Devereux, James Edward (1766–1845), catholic landowner, politician, and pamphleteer, was born on 22 November 1766 at Carrigmannon, near Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, the eldest of two sons of Robert Devereux (d. 1787) and his wife and cousin Maria Thomasina, daughter of Thomas Ward of Newtown, near Carlow. The Devereux had been landowners in the parish of Glynn since 1638 and were prominent catholics in the county. Robert's great-grandfather, James Devereux (d. 1697?), was MP for Enniscorthy and a Jacobite colonel; his father, James (d. 1758), was a confidant of the earl of Chesterfield (qv) and a source of assurance to Dublin Castle that Irish catholics would not heed the Young Pretender. Robert, who for long lived in France, was a member of the Catholic Committee until his death.
James Edward Devereux was educated in France (at a military college) and returned to Ireland in 1792 full of admiration for the French revolution. By April 1792 he had come to the attention of the catholic bishop of Ferns, James Caulfield (qv), as ‘a young hot-headed libertine . . . who has acquired an amazing influence on the people by his harangues and specious promises of a total emancipation’ (quoted in Whelan, ‘Devereux family’, 40). In Co. Wexford it was Devereux who, with his kinsmen Edward Hay (qv) and Edward Sweetman (qv), led those catholic gentry who sided with liberal protestants against the conservative protestant gentry led by George Ogle (qv) – a division that was to culminate in 1798 in the rebellion in that county. Devereux was active on the Catholic Committee as an organiser of the Catholic Convention that took place in Dublin in December 1792 and at which, with Hay and Sweetman, he represented his county. Devereux chaired a session and was appointed as one of the five delegates who delivered an agreed petition to George III (2 January 1793). He remained in London ‘as a kind of chargé d'affaires’ (Tone, Writings, i, 475) to negotiate with the British home secretary, Henry Dundas, promoter of the catholic relief act of 1793 which restored the franchise to catholics in Ireland. Though he publicly professed loyalty to the king, Devereux is said to have met a French agent in London (where he was engaged in commerce) and to have been suggested by him to the Directory in Paris as a possible leader of an Irish revolution (1796).
By the mid 1790s Devereux had debts totalling £23,000 – about seven times his annual rental. On 18 July 1797 he was arrested in London at the suit of John and Thomas O'Neill of Waterford and confined in prison until 1802. Thus he was insulated from the rebellion and able to write the first of several pamphlets, Observations on the factions which have ruled Ireland . . . and on the justice, expediency and necessity of restoring to the catholics their political rights (1801). Eventually he sold part of his estate to satisfy creditors – mainly wealthy catholics in Co. Wexford. He returned not to Ireland but to France where, despite his gambling, he created a good impression on Miles Byrne (qv). When war resumed between France and England (May 1803) he was, like other British subjects, placed under loose arrest and his property confiscated. By the will of a relation, James Fanning (d. 1806), a native of Waterford who had been a merchant at Cadiz in Spain, Devereux inherited the chateau and estate of La Roche Talbot near Angers (Sarthe), but apparently he did not get title or possession, for the will was under dispute in the courts until 1841. After the peace of Paris (1814) he spent time in London and occasionally intervened in Irish politics. On 19 July 1820 he was one of a delegation that presented an address from the catholics of Ireland to George IV. As a landowner in Co. Wexford he was a generous patron of the parish of Glynn.
Other pamphlets by Devereux are: Letter to the Roman Catholics of New Ross . . . in utter reprobation of the wings (1826); Address to the people of the county of Wexford on the repeal of the Union (1830); Letter to the people of Wexford on Lord John Russell's reform bill (1831); Letter addressed to the . . . protestant bishops of Ireland . . . on Messrs Stanley and Wyse's liberal school education bills (1832); Letter to the earl of C[arnarvon] . . . on the Trappist question (1840); On Lord Wharncliffe's catholic bequest bill (1844).
James Edward Devereux died in London 26 or 27 March 1845. He married Angelica, daughter of Bartholomew Martin of Montsec de Régence near Bordeaux, and by her had, beside two daughters, a son Robert Edward who lived in France and inherited Carrigmannon.