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Styled Lord Tullamore until he succeeded to the earldom in 1835, he was placed as an M.P. for his family's seat of Carlow, Ireland, from 1826.
Carlow ceased to be a pocket borough after the 1832 Reform Act, so Lord Tullamore's father, the Earl of Charleville, funded expensive election campaigns in order to maintain Tullamore as a member of the House of Commons. He failed to win the King's County seat in the general election in December 1832 (the successful candidates were Lord Oxmantown and Nicholas Fitzsimon), but was elected as M.P. for Penryn in Cornwall.
In 1838, having succeeded as 2nd Earl of Charleville, he was elected as a Representative Peer of Ireland to sit in the British House of Lords.
The Earl had married Harriet Beaujolais, née Crawford, in 1821. She brought no fortune to the marriage. The Earl's estates were heavily indebted, and the economic crisis in Ireland in the mid-1840s led to him selling many of his estates and leaving the country for Berlin in 1844.