Captain William Bunbury McClintock: Owner of Earlscliffe, 1864–1878

The first person we know who owned Earlscliffe was Captain William Bunbury McClintock. ¹ If Cornelius Egan reflects the commercial drive and civic ambition of mid-nineteenth-century Dublin, the Captain belongs to a very different world. His was the world of the established Anglo-Irish landowning class, whose influence and connections extended well beyond Howth and far beyond Ireland itself.

Family history

William Bunbury McClintock was born in Dublin on 8^th September 1800, one of three children in a family deeply embedded in the British military and the Irish landed gentry. His father, John McClintock, sat as Member of Parliament for Drumcar in County Louth and later served as Lord Lieutenant of the county. The family moved easily within the political and social networks that shaped Irish life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. John married Jane Bunbury on the 11^th July 1797. They had three children, with William being the youngest.

William was christened William Bunbury McClintock, named in memory of his maternal grandfather, William Bunbury, a rising political figure whose career was cut short by a fatal riding accident near Leighlinbridge in County Carlow some twenty-four years earlier. Loss marked William’s early life in other ways too. His mother died on 28^th April 1801 in a riding accident in Bath when he was just seven months old.

His father remarried, this time to a sister of the Earl of Clancarty, Lady Elizabeth La Poer Trench, one of the most influential figures at the Congress of Vienna that followed the defeat of Napoleon. The family expanded further, with eight more children, linking William even more firmly into a web of political, military, and aristocratic connections that stretched across Britain and Europe.

Early Naval career

William was born in the same year as Cornelius Egan, yet their lives took very different paths before they both became early owners of Earlscliffe.

Educated in Gosport, Hampshire, William joined the Royal Navy in July 1813 at just thirteen, starting aboard HMS Ajax. The Napoleonic wars were in full swing and William saw his first action in March 1814 when Ajax captured L'Alycon, a French national corvette of 16 guns and 120 men. ²

By the age of sixteen, as a midshipman on HMS Severn, he was present at the bombardment of Algiers — an action aimed at curbing the Barbary slave trade, and one of the conflicts that shaped British naval priorities in the early nineteenth century. ²

William served on a number of ships until his promotion to Lieutenant on 12^th September 1822.

In the 1820s and 1830s William served in the southern hemisphere as an officer on HMS Samarang, where his duties combined chasing slaving vessels with protecting British commercial interests in distant waters. According to Turtle Bunbury, a descendant of the Captain's family:

[Those on board the ship]...would not see England again until January 1835 during which time they surveyed the east coast of South America from Pernambuco to Monte Video and rounded Cape Horn on no less than four occasions to explore as far north as Guaymas in the Gulf of California. Their journeys encompassed a staggering 56,610 miles - and that was before they set sail on the long trip home. ³ -Turtle Bunbury

It was during this period that Samarang encountered HMS Beagle, the vessel then carrying Robert FitzRoy and Charles Darwin on the voyage that would later revolutionise natural science. ²

Among William's shipmates on HMS Samarang were his first cousin, the future Admiral Sir Francis Leopold McClintock. Francis was the son of William's father's brother, Henry McClintock. Francis became an arctic explorer who later discovered the Prince of Wales Island and Prince Patrick Island and also ascertained the fate of the explorer John Franklin who had perished looking for the Northwest Passage. ⁴

Inheritance and Identity: Bunbury squared!

On the death of his maternal uncle, Thomas Bunbury MP, in 1847, William succeeded to the Bunbury family estates at Lisnavagh, outside the village of Rathvilly in County Carlow. The inheritance came with a legal condition attached: under the terms of his uncle’s will, he was required to take the Bunbury name in addition to his own.

As a result, his full name became William Bunbury McClintock Bunbury.

The arrangement reflected a familiar reality of nineteenth-century Irish society. As Turtle Bunbury says on his website about the family, the McClintocks had the money, and the Bunburys had the name. The double Bunbury was the price of securing both. Luckily, that double-barrelled, double-Bunbury name was only used by William himself and was not passed down to future generations, who simply used the name McClintock Bunbury.

Parliament and Public Life

Alongside the Lisnavagh estate, William also succeeded to his uncle’s seat in the British House of Commons. ⁶ On the 1^st July 1846 he began to represent County Carlow as a Conservative MP, serving alongside Colonel Henry Bruen during one of the most difficult periods in Irish history: the years of the Great Famine i.

His parliamentary career spanned two periods, first from 1846 to 1852, and again from 1853 until declining health forced his retirement in 1862. These were years marked by political strain, social upheaval, and intense debate over Ireland’s future, and William’s role placed him firmly within the governing structures of the time.

Lisnavagh: Building a Seat

In the same year he inherited Lisnavagh, William commissioned the eccentric and imaginative American-born architect Daniel Robertson to design a new house on the estate. Robertson was also tasked with laying out the surrounding landscape, gardens, and grounds, creating a setting intended to match the status and ambition that came with the Bunbury inheritance. ⁶

The project at Lisnavagh was not simply about comfort or display. It was a clear statement of arrival: William was now the head of a landed estate, reshaping both house and landscape to reflect his new position.

Marriage and Family

William had married earlier, in 1842, to Pauline Stronge, the second daughter of Sir James Stronge of Tynan Abbey, County Armagh, a prominent Orangeman and influential figure in his own right. ⁵ The marriage further strengthened William’s political and social connections.

Together they had four children: two sons, Tom and Jack, and two daughters, Bella and Helen. Family life at Lisnavagh unfolded against the backdrop of public duty, estate management, and the wider turbulence of nineteenth-century Ireland.

List of Residents/Owners

Earlscliffe in context: Ireland in the 1860s

By the time McClintock Bunbury appears in connection with Earlscliffe in the 1860s, Ireland was entering a new and unsettled chapter.

The 1860s sit in an interesting gap between the catastrophe of the Great Famine i and the agitation of the Land War. It was a period of consolidation and anxiety. Fenian activity was rising. Debates about land tenure simmered. The Protestant landed class still held formal power, but the political ground beneath them was shifting.

McClintock’s presence at Earlscliffe reflects how coastal properties around Howth were becoming desirable residences for members of this class. Unlike rural estate houses tied to agricultural rents, houses such as Earlscliffe offered something different: proximity to Dublin’s institutions combined with physical separation from the urban centre. They were part of a lifestyle shift among the Anglo-Irish professional and landed elite, who increasingly divided their time between city, countryside and coast.

For a man of McClintock’s background, residence at Earlscliffe would have placed him within commuting distance of Dublin’s legal, parliamentary and administrative circles while maintaining the social markers of status associated with a substantial coastal property. The railway, extended to Howth in the mid-nineteenth century, made such arrangements practical rather than symbolic. The house was no longer remote. It was connected.

The McClintock Bunbury name also carries imperial resonance. Families of this standing were often intertwined with military service, colonial administration and parliamentary politics across the British Empire. While Earlscliffe itself remained firmly rooted on the Howth peninsula, its occupants during this period were part of networks that linked Ireland to London, India, Canada and beyond. The Anglo-Irish elite functioned as a bridge between Ireland and imperial governance, and houses like Earlscliffe formed part of that lived infrastructure.

This was also the decade following the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869. That reform struck at the symbolic heart of Protestant institutional dominance. For families such as the McClintocks, it represented not only religious restructuring but a sign that the old order was no longer guaranteed. Landed identity in Ireland was becoming less secure.

Seen in this light, McClintock’s association with Earlscliffe sits at a subtle turning point. The house had moved from the hands of a commercially driven Catholic entrepreneur into the orbit of an established Protestant landholding family. That shift mirrors broader patterns in nineteenth-century Ireland, where property, status and political influence were continually renegotiated.

Yet the occupation was not part of a static “big house” tradition. Earlscliffe was not an ancestral demesne; it was a coastal residence within reach of Dublin. Its meaning lay as much in mobility and connection as in permanence. Even within the Anglo-Irish world, identities were becoming more urban and more professionalised. Estates were managed through agents, careers were pursued in administration or the military, and suburban or coastal living grew more common.

The McClintock Bunbury period therefore deepens the story of Earlscliffe in two ways. First, it anchors the house within the network of nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish landed society. Second, it shows how that society itself was adapting to change — politically, economically and geographically.

If the Egan years tied Earlscliffe to civic reform and commercial ambition, the McClintock Bunbury years connect it to land, lineage and imperial reach. Together, they show that from its earliest decades the house was never socially narrow. It stood at the intersection of Catholic commercial advancement and Protestant landed tradition, reflecting the layered and sometimes tense fabric of nineteenth-century Ireland.

In the decades that followed, those tensions would intensify. Land reform would gather pace. Administrative structures would expand. The Protestant landed elite would gradually lose their dominance. And Earlscliffe would continue to pass between residents whose lives traced those wider shifts.

List of Residents/Owners

Earlscliffe timeline