Lord Charlemont and Learning

Abstract

James Caulfeild (1728-99), first earl of Charlemont (PL I) and first president of the Royal Irish Academy, was one of the most interesting members of the Irish peerage in the eighteenth century when members of that elite were at their most imposing politically and influential culturally. Charlemont was popularly known as the 'volunteer earl' because of the care and attention with which he filled the honorary office of commander-in-chief of the volunteers.1 The high esteem in which this appellation suggests he was held is corroborated by the fact that he was long considered the leading patriot peer in the House of Lords and, in his capacity of eminence grise of the patriot political interest, the friend and patron respectively of Henry Flood and Henry Grattan.2 He was a self-described 'constitutional royalist',3 whose finely-honed Whig political convictions were shaped by his reverence for the constitutional monarchy brought into being by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. His political career was defined by his commitment to the achievement of full