattering unction to her soul that she has acted with probity towards Ireland?" On his release he 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. He 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,
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