Charles Brownlow, 1st Baron Lurgan

[2] During parliamentary debate in 1824, he announced his admission to the Orange Order and presented a vigorous case for the suppression of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Association.

However, the following year a parliamentary committee to inquire into the state of Ireland, and which took evidence from leading Catholic clerics, appeared to have a profound impact on Brownlow.

Accepting that the Roman Catholics of Ireland received their spiritual guidance but not their politics from Rome, he asserted that there was no longer any "shadow of argument" that could justify the continued denial of their claims.

However, to the dismay of George Ensor, and a coterie of other reformers in the county who campaigned for his re-election, Brownlow accepted, and defended, as a condition for admitting Catholics to parliament and to higher offices, that the property qualification for the electoral franchise in Ireland be raised five-fold to the English ten pound level.

[7] In 1833 he had built Brownlow House designed by the Edinburgh architect William Henry Playfair in the Elizabethan style and constructed of Scottish sandstone.