of the Irish court of exchequer. Subsequently he became auditor and registrar of the royal hospital near Dublin, of which in 1725 he published an account (‘Account of the Foundation of the Royal Hospital of King Charles II, near Dublin, for Relief and Maintenance of Antient and Maimed Officers and Soldiers of the Army of Ireland,’ 1725, 12mo). Meanwhile, in 1723, Colley succeeded to the Kildare estates on the death of his elder brother Henry. On 23 Sept. 1728 he succeeded to the estates of his cousin Garrett Wesley or Wellesley of Dangan and Mornington, co. Meath, M.P. for co. Meath, who died without issue. Thereupon Colley assumed the additional surname of Wesley, which is ordinarily spelt Wellesley. (This Garrett Wesley was son of Garrett Wesley of Dangan and Mornington, by his wife, Elizabeth Colley, eldest daughter of Dudley Colley, the first Lord Mornington's grandfather.)
From 1729 to 1746 Wesley represented Trim, and in 1734 was high sheriff of Meath. On 9 July 1746 he was created a peer of Ireland by the title of Baron Mornington of Meath, and took his seat on 6 Oct. 1747. He built and endowed near Trim a charter working school for fifty children, which was opened on 5 Nov. 1748. He died at his house, on the north-west side of Grafton Street, Dublin, on 31 Jan. 1758.
Mary Delany [q. v.] was an intimate friend of the Wesley family, and often stayed at Dangan, the family seat near Trim. Of the owner she wrote: ‘He has certainly more virtues and fewer faults than any man I know. He valued his riches only as a means for making those about him happy.’ In 1731 she records that the Wesley family was drawn by Hogarth.
Wesley married, on 23 Dec. 1719, Elizabeth, eldest daughter of John Sale, registrar of the diocese of Dublin. She died on 17 June 1738. The only son, Garrett Wellesley, earl of Mornington [q. v.], is separately noticed. Of the daughters, Elizabeth married Chichester Fortescue, of Dromsken, co. Louth; and Frances married William Francis Crosbie.
[O'Hart's Irish Pedigrees, 4th edit. ii. 123–7 (for Colley pedigree). With the Wellesley pedigree (ii. 443) in Burke's Peerage compare Lodge's Peerage of Ireland, ed. Archdall, iii. 59–72, and Pearce's Memoirs of Marquis Wellesley, chap. i. See also Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 94; Gilbert's Hist. of Dublin, iii. 198; Cat. of Dublin Grad.; G. E. C[okayne]'s Peerage; Mrs. Delany's Autobiogr. and Corresp. i. 283–4, 312, 348–9, 406–8 sq.]
WELLESLEY, RICHARD COLLEY, Marquis Wellesley (1760–1842), governor-general of India, born at Dangan Castle on 20 June 1760, was the eldest of the six sons of Garrett Wellesley, first viscount Wellesley of Dangan Castle and earl of Mornington in the county of Meath [q. v.] His mother was Anne, eldest daughter of Arthur Hill-Trevor, first viscount Dungannon. Henry Wellesley, baron Cowley [q. v.], Arthur Wellesley, the great duke of Wellington [q. v.], and William Wellesley-Pole, first baron Maryborough and third earl of Mornington [q. v.], were his younger brothers. Richard began his education in a private school at Trim, whence he was sent to Harrow. There he was implicated in barring out a newly appointed headmaster named Heath, whose appointment was resented by the elder Harrow boys. He was then sent to Eton, where he speedily acquired an accurate knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics, and also the remarkable facility in composition in those languages which distinguished him to the end of his life. From Eton he went to Oxford, matriculating from Christ Church on 24 Dec. 1778. In 1780 he won the chancellor's prize for Latin verse, the subject being Captain Cook. He was elected a student of Christ Church. His father dying in 1781, he left Oxford without taking a degree, and returned to Ireland, where he devoted himself to putting his estates in order and to looking after the education of his brothers. The estates he placed under the management of his mother. He at the same time took upon himself the payment of his father's debts. When he came of age he entered the Irish House of Peers, where he contracted a great admiration for Grattan. William Wyndham Grenville (afterwards Baron Grenville) [q. v.], who had been his intimate friend both at Eton and at Oxford, was at that time chief secretary for Ireland, and the former intimacy was renewed. On 3 April 1784 Wellesley was returned to the English House of Commons as member for Beeralston in Devonshire, on 19 July 1787 and on 16 June 1790 for Windsor, and on 13 May 1796 for Old Sarum. He was one of the original knights of St. Patrick on the foundation of the order in 1783, and was made a lord of the treasury in 1786. He early imbibed liberal principles. He sympathised with Pitt's free-trade principles and with Wilberforce regarding the slave trade; but in the earlier part of his life, influenced by what he saw of revolutionary proceedings in Paris, he was opposed to parliamentary reform. He has been called a typical representative of the conservatism which owed its birth to Pitt and Burke. In 1793 he was appointed by Pitt a member of the board of control for Indian affairs,
