John Brownlow, 1st Viscount Tyrconnel

John Brownlow, 1st Viscount Tyrconnel (16 November 1690 – 27 February 1754), KB, known as Sir John Brownlow, 5th Baronet, from 1701 to 1718, of Belton House near Grantham in Lincolnshire, was a British politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1713 to 1741.

[1] Both his parents died before he was 11 and he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, Lady Mason, who had assumed administration of his father's affairs.

When he came of age at 21, he found great fault with the management of his property, and the resulting coolness between himself and his grandmother was exacerbated by his possession of the Mason manor of Sutton in Surrey, which he had inherited from his mother, but which Lady Mason believed belonged rightly to the children of her other daughter, Anne Brett, aka Anne Mason, the notorious Countess of Macclesfield, the divorced former wife of Charles Gerard, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield.

In 1718 he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Charleville in the County of Cork, and as Viscount Tyrconnel.

The motives for his patronage are unclear but, apparently, he accepted the poet's claim as to his parentage and, as referenced above, there was familial friction between Lord Tyrconnel and his grandmother, Lady Mason.