On either 31 December 1838 or 1 January 1839, unknown assailants shot Lord Norbury while he walked part of his estate with his steward in Durrow, King’s County. Newspaper accounts did not know what to make of the event. Norbury held a fairly good reputation in the surrounding area, and as the conservative Mail noted, he was a ‘resident landlord [who] dispensed the rites of hospitality with a munificent hand’, and ‘exercised towards his tenants and the poor all kindliness and benevolence which their relative positions could demand’. While certainly less grandiloquent, even the nationalist Dublin Pilot conceded that Norbury’s tenants had little motive to attack him, as they had ‘always heard of him as an excellent landlord’. The Pilot, however, did note that peasants often targeted their landlords on account of what the newspaper called ‘the landlord[s’] exterminating war’, which pushed tenants off the land they occupied, inducing them to respond through modes of resistance that included assassination. Whig government officials feared the effects Norbury’s murder would have on Irish society and how it might embolden their Tory opponents to draw negative conclusions about the state of Ireland.