William Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim

Who was William Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim?

William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim was an Anglo-Irish nobleman and landlord notorious in Irish history for his mistreatment of his tenants. He was assassinated in Donegal in April 1878.

Born in Dublin, he was educated at the Sandhurst and was commissioned as an Ensign in the 43rd Foot in 1824. In 1831 he was promoted Captain, having served in Portugal between 1826 and 1827, and that same year was appointed an aide-de-camp to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1835 he transferred to the 51st Foot. In 1839, on the death of his elder brother, he became known as Viscount Clements and also succeeded his brother as a Member of Parliament for County Leitrim, a seat he held until 1847.

On his father's death in 1854, Clements succeeded as 3rd Earl. In 1855 he was promoted Lieutenant-Colonel and subsequently retired from the British Army. Over the next two decades, his overbearing behaviour as a landlord brought him much hatred from his tenants, both Catholic and Protestant alike, whom he evicted with equal enthusiasm. However, his motivations for the evictions were pure. He saw the Irish population boom coming and realised that the land could not possibly hold so many tenants. He encouraged his evicted tenants to settle in the Americas where they could have had a better quality of life.