Sir Joseph Napier, 1st Baronet

He was the son of William Napier and Rosetta MacNaghten of Ballyreagh House, County Antrim, and was born in Belfast, Ireland, where his father was a prosperous brewer.

He accepted the position of Lord Justice of Appeal, but the reaction from the Bar was so unfavourable (his deafness rather than his religious beliefs seems to have been the issue here) that he withdrew his name.

[2] In 1880, following the death of his eldest son William, a blow from which he never recovered, he retired to St Leonards-on-Sea in Sussex and died there on 9 December 1882.

He was remembered as a learned jurist and a diligent Parliamentarian, but above all as a devout Protestant with a deep devotion to the Church of Ireland, whose disestablishment he fiercely opposed.

He was sometimes accused of hypocrisy, and certainly knew how to dissemble: candidates for office who were assured of his support sometimes found to their outrage that he had been blocking them all along.

Another sister, Mary Napier, married Echlin Molyneux who later became a Professor of English Law at Queen's University Belfast; she died young in 1831, leaving a son, James Henry.

John Robinson, founder and proprietor of the Dublin Daily Express, was a cousin: this assured Napier of favourable press coverage in a wide-circulation Unionist newspaper.