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Death of Sir James Ware, Anglo-Irish Historian

Sir James Ware, historian, collector of manuscripts, and civil servant, dies at his home in Castle Street, Dublin, on December 1, 1666.

Ware is born on November 16, 1594, in Castle Street, Dublin, eldest surviving son among ten children of Sir James Ware, auditor general, and his wife Mary Bryden, sister of Sir Ambrose Briden of Maidstone, Kent, England, whose house provides Ware’s base in England. His father, a Yorkshireman, comes to Ireland in the train of Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir William FitzWilliam in 1588 and builds up a substantial landed estate. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where his father is the college auditor, as a fellow commoner in 1605 and is presented a silver standing bowl in 1609. His association with the college continues, as he particularly remembers the philosophy lectures of Anthony Martin, who becomes a fellow in 1611. He takes his MA on January 8, 1628, but by then he has already launched on his future course. His father procures him the reversion of his office in 1613, and by 1620 he already owns the Annals of Ulster and is taking notes from the Black Book of Christ Church. In 1621, he marries Elizabeth Newman, daughter of Jacob Newman, one of the six clerks in chancery. Newman becomes clerk of the rolls in 1629, which apparently facilitates Ware’s assiduous research in the Irish public records.

From Ware’s numerous surviving notebooks, it is possible to follow his scholarly tracks over the rest of his life. He is particularly concerned to trace the succession of the Irish bishops. The first fruits appear in print in 1626, Archiepiscoporum Cassiliensium et Tuamensium . . . adjicitur historia coenobiorum Cisterciensium Hiberniae, followed in 1628 by De presulibus Lageniae . . ., the whole to be rounded off in 1665 with De presulibus Hiberniae. . . . However, he has wide interests in Irish history and in 1633 edits Edmund Spenser‘s A View of the Present State of Irelande and the Irish histories of Edmund Campion, Meredith Hanmer, and Henry of Marlborough. The first Irish biographical dictionary follows in 1639, De scriptoribus Hiberniae. Both publications are dedicated to the viceroy, Thomas Wentworth. In public life he is a supporter, first of Wentworth, later of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, rather than a leader, and always a stout royalist. He is knighted in 1630 and following his father’s death in 1632 he succeeds as auditor general. He is elected member of parliament for Dublin University in 1634, 1640, and 1661, but is not admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland until 1640.

Shortly after the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641, Ware is in England, and in London at the time of the passing of the Adventurers’ Act 1640, presumably on the council’s business. During Ormond’s prolonged negotiations with the confederates, he is sent to advise the king at Oxford in November 1645. While there he works in the Bodleian Library and is incorporated into the university as a Doctor of Civil Law. On his way back to Ireland in January 1646, he is captured at sea by a parliament ship and held prisoner in the Tower of London until October 1646.

When Ormond is arranging the surrender of Dublin to the parliament in the summer of 1647, Ware is sent to London as one of the hostages for his performance of the terms. Back in Dublin he has been replaced as auditor general but is able to carry on his work on the public records. In 1648 he publishes the catalogue of his manuscript library. As a leading royalist he is unwelcome to those governing the city for the parliament and is sent into exile in France on April 7, 1649, with his eldest son, also James, who already holds the reversion of the auditor generalship and eventually succeeds his father. He is allowed to live in London from October 1650, and from 1653, when hostilities end in Ireland, he is allowed brief visits there, perhaps taking up residence again in 1658.

Ware’s years in London are spent in the library of Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher, then in Lincoln’s Inn, and in the Royal, Cotton, Carew, and Dodsworth libraries. He publishes his De Hibernia et antiquitatibus ejus disquisitiones in 1654, lamenting the inaccessibility of his notes, then in Dublin. The second edition, published in 1658, also includes the annals of Henry VII. His Opuscula Sancto Patricio . . . adscripta . . . appears in 1656. In it he remarks that his knowledge of the Irish language is not expert enough for an edition of the ‘Lorica’. According to Roderick O’Flaherty, Ware can read and understand but not speak Irish. For the older language he employs Irish scholars, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh being the last and most learned. The 1660 Stuart Restoration sees him back as auditor general and one of the commissioners for the Irish land settlement. He publishes annals of Henry VIII in 1662, and in 1664 annals for 1485–1558.

Ware dies in his house in Castle Street on December 1, 1666, and is buried in the family vault in St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. He has numerous friends among the scholars of the day, including Irish Franciscans, across the sectarian divide. While clergy lists are still partly dependent on his work, his notebooks and manuscripts remain of first importance for the study of medieval Ireland. Of his ten children, two boys and two girls survive him. His wife dies on June 9, 1651. The engraving by George Vertue prefixed to Harris’ edition of Ware’s Works is claimed to be based on a portrait in the possession of the family.

(From: “Ware, Sir James” by William O’Sullivan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Ella MacMahon, Romance Novelist

Ella MacMahon, prolific Irish romance novelist, dies in the United Kingdom on April 19, 1956.

MacMahon is born Eleanor Harriet on July 23, 1864, in Dublin, the elder of two children of the Rev. John Henry MacMahon (1829–1900), curate of St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin (1860-71), and later chaplain of Mountjoy Prison (1887–1900), and Frances MacMahon (née Snagge). Her father is also secretary to the board of religious education of the Church of Ireland, editor of The Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, and author of four books, including a translation of Aristotle‘s Metaphysics (1857) and Church and State in England, Its Origin and Use (1872).

MacMahon, who is educated at home, is also literary. From the 1890s she begins contributing to periodicals such as the New Ireland Review, for which she writes on local history. Her first novel, A New Note, appears in 1894 and over the next thirty-five years she is prolific, publishing over twenty novels as well as making numerous contributions to magazines, and several to BBC radio programmes. She is unmarried and writing is her main source of income, but during World War I she works as a civil servant in various government departments including War, Trade, and the newly created Intelligence department. Afterward she lives in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, England, and converts at some stage to Catholicism.

MacMahon’s novels are romances. Typical of them is An Honorable Estate (1898), which features an English heiress marrying an impoverished Irish clergyman in a fit of pique, only to fall in love with him. They are undemanding but entertaining and occasionally ironic, with clever social commentary. Irish Book Lover, a quarterly review of Irish literature and bibliography, commends The Job (1914) for its insightful and sympathetic characterisation. It is an account of a baronet‘s struggle to improve his Irish estate despite the fecklessness of the inhabitants. Ireland is a frequent setting for her stories. Her view of it verges on the sentimental, and she often features eccentric but ultimately good-hearted country people.

However, MacMahon’s last book, Wind of Dawn (1927), is a more profound, interesting study. Set during the Irish War of Independence and the truce, it looks at the complexities within Irish society and the differences in attitude between the Anglo- and native Irish. Rich in characters, it features a naive English girl in love with Ireland, a papist-hating domestic servant, and an ascendancy grande dame who finds England monotonous but is adamant that her children will be educated there and will not acquire a brogue. Unlike MacMahon’s other books, it is not a romance and ends in tragedy and then acceptance for the coming change of regime. It reads like a lesser novel by Elizabeth Bowen and resembles in theme and argument, though not in quality, The Last September (1929), which it predates. Unfortunately, she is not inspired to go further in this line. She writes no more and retires on a government civil pension.

By the time of her death on April 19, 1956, MacMahon has fallen into complete obscurity, and surprisingly, given the quantity and relative merit of her work, she has no entry to date in any of the numerous anthologies of Irish or women writers.


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Death of Henry Charles Sirr

Henry Charles Sirr, Irish soldier, Town Major (police chief) of Dublin, extortioner, wine merchant and collector, dies on January 7, 1841, in his rooms in Dublin Castle. He is one of the founders of the Irish Society for Promoting Scriptural Education in the Irish Language.

Sirr is born in Dublin Castle on November 25, 1764, the son of Major Joseph Sirr, the Town Major of Dublin from 1762 to 1767. He serves in the British Army from 1778 until 1791 and is thereafter a wine merchant. In 1792 he marries Eliza D’Arcy, the daughter of James D’Arcy. He is the father of Rev. Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, MRIA and of Henry Charles Sirr.

In 1796, upon the formation of yeomanry in Dublin, Sirr volunteers his services, and is appointed acting Town Major, and is thenceforward known as the chief agent of the Castle authorities. In 1798 he is promoted to the position of Town Major, and receives, in accordance with precedent, a residence in Dublin Castle.

Sirr is active in the efforts of the Castle to suppress the republican and insurrectionary Society of United Irishmen. In the months prior to their rising in May and June 1798, he is prominent in the arrests of Peter Finnerty, the editor of their Dublin paper, The Press, on October 31, 1797, and of their leaders Thomas Russell and the popular Lord Edward Fitzgerald. It is the capture of FitzGerald on May 19, 1798, that brings him before the public.

In 1802, in a lawsuit, Hevey v. Sirr, presided over by Lord Kilwarden, Sirr is fined £150 damages, and costs, for the assault and false imprisonment of John Hevey. His lawyer in this case refers to his “very great exertions and laudable efforts” to crush the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The opposing lawyer, John Philpot Curran, tells a long tale of a grudge held by Sirr against Hevey, the latter a prosperous businessman and a Yeoman volunteer against the Rebellion, who has happened to be in court during a treason case brought by Sirr. Hevey recognises the witness for the prosecution, describes him in court “a man of infamous character,” and convinces the jury that no credit is due to the witness. The treason case collapses. Sirr and his colleague had then subjected Hevey to wrongful arrest, imprisonment incommunicado, extortion of goods and money, and condemnation to hanging. Curran implies that these techniques are typical of the methods used by Sirr and by others to suppress the Rebellion.

On August 25, 1803, Sirr is instrumental in the arrest of Robert Emmet, in the course of who’s abortive rising the previous month in Dublin, Kilwarden had been murdered.

In 1808 the Dublin police is re-organised and Sirr’s post is abolished, but he is allowed to retain the title. Niles’ Register of March 24, 1821 remarks that “Several persons have been arrested at a public house in Dublin, by major Sirr, charged with being engaged in a treasonable meeting, and committed to prison. We thought that this old sinner, given to eternal infamy by the eloquence of Curran, had gone home.”

Sirr is an avid collector of documents and curios. He sells McCormac’s Cross and other valuable antiquities in exchange for second-rate copied paintings. The remains are given by his older son, Joseph, to Trinity College, Dublin at some time between 1841 and 1843. It now forms the Sirr Collection of the Trinity College Library, Dublin.

Henry Charles Sirr dies on January 7, 1841, in Dublin Castle. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Werburgh’s Church, while his victim, Lord Edward FitzGerald, is buried in the vaults of the same church.


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Birth of Lord Edward FitzGerald

Lord Edward FitzGerald, Irish aristocrat who abandoned his prospects as a distinguished veteran of British service in the American Revolutionary War, and as an Irish Parliamentarian, to embrace the cause of an independent Irish republic, is born at Carton House, near Dublin, on October 15, 1763.

FitzGerald is the fifth son of James FitzGerald, 1st Duke of Leinster, and the Lady Emily Lennox, daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond. In 1773 his father dies, and his mother soon afterwards marries William Ogilvie, who had been the tutor for him and his siblings. He spends most of his childhood in Frescati House at Blackrock, Dublin, where he is tutored by Ogilvie in a manner chiefly directed to the acquisition of knowledge that will fit him for a military career.

FitzGerald joins the British Army in 1779 and then becomes aide-de-camp on the staff of Lord Rawdon in the Southern theatre of the American Revolutionary War. He is seriously wounded at the Battle of Eutaw Springs on September 8, 1781, his life being saved by an escaped slave named Tony Small. He commissions a portrait of Small by John Roberts in 1786. He frees Small and employs him to the end of his life. He is evacuated from Charleston, South Carolina in 1782 when the British forces abandon the city.

In 1783 FitzGerald visits the West Indies before returning to Ireland, where his brother, William FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster, has procured Edward’s election to the Irish Parliament as an MP for Athy, a seat he holds until 1790. In Parliament he acts with the small Opposition Irish Patriot Party group led by Henry Grattan but takes no prominent part in debate. In the spring of 1786, he takes the then unusual step for a young nobleman of entering the Military College, Woolwich, after which he makes a tour through Spain in 1787. Dejected by unrequited love for his cousin Georgina Lennox, he sails for New Brunswick to join the 54th Regiment with the rank of Major.

In April 1789, guided by compass, FitzGerald traverses the country with a brother officer from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Quebec, falling in with Indians by the way, with whom he fraternizes. He accomplishes the journey in twenty-six days and establishes a shorter practicable route than that hitherto followed. The route crosses the extremely rugged and heavily forested northern part of the present state of Maine. In a subsequent expedition he is formally adopted at Detroit by the Bear clan of the Mohawk with the name “Eghnidal,” and makes his way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, whence he returns to England.

Finding that his brother has procured his election for Kildare County, a seat he holds from 1790 to 1798, and desiring to maintain political independence, FitzGerald refuses the command of an expedition against Cádiz offered him by William Pitt the Younger and devotes himself for the next few years to the pleasures of society and to his parliamentary duties. He is on terms of intimacy with his first cousin Charles Fox, with Richard Sheridan and other leading Whigs. According to Thomas Moore, FitzGerald is only one of numerous suitors of Sheridan’s first wife, Elizabeth, whose attentions are received with favour. She conceives a child by him, a baby girl who is born on March 30, 1792.

His Whig connections, together with his transatlantic experiences, predisposed FitzGerald to sympathize with the doctrines of the French Revolution, which he embraces enthusiastically when he visits Paris in October 1792. He lodges with Thomas Paine and listens to the debates in the Convention. While in Paris, he becomes enamoured of a young girl named Pamela whom he chances to see at the theatre, and who has a striking likeness to Elizabeth Sheridan. On December 27, 1792, he and Pamela are married at Tournai, one of the witnesses being Louis Philippe, afterwards King of the French. In January 1793 the couple reaches Dublin.

Ireland is by then seething with dissent which is finding a focus in the increasingly popular and revolutionary Society of the United Irishmen, which has been forced underground by the outbreak of war between France and Britain in 1793. FitzGerald, fresh from the gallery of the Convention in Paris, returns to his seat in the Irish Parliament and immediately springs to their defence. Within a week of his return, he is ordered into custody and required to apologise at the bar of the House of Commons for violently denouncing in the House a government proclamation which Grattan had approved for the suppression of the United-Irish attempt to revive the Irish Volunteer movement with a “National Guard.” However, it is not until 1796 that he joins the United Irishmen, who by now have given up as hopeless the path of constitutional reform and whose aim, after the recall of Lord Fitzwilliam in 1795, is nothing less than the establishment of an independent Irish republic.

In May 1796 Theobald Wolfe Tone is in Paris endeavouring to obtain French assistance for an insurrection in Ireland. In the same month, FitzGerald and his friend Arthur O’Connor proceed to Hamburg, where they open negotiations with the Directory through Reinhard, French minister to the Hanseatic towns. The Duke of York, meeting Pamela at Devonshire House on her way through London with her husband, tells her that his plans are known and advises that he should not go abroad. The proceedings of the conspirators at Hamburg are made known to the government in London by an informer, Samuel Turner. The result of the Hamburg negotiations is Louis Lazare Hoche‘s abortive expedition to Bantry Bay in December 1796.

In September 1797 the Government learns from the informer Leonard McNally that FitzGerald is among those directing the conspiracy of the United Irishmen, which is now quickly maturing. Thomas Reynolds, converted from a conspirator to an informer, keeps the authorities posted in what is going on, though lack of evidence produced in court delays the arrest of the ringleaders. But on March 12, 1798, Reynolds’ information leads to the seizure of a number of conspirators at the house of Oliver Bond. FitzGerald, warned by Reynolds, is not among them.

As a fellow member of the Ascendancy class, the Government are anxious to make an exception for FitzGerald, avoiding the embarrassing and dangerous consequences of his subversive activities. They communicate their willingness to spare him from the normal fate meted out to traitors. FitzGerald however refuses to desert others who cannot escape, and whom he has himself led into danger. On March 30 the government proclamation of martial law authorising the military to act as they see fit to crush the United Irishmen leads to a campaign of vicious brutality in several parts of the country.

FitzGerald’s social position makes him the most important United Irish leader still at liberty. On May 9 a reward of £1,000 is offered by Dublin Castle for his apprehension. Since the arrests at Bond’s house, he has been in hiding. The date for the rising is finally fixed for May 23 and FitzGerald awaits the day hidden by Mary Moore above her family’s inn in Thomas Street, Dublin.

Tipped off that the house is going to be raided, Moore turns to Francis Magan, a Catholic barrister and trusted sympathiser, who agrees to hide Fitzgerald. Making its way to Magan’s house on May 18, Fitzgerald’s party is challenged by Major Henry Sirr and a company of Dumbarton Fencibles. Moore escapes with Fitzgerald and takes him back to Thomas Street to the house of Nicholas Murphy.

Moore explains to Magan what had happened and, unbeknownst to her, Magan informs Dublin Castle. The Moore house is raided that day. Mary, running to warn the Leinster Directory meeting nearby in James’s Gate, receives a bayonet cut across the shoulders. That same evening Sirr storms Murphy’s house where FitzGerald is in bed suffering from a fever. Alerted by the commotion, he jumps out of bed and, ignoring the pleas of the arresting officers to surrender peacefully, he stabs one and mortally wounds the other with a dagger in a desperate attempt to escape. He is secured only after Major Sirr shoots him in the shoulder.

FitzGerald is conveyed to New Prison, Dublin where he is denied proper medical treatment. After a brief detention in Dublin Castle he is taken to Newgate Prison, Dublin where his wound, which has become infected, becomes mortally inflamed. His wife, whom the government probably has enough evidence to convict of treason, has fled the country, never to see her husband again, but FitzGerald’s brother Henry and his aunt Lady Louisa Conolly are allowed to see him in his last moments. He dies at the age of 34 on June 4, 1798, as the rebellion rages outside. He is buried the next day in the cemetery of St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. An Act of Attainder confiscating his property is passed as 38 Geo. 3 c. 77 but is eventually repealed in 1819.

There are Lord Edward Streets named in FitzGerald’s honour in many places in Ireland, such as Dublin, Limerick, Sligo, Kilkenny, Ballina, Ballymote, and Ballycullenbeg in County Laois. The County Roscommon GAA club Tulsk Lord Edward’s and the Geraldines P. Moran’s GAA club in Cornelscourt, Dublin, are named after him.


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Birth of Sir Maziere Brady, 1st Baronet & Lord Chancellor of Ireland

Sir Maziere Brady, 1st Baronet, PC (Ire), Irish judge, notable for his exceptionally long, though not particularly distinguished tenure as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, is born on July 20, 1796.

Brady is born on Parliament Street, Dublin, the second son of Francis Tempest Brady of Booterstown, a manufacturer of gold and silver thread, and his wife Charlotte Hodgson, daughter of William Hodgson of Castledawson, County Londonderry. He is baptised at St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. He is the brother of Sir Nicholas Brady, Lord Mayor of Dublin, and uncle of the eminent ecclesiastical historian William Maziere Brady.

The Bradys are an old and distinguished Munster family who are particularly associated with the town of Bandon, County Cork. Probably the most celebrated of his ancestors is the poet and psalmist Nicholas Brady (1659–1726), who collaborated with Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate, on New Version of the Psalms of David.

Other notable forebears include Hugh Brady, the first Protestant Bishop of Meath (d. 1584), his father-in-law Robert Weston who, like Maziere serves as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the judge and author Luke Gernon (d. 1672), who is now best remembered for his work A Discourse of Ireland (1620), which gives a detailed and (from the English colonial point of view) not unsympathetic picture of the state of Ireland in 1620.

Brady is educated at Trinity College Dublin and takes his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1816. He enters the Middle Temple in 1816, is called to the Bar in 1819 and becomes King’s Counsel in 1835.

In politics Brady is a Liberal and supports Catholic emancipation. He sits on a commission of inquiry into Irish municipal corporations in 1833. He is appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland in 1837 and Attorney-General for Ireland the following year. In 1840 he is appointed Lord Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. In 1846 he is appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland and serves in that office, with short intervals, for the next 20 years. He retires in 1866 and is made a baronet, of Hazelbrook in the County of Dublin, in 1869. His appointment ends the practice which grew after the Acts of Union 1800 of appointing only English lawyers as Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He sits on the Government Commission on Trinity College Dublin in 1851 and is nominated as Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast in 1850. All through his life he shows a keen interest in education.

According to Elrington Ball, Brady’s Lord Chancellorship is notable for its length but for nothing else. Ball calls him “a good Chief Baron spoiled to make a bad Chancellor.” By general agreement he had been an excellent Chief Baron of the Exchequer, having a reputation for being fair-minded, courteous and approachable, but in Ball’s view the more onerous (and partly political) office of Lord Chancellor is beyond his capacity. Unlike some judges whose training had been in the common law, he never quite masters the separate code of equity. Delaney takes a somewhat more favourable view of Brady as Lord Chancellor, arguing that while his judgements do not show any great depth of learning they do show an ability to identify the central issue of any case and to apply the correct legal principle to it.

An anonymous pamphlet from 1850, which is highly critical of the Irish judiciary in general, describes Brady as being unable to keep order in his Court, and easily intimidated by counsel, especially by that formidable trio of future judges, Jonathan Christian, Francis Alexander FitzGerald, and Abraham Brewster. The author paints an unflattering picture of Brady as sitting “baffled and bewildered” in a Court where he is “a judge but not an authority.” On the other hand, Jonathan Christian, who had often clashed with Brady in Court, later praises him as “no ordinary man” despite his shortcomings as a judge. He describes him as “independent-minded, patriotic, natural and unaffected.”

Brady is a founder member of the Stephen’s Green Club and a member of the Royal Dublin Society and the Royal Irish Academy. In addition to the arts, he shows a keen interest in science, especially after his retirement. Like most judges of the time, he has both a town house in central Dublin and a place some distance from the city centre. His country house is Hazelbrook, Terenure, Dublin. He changes his town house several times, settling finally in Pembroke Street.

Brady marries firstly Elizabeth Anne Buchanan, daughter of Bever Buchanan, apothecary of Dublin, and his wife Eleanor Hodgson, in 1823 and they have five children. Elizabeth dies in 1858. In 1860, Brady marries Mary Hatchell, daughter of John Hatchell, Attorney-General for Ireland and Elizabeth Waddy, who survives him. He dies at his house in Pembroke Street on April 13, 1871. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.


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Death of Lord Edward FitzGerald

lord-edward-fitzgerald

Lord Edward FitzGerald, Irish aristocrat and revolutionary, dies on June 4, 1798, of wounds received while resisting arrest on a charge of treason.

FitzGerald, the fifth son of James FitzGerald, 1st Duke of Leinster, and the Lady Emily Lennox the daughter of Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, is born at Carton House, near Dublin on October 15, 1763. He spends most of his childhood in Frescati House at Blackrock in Dublin where he is tutored in a manner chiefly directed to the acquisition of knowledge that would fit him for a military career.

FitzGerald joins the British Army in 1779 and in 1781 is aide-de-camp on the staff of Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 1st Marquess of Hastings in the southern theatre of the American Revolutionary War. He is seriously wounded at the Battle of Eutaw Springs on September 8, 1781.

Fitzgerald is first elected to the Parliament of Ireland in 1783. His enthusiasm for the French Revolution leads to dismissal from the army in 1792. Four years later he joins the Society of United Irishmen, a nationalist organization that aspires to free Ireland from English control. This group appoints him to head the military committee formed to plan an uprising and obtain aid from the French revolutionary regime.

Although the French delay in supplying arms and troops, Fitzgerald’s committee proceeds with its plans for a general rebellion. The insurrection is set for May 23, 1798. In March his co-conspirators are seized by government agents, making him the most important United Irish leader still at liberty. On May 9 a reward of £1,000 is offered by Dublin Castle for his apprehension.

FitzGerald’s hiding place in a house in Thomas Street, Dublin is disclosed by a Catholic barrister and informant named Francis Magan. On May 18 Major Henry Sirr leads a military party to the house where FitzGerald is in bed suffering from a fever. Alerted by the commotion, he jumps out of bed and, ignoring the pleas of the arresting officers Captain William Bellingham Swan and Captain Daniel Frederick Ryan to surrender peacefully, FitzGerald stabs Swan and mortally wounds Ryan with a dagger in a desperate attempt to escape. He is secured only after Major Sirr shoots him in the shoulder.

FitzGerald is conveyed to New Prison, Dublin where he is denied proper medical treatment. After a brief detention in Dublin Castle he is taken to Newgate Prison, Dublin where his wound, which had now become infected, becomes mortally inflamed. His wife, whom the government probably has enough evidence to convict of treason, had fled the country, never to see her husband again, but his brother Henry and his aunt Lady Louisa Conolly are allowed to see him in his last moments.

FitzGerald dies at the age of 34 on June 4, 1798, as the rebellion rages outside. He is buried the next day in the cemetery of St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. An Act of Attainder confiscating his property is passed as 38 Geo. 3 c. 77 but is eventually repealed in 1819.

(Pictured: Portrait of Edward FitzGerald by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, 1796. National Portrait Gallery, London.)


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Birth of Henry Charles Sirr

Henry Charles Sirr, Irish soldier, police officer, wine merchant and collector, is born in Dublin Castle on November 25, 1764. He is the founder of the Irish Society for Promoting Scriptural Education in the Irish Language.

Sirr is the son of Major Joseph Sirr, the Town Major (chief of police) of Dublin from 1762 to 1767. He serves in the British Army from 1778 until 1791 and is thereafter a wine merchant. In 1792 he marries Eliza D’Arcy, the daughter of James D’Arcy. He is the father of Rev. Joseph D’Arcy Sirr, MRIA and of Henry Charles Sirr.

In 1796 Sirr is appointed acting Town Major of Dublin. He is responsible for the arrest of Irish revolutionaries Lord Edward FitzGerald, Thomas Russell and Robert Emmet.

In 1802 Sirr is mulcted £150 damages, and costs, for the assault and false imprisonment of John Hevey. His lawyer in this case refers to his “very great exertions and laudable efforts” to crush the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The opposing lawyer, John Philpot Curran, tells a long tale of a grudge held by Sirr against Hevey, the latter a prosperous businessman and a Yeoman volunteer against the Rebellion, who has happened to be in court during a treason case brought by Sirr. Hevey recognises the witness for the prosecution, describes him in court “a man of infamous character,” and convinces the jury that no credit is due to the witness. The treason case collapses. Sirr and his colleague had then subjected Hevey to wrongful arrest, imprisonment incommunicado, extortion of goods and money, and condemnation to hanging. Curran implies that these techniques are typical of the methods used by Sirr and by others to suppress the Rebellion.

In 1808 the Dublin police is re-organised and his post is abolished, but he is allowed to retain the title. Niles’ Register of March 24, 1821 remarks that “Several persons have been arrested at a public house in Dublin, by major Sirr, charged with being engaged in a treasonable meeting, and committed to prison. We thought that this old sinner, given to eternal infamy by the eloquence of Curran, had gone home.”

Sirr is an avid collector of documents and curios. He sells McCormac’s Cross and other valuable antiquities in exchange for second-rate copied paintings. The remains are given by his older son, Joseph, to Trinity College, Dublin at some time between 1841 and 1843. It now forms the Sirr Collection of the Trinity College Library, Dublin.

Henry Charles Sirr dies in 1841 and is buried in the churchyard of St. Werburgh’s Church, while his victim, Lord Edward FitzGerald, is buried in the vaults of the same church.