Page 21 - They Also Served

3William Clements 1824.
A member of the Anglo-Irish nobility,
William Sydney Clements was born
in Dublin on 15th October 1806.
After attending the Royal Military
College Sandhurst, he did not complete
the course, being ‘withdrawn by his
friends’, although he was eventually
commissioned into the 43rd Regiment
in 1824. Serving in Portugal from
1826–27, he was promoted to captain
in 1831 and served as ADC to the
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. After transferring to the 53rd Regiment of Foot, he became Viscount Clements upon the death of his older brother, and also one of the two MPs for the county of Leitrim.
In 1854, Clements succeeded his father as the 3rd Earl of Leitrim, was promoted to lieutenant-colonel the following year and retired from the army to concentrate on running his estates. It was at this time that the fun-loving and gregarious youngest son turned into the austere, spartan and driven man who devoted the rest of his life to dragging his vast estates into some semblance of order. Presiding over 90,000 acres, he evicted Protestant and Catholic tenants from his land with equal enthusiasm. He so refined the process that every tenant was served with a notice to quit every April, meaning they could be evicted if the earl so decided when the notice expired the following October. Unsurprisingly, the earl incurred much hatred and survived several attempts on his life. In 1864, he was attacked by two men in an event drawn for a local newspaper. He was even alleged to have insisted on the ancient droit de seigneur (Lord’s right) or jus primae noctis (right of the first night) to sleep with tenant wives on their wedding night. There is no actual evidence that this ever happened, but such was his poor management of his subordinates that he became known in the House of Lords as ‘The Bad Earl’. There is, however, no doubt that he was such a poor landlord that few people thought such outrageous behaviour to be out of character.
On 2nd April 1878, the earl was ambushed on the way to inspect one of his villages by three men who fired several shots, killing his clerk, John Makim and driver, Charles Buchanan. The earl was shot in the arm, rendering him incapable of drawing his
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