Union
Under a provision of the Act of Union 1800 he retained his seat in the 1st Parliament of the United Kingdom 1801-02 without a fresh election, and in the Union Parliament he was a supporter of William Pitt the younger and later Henry Addington; he had to give up his Irish business interests in order to play a full part in Parliamentary business. He was re-elected at the general election of 1802, being top of the poll.
On 3 June 1803 Beresford was the only previous supporter of the government to desert them and support a censure motion moved by Peter Patten, making a speech in support which was regarded as "absurd" by the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant for Ireland. In March 1804, Beresford was appointed to the Irish currency committee, and therefore resigned his seat by accepting the Escheatorship of Ulster, a sinecure office of profit under the Crown (see Resignation from the British House of Commons for details of the procedure).
Read more about this topic: John Claudius Beresford
Famous quotes containing the word union:
“The methods by which a trade union can alone act, are necessarily destructive; its organization is necessarily tyrannical.”
—Henry George (1839–1897)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The old ideals are dead as nails—nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman—sort of ultimate marriage—and there isn’t anything else.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)