Bury, Charles William (1764–1835), 1st earl of Charleville , developer of Tullamore and president of the RIA, was born 30 June 1764 in Dublin, the only son of John Bury of Shannongrove, Co. Limerick, and his wife, Catherine, daughter and co-heir of Francis Sadleir of Sopwell Hall, Co. Tipperary. John Bury (1735–64), whose mother, Jane, was the sister of Charles Moore, earl of Charleville (1712–64), had on 17 February 1764 inherited the Charleville estate on the death of his maternal uncle, but on 4 August drowned, making his infant son the owner of several thousand hectares in King's Co., including the town of Tullamore. Charles William Bury graduated BA at TCD in 1785, the year of the great fire at Tullamore and of his coming of age, a coincidence that enabled him to grant new leases in that town and bring about its rapid development. He employed the architect Francis Johnston (qv) on the Market House and St Catherine's church.
Bury was MP for Kilmallock in 1789–90 and 1791–7, becoming Baron Tullamore on 26 November 1797, Viscount Charleville on 29 December 1800, and 1st earl of Charleville (of the second creation) on 16 February 1806. He was an Irish representative peer from 1801 until his death. With Johnston he designed and built a Gothic castle on his demesne, Charleville Forest, 3 km south-west of Tullamore. Begun by November 1800, it was completed in 1808, to which a terrace, lawns, artificial lake, grotto, and 1,500 acres of woodland were added. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1803 and a fellow of the Society of Arts in 1814, Charleville had ‘wide intellectual interests which never came to fruition’. His only paper in the RIA's Transactions (on turf ash, presented in 1799) was brief, and during his presidency of the academy (from 1812 to 1822) he was frequently absent.
The earl of Charleville died 31 October 1835 in his lodgings at Dover and was buried at Charleville. He married, on 4 June 1798, Catherine Maria (1762–1815), the widow of James Tisdall of Bawn, Co. Louth, and a daughter of Thomas Townley Dawson of Kinsaley, Co. Dublin. Educated in France, she had strong intellectual interests, corresponded with Maria Edgeworth (qv), was a noted hostess, a talented artist, and translator (perhaps with her second husband) of Voltaire's La Pucelle. Their son, another Charles William Bury (1801–51), was (as Lord Tullamore) tory MP for Carlow borough, 1826–32, and for Penryn, 1832–5, before succeeding his father as 2nd earl of Charleville.