William Borough

William Borough 1536-99, British naval officer. A younger brother of Stephen Borough , William accompanied him on early voyages and was himself a captain for the Muscovy Company. As a naval officer he took part in Sir Francis Drake 's attack on Cádiz (1587) and also fought against the Spanish Armada (1588). He wrote accounts of his voyages and a treatise on the variation of the compass and compiled several charts.

Conyngham, William ( Burton Conyngham) (1733–96). Born William Burton, the second son of a Co. Clare landowner, he inherited a life interest in the estates in Co. Meath and Donegal of his uncle, the 1st Earl Conyngham. (The title and other lands went to Burton's elder brother, on condition that both legatees changed their name to Conyngham.) He had entered parliament for his uncle's borough of Limavady in 1761 and generally supported government, for which he received appointments to the Barrack Board and elsewhere. In 1785 he began to develop a herring fishery on an island off the Donegal estate, which he renamed Rutland after the 4th duke of Rutland, lord lieutenant (1784–7). He invested in the project £20,000 raised on the Conyngham estate, and £20,000 granted by parliament. The fisheries declined after the first few years, and had collapsed by 1793–4. Also a keen student of antiquities, Conyngham was first treasurer of the Royal Irish Academy.

Russell, Lord William (1639–83). Russell, son of the earl of Bedford, entered Parliament in 1660 for the family borough of Tavistock and became a leader of the Shaftesbury Whigs. In 1678 he moved an address asking Charles II to remove his brother James, duke of York, from his counsels and in 1680 he joined in presenting the duke as a notorious papist. He was a strong advocate of the bill to exclude James from the throne. But the court took its revenge. In 1683 Russell was accused of complicity in the Rye House plot to assassinate James and Charles and was beheaded in Lincoln's Inn Fields. After the Glorious Revolution, his services to the Whig cause were recognized in the dukedom granted to his father, the patent of which described Russell as ‘the ornament of his age’. The Complete Peerage, by contrast, called him a ‘canonised ruffian’.

J. A. Cannon