Browne, Geoffrey Henry (1861–1927), 3rd Baron Oranmore and Browne in the peerage of Ireland, 1st Baron Mereworth (UK peerage), politician, and landowner, was born 6 January 1861, only son of Geoffrey Dominick Browne Guthrie, 2nd baron (Irish representative peer 1869–1900), who had assumed the name of Guthrie on his marriage to Geoffrey's mother Christina, only surviving child and heiress of Alexander Guthrie, of the Mount, Kilmarnock, and Bourtree Hill, Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland. Geoffrey was also known as ‘Brown Guthrie’ till he resumed his original paternal surname in 1906. Owing to a curvature of his spine he was confined to bed for much of his childhood and was privately educated, except for a brief period at Cheam preparatory school. A cure being effected, he travelled widely throughout Europe with tutors before proceeding to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Prior to succeeding his father as 3rd baron (1900), he served briefly as a lieutenant in the 4th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. He owned some 7,000 acres in Ireland (Mayo and Galway) and 1,000 in Scotland, including some coal mines. (The Browne estate in Connacht had originally been much larger but went to the encumbered estates court after the great famine because of a heavy debt burden; Browne's father repurchased the core holding with his wife's money.) Browne sold his Irish property to the congested districts board, but retained his Irish residence, Castle MacGarrett House, Claremorris, Co. Mayo, and its demesne of 2,000 acres as his principal residence; he always spoke of Castle MacGarrett as ‘home’. He was a significant employer of labour in the Claremorris area and active in various local causes, including the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, for whose journal he wrote several articles. Browne was president of the Mayo branches of the Irish Landowners’ Convention and of the Irish Unionist Alliance (IUA); he held the offices of DL, JP, and high sheriff (1890) for the county. He was also a JP for Ayrshire. During the first world war Browne served as a special constable in London, guarding Buckingham Palace.
Browne married (2 January 1901) Lady Olwen (‘Onie’) Ponsonby, eldest daughter of the 8th earl of Bessborough, and imitated his father-in-law both in conservative political activism and in business activity. A director of the Ottoman Bank, the Bank of Rumania, the Henderson Estates in Transvaal, the Delagoa Development Co. in Portuguese East Africa, and the Wankie coal mine in Southern Rhodesia, Browne had coal mining interests in Scotland and served on the railways board, Dublin. He was a Grand Officer of the Crown of Rumania and a Knight of Grace of the English Order of St John of Jerusalem, and was created a Knight of St Patrick in 1918.
Owing to Onie's friendship with Madeleine Stanley, second wife of the earl of Midleton (qv), Browne and Midleton became close friends as well as political colleagues. Elected an Irish representative peer (1902), Browne spoke frequently in Irish debates in the house of lords and addressed public meetings in England in support of the unionist cause. He was a fervent defender of the rights of property, believing that democracy led straight to anarchy and communism; he saw the 1911 abolition of the lords’ veto (‘Asquith's coup d'etat’; Butler, 555) as materially advancing this prospect.
While an active opponent of the third home rule bill, Oranmore grew increasingly apprehensive at the implications of partition for southern unionists. He welcomed the support of John Redmond (qv) for the Entente war effort, writing to the nationalist Leader on 13 November 1914 to praise his recruiting campaign while excusing himself from appearing on a recruiting platform with Redmond on the grounds that the presence of a unionist might alienate nationalists. Like other moderate unionists, Oranmore reacted fiercely to the Easter rising, and joined the Midleton group in lobbying against the attempt to implement an immediate settlement based on home rule with partition. (Oranmore wrote in his journal that he blamed the Redmondites for the failure to repress the Irish Volunteers before the rising, and that if home rule had been in operation the Irish government would have been seized by the rebels. He also disliked the ‘bitter’ speech of John Dillon (qv) on the repression of the rebellion; Browne always disliked Dillon and rejoiced at his defeat in 1918.)
Browne represented the Irish peers at the 1917–18 Irish convention and supported Midleton's January 1918 compromise proposals, which included a large measure of self-government; his principal importance lay in his social skills, which helped to create a conciliatory atmosphere between Redmondites and southern unionists. His distrust of democracy is reflected in his proposal to the convention that the senate of an autonomous Ireland should be renamed the Irish house of lords (defeated by one vote); he also argued that the proposal should represent a final settlement which could only be changed by a 75 per cent majority, and that the supremacy of the imperial parliament must be real and not equivalent to the nominal authority claimed over the dominions. Oranmore believed that the guaranteed minority representation (especially in the senate) made the proposal preferable to the 1914 bill, and hence Ulster should make significant concessions to secure it; any possible Irish government would be under considerable unionist influence. After the proposed compromise was stillborn due to the opposition of a large section of home rulers (which Oramore ascribed to catholic clerical intrigue) and the Ulster unionists, Oranmore's principal concern was to have these safeguards reinstated in any future settlement.
When Midleton and his allies were deposed by a hardline grassroots revolt of IUA activists hostile to the compromise endorsed by the southern unionist leadership at the convention, Browne became a leading member of Midleton's breakaway Irish Unionist Anti-Partition League (though for a time he retained his position in the Mayo branch of the IUA). Appointed an honorary member of the congested districts board (1919–23), he was frequently nominated by his colleagues as chairman in the absence of the chief secretary and under-secretary. During the debate on the government of Ireland bill (which he regarded as worse than the preceding home rule bills) in 1920, the house of lords, on Browne's initiative, amended the government's proposals so that each proposed parliament would have a senate. Browne was elected by his fellow peers to the proposed senate of Southern Ireland and in the same year was sworn of the Irish privy council.
In 1922 Joseph McBride (d. 1938), TD, recommended Browne for a nomination to the Free State senate, but Browne, though proud of his Irish heritage and nationality, was convinced that nobody with a unionist background would be able to live in Ireland after 1922. He lamented that the Irish Free State was a ‘mushroom creation’, ‘a degradation for the ancient kingdom of Ireland’ (Butler, op. cit., 584), blamed the civil war on English ‘supineness’ (588), and speculated that British reconquest would eventually be necessary; he lamented that most of the minority safeguards included in previous schemes had been omitted from the treaty, and tried unsuccessfully to persuade other Irish peers to attempt to amend the Irish Free State constitution on its passage through parliament in December 1922. He recorded the royal consent with ‘Oh day of wrath Oh day of mourning!’ (ibid., 590).
Castle MacGarrett was occupied by Free State troops during the civil war; they remained there till June 1924, causing extensive damage. Anticipating that it would be impossible to live in Ireland for the foreseeable future and that most of the demesne land would be compulsorily redistributed to small farmers by the new government, Browne purchased Mereworth Castle, Kent, as his permanent residence. In 1926 he was created Baron Mereworth; however, he continued to use his Irish title. His principal concerns during the remaining years of his life were that Irish peers should continue to be represented in the lords (he opposed the official refusal to allow the election of new Irish representative peers after the treaty) and that landlords should be compensated for the difference between the land purchase terms they would have received under the settlement proposed by the convention and those given by the 1923 Free State land act.
He died 30 June 1927 at Mereworth, weeks after a motor car accident at Southborough (near Tunbridge Wells) in which his wife was also mortally injured. During their attempts to detect and treat his injuries, doctors made use of one of the first X-ray machines in Britain.
An affable and benevolent man with a strong sense of public service, Browne was affectionately described by one nationalist as being ‘as stout as the lamb of God’, a description which he repeated with relish. He exemplifies the combination of local attachment and reactionary political myopia that drove many Irish landed unionists of his generation; while some of his fears for the position of the southern minority were not unreasonable, the restrictions on democracy he favoured would have been politically unacceptable in any democratic state and might in the long term have worsened the plight of those whom they were supposed to benefit. His journal (extracts from which were published in Irish Historical Studies in 1995) is a vital source for providing insight into the thinking of influential southern unionists in the last years of the union.