The lengthy political career of Charles James Patrick Mahon was intertwined with both Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell. In fact, he may be said to have played a crucial role in both of the careers of the two titans of 19th-century Irish nationalism.
In the 1820s, Mahon became a member of the Catholic Association and encouraged Daniel O’Connell to stand for election in Clare. In the late 1870s, he ran for parliament as a supporter of Parnell, being returned for Clare with a certain William O’Shea. It was Mahon who introduced Parnell to O’Shea, and, thus, indirectly, O’Shea’s estranged wife, Kitty.
Mahon’s parliamentary career began in 1830, when he himself was elected for Clare, but came to an abrupt halt a year later when it was discovered that he had corruptly bought the seat. He and O’Connell fell out when the latter opposed Mahon’s candidacy. It was not until 1847 that Mahon returned to the British parliament, this time for the constituency of Ennis. This second period in parliament coincided with the worst years of the Great Famine. His final stint in the Commons, representing Clare (1879-1885) and Carlow (1887-1891), took place during the great parliamentary agitation for Home Rule.
While his political career was significant if unspectacular, Mahon himself was one of the most colourful characters to roam the corridors of Westminster. He styled himself “the O’Gorman Mahon”, claiming ancestry to a dynasty of Gaelic chieftains, leading to Thackeray caricaturing him as the portentous “the Mulligan” in his novel Mrs Perkins’s Ball.
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“The greatest offence that can be offered to him, is to call him Mr. Mulligan,” wrote the esteemed novelist in a passage that somewhat betrays the British Establishment’s attitude towards the Irish in that era. ‘”Would you deprive me, Sir,” says he, “of the title which was bawren be me princelee ancestors in a hundred thousands battles? In our green valleys and fawrests, in the American Savannaghs, in the Sierras of Speen, and the Flats of Flandthers, the Saxon has quailed before me war-cry of MULLIGAN ABOO!”’
More recently, one historian of the British Houses of Parliament has described Mahon as “a grotesque figure even by the exotic standards of some of the Irish Members in this period” and “a figure of pure self-invention”. Another biographer, Frederick William Whyte, wrote that he was “one of the last of the old race of dare-devil Irish gentlemen”.
As was common of that breed – and the English perception of it – Mahon was quick to pick up his duelling pistols. Accounts vary, but it seems Mahon fought more than a dozen duels, although some biographers put the total closer to 20. Whyte even claimed that a couple of notches on one of Mahon’s duelling pistols seemed significant. In his defence, Mahon claimed never to have done anything deliberately to provoke a challenge.
He did, however, evince a compulsion for adventure. Shortly after being called to the Irish bar – he never practised – he set off for Europe. In France, he met Talleyrand and spent time at the court of Louis Philippe. In Russia, he served in the army and allegedly went hunting bears with the Tzarevitch. His travels took him to Turkey, China, India, Arabia and South America. In Chile, he was said to have commanded a fleet, in Uruguay a brigade. In Brazil, he claimed to have been consecrated an archbishop.
In 1860, he found himself in Lima, investigating a murder. During the voyage to Peru, aboard the Vixen, Mahon had become friendly with the ship’s commander, Capt Lionel Lambert. Shortly after arriving in Lima, Capt Lambert had ventured out of his lodgings to bathe in a river when he was set upon by thieves and killed. Mahon took up the case of the deceased, pressurising the Peruvian government to find the murderers and even raising the issue with Lord Palmerston, the British prime minister.
After Lima, Mahon spent time in the United States, where he claimed to have fought on the Union side in the civil war, and in Berlin, during which period he tried to convince Bismarck to give him a concession to open a joint-stock bank. By the beginning of the 1870s, he was back in Ireland, participating in Isaac Butt’s Home Rule movement.
During Mahon’s last years in parliament, he became an enthusiastic adopter of obstructionism before publicly repudiating Parnell during the split in the Irish Party. He died on June 21st, 1891, and was buried in the O’Connell Circle in Glasnevin Cemetery. Three and a half months later, his one-time leader, Parnell, was also dead.