Family and Education

b. ?1790, o.s. of Ephraim Carroll, MP [I], barrister, of Stephen’s Green and Rockfield, co. Wicklow and Eliza, da. of John Doherty, attorney, of Aungier Street, Dublin.1 educ. Trinity, Dublin 4 July 1808, aged 17; G. Inn 1813, called [I] 1815. suc. fa. 1825.

Offices Held

Biography

Carroll, an Irish barrister, who had been returned for New Ross in 1818 on the interest of his father’s cousin Charles Tottenham, came in there again in 1820 as a locum for the co-patron, Francis Leigh of Rosegarland. No trace of parliamentary activity has been found, though he was certainly a supporter of the Liverpool ministry, who noted that he wanted a commissionership of appeals.2 He evidently did not get one. He vacated his seat for Leigh as soon as Parliament met in 1821.

Carroll’s father, a man of ‘the strictest integrity and the most amiable disposition’, died on 3 Mar. 1825, ‘after a painful and protracted illness’.3 Carroll himself has been wrongly identified as the John Carroll who married Frances Sharp in London in 1812, and a woman named Charlotte, possibly in 1867, and who died at 34 Lansdown Road, Notting Hill, in 1875.4 In fact, this Member was dead by 1841, for on 30 Aug. that year his uncle John Doherty* of Dublin, the Irish lord chief justice of common pleas, supported his unsuccessful application to Sir Robert Peel* for a peerage by boasting of his possession of Irish estates ‘which have devolved on me by the death of my nephew Mr. Carroll (who while in the House of Commons was not unknown to you)’.5 In his will of 30 Aug. 1850, Doherty devised these estates, which were at Newstown, Carlow, and which he had mortgaged for £15,000, to his own eldest son, and confirmed as a charge on them an annuity of £200 given by Carroll to his (Doherty’s) sister Letitia.6 Carroll may have died before 1837, for by then his name had disappeared from the list of barristers in the Dublin Almanac, and the occupant of his Dublin House was given as Mrs. Carroll.

Ref Volumes: 1820-1832

Author: David R. Fisher

Notes

• 1. Gent. Mag. (1789), ii. 859.
• 2. Add. 40296, f.10.
• 3. Gent. Mag. (1825), i. 286.
• 4. See HP Commons, 1790-1820, iii. 409-10. This identification was based on the notice of John Carroll’s death in The Times, 8 June 1875, and on an examination of his will, dated 18 Jan. 1871 and proved, with six codicils, under £2,000, 23 Sept. 1875.
• 5. Add. 40486, f. 244.
• 6. PROB 11/2127/109.