WILLIAM CONYNGHAM, Baron, Lord Chancellor of Ireland. This eminent lawyer, orator, and statesman, was the second son of the Rev. Thomas Plunket, a minister of the Church of Scotland in Ireland, and was born in the county of Fermanagh in July 1765. He was educated in boyhood by his father, who was a man of considerable abilities and reputation; and in 1779 he became a student of Trinity College, Dublin, having failed at his entrance in obtaining the humble honour of a sizarship. Though well versed in regular academic studies, as his writings and speeches abundantly prove, he was most conspicuous in his university career as the acknowledged leader of the Historical Society, the debating club of Trinity College, at this time full of young men of remarkable promise. In this arena, according to the tradition of his contemporaries, he showed from the first the powers of a great speaker; and he held an admitted superiority in an assembly among whose members were several orators of great future eminence.

Having entered Lincoln's Inn in 1784, Plunket was called to the Irish bar in 1787. His talents, acquirements, character, and station in life were calculated to insure him success in the profession of the law. If somewhat deficient in ready dexterity, his intellect was exactly that of a jurist or a great master of equity—not too refining or overprone to speculation, and yet capable of the highest legal generalizations, and of applying them to masses of fact, however tedious and complicated. His power of close and rapid argument was very remarkable, his memory equally capacious and exact, and he had enriched an ample store of professional learning with the fruits of assiduous general study. In addition, he was sedate and persevering in his disposition, his promise of eloquence was already acknowledged, and his fortune was sufficiently scanty to coerce him to submit to drudgery. Accordingly, although at first his progress at the bar was not rapid, he gradually obtained a considerable practice in equity; became known as a logical pleader and powerful advocate; and after an apprenticeship of eleven years as a junior, was raised to the rank of king's counsel in 1798.

In 1798 he entered the Irish Parliament as member for Charlemont. His political faith was already settled, and was only slightly modified in after life, at least as regards its cardinal tenets. He was an anti-Jacobin Whig of the school of Burke, not ungracefully filled with a fervent Irish patriotism. Having but little turn for speculation, he disliked the principles of the French Revolution, and its ferocious excesses made such an impression upon him that he always showed the greatest antipathy to merely democratic movements. But he was a sincere admirer of the constitutional government of England as established in 1688; he reverenced the predominance it secures to law and to the play of social forces; and he naturally loved its parliamentary and municipal institutions. He even justified the ascendancy it had given to the established church, although he thought that the time had at length arrived for extending toleration to Roman Catholics and Dissenters. To transfer it to Ireland as thus modified, and under an independent legislature, was, even in his youth, the only reform he sought for his country; and although he opposed the Union with all his power, this was only because he thought it incompatible with this object.

When Plunket became a member of Parliament, the Irish Whig party was almost extinct, and Mr Pitt was feeling his way to accomplish the Union. In this he was seconded ably by Lord Castlereagh, by the panic caused by a wild insurrection, and by the secession of Mr Grattan from politics. When, however, the measure was actually brought forward, it encountered a vehement opposition; and among the ablest and fiercest of its adversaries was Plunket, whose powers as a great orator were now universally recognised. His speeches in these debates show all the force of reasoning, the admirable arrangement, and the grasp of facts which characterize his later efforts; but they are somewhat disfigured by personal invective, and here and there betray an indecent acrimony. They raised him, however, immediately to the front rank of his party; and when Mr Grattan re-entered the moribund senate in which even his genius had been displayed in vain, he took his seat next to Plunket, thus significantly recognizing the place he had attained.

After the union of Great Britain and Ireland Plunket returned to the practice of his profession, and became at once a leader of the equity bar. In 1803, after the outbreak of Emmet's rebellion, he was selected as one of the crown lawyers to prosecute the unfortunate enthusiast, and at the trial, in summing up the evidence, delivered a speech remarkable power, which shows his characteristic dislike of revolutionary outbreaks. For this speech he was exposed to much unmerited obloquy, and more especially to the libellous abuse of Cobbett, who could not endure his antipathy to democratic violence, and against whom he brought a successful action for damages. In 1804, in Mr Pitt's second administration, he became solicitor, and then attorney-general for Ireland; and he continued in office when Lord Grenville came into power at the head of the ministry of all the talents. Plunket held a seat in Parliament during this period; and when there, made several able speeches in favour of Catholic emancipation, and of continuing the war with France; but when the Grenville cabinet was dissolved, he returned once more to professional life, and for some years devoted himself exclusively to it.

In 1812, having amassed a considerable fortune, he re-entered Parliament as member for Trinity College, and identified himself thoroughly with the Grenville or anti-Gallican Whigs. He was now in the full maturity of his powers, and very soon was acknowledged one of the first, if not the first, orator of the House of Commons. His political tenets and his great abilities combined to secure him respect and admiration. His peculiar reverence for the English constitution in church and state, his strong dislike of French principles, his steady advocacy of the war with Napoleon, and his antipathy to anything like democracy, made him popular with the Tory party. On the other hand, he was the zealous and most able supporter of Catholic emancipation; he was not averse to some measure of parliamentary reform; and, as generally he was on the side of constitutional progress, he was reckoned a principal ornament of one of the sections of the Whigs. During the period between 1812 and 1822 his speeches on the Catholic question, on the renewal of the war in 1815, and on the "Peterloo massacre," as it was called, will alike indicate his position as a statesman, and give an idea of his oratorical abilities.

In 1822 Plunket was once more attorney-general for Ireland, with Lord Wellesley as lord-lieutenant. One of his first official acts was to prosecute for the "bottle riot;" an attempt on his part to put down the Orange faction in Ireland. But, though always the advocate of the Catholic claims, he strenuously opposed the Catholic Association, which about this time, under the guidance of Mr O'Connell, began its extraordinary and successful agitation. He struggled vehemently to extinguish it, and in 1825 made a powerful speech against it; and thus the curious spectacle was seen of the ablest champion of an oppressed sect doing all in his power to check its efforts to emancipate itself. And yet in this conduct it cannot be denied that Plunket was quite consistent with his principles of politics.

In 1827 Plunket was made master of the rolls in England; but, owing to the professional jealousy of the bar, who not unnaturally thought him an intruder, he was obliged to abandon this office. Soon afterwards he became chief justice of the common pleas in Ireland, and was then created an English peer. He was thus no longer a member of the House of Commons when the great measure of 1829 at length threw it open to the misgoverned sect of whom he had for many years been the chief advocate. In 1830 he was appointed lord chancellor of Ireland, and held the office, with an interval of a few months only, until 1841, when he finally retired from public life. During this period he made some able speeches in favour of parliamentary reform; but they were scarcely equal to his earlier efforts; and his reputation as a judge, though far from low, was not so eminent as might have been expected. He died in 1854, in his ninety-ninth year; and at his death the bar of Ireland held a general meeting to acknowledge their sense of his great qualities, and to devise a monument to his memory.

The eloquence of Lord Plunket is his best title to fame. It was remarkable for a felicitous exposition of principles not too recondite for the general hearer, and yet broad, deep, and comprehensive; for close, rapid, and vigorous reasoning; for perspicuous and well-arranged narrative; and for a diction, chaste, severe, and idiomatic—very rarely adorned with metaphor or antithesis, yet occasionally enriched with the most admirable illustrations, and frequently enlivened with a caustic and powerful satire. If it was wanting in anything, it was in passion; unlike that of Mr Fox, it never subdued the hearer; but it convinced him by a mingled display of argument, exposition, and irony, scarcely equalled even in the age of Brougham, Canning, and Lyndhurst.