seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Gilbert Stuart


by Leave a comment

Birth of Hugh Hamilton, Church of Ireland Bishop

Hugh Hamilton FRS, mathematician, natural philosopher (scientist) and professor at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and later a Church of Ireland bishop, Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh and then Bishop of Ossory, is born at Knock, near Balrothery in Fingal, County Dublin, on March 26, 1729.

Hamilton is the eldest son of Alexander and Isabella Hamilton. His father is a solicitor and politician who represents the Killyleagh constituency in the Irish House of Commons from 1739 to 1759. Alexander’s great-grandfather Hugh Hamilton migrates from Scotland to County Down in the early 17th century. The Scottish architect James Hamilton of Finnart is an ancestor. Isabella Hamilton is born Isabella Maxwell, the daughter of Robert Maxwell of Finnebrogue, Downpatrick. Hugh’s siblings include George Hamilton, Baron of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) and Charles, father of the wealthy Canadian lumber merchant and politician  George Hamilton.

Hamilton enters Trinity College Dublin on November 17, 1742, at the age of 13 with Thomas McDonnell as his tutor. He graduates Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1747 and Trinity Master of Arts (MA Dubl) in 1750. He takes the competitive examination for a vacant fellowship of the college in 1750, but the position is secured instead by his friend Richard Murray, who is a few years older. Two fellowships become vacant the following year and Hamilton is elected to one of them at the age of 22. He is appointed Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin in 1759 and that same year graduates Bachelor of Divinity (BD). He is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on February 19, 1761, and graduates Doctor of Divinity (DD) in 1762.

Trinity College presents him to the rectory of Kilmacrennan in the diocese of Raphoe, County Donegal, in 1764. This is a small benefice in the gift of the college, for which he resigns his fellowship. He retains the Erasmus Smith’s chair, however, being succeeded in that by Thomas Wilson in 1769. He resigns from Kilmacrenan in 1767 and becomes vicar of St. Ann’s Church in Dublin.

Hamilton then becomes Dean of Armagh, the chief resident cleric of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, County Armagh, from April 1768 to 1796. Finding the existing dean’s house inconvenient and poorly situated, he has a new one built in a better location just off Portadown Road, now known as Dean’s Hill. The house, of three stories and a semi-basement, is built in 1772–74. The house is later sold by the church and the present owners provide bed and breakfast accommodation in it. While dean he also acts as treasurer for the infirmary or county hospital, he establishes Sunday schools in the districts of the parish, and he founds a charitable loan for poor tradesmen. He is also instrumental in planning a piped water supply for the town, which is later put into effect. He is one of the 38 original members of the Royal Irish Academy when it is founded in 1785. Gilbert Stuart paints his portrait in about 1790 (pictured above).

Hamilton is promoted to Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh on January 20, 1796, without seeking it. On January 24, 1799, he is translated to Ossory, where he is bishop until 1805. He dies of a fever at Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, on December 1, 1805. He is buried in the graveyard of St. Canice’s Cathedral at Kilkenny, and there is a memorial to him inside the cathedral.

Hamilton writes a mathematical treatise on conic sections called De Sectionibus Conicis: Tractatus Geometricus, published in 1758. In this book he “was the first to deduce the properties of the conic section from the properties of the cone, by demonstrations which were general, unencumbered by lemmas, and proceeding in a more natural and perspicuous order,” according to writer James Wills in 1847. The work is acclaimed for its lucidity and Leonhard Euler describes it as a perfect book. It is “soon adopted in all the British universities” and is translated from Latin into English as A Geometrical Treatise of the Conic Sections in 1773.

Hamilton also writes Philosophical Essays on Vapours (1767), Four Introductory Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1774), and An Essay on the Existence and Attributes of the Supreme Being (1784). His principal works are collected and republished, with a memoir, as The Works of the Right Rev. Hugh Hamilton by his eldest son, Alexander Hamilton, in two volumes in 1809.

Hamilton marries Isabella, daughter of Hans Widman Wood of Rosmead, County Westmeath, in 1772. Isabella’s mother Frances is the twin sister of Edward King, 1st Earl of Kingston. They have five sons and two daughters. They are Alexander, who was a barrister; Frances; Hans, who is rector of Knocktopher, County Kilkenny, and associated with the Carrickshock incident of 1831; Isabella; Henry; George, who is a biblical scholar; and Hugh, who marries Elizabeth Staples, a daughter of John Staples, a Member of Parliament. The younger Hugh is the great-grandfather of Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C. S. Lewis. Bishop Hugh Hamilton is a great-great-great-grandfather of the mathematicians John Lighton Synge and his brother Edward Hutchinson Synge. Dodgson Hamilton Madden, the High Court judge and noted scholar, is Hamilton’s great-grandson.

(Pictured: “Hugh Hamilton,” oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart)


by Leave a comment

Birth of William La Touche, Founder of the Bank of Ireland

William George Digges La Touche, diplomat and banker, is born in Dublin on August 28, 1747, the third son of James Digges La Touche and his second wife, Martha (née Thwaites) of St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin. He is admitted to St. Paul’s School, London, on August 30, 1757. In 1764, he accompanies “Mr. Moore,” the British resident at Basra, to the Persian Gulf. La Touche acts as personal secretary to Moore for a number of years before succeeding him as British resident. Basra is then one of the key trading places for the East India Company, and both the British and Dutch governments have official representation there. La Touche obtains the respect of both Arabs and Europeans. At the siege of Basra in 1775, he gives refuge to prominent citizens of the city and their families. When Az Zubayr is captured by the Persians in the same year, La Touche allegedly ransoms all of the inhabitants at his own expense to save them from slavery.

While serving in the east for twenty years, La Touche collects illuminated Persian manuscripts, some of which come from the royal library at Shiraz. A number of these volumes are presented to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1786 and 1787. He returns to London around 1784 and marries Grace, daughter of John Puget, a wealthy London-based banker of Huguenot origins.

By 1786, he settles in Dublin and becomes a partner of the La Touche bank. In the years 1786, 1788, 1790, 1792, 1794, and 1796, he sits on the board of the Bank of Ireland. He is an active opponent of the Acts of Union and chairs a large meeting on the subject in 1798. Like other members of his family, he gives large sums to charity and is a governor of Dr. Steevens’ Hospital and the Lying-in Hospital, Dublin, and a director of the Grand Canal Company. He lives on St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, and at Sans Souci, a country estate that he purchases at Booterstown, Dublin.

La Touche dies in Dublin on November 6, 1803, leaving four sons. A small pastel portrait of him, and another of his wife Grace, probably by Hugh Douglas Hamilton is in the Bank of Ireland collection. Lye is known to have had his portrait painted in oils by Gilbert Stuart.

(From: “La Touche, William George Digges,” by Daniel Beaumont, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


by Leave a comment

Birth of William Beresford, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Tuam

William Beresford, 1st Baron Decies, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Tuam, is born on April 16, 1743.

Beresford is the third surviving son, out of eight daughters and seven sons of Marcus Beresford, 1st Earl of Tyrone, and his wife Catherine Power, 1st Baroness de la Poer, the only daughter and heiress of James Power, 3rd Earl of Tyrone and 3rd Viscount Decies. He enters Trinity College Dublin on December 18, 1759, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1763 and Master of Arts in 1766, before becoming a clergyman.

His birth into the politically influential Beresford family affords him a degree of opportunity, and he is made a vice-regal chaplain in 1766. Brother of George de la Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, he marries Elizabeth Fitzgibbon, sister of John FitzGibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, on June 16, 1763. They had three sons and five daughters. These connections, however, do not automatically result in his being promoted to bishop, despite reaching episcopal age in 1773, and he spends several years as a well-beneficed rector of Urney in the Diocese of Derry. The Beresford family complains that he has been overlooked for several episcopal vacancies in the 1770s and it is not until 1780 that he is created Doctor of Divinity and consecrated Bishop of Dromore on April 8, 1780. At Dromore he erects a handsome new episcopal residence. On May 21, 1782, he is transferred to the diocese of Ossory and, as bishop there, takes his seat in the Irish parliament and exercises influence over the ecclesiastical borough of St. Canice.

The death of Primate Richard Robinson in 1794 is the stimulus for a reorganisation within the Church of Ireland hierarchy, and Beresford is one of the candidates rumoured to succeed him. However, his familial ties disadvantage him, because the government does not want to favour one Irish “party” over another. He is instead appointed to the vacant archbishopric of Tuam on October 10, 1794. An influential and senior position within the church, it is worth £5,000 per annum, which is more than Archbishop Charles Agar receives for the archbishopric of Cashel and provides him with extensive patronage.

In the late 1790s Beresford regularly attends parliament, particularly in the crucial session of 1799 as the Acts of Union is debated and shares his brother John’s view that a union is the best means of securing the Protestant interest in Ireland.

In the years following the union Beresford gains a temporal peerage, becoming 1st Baron Decies on December 22, 1812. He is an amiable, kind and loquacious individual, and is patron to artists, including Gilbert Stuart, who produces a portrait of him as Bishop of Ossory. His long years of service within the established church also makes him very wealthy, worth £250,000 at the time of his death.

Beresford dies on September 6, 1819, at Tuam, County Galway, and is succeeded in the barony by his eldest surviving son John on September 8, 1819. His eldest son Marcus had died in 1803. His youngest daughter Louisa, widow of Thomas Hope, marries, by special license, her cousin William Carr Beresford on November 29, 1832. Through Louisa he is a grandfather of British MP and patron of the arts, Henry Thomas Hope.

(From: “Beresford, William” by Martin McElroy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, revised June 2024)