Henry Dillon, 13th Viscount Dillon
Henry Augustus Dillon-Lee, 13th Viscount Dillon (1777–1832), was an Irish peer, soldier, writer, and MP for Harwich in England and County Mayo in Ireland. He wrote about Catholic emancipation in Ireland, about military subjects, and also published two historical novels. Birth and origins. Henry Augustus was born on 28 October 1777 at Brussels, then the capital of the Austrian Netherlands. He was the elder of the two children and the only son of Charles Dillon-Lee and his first wife Henrietta Maria Phipps. His father, the 12th Viscount Dillon, had conformed to the established  religion. His mother was the only daughter of Constantine John Phipps, 1st Baron Mulgrave, an Anglo-Irish family. Thus both parents were Protestants and part of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They had married in 1776 at Brussels. He appears below as the elder of two siblings: Early life. His mother died in 1782 when Henry Augustus was only four. In 1787 his father remarried to Marie Rogier of Mechelen, who had been an actress in Brussels and had been his father's mistress before he married Henry's mother. He had three half-siblings from his father's second  marriage, which are: In 1794, when he was 17 years old, Henry Augustus was made a Colonel of a regiment in the newly created Catholic Irish Brigade, an unlikely employment for a Protestant, that was due to his family's military connection to the Irish Brigade. This Catholic Irish Brigade lasted four years, being dissolved in 1798. He went to England where, in 1799, aged 22, he was a Member of Parliament for County Harwich in Essex. In 1802 he became an MP for County Mayo (knight of the shire) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. In  1805 he raised a new regiment in Ireland, called the Duke of York's Irish or the 101th Regiment of Foot. He owned the regiment and hired out its services to the British army under a letter of service. Marriage and children. In February 1807, Henry Augustus Dillon-Lee married Henrietta Browne, sister of Dominick, 1st Baron Oranmore and Browne, daughter of Dominick-Geoffrey Browne, by Margaret, daughter of George Browne, 4th son of the 1st Earl of Altamont. The marriage took place at Castle MacGarrett near Claremorris, County Mayo, Ireland. The Brownes were an Anglo-Irish and Protestant family . Augustus and Henrietta had ten children: Later life, death, and timeline. His regiment was ordered to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to where he also took his wife and where his eldest child was born in 1807. On 9 November 1813 his father died at Loughglinn, County Roscommon, and was buried in the Dillon Vault at Ballyhaunis. Henry succeeded as the 13th Viscount Dillon, at the age of 36. Lord Dillon lived with his wife and children in Florence, Italy in the late 1810s and in London in the 1820s where he seems to have had an affair with the writer  Eliza Rennie. and where wrote his two historical novels, "Maltravers", published in 1822, and "Rosaline de Vere", published in 1824. He died on 24 July 1832 in London and was buried in the All Saints Church at Spelsbury. He was the first Dillon to be buried in Spelsbury. His widow died thirty years later at the Hotel Windsor, Paris, 18 March 1862, aged 73. Works. Henry Dillon's published works include: Also: various works of jurisprudence.