Carey Dillon, 5th Earl of Roscommon

Carey or Cary Dillon, 5th Earl of Roscommon (1627–1689) was an Irish nobleman and professional soldier of the seventeenth century. He held several Court offices under King Charles II and his successor King James II. After the Glorious Revolution he went over to the Williamite side,  and was attainted as a traitor by James II's Irish Parliament in 1689,   shortly before his death.

In his earlier days, he had been  a friend of Samuel Pepys, who in his celebrated Diary followed with interest Dillon's abortive love affair with their mutual friend,  the noted  beauty Frances Butler.

Background
Cary was a younger son of Robert Dillon, 2nd Earl of Roscommon (died 1642),  by  his third wife Anne Strode, daughter of Sir William Strode of Somerset. His mother, who died about 1650, was the widow of Henry Folliott, 1st Baron Folliott, by whom she had several children. As a younger  son  with his livelihood  to earn  in the war-torn Ireland of the 1640s and 1650s,   a military career was an obvious choice for him:  he was made  a  Captain by the age of seventeen. Although Samuel Pepys in the  Great Diary    always called him "Colonel Dillon" he was apparently only a Lieutenant  until 1684, when he became a  Major,  and subsequently a  Colonel.

His father in the 1630s had been a supporter of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, the formidable and virtually all-powerful  Lord Deputy of Ireland, as was his  half-brother James Dillon, 3rd Earl of Roscommon, and a family tie  between the Dillons and the Wentworths  was created when James married Strafford's sister Elizabeth. During the English Civil War, both brothers were staunch Royalists: James, who died in 1649, was posthumously listed in the Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652  as one of the ten leaders of the Royalist  cause in Ireland who were excluded  from pardon,  and thus liable to forfeiture  of their  estates.

Duel
Following the Restoration of Charles II, Dillon  entered politics, sitting in the Irish House of Commons as MP for Banagher  in the Parliament  of 1661-1666. His career was almost ruined in 1662 when he acted as second to Colonel Thomas Howard in his notorious duel with Henry Jermyn, 1st Baron Dover (Howard and Dover being rivals for the affections of  the notoriously  promiscuous  Anna Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury). Howard left Lord Dover for dead, and Dillon killed Dover's second, Giles Rawlings. He and Howard initially fled, but later returned to stand their trials, and as was usual   in an affair of honour,  they  were  both acquitted, as killing a man in a duel was  then  generally regarded as  an act of self-defence.

Political career
This check to his career was temporary, and after 1670 his rise  in Irish public life  was rapid. He was sworn a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1673, and also became Master of the Irish Mint, Commissary-General  of the Horse of Ireland,  Surveyor-General for Customs and  Excise in Ireland, and a Governor of the  Royal Hospital Kilmainham. In 1685, on the death of his nephew, the poet Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon, he succeeded to the Earldom. The following year he clashed bitterly with the Duke of Tyrconnel, the rising  Roman Catholic  Royal favourite. Tyrconnel, as Lieutenant-General of the Irish Army, had removed all the Protestant officers of the regiment which was   stationed at Kilkenny. Roscommon, with it seems considerable justification, challenged his legal right to do so, and when the matter came before the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Clarendon, Roscommon  called Tyrconnel a liar  to his face: this was  a shrewd blow,  since Tyrconnel had the unfortunate nickname "Lying Dick Talbot". The "Kilkenny affair" caused something of a furore at home, but did not damage Tyrconnel's  standing at the English Court.



The Williamite
Having served the Stuart dynasty  with   notable loyalty both during the Civil War and after  the Restoration, Lord Roscommon, like many of the Irish  Protestant ruling class,  changed sides after the downfall and flight to France   of James II in 1688. Roscommon and the majority  of his fellow peers   were opposed to James's   pro-Catholic policy, and appalled at the mishandling of the economy by Tyrconnel, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, with whom Roscommon had a bitter  personal feud as well. When James  in 1689 attempted to reconquer England by occupying Ireland,  Roscommon  offered his services to King William III of England. He was commissioned to raise troops on William's  behalf, and  was present at the taking of Carrickfergus, the crucial first step in William's campaign to wrest  control of  Ireland from  James's invading army,  in  August 1689. In consequence he was attainted for treason by King James II's Patriot Parliament held in Dublin in the summer of 1689. He died the following November.

Family
He married Katherine Werden (died 1683), daughter of John Werden of Chester, by whom he had a son and heir, Robert Dillon, 6th Earl of Roscommon (died 1715), who is said still to have been a young child when his father died. The 5th Earl also had two daughters, Anne, who married Sir Thomas Nugent in about 1675,   and Catherine (died 1674), who married Hugh Montgomery, 2nd  Earl of Mount Alexander. The sisters were so many years older than their brother that it is possible they were children of an earlier unrecorded  marriage: if so, their mother must have died before 1660, since it is clear from the Diary of Samuel Pepys  that Dillon was free to marry between 1660 and 1668.

Dillon in Pepys's Diary


Pepys evidently liked  "Colonel Dillon",  whom he first seems to have  met in 1660,  when he  called  him  "a very merry and witty companion". At the start of the Diary period (1660-1669) one of Pepys's  closest friends was a young clergyman  called Butler (nicknamed "Monsieur l'Impertinent", apparently because he never stopped talking), who was probably,  like Dillon, an Irishman. Pepys admired both of  Butler's sisters, especially Frances (nicknamed "la belle Boteler"),  whom he thought one of the greatest beauties in London. Dillon courted Frances, and matters proceeded as far as an engagement, but this was broken off  in 1662, apparently after a violent quarrel between Dillon and  Frances's brother  "Monsiuer l'Impertinent", who complained of Dillon's "knavery" to him. In the summer of 1668 Dillon apparently renewed his proposal of marriage- Pepys saw him and Frances  riding in a carriage together- but  it seems that Frances declined the offer. It is not known whether Frances ever married.