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HISTORY

FAMILY HISTORY

The Cuffe Family, Earls of Desart 1583 - 1933

Ghostly Women and Forgotten HeroesLady Kathleen Pilkington

Contents


1.The Origins of the Cuffe Family
Somerset Gentry ‡ Ireland under Henry VIII ‡ The Accession of Queen Elizabeth ‡ Captain Cuffe and the first Kilkenny connection

2. Hugh Cuffe of Kilmore: Elizabethan Adventurer
The Desmond Rebellion ‡ Land Grants in Cork and Clare ‡ Skartye's Castle ‡ Dispossession ‡ The Move to Clare ‡ Sir Charles Coote

3. Henry Cuffe (1563 - 1601): Secretary to the Earl of Essex
A Prominent Kinsman ‡ The Earl of Essex ‡ Essex in Ireland ‡ Coup d'Etat ‡ Execution

4. Sir Charles Coote, the 1st and 2nd Baronets
Dorothea Cuffe ‡ Common Bonds ‡ Early Ambitions ‡ Sir Charles Coote, 1st Baronet ‡ The Confederate Wars ‡ A Bloody Campaign ‡ The Defence of Ballyalley Castle ‡ Lord President Coote ‡ Sir William Petty ‡ The Restoration

5. Joseph Cuffe (1621 - 1679): Cromwellian Soldier
A Cavalry Officer ‡ The Parish of Castleinch ‡ The Comerfords and Cardinal Rinnucini ‡ Colonel Agmondesham Muschamp ‡ Martha Muschamp ‡ Cuffe's Desart and Cuffe's Grove

6. Agmondesham Cuffe, MP (d. 1627) - Williamite Soldier
Marriage to Anne Otway (1679) ‡ The Williamite Wars ‡ MP for Kilkenny (1695 - 1699) ‡ The Flood Petition (1705)

7. John Cuffe, 1st Baron Desart (1683 - 1749)
Trinity College Dublin ‡ "A Good Man" ‡ A Kilkenny Magistrate ‡ Marriage to Margaret Hamilton (1717) ‡ Marriage to Dorothea Gorges (1726) ‡ Nicola Hamilton: The Black Velvet Widow ‡ Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gorges ‡ The St. Lawrence Duel and Howth Castle ‡ The Rising Sun ‡ Birth of Georgian Dublin ‡ Edward Lovett Pearce: The Building of Desart Court (1733) ‡ Baron Desart of Desart ‡ The Callan Estate ‡ Death of the 1st Baron Desart ‡ The Dowager Lady Desart ‡ The Blundens and the Herberts

8. John Cuffe, 2nd Baron Desart (1730 - 1767)
Sean an Chaipin: A Trinity Scholar ‡ Marriage to the Kingstons of Cork ‡ The 2nd Baron's Daughters ‡ An Illegitimate Son ‡ Sale of the Callan Estate ‡ Death of the 2nd Baron Desart

9. Otway Cuffe, 1st Earl of Desart (1737 - 1804)
An Oxford Student ‡ Succeeds his Brother as 3rd Baron Desart ‡ Mayor of Kilkenny ‡ James Hoban: White House Architect ‡ Marriage to Lady Anne Browne (1781) ‡ The Earls of Altamont ‡ A New Dawn for Republicans ‡ The Earldom of Desart ‡ The 1798 Rebellion and the 1801 Act of Union ‡ Death of the 1st Earl

10. Otway Cuffe, 2nd Earl of Desart (1788 - 1826)
Viscount Castle-Cuffe ‡ Lady Elizabeth Wemyss and Lady Dorothea Campbell ‡ Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo ‡ The Raid on Agamemnon's Tomb ‡ The Emancipator of Jamaica ‡ MP for Bossiney, Lord of the Treasury and Lord Mayor ‡ Maurice O'Connor of Gortnamona ‡ The Burkes of Marble Hill ‡ Ballykeefe Hill

11. Catherine, Countess of Desart (1799 - 1874)
A Young Widow ‡ Sir Rose Price of Trengwainton ‡ Death of Rose Lambert Price and birth of Maria ‡ The Fate of the Price Family ‡ Happier Years

12. John O'Connor Cuffe, 3rd Earl of Desart (1818 - 1865)
The Baby Earl ‡ Marriage to Lady Elizabeth Campbell (1842) ‡ Isabella Byng and the 2nd Marquess of Bath ‡ Scandal at Longleat ‡ The 3rd Earl of Harewood ‡ The 5th Duke of Buccleuch and his Labradors ‡ The Thane of Cawdor and the French Invasion ‡ The 1st Earl of Cawdor of Stackpole Court ‡ Blood Ties, Queen Victoria and the Wedding ‡ Cowes and the Royal Circle ‡ Life at Desart ‡ Death of the 3rd Earl

13. William Cuffe, 4th Earl of Desart (1845 - 1898)
A Victorian Gentleman ‡ Famine in Ireland ‡ Death of the Earl of Cawdor (1860) ‡ Military Service and Baron Henniker ‡ Succeeds his Father (1865) ‡ Sir Guy Campbell and Little Pam Fitzgerald ‡ Maria Preston and Charles Sugden ‡ Bischoffsheim & Goldschmidt ‡ Mr and Mrs Bish Conquer London ‡ A Jewish Countess: Ellen Bischoffsheim ‡ Amelia Bishoffsheim and the Knight of Kerry ‡ Desart under the 4th Earl ‡ Death of a Writer ‡ The Jewish Senator

14. Hamilton Cuffe, 5th Earl of Desart (1848 - 1934)
The Brothers Cuffe ‡ Early Years ‡ From Cowes to the Royal Navy ‡ Social High Jinks ‡ German Adventures ‡ The Courting of Lady Margaret Lascelles ‡ Solicitor to the Treasury ‡ An Insight into His Character ‡ Succeeds his Brother (1898) ‡ Wrangling with the Countess Ellen ‡ Lady Joan Cuffe and Sir Harry Lloyd-Verney ‡ Lady Sybil's Account of Desart ‡ The 1903 Land Act ‡ An American Husband: William Cutting ‡ Lady Sybil Lubbock in Italy.

15. Captain Otway Cuffe and the Gaelic League
The Irish Question ‡ Captain Otway Cuffe ‡ The Gaelic League in Kilkenny ‡ Death of Otway Cuffe

16. Lady Kathleen Pilkington
Lady Kathleen Cuffe ‡ Sir Thomas Pilkington ‡ The Pilkington Heirs

17. The End of Desart Court
The Irish Troubles ‡ The Burning of Desart Court ‡ Retreat to Sussex ‡ Death of the 5th Earl ‡ Richard Orpen's Restoration ‡ The End of Desart Court

** Bibliography

The House of Desart 1583 - 1933Up arrow


The story of the Cuffes of Desart Court in the Irish county of Kilkenny is as sprawling an epic as ever there was. Over nine generations, the family were deeply ensconced in the affairs not just of the Irish estate they made their own in the mid-17th century but also of the infinitely greater affairs of state that became the lot of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the 300 years leading up to the Great War of 1914 - 1918. (1) Their rise through the ranks of Great Britain's social hierarchy makes for a fascinating mirror of the rise of Britain itself, from uncertain nation state to a brash and broody empire. And perhaps swirling amid the smoke stained walls of Desart Court in the wake of its eventual burning, the spirit of a fallen empire is also to be found. For within two years of the 1922 fire at Desart Court, Britain was ruled by its first Labour Government and Ireland itself had finally come under the governance of a long sought independent administration.

The first Cuffes to live to Ireland were soldiers, born in an age when mastery of the sword and military strategy were amongst the foremost ambitions of male society. It was a mind-set born in the mountains of northern France and developed within the feudal system established by the Normans in the 12th century. At stake was perhaps the most valuable commodity of all - land. During the reign of Henry VIII, a new age in feudal policy emerged enabling the lower ranks and younger sons of the established elite to become substantial landowners in their own right. The dissolution of the monasteries during the mid-16th century paved the way for the redistribution of monastic property to those deemed worthy of such patronage. Under Queen Elizabeth I, officers who fought for the English Crown in Ireland were offered Irish land in payment for their service. It was under these circumstances that Captain John Cuffe left his home in Somerset and crossed the Irish Sea in 1561. Captain Cuffe did not survive to receive proper payment; he died during a skirmish in Wexford in 1564. However, some 20 years later, his kinsman, Hugh Cuffe, also of Somerset, received land in Counties Cork and Clare in return for his contribution to England's victory over the rebel Earl of Desmond.

In 1641, Hugh Cuffe's grandson, the Ennis-born Joseph Cuffe, joined a cavalry regiment raised to defend the interests of the new planters during what would become one of the most brutal wars in Irish history. During Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, Sir Charles Coote, a first cousin of Joseph, became one of the most powerful men in Ireland. Another close family friend was Sir William Petty, the man entrusted with the redistribution of lands confiscated from Catholic Irish families to English officers. In 1654, Joseph Cuffe was awarded a substantial 5000 acre estate in the barony of Shillelogher, County Kilkenny. In due course his descendents would come to call the estate "Desart". When a serious challenge to the Cromwellian land settlement was initiated by the administration of the Catholic James II, Agmondesham Cuffe, Joseph's son and heir, was amongst the first men to take up his sword for the Dutch Prince William of Orange.

The victory of the Williamite forces over the Irish Catholics was in many ways absolute. It set in motion an age where the new Protestant elite was able to settle down and develop the hitherto unruly island into a proper English colony. Indeed, after the final defeat of James II in 1691, it is perhaps symbolic to note that no Cuffe was obliged to touch his sword until the 1st Earl of Desart galloped south with a Protestant militia to suppress a peasant rebellion in Tipperary exactly one hundred years later. The 18th century was, by and large, a peaceful time in Ireland. The vast Catholic majority was stripped of land, religious belief and the will to resist. Meanwhile, the descendents of the planter families moved swiftly to cement their hold on power.

Perhaps the greatest symbol of the age of the Protestant Ascendancy was the enormous mansions erected by individual landowners across the country. Desart Court was amongst the earliest such constructions. It was built on the Cuffe family estate in Kilkenny in 1733 for John Cuffe, later 1st Lord Desart, eldest son of Agmondesham Cuffe, the Williamite soldier. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin, John Cuffe stood as MP for Thomastown, County Kilkenny, from 1715 to 1727. Desart Court has been described as one of Ireland's most outstanding architectural triumphs. Its original architect is increasingly believed to have been Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, the man who designed Parliament House in Dublin. The construction costs appear to have been partially met through the sale of a large quantity of silver plate seized during a raid on the French fortress of Quebec by the father-in-law of the 1st Lord Desart.

Desart Court stood for nearly two hundred years before an order from the high command of the anti-treaty faction was issued during the Irish Civil War demanding the burning of all houses occupied by Senators of the governing Irish Free State. Ellen, Countess of Desart, had been appointed to the Senate just a few months earlier. Desart Court should never have been burned. The Countess, a patron of the Gaelic League, was the widow of the 4th Earl and did not live in the house. At the time, it was occupied by her brother-in-law, the 5th Earl, a prudent and successful solicitor who was amongst the greatest diplomats working for a solution to the Irish crisis in the lead up to independence. He was a great-great-grandson of the 1st Lord Desart who built Desart Court in 1733. It is rather extraordinary to contemplate that the 1st Lord, born during the reign of Charles II (1661 - 1685), was only four generations distant from the 5th Earl, a man who witnessed the birth of the Irish Free State and died in 1934.

Between the arrival of Hugh Cuffe, the Elizabethan Adventurer, in Ireland in 1583 and the death of the last earl of Desart, there were nine generations. This story follows the family on a chronological journey from the wilds of County Cork in the 16th century through to the burning of Desart Court in 1922.

Notes:
(1) The term "Anglo-Irish" only came into play in the early part of the 20th century. In older historys those who settled in Ireland during Elizabethan and Jacobean times are generally described as "New English", to differentiate them from the Anglo-Norman settlers, or "Old English", who came over in the 12th and 13th centuries.

The Origins of the Cuffe FamilyUp arrow

The Cuffe family were landowners in the prosperous county of Somerset at least from the time of the War of the Roses. In August 1585, the Lancastrian and Yorkist armies met for the final battle of that war at Bosworth in Leicestershire. Richard III was slain and the wily Welshman, Henry Tudor, ascended the English throne as Henry VII. At about this time, the Cuffe family built a manor house at Rowlands, midway between Taunton and Yeovil. (2) The house still stands today and includes a Great Hall, about 25-foot in height, with mullion windows and plasterwork dating from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. This house was the family seat for the duration of the Tudor period, an age in which England advanced steadily from its hitherto unimportant role as an island on the fringes of Western Europe to become one of the leading maritime powers in Europe. Little is known of the Cuffe family activities during the reign of the first Tudor king, the wily King Henry VII, or his son and successor, King Henry VIII. As Somerset gentry however, they must have inevitably been embroiled in the West Country rebellions that occurred in reaction to the growing centralization of Royal authority in London.

In 1541, the Irish Parliament passed the Act of Kingly Title, and changed the legal status of Ireland, from a Lordship attached to the English crown, to a separate kingdom, vested in the English crown. In constitutional terms the English and Irish kingdoms enjoyed equal status, in practical terms Ireland became a subsidiary kingdom and the first colony. Consequently, the resources of the Irish kingdom enabled the crown government in Ireland, to provide a steady stream of patronage with grants of offices and lands. The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s, for example, allowed the Crown to reward its adherents, whether Englishmen or loyal members of the Irish elite - native Irish and Anglo-Norman alike - with grants of former monastic lands. By the second half of the 16th century, the new land owning situation in the Irish kingdom presented England's minor gentry, and the younger sons of noble and gentry families in both England and Ireland, with fresh opportunities to make or increase their fortunes.

In November 1558, Henry VIII's daughter, the Protestant Princess Elizabeth Tudor, ascended the throne as Queen of England and Ireland. For the next forty years, England was to enjoy a Golden Age in which her sailors discovered unknown lands, and laid the basis for a marine-mercantile nexus, the foundations on which the British Empire later developed, in the 17th Century. Control of the Irish kingdom was pivotal to England's ability to explore the North Atlantic and to begin the settlement of North America, which set the stage for much of the modern history of Europe and America.

The earliest reference to the Cuffe family in Ireland is during the Elizabethan age, when a Captain John Cuffe adventured to Ireland in 1561 as part of the new Elizabethan army dispatched to bring the uncivil Irish populace to heel. (3) In 1564 Captain Cuffe was granted a commission to execute martial law in County Waterford. Little further is known of him other than the fact that he died of wounds received in a skirmish in Wexford later that year. (4) His widow, Catherine Cuffe, sought compensation for his loss and, by 1574, she was in receipt of the tithes due to the Ormonde rectories of Thomastown and Columkill, Taghan Church and the old Augustinian priory of "Enestiocke" (Inistioge) in County Kilkenny. In 1577, the sons of Captain and Catherine Cuffe, James and Edward (sometimes stated as Edmund), were confirmed in these possessions but, for reasons unknown, the properties were seized in 1589 and granted to George Sherlocke. (5) How these dispossessed Cuffes were related to the later Cuffes of Desart is not known but it is worth noting that the family connection to County Kilkenny dates from 1574.

Notes
(2) Members of the Cuffe family were almost certainly embroiled in the War of the Roses when Yorkist forces laid siege to Taunton Castle on Palm Sunday (March 29th) 1461. Some 28,000 soldiers died in the ensuing battle. In 1497 Taunton again featured prominently when the renegade pretender Perkin Warbeck was captured there.
(3) There is also an unsupported reference to a Captain Cuffe serving, in 1551, with Sir Ralph Bagenal in a campaign to oust the McDonnells from Rathlin Island off the coast of county Antrim. The English ship was thrown ashore by an unpredictable swell and both Bagenal and Cuffe captured. They were later released in exchange for the release of Sorley Boy MCDonnell, then captive in Dublin Castle.
(4) Fiant Elizabeth, 590, 682.
(5) Fiant Elizabeth 2872, 3066; 5356.Up arrow

Hugh Cuffe of Kilmore - Elizabethan Adventurer

The first of the family of whom we have any concrete knowledge is Hugh Cuffe, born circa 1564, a gentleman of Somerset who, following the attainder of the Earl of Desmond, was awarded part of the Desmond estate in Munster in the 1580s. A descendent of the Welsh-Norman family of Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond, had rebelled against the Dublin administration in 1579, and received some assistance from Philip II of Spain who sent a small armed force. The resources of the Crown forces under the command of Black Tom Butler, Earl of Ormond, overpowered Desmond's army in Munster, and Desmond was forced to go on the run as a defeated traitor. In 1583, the renegade Earl was captured and killed by the O'Moriartys in a forest near Tralee; his severed head was dispatched to London and there left to rot on London Bridge as a warning to would be traitors. "The territory over which he had ruled like a monarch was quickly annexed to the English crown and, three years later, the Munster plantations began. An estimated 300,000 acres of good land was involved". (6)

Among the 34 beneficiaries to be granted the forfeited Desmond estates were Sir Walter Raleigh, the poet Edmund Spenser and a young Somerset gentleman named Hugh Cuffe. It is not clear just how much land Hugh Cuffe was awarded but his name appears in several Elizabethan fiants relating to County Cork and there are records stating that at least some of his children were born at Ennis, County Clare, in the early 1580s. In a fiant dated 14th November 1587, he was granted the lands of Kilabraher Abbey in Kilmore, County Cork, near Edmund Spenser's 3028-acre estate of Kilcolman Castle, Doneraile. There is evidence of early clashes between the incoming New English and the established Old English (Anglo-Normans), who feared that the newcomers undermined their traditional rights and authority in Ireland. In 1588, Hugh Cuffe co-signed a petition drawn up by Spenser accusing their Irish neighbour, Viscount Roche of Fermoy, of continued allegiance to the "Rebell" cause. Their particular objection was to a proclamation by Roche that "none of his people should have trade or conference with Mr. Spenser", a tactic famously employed against Captain Boycott in the 19th century.

Hugh Cuffe was also granted a castle and certain lands at Kilbolane near the present town of Charleville, County Cork. These lands were formerly held by Thomas MacShane MacMorris (alias Tomas ne Skartye), a kinsman of Edmund Fitzgibbon, the "White Knight". Skartye was attainted for his role in the Desmond Rebellion. The castle was probably in a poor condition, perhaps even ruined. The surrounding countryside cannot have been much better. The Elizabethan army in Munster had conducted a scorched earth campaign, destroying crops in the fields and bringing famine to the region. Over time Hugh Cuffe restocked his land by shipping fresh supplies - livestock, equipment, raw materials and arms - across the Irish Sea, probably via the port at Bristol. Under the terms of his land grant, he was also obliged to sponsor a designated number of English tenants and freeholders who would have lived in more modest houses of wood and stone. Nonetheless, as a new landowner in a conquered land, Hugh Cuffe must have been a man to whom sleep did not come easy.

Hugh Cuffe did not long enjoy his Cork estate for, in about 1590, Skartye's niece, Helen Fitzgibbon successfully appealed her uncle's attainment to the authorities in Dublin Castle and the lands were restored to her by Lord Deputy Fitzwilliam. It may be that Hugh paid the price for poor management of his estates; a Sir Percival Willoughby of Woolaton Hall in Nottinghamshire berated a Mr. Cuffe of County Cork for treating his "tenants" with undue harshness.

No records survive as to the identity of Hugh Cuffe's wife (or wives) but he was to father a dynasty that would continue to exert an influence over Irish affairs right up until Independence in 1921. At some point, he and his family moved north of the River Shannon to County Clare. Perhaps the outbreak of the "Nine Years War" in 1592 compelled him to retreat to that unruly Atlantic coastal land. A son, Maurice Cuffe, was born at Ennis in about 1581 and buried in Ennis Abbey upon his death in 1638. A daughter Elizabeth Cuffe was also born at Ennis in about 1585. (7) But perhaps more importantly to this tale Ennis is also given as the place of birth of Joseph Cuffe in 1601. It was this Joseph who would go on to settle at Desart in County Kilkenny.

Nonetheless the Cuffes maintained a link with Cork even after the loss of Kilbolane in 1590. In the 1604 marriage settlement drawn up between another daughter, Dorothea, and (later Sir) Charles Coote, Hugh Cuffe is described as "of Cuffe's Wood (or Kilmore), County Cork".

Notes:
(6) "The Irish Country House: A Social History", Peter Somerville-Large (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995).
(7) In 1634, Elizabeth married Francis Slingsby (b. 1569), sixth son of Sir Francis Slingsby (d. 4 Aug 1600) of Scriven, Knaresborough, West Riding, Yorkshire by his wife Mary Percy (d 1598), daughter of Sir Thomas Percy. Their daughter, Mary Slingsby of Kilmore, married Captain William Dodwell (1604 - 1654), by whom they had at least one son , Henry Dodwell (October 1641 - June 1711) who is noted in The Dictionary of National Biography. Maria Pulleyn, the wife of Guy Fawkes, had a brother Walter Pulleyn who married Margaret Slingsby of Scriven. Mary's cousin, Sir Henry Slingsby, 1st Bart, of Scriven, was executed by Cromwell on 8th June 1658 for supporting the Royalist cause.


Henry Cuffe (1563 - 1601) Private Secretary to the Earl of EssexUp arrow

To the Irish Cuffes, we shall return in due course. We turn now to another Cuffe of Elizabethan times, whose biography may later have influenced his kinsmen. Henry Cuffe was born at Rowlands in Somerset in 1563, the son of Robert Cuff of Donyath, and rose to prominence as private secretary to the ill-fated Earl of Essex. If Hugh Cuffe, the Elizabethan adventurer in County Cork, was born in 1564 then it seems not unreasonable to suppose that he was either a younger brother or perhaps a cousin of Henry. Proof of their relationship eludes us, although historians agree that the two men were certainly kinsmen the exact relationship is not known. (8)

A graduate of Merton College, Oxford, Henry Cuffe joined the Earl of Essex's inner circle during the early 1590s. Contemporaries described him as an intensely studious and learned young man, not necessarily of a classical Renaissance mould but scathing of the "medieval" mind-sets he perceived to hold power in Elizabethan England. Cuffe would have been aware of the inner thoughts of Essex and his circle. Born in Hereford in 1568, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, was one of the great privateers of the Elizabethan age. He first endeared himself to the English people when, at the age of 29, he commanded a fleet in a raid upon the Spanish port of Cadiz. Hugh Cuffe was at his side during the campaign and quite possibly encouraged the young hero's "vaulting ambitions" for political influence in the Royal Court. However, despite her personal fancy for the man, Elizabeth I maintained that such a hot-headed soldier was not what she required in an age when diplomacy was fast emerging as the ultimate battle skill. The raid on Cadiz in 1596 was nonetheless a remarkable victory and not even Essex's failure to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet off the Azores the following year could undermine his popularity at home.

By 1598 the rebels in Ireland were in the ascendancy, and Elizabeth I faced the very real prospect of loosing control of her Irish patrimony. It was time to send an army across the Irish Sea and the Earl of Essex was chosen to command the crown's army in Ireland. Essex had the reputation as the greatest military commander in England, but even more significantly, he was the leader of the 'war party' at court. This court faction were determined to complete the war in Ireland quickly, in order to free up the crown's forces to pursue English interests in the Spanish Netherlands. In March 1599, Essex was appointed as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and set off at the head of a colossal army numbering 1300 cavalry, 16,000 foot soldiers and 2000 veterans of the Dutch wars. Once again, Hugh Cuffe was at his side. Essex's Irish campaign was one of mixed results. He mopped up rebel fighting in Munster and re-established some control in the province of Leinster. The Queen however criticized the southern campaign as pointless, and ordered him North to battle with Hugh O'Neill, the earl of Tyrone. Despite the magnitude of his force, Essex was unable to secure the line of attack in the North, and in September 1599 at the end of the campaigning season, he met alone with O'Neill to parlay a ceasefire, without the crown's authority. While in Ireland, Essex was constantly looking over his shoulder at events in the English court. He blamed Sir Robert Cecil, leader of the aristocratic faction of moderates, for his loss of favour with the Queen. At length, Essex decided his best course of action would be to visit the Queen personally. On 24th September 1599, he suddenly left his Irish command, without permission, and, accompanied by his private secretary, Henry Cuffe, journeyed to London in a vain attempt to regain the Queen's favour. With the rebellion in Ireland still continuing, this proved a foolhardy decision for it was a treasonable offence for the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland to abandon his post without license from the crown. Essex was arrested on arrival in London and placed under house arrest for 18 months.

Henry Cuffe remained in London for the duration of Essex's imprisonment and devoted himself to defending the Earl's actions. Essex, however, had not the patience to await a peaceful outcome. Rumours abounded that Cecil sought his execution. At length, fearing the worst, Essex took his last big gamble and launched a coup d'etat on 8th February 1601, full of hope that the Londoners who had so worshipped him after the siege of Cadiz would now rally to his defence and help oust his enemies from the Queen's council. A popular myth that later grew up around the Essex rebellion is that the day before the coup, Essex's supporters convinced William Shakespeare to stage the debut performance of his controversial new play, Richard II, the story of a monarch who lost his throne because he kept listening to evil advisers. One wonders whether Henry Cuffe was among those who put pressure on the Great Bard to commit this early act of spin doctoring. Alas for Essex, only 300 men rose in his favour and the riot was easily crushed.

"You sought to be Robert the First," shouted Edward Coke at the trial, "but you shall be Robert the Last". The Queen glumly dipped her quill in the inkwell, Essex was shackled and taken to the Tower of London and, on 25th February 1601, an executioner's axe severed his head from his body. He was 34 years old. Interestingly, the Queen insisted the execution be a private affair, the only such execution ever to be conducted within the Tower. She insisted this was because she didn't wish to upset those who still admired the Earl. But one wonders whether the daughter of a beheaded Queen, about to bequeath her kingdom to the son of another beheaded Queen, was simply upset that her government were about to behead one of her former favourites. At any rate, it was also the end of the line for Essex's inner circle and, ten days later, Henry Cuffe was hung at to Tyburn.

Notes:
(8) The Dictionary of National Biography states that Henry and Hugh Cuffe were "of the same family although the relationship does not seem to have been definitely settled." DNB Vol. V (Oxford University Press), pp. 272 - 275. They may have both been kinsmen of John Pyke, also of Somerset, born 1572, son of Stephen Pike and his wife Dorothy (nee Cuffe), who emigrated to North America and died in Massachusetts in 1654.

Sir Charles Coote, the 1st and 2nd Baronets - Uncle and 1st Cousin of Joseph Cuffe of Desart CourtUp arrow

Whether or not the Henry Cuffe executed in 1601 was his kinsman or not, Hugh Cuffe's fortunes improved considerably following the 1604 marriage of his daughter Dorothea to Charles Coote. Coote was a young officer who joined the English army in Ireland shortly after Lord Mountjoy replaced the disgraced Earl of Essex in 1600. He was to become one of the most powerful and reviled military leaders in Ireland over the course of the next forty years.

The marriage of Dorothea Cuffe and Sir Charles Coote helped to align these two families in successive generations. Both families were New English settlers, attracted to Ireland by the prospect of gaining estates and high office through service to the crown. The goals of both families must have been much the same, namely to secure their land-holdings, and advance their family's prestige, but they could only succeed by displacing the Old English. In so doing, they alienated the old ruling elite, and this in turn reinforced the shared interests of the New English as a group.

The Cootes were prominent landowners in Norfolk and Suffolk during the 15th and 16th centuries. In 1596, Charles's father, Sir Nicholas Coote, was heavily fined and sentenced to prison in Fleet Street for his support of the rebellious Duke of Norfolk. At the age of 19, Charles sold the family estates in Norfolk to pay his father's debts and, with his brothers, joined Mountjoy's army in Ireland. He was present at the battle of Kinsale in 1601 when the Earl of Tyrone and Lord O'Donnell, assisted by a Spanish expeditionary force, were routed by Mountjoy's forces. Kinsale proved the decisive battle of the Nine Years War; the subsequent reassertion of crown authority in Ireland during the next generation paved the way for the wholesale plantation of the country.

In 1605, King James I appointed Charles Coote as Provost Marshal of the province of Connaught. Coote and his wife Dorothea Cuffe then settled in County Roscommon and built Castle Coote. In 1606 Coote was appointed Sheriff for County Cork. Over the next ten years, Charles and Dorothea had five children - three sons, all of whom were later appointed Colonels, and two daughters. In 1616 Charles Coote was knighted and, in 1621, James I appointed him a Privy Councilor and created him one of the first Baronets of Ireland "in consideration of his good and faithful services in the province of Ulster". Coote founded the towns of Carrick-on-Shannon (then Jamestown), County Leitrim in 1623 and Mountrath, County Laoise, in 1628. By 1640, the increasingly Puritanical Sir Charles possessed a considerable fortune in Ireland, principally in Connaught, and he used some of this to commence the construction of a mansion in the Slieve Bloom Mountains near Clonaslee, County Laoise, which he named Castle Cuffe in tribute to his wife's family. The outbreak of rebellion in Scotland in 1638, spread to Ireland by 1641, and then to England, tipping the United Kingdom into civil war by 1642. The Irish rebels in particular targeted the English planters and the still uncompleted Castle Cuffe was burned to the ground - the mortar that the masons used was so strong that much of the ruin still stands today. For more, see The Siege of Castlecuffe.

Ireland in the mid-17th century was a desperately unhappy land. With religious divisions ever deepening throughout Europe, it was inevitable that a people so predominantly Catholic would be plunged into further conflict. The rebellion of 1641 ignited a ferocious civil war that dragged on for nearly 14 years, pitting a fragile confederation of Irish and Anglo-Norman Catholic against the militant forces of English Protestant Republicanism. Head-quartered in Kilkenny, the Confederates produced many admirable victories but were ultimately unable to sustain the pressure.

Chief amongst those fighting for the Republican cause was Sir Charles Coote and his kinsmen. Castle Cuffe had not been his only loss. The same year, his son and eventual heir, another Charles, was besieged at Castle Coote, while his nephew Maurice Cuffe fought off a rebel force outside his County Clare stronghold, Ballyalley Castle. In 1642, the then 60 year old Sir Charles Coote mounted his steed and set forth at the head of a force of 1500 men, to wipe out rebel activity in the Wicklow Mountains. In his subsequent campaign, he earned a reputation as a fearless, bloody-minded commander. In the spring of 1642 Coote's militia were attacked at Trim by a force of some 3000 rebels; Sir Charles was shot dead while he led a cavalry charge. The ominous epitaph above his tomb in Christ Church Cathedral reads "England's honour, Scotland's wonder, Ireland's terror here lies under". Contemporaries regarded him as "a hot headed and bloody man" (Lord Castlehaven), "very rough and sour in his temper".

At least two of Dorothea Cuffe's nephews fought for the English army in its campaign against the Irish Confederates. One of these was Maurice Cuffe, a merchant of Ennis, who wrote an account of the defence of Ballyalley Castle during its siege in 1641. (9) The other was the Joseph Cuffe who went on to settle at Desart (or Castlinch) in County Kilkenny.

Sir Charles Coote, 2nd Baronet, proved every bit as brutal as his father. In 1645, he was made Lord President of Connaught and "disregarding the truce made by order of the King in 1643 he continued to ravage it, like another Attila the Hun, with fire and the sword". During the latter years of the Confederate Wars, he won major victories over rebel forces at Sligo (1646), Coleraine (1649), Carrickfergus (1649), Londonderry (1650), Athlone (1650), Portumna (1650), Ballyshannon (1651), Donegal (1651), Ballymote (1651) and Galway (1652). Thousands of suspected rebels, including children, were massacred under his command. Indeed he callously stated with regard to the slaughter of children that "nits will grow lice". In 1653 he personally orchestrated the shipping of 2000 rebels from Connaught to Jamaica, lately conquered by Cromwell's Admiral Penn. The Cuffe family maintained a connection with Jamaica until the 19th century.

Sir Charles Coote, the younger, continued to prosper during the Cromwellian era. By 1659 he was one of the five Commissioners entrusted with the governance of Ireland. One of his few close friends was Sir William Petty, the man appointed by Cromwell to oversee the redistribution of forfeited Irish lands to loyal English soldiers and the London businessmen who sponsored the conquest. Sir Charles benefited greatly from this friendship, acquiring a substantial estate of 4444 acres in County Clare as well as lands throughout Leinster, Munster and Connaught.

Sir Charles Coote was a prime mover at the convention of 1660 for the Restoration of Charles II, who rewarded him with lands and the title of Earl of Mountrath. He was subsequently confirmed in his role as President of Connaught and appointed Governor of the merchant city of Galway. He also received a grant of Athlone Castle and was awarded an exceptionally generous annual salary. As one of three Irish Justiciars (chief governors) appointed, Coote enjoyed a large degree of independence in the governance of Ireland control over Irish affairs. Coote's luck ran out in December 1661 when he died of the small pox. His widow, Lady Jane, remarried Sir Robert Reading. In compensation for the loss of her husband, she was granted a license to build and maintain lighthouses around the Irish coast and to extract dues from mariners accordingly for 31 years. The ruined lighthouse on the Old Head of Kinsale, County Cork, is the only one still standing.

Notes:
(9) Maurice Cuffe's journal was printed by the Camden Society in 1841.

Joseph Cuffe of Castleinch (1621 - 1679) - A Cromwellian Soldier Up arrow

Joseph Cuffe, the grandson of Hugh Cuffe, was born at Ennis in 1621 and died at Castleinch, County Kilkenny, on Christmas Day 1679. Thus he would not have been 21 years old when the rebellion first broke out in Ulster in 1641. He subsequently served in a cavalry regiment of the Republican Army during its bloody campaign against the Irish Confederates. He may even have served alongside his baleful uncle Sir Charles Coote or his equally sinister son. He commanded a troop of horse under Major Warden at the capture of Cork City on 16th October 1649. Joseph Coote took part in the capture of Cork in December 1649. Among the family portraits burned during the 1922 fire at Desart Court was "a curious but by no-means artistic … three-quarter length portrait" depicting Captain Joseph Cuffe in buff jerkin, holding a pistol. In the wake of the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland, Joseph was rewarded for his efforts with a castle and estate at Castleinch in the barony of Shillelogher, County Kilkenny.

At this point it is worth taking a short look at Castleinch (also known as Inchiholaghan) for that is the name of the parish in which Desart Court was to stand for nearly 300 years. Today it is a fertile landscape, principally given to pasture, but featuring some bogland and a large ancient forest maintained as "Castleinch Forest" under the Millennium Woods Project. Tourism guides refer to "the ruins of a castle and church" in the vicinity. It is often easy to skip over such incidentals as "a ruined castle and church" without pausing to think what these places once meant. However, in terms of the castle and church at Castleinch we are blessed with some information.

In the twelfth century, Earl William Marshal granted the parish of Castleinch to the Anglo-Norman De Valle (or Wall) family. By the 17th century, Shillelogher was one of the wealthiest baronies in the country, held in the patrimony of the Earl of Ormonde. In the 1640s the resident landholder, Gerald Comerford of Castleinch hosted Cardinal Rinnuccini, the Papal Nuncio, before he entered Kilkenny City to meet with the Irish confederates there. In 1650 Kilkenny surrendered to Cromwell's forces, and in 1654 Gerald Comerford was attainted for treason. His castle and lands at Castleinch were forfeited to Joseph Cuffe, Esq.

There is, however, a historical peculiarity here for, also in 1654, Joseph Cuffe married a girl named Martha Muschamp. Parish records state that she was born at Castleinch in 1626. Martha's father, the magnificently named Colonel Agmondesham Muschamp, was born at Castleinch ca.1600. (10) Thus, if we are to follow the male line of the House of Desart then 1654 was the year in which the Cuffe's established a seat at Castleinch. But if we follow instead the female line, then the family's association with Castleinch began at least as early as 1600 when Agmondesham Muschamp was born in the parish.

Joseph and Martha Cuffe's eldest son was also named Agmondesham, in his grandfather's honour and the name was to feature again and again in the Cuffe family pedigrees. Indeed Martha Cuffe must have been a lady of impressive stamina for she provided her husband with 20 children, of which four sons and eight daughters survived to adulthood.

Following the restoration of Charles II, and the death of Sir Charles Coote in 1661, the Comerfords, perhaps encouraged by their friendship with the Duke of Ormonde, successfully appealed the forfeiture of their estates. However, in October 1666, under the Act of Settlement & Explanation, Joseph Cuffe was granted 200 plantation acres including 1200 acres at "Tullaghane, to be called and known for ever by the name of Cuffe's Desart… and Lislonan, to be called and known for ever by the name of Cuffe's Grove." (11) The previous year he had been elected MP for Knocktopher but was unseated on petition. In 1678, Joseph Cuffe was confirmed "in the possession of the castle, manor, lands etc of that estate which was ever afterwards to be called "Castleinch'". He died the following year and was buried in St. David's Church, Inchiholaghan. An elaborate marble tablet was erected to his memory in the north chancel of the church with this inscription:

Sacred to the Pious Memory of Joseph Cuffe, of Castleinch, Esq,
who died on Christmas Morning
Between 9 and 10 o'clock,
in the Year of Our Lord 1679,
and in the 58th year of his age".

Notes:
(10) Joseph and Martha had a daughter, Ann Cuffe, born at Castleinch in 1654. She married Samuel Matthews, grandson of a Welsh soldier. Their grandson Samuel Matthews was Mayor of Kilkenny in 1737 and built Bonnestown Hall during the same period as Desart Court. Anne Matthews (nee Cuffe) died at Bonnestown, Kilkenny, in July 1695.
(11) In total his estate in Kilkenny came to 5425 acres, including 324 acres at Cuffe's Grange and 420 acres in Killaloe. See Ronald P. Larkin, The Road to Knockeenbaun, Kilmanagh. (2002), p. 46.


Agmondesham Cuffe, MP, of Castleinch (d. 1727)Up arrow

Colonel Sir John OtwayJoseph Cuffe died on Christmas Day 1679 and was buried at Castleinch, County Kilkenny. Earlier that year his eldest son and heir, Agmondesham Cuffe, married a widow named Anne Warden. (12) Her father, Sir John Otway (1623 - 1693), had fought for the Royalists during the English Civil War and, in 1665, was knighted by Charles II for his efforts. He subsequently served as a member of the Privy Council during the first years of James II's reign (1686 - 1687) and as both Vice Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and Chancellor of the County Palatine of Durham. Agmondesham was born in Athlone in about 1658 and entered Trinity College Dublin as a Fellow Commoner on 8th August 1672. Anne Warden's late husband, John Warden, owned a house and lands at Burnchurch, a few miles east of where Desart Court stood. It would seem that Agmondesham and Anne settled at Burnchurch for that is where their son and eventual heir, John Cuffe, later 1st Baron Desart, was born on 14th April 1683.

In the 1680s, Agmondesham Cuffe - as a Kilkenny alderman and member of the New English elite - became increasingly hostile to the policy of James II. James had succeeded his brother Charles II, as king of England, Ireland and Scotland early in 1685. Although initially fearful of alienating English and Irish Protestant opinion, James II came under the influence of the Catholic Earl of Tyrconnell and determined to make the island of Ireland a Catholic stronghold. Tyrconnell also secured the king's agreement to revise the 1662 Act of Settlement, which had confirmed many of the leading Cromwellian planters in their estates. Among those now stripped of their lands by the new legislation was Agmondesham Cuffe. In December 1687 Agmondesham received further bad news when a Royal Charter signed by James II called for his dismissal from Kilkenny Corporation and his removal from the office of Mayor of Kilkenny to which he had been elected the previous June. Stripped of both public office and private lands, it is not improbable that Agmondesham must have started to polish his musket when news arrived that the Dutch Protestant William of Orange had arrived in England to oust King James from the throne. Further warfare followed, but the decisive victory of the Williamite forces at the battle of the Boyne in 1690, and the battle of Aughrim in 1691, brought a new dynasty to the throne, and finally secured New English interests in Ireland. Whether or not Agmondesham Cuffe fought at any of these encounters is unknown but, following the accession of William and Mary to the throne, he was restored to his lands at Castleinch. Indeed, in 1733 when his son and heir John Cuffe was raised to the peerage as Lord Desart, the preamble to the patents specifically referred to the efforts of both Agmondesham Cuffe and his father Joseph, for their efforts to ensure the "Protestant succession". These efforts appear to have been the "safeguarding and forwarding [of] supplies and ammunition [to King William's men] during the Jacobite campaign". (13)

In 1695 Agmondesham Cuffe was returned as Member of Parliament for County Kilkenny. In spite of an electoral inquiry that revealed him to have blatantly and illegally created freeholders to vote for him, he retained the seat until the Parliament was dissolved in June 1699. This was the Parliament that implemented the bulk of the Penal Laws that would go on to keep the Catholic majority subjugated for the next 150 years. Among the acts Agmondesham would have voted on were those forbidding Catholics from sending their children abroad for education, from owning arms or horses valued at more than £5 and from becoming solicitors. During this time his young son Joseph attended Trinity College Dublin. One wonders how often father and son met and walked together upon the muddy streets of the medieval stronghold that would one day become the second city of the British Empire.

In 1705, Agmondesham addressed "the Knights, Citizens and Burgesses in [Queen Anne's Irish] Parliament on behalf of himself, his tenants and others in the county of Kilkenny against the conduct of Major Francis Flood". He unsuccessfully contested the Borough of St. Canice (Kilkenny) in 1707 and also lost in an election bid for the Kilkenny county seat in 1715. In his latter years he married secondly, Anne, widow of an Ulster planter named John Dawson and ancestor of the Earl of Dartrey. (14) He died in December 1727, leaving four sons and a daughter. He was succeeded by his 44-year-old son, John Cuffe, later Lord Desart, who married Dorothea Gorges earlier that same year.

Among the family portraits that perished during the burning of Desart Court in 1922 was an oil in good condition, of a man believed to have been Agmondesham Cuffe. The artist was reputed to have been the Dutch artist, Sir Godfrey Kneller.

Notes:
(12) She may have been related to the Major Warden with whom Agmondesham's father, Joseph Cuffe, served during the Cromwellian Wars.
(13) Playfair's British Family Antiquity, Vol. IV, app., p. 114.
(14) Anne's father was Henry Richardson of Poplar Vale, County Monaghan. Air Marshal Sir Victor Richardson who died in 1960 was a direct descendent.


John Cuffe, 1st Baron Desart (1683 - 1749)Up arrow

John Cuffe was born at Burnchurch, County Kilkenny, on 14th April 1683, the "eldest son" of Agmondesham Cuffe by his first wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Otway. However, there appears to be some dispute as to whether John was actually the firstborn son. The Register of Trinity College Dublin states that his brother Maurice was born in 1681 which would, of course, make Maurice the older son. Maurice was called to the Irish Bar in 1712, became a King's Counselor for four years and represented the City of Kilkenny in King George I's Irish Parliament from 1715 to 1726. In 1732 he built a house at Killaghy (or St. Alban's) near the Ballyspellin Spa in County Kilkenny. He married Martha Fitzgerald, daughter of John Fitzgerald of Ballymaloe, Co. Cork. (15) A third brother was Denny Cuffe, MP, who married Grace Wright of Dublin and was ancestor of the Wheeler-Cuffe family. There was also a daughter, Martha, who married John Blunden, MP, father of Sir John Blunden, 1st Bart.

John was educated at Kilkenny College where Jonathan Swift had studied a decade earlier. Like Swift and his father before him, John Cuffe went on to study at Trinity College Dublin, founded just over a century earlier by Queen Elizabeth. He entered Trinity aged 14 on 7th August 1697, became a Fellow Commoner and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1701. It was during this period that the Rubrics, the oldest surviving building in the college today, was built.

As John Cuffe was the first of the family to acquire the name of Desart, it may be worth a quick recap of the family fortunes to date. His great grandfather had fought in Ireland even before Trinity was founded. His great grand uncle appears to have been the man executed for his support of the Earl of Essex in 1601. His paternal grandfather had fought in the Cromwellian wars, perhaps alongside the infamous Sir Charles Coote, and died four years before John's birth. His maternal grandfather, Sir John Otway, had fought in the English Civil War and risen to prominence in the administration of King Charles II. As a young boy, John Cuffe would surely have been aware of the extraordinary political developments then in operation across the British Isles. Did he start life in the damp old tower house built by the Comerfords in the 16th century and granted to his grandfather in the wake of the Cromwellian wars? His father was attainted by King James's Parliament and evicted from Castleinch when John was six years old. Did he then perhaps go and stay with the elderly Sir John Otway, his only living grandfather, then lording it up at his country manor, Beckside Hall, on the banks of Lake Windermere? By the time of Sir John's death on 17th October 1693, John Cuffe was 10 years old. King William's victory over the Jacobites in 1691 ensured his fathers' restoration to the lands in Kilkenny and it was perhaps now, with the Protestants finally in complete control of Irish affairs, that John returned to the county that was to become his home in later years. As to his character, we have a description by his granddaughter Dorothea Herbert who recalled him as "a remarkably handsome and good man".

John Cuffe's political career commenced in 1708, when, at the age of 25, he was appointed Sheriff of Kilkenny. Seven years later he began to make his mark in the Irish House of Commons when he became MP for Thomastown, a position he retained for 12 years from the accession of King George I in 1715 to the accession of King George II in 1727. (16)

On September 2nd 1717, the 36-year-old MP attended the Protestant church in Comber, County Down and there wed a young lady named Margaret Hamilton. Her father, James Hamilton, lived at nearby Carnesure while her maternal grandfather, also James Hamilton, lived at what is now Tollymore Forest Park in the mountains of Mourne. No children were born of this marriage and it may be presumed that young Mrs. Cuffe was carried away before her time.

In 1718, his qualifications were further enhanced when, in 1718, the University of Dublin conferred upon him the honorary degree off LLD for services rendered in Parliament. From 1721 - 1722 he was, like his father before him, Mayor of the City of Kilkenny. On 12th February 1726, John Cuffe married again. His second wife - the future 1st Lady Desart - was Dorothea Gorges and her own family story is worthy of record if only because it brings John Cuffe into close proximity to one of the great Irish ghost stories, namely that of the Black Velvet Ribbon Window.

Dorothea's mother was born Nicola Sophia Hamilton, second daughter of Hugh, Baron Hamilton of Glenawley. Hugh Hamilton's father, Malcolm Hamilton, had been Archbishop of Cashel under King James I. Like Sir John Otway, Hugh fought for the Royalist cause during the English Civil War, after which he fled to Sweden for the duration of Cromwell's Republic. Nicola was born on 23rd February 1666, six years after her father's elevation to the peerage as Baron Hamilton of Glenawley. Her mother died soon after her birth. The family settled in County Down. Upon the 1st Baron's death in April 1678, Nicola's only brother William succeeded to the title but he was killed in a horse-fall less than three years later and the baronetcy became extinct.

In 1681, the 15-year-old orphan was dispatched to live with her 16-year-old cousin, John de la Poer, Viscount Decies, in Dublin. Earlier that same year, the Viscount's father, Richard, 1st Earl of Tyrone, had been arrested and imprisoned in London for his alleged involvement in the Popish Plot of 1679. Thus, parentless and alone, the young Viscount and Nicola became close friends. They particularly enjoyed a mutual passion for religious mysticism and wondered often at the possibilities of an afterlife. The two teenagers made a solemn pact that whichever of them died first should appear to the survivor and declare the truth. Nicola Hamilton was then married off to a landowner from Derry, Sir Tristam Beresford. On 14th October 1690, the Earl of Tyrone died in the Tower of London and Viscount Decies succeeded as the 2nd Earl. Three years to the day later, the 2nd Earl died at Curraghmore, County Waterford, thus being the first between himself and Nicola to avail of the opportunity of knowing the truth. At the time of his death, Nicola, Lady Beresford, was staying with her elder sister, Arabella MacGill, at Gill Hall in County Down. She appeared for breakfast, pale and wan. Later that morning, a letter arrived for her, informing of her childhood sweetheart's death three days earlier. She disclosed that during the night she had been startled by an apparition of the Earl. The ghost had predicted her future, warning of a second, unhappy marriage, stating that her son would ultimately succeed as Earl of Tyrone and that she herself would die on her 47th birthday. She, being incredulous of the reality of the vision, invited him to touch her wrist though warned that she would be scarred for life. The apparition did so and "forever more that lady wore a band on her wrist".

One by one the 2nd Earl's prophecies came true. Sir Tristam Beresford died unexpectedly on a winter's day in 1701. Three years later, his widow entered into an unhappy second marriage with a young officer from County Meath named Richard Gorges; eventually his "abandoned and dissolute conduct forced her to seek and to obtain a separation". Dorothea Gorges, the future Lady Desart, was the first of their children. Upon the death of the 3rd Earl of Tyrone (younger brother of the 2nd Earl) in August 1704, the Earldom of Tyrone became extinct. However, Nicola's eldest son by her first marriage, Sir Marcus Beresford, married the 3rd Earl's heiress, Catherine Power and so came into possession of the de la Poer's lands at Curraghmore. In 1746, Sir Marcus Beresford was created Earl of Tyrone. His mother, Lady Nicola Gorges (nee Hamilton) died on 23rd February 1713 on her 47th birthday which, from a mistake about the year of her birth, she thought she had passed.

Such then was the extraordinary life and death of the mother of the 1st Lady Desart. Her father also merits a mention. Shortly after his marriage to Lady Nicola Beresford, Lieutenant Richard Gorges had crossed into Europe with Arthur Chichester, Earl of Donegal, and the 35th Foot, a regiment chiefly composed of Ulster Protestants. The War of the Spanish Succession had begun and Gorges task was to oust the French puppet king, Philip V, from the Spanish throne. In April 1706, Chichester was killed in action near Barcelona and the regiment came under the control of the newly appointed Lieutenant Colonel Richard Gorges. If he was subsequently guilty of "abandoned and dissolute conduct", this may have been on account of his misfortune at the battle of Almansa in April 1707 during which he lost three quarters of his men together with the regimental colours. Moral may have revived when the 35th Foot won the colours back in 1710 but the British forces nonetheless failed to oust Philip from the throne before peace returned to Europe with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Gorges continued to command the regiment until his retirement in July 1717 when he took a seat in the House of Parliament as MP for Ratoath. He died shortly after his eldest daughter's marriage to John Cuffe on 12th April 1728. (17)

Dorothea Gorges was an interesting catch for John Cuffe but one wonders did she not also bring into his life a large element of trouble for her family was clearly one of much peculiarity. The strange circumstances surrounding her parents estrangement and her mothers death when she was a young girl must have weighed heavily upon her. Worse was yet to come. The summer after her marriage she and John attended the wedding of her pretty younger sister Lucy to William St. Lawrence, Lord Howth. The St. Lawrence family were - and still are - headquartered in Howth Castle but also had lands at Kilfane in County Kilkenny. Lord Howth had shared the representation of Ratoath with General Gorges in the Irish Parliament. He was a close friend of Jonathan Swift who once described Lady Howth as his "blue-eyed nymph". Relationships between the families of Gorges and St. Lawrence must have come asunder in 1736 when Hamilton Gorges, brother to both Lady Desart and Lady Howth, killed Lord Howth's brother, William St. Lawrence in a duel.

Within a year of John and Dorothea Cuffe's marriage both their fathers and King George I were dead. So too was John's sister, Martha Blunden. As heir to Agmondesham Cuffe, John and his wife then moved to the family estate at Castleinch in County Kilkenny. Over the next twelve years, Dorothea bore her husband nine children, of whom seven survived childhood. In between all this, she spent her time weaving a tapestry representing the Rising Sun which her granddaughter, Dorothea Herbert, recalled seeing on a visit to Desart in 1773.

Perhaps it was the noise of so many children in his home or more likely it was the growing pretensions of the landed gentry that, in 1733, inspired John Cuffe to abandon the old tower house of Castleinch and commission the construction of a new country manor which he would call Desart Court. This era of John Cuffe's life had coincided with the start of the great Georgian Age in Ireland, an age in which Dublin would be transformed from a grimy, war-weary shanty town into one of the most glittering cities in Western Europe. In 1720, the banker Luke Gardiner began developing the area between Henrietta Street and Gardiner Street as the first truly fashionable area for the new ruling elite - the so-called Ascendancy. Two years after John Cuffe stood down as MP, a stunning new Parliament House was commissioned; the contract went to Sir Edward Lovett Pearce (1699 - 1733).

The name Pearce is important to the Cuffe story for, with the true identity of the architect unknown, he is the man most often credited with the design of Desart Court. The house certainly looked remarkably similar to Pearce's design of the Bishop's Palace in Cashel. Both were inspired by Inigo Jones's design of the Queen's House in Greenwich. It is also surely of relevance to note that, following General Gorges death, the vacated parliamentary seat of Ratoath, County Meath, was filled by no less a man than Edward Lovett Pearce. It is tempting to think that John Cuffe met the young architect during his time in Dublin and was so much impressed by his work on the new Parliament that he invited him to Kilkenny and offered him some of the silver plate gifted by his late father-in-law. Perhaps they merely toyed with the idea while walking around the new parklands of St. Stephen's Green. However, even if Pearse did commence the design, he cannot have been there to see its completion because on 7th December 1733 he died.

At any rate, Desart Court was built, a stunning early Georgian masterpiece of blue limestone, a central block with pavilions projecting on either side. Over the ensuing decades, the interior was fitted with sumptuous tapestries, oil paintings by Italian Masters, Chippendale chairs, dado wood paneling, rococo ceilings, Dutch walnut cabinets, bookcases "enriched with fluted pilasters", beautifully carved oakwood balustrades, mantelpieces from Sienna … the Cuffe family fortunes were substantially reduced in the process.

Dorothea Herbert who visited the house nearly forty years later offers us this description.

"Sometime after … we went to Desart, Lord Desart's fine old family Seat in the County Kilkenny remarkable for its fine Woods and large Oaks - The House is a very Grand one much like Bessborough but its chief Beauty is its two Superb Staircases and Noble Gallery - It is altogether a very grand and venerable place and I felt a pleasure in hearing my mother [Martha Cuffe, daughter of John, 1st Lord Desart] recount the Many Happy Hours she spent in the large Hall where in my Grandfathers time the family met and dined round a blazing Wood fire after the Manner of Old Times".

John Cuffe may have been fretting about the unpaid bills involved in the construction of his new stately home but he must also have derived considerable pleasure when, on 10th November 1733, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Desart of Desart in the Irish Peerage. The preamble to the patent applauded his father and grandfather; particularly the latter's efforts to ensure the "Protestant succession". He took his seat in the Irish House of Lords two days later, no doubt casting a nod at his brother-in-law, Lord Howth, seated opposite.

Lord Desart further indebted himself in 1735 with the purchase of the Ormond Estate at Callan from Charles Butler, Earl of Arran, for £11,120. Thirty years later his son was compelled to sell some 2000 acres of the Callan lands to pay off the family debts.

John Cuffe, 1st Lord Desart, died on 26th June 1749 and was buried alongside his father and grandfather at the Church of Inchiholaghan in Castleinch. He was succeeded by his eldest son, 19 year old John Cuffe, 2nd Baron Desart, then a student at Trinity College, Dublin.

His wife, the Dowager Lady Dorothea Desart, survived him for nearly 18 years, finally succumbing "at her house in Henry Street" in 1777, shortly after the American colonies declaration of independence. Her daughter Martha Herbert was at her side when she died. If the early years of her life were devoted to the raising of seven children, then her latter years were spent in securing good spouses for them all. In 18th century Ireland, the ownership of a title considerably enhanced one's chances in this regard and for the widowed Lady Desart it can only have been of benefit that her half-brother, Sir Marcus Beresford, the beloved son of the ghostly Nicola Hamilton, was elevated to the Earldom of Tyrone in 1746. At any rate, her late husbands' expenditure on the new house of Desart Court was such that her descendents would have to wait another generation before they would find themselves on the list of truly desirable marriage partners.

Her daughter Susanna was married off to her first cousin, Sir John Blunden, son of the 1st Lord Desart's sister Martha. It was Sir John who built the original house at Castleblunden, perhaps seeking to emulate his father-in-law's creation at Desart Court. Sir John seems to have been a difficult man. His niece, Dorothea Herbert, recalled how he let none of his sons go to a public school and "kept his beautiful daughters shut up in a nursery making lace under an old Governess and their Mammy nurse until they were 15 or 16". When he died in January 1783, Sir John's will expressed the memorable wish "that he may not be buried till his head begins to be putrefied or his head severed from his body, and laid without ceremony in the round part of the wood where the laurel is planted and the ditch of water surrounds it".

Lady Desart's second daughter Sophia, mother of Dorothea, was given to a Killarney-born lawyer named John Herbert and the third, Martha, to his brother, the Reverend Nicholas Herbert.

With regard to Lady Dorothea Desart's sons, the eldest, John, 2nd Lord Desart, went to Trinity College Dublin and married a Cork heiress but predeceased her by 10 years. The second son Otway, 3rd Lord Desart, later 1st Earl of Desart, was dispatched across the sea to Christ Church College, Oxford, and became a lawyer. As befitting the age, the third son, Hamilton, joined the church whilst the fourth, William, secured a commission in the army with the 17th Dragoons and became a Major in the British Army but died of a fever while serving with the garrison at Athlone in 1790. Dorothea Herbert recalled him as a "headstrong and hot" man who caused much trouble in his youth with his argumentative nature. A portrait of him by Johan Zoffany was among those destroyed in the 1922 fire at Desart Court.

They seem to have been an amiable family although Dorothea Herbert, daughter of the Reverend Nicholas and Martha Herbert, was later wont to remonstrate after a visit to Desart that her Aunt Sophia Herbert and Uncle Hamilton Cuffe were "neither very Economical, their Extravagance greatly injured their families while [the 2nd] Lord Desart and the Other Branches lectured them in vain".

Notes:
(15) Maurice and Martha's daughter Anne (Nancy) Cuffe was, for a short time, the wife of Edmond Fitzgerald, 20th Knight of Glin, (1705 - 1773), a member of the notorious Hell Fire Club. Born in February 1721, she was the second of seven daughters. A contemporary described her as 'a popular Protestant beauty from Kilkenny'. It is thus a surprise that her husband, whom she married in March 1740, was the still Catholic Knight of Glin. For reasons unknown, perhaps the Knights' mounting gambling debts, the marriage was a failure. She subsequently married her second cousin, as his second wife, Denny Baker Cuffe of Cuffesborough, Kings' County (modern Offaly) but died soon after on 24th October 1776.
(16) One of his contemporaries at Kilkenny College and sometime neighbours was the philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, who was born at Dysart (not to be confused with Desart) Castle outside Thomastown in 1685. Berkeley achieved much fame when he visited the American colonies with the novel idea of establishing schools for "the instruction of the youth of America". His memory is enshrined in the name of Berkeley College, California.
(17) In her recollections, Dorothea Herbert, grand-daughter of John Cuffe, wrote that the marriage settlement between her grandparents had included "ten thousand pounds worth of plate, taken by her father [ie: General Gorges] at the Siege of Quebec". However, as the Siege did not take place until 1759, this may be a mistake. Perhaps Gorges acquired the fortune during the English raids on the French fortress of Quebec in the 1690s.

John Cuffe, 2nd Baron Desart (1730 - 1767)Up arrow

Known to his Irish contemporaries as "Sean an Chaipín", John Cuffe was born on 16th November 1730, the eldest surviving son of John and Dorothea Cuffe. Although he left no legitimate male heirs, his life is of some interest and his death even more so. Six days after his third birthday, his father was elevated to the peerage as the 1st Lord Desart. Like his father, John was educated at Trinity College Dublin although, unlike his father, he would have been accorded all the privileges due to the son of a peer. He had not long entered the college when his father died on 26th June 1749. Thus, at the age of 19, John succeeded as 2nd Lord Desart, an inheritance that brought with it one of the grandest country houses in Ireland. Showing every bit as much political pluck as his forbears, the 2nd Baron took his seat in the House of Lords on 25th November 1751, 9 days after his 21st birthday.

On September 2nd 1752 this most eligible of bachelors took as his bride a young widow from County Cork, Sophia Thornhill. (18) Her father was a wealthy landowner named Bettridge Badham of Rockfield, County Cork. Her mother was Sophia King, daughter of John King, 3rd Baron Kingston (1664 - 1728) and his wife "a pretty and persistent Irish scullery maid". (19) John King was the younger son of Sir John King, a distinguished Cromwellian officer, and Catherine Fenton, sole heiress of the substantial Fitzgibbon family estates at Mitchelstown, County Cork. It was while living at the King family's new house of Rockingham near Boyle in County Roscommon that the future 3rd Baron Kingston first developed "a more than ordinary and suspicious familiarity" with Margaret (Peggy) O'Cahan. By the time his elder brother, Robert, 2nd Baron Kingston, heard of the romance the "amour was well advanced" and the couple had married. The 3rd Baron's uncle captured the essence of the King family reaction to the marriage in this eloquent statement:

"Few of the nobility of English extraction have ever contracted marriages with Irish papists but none (up to this case) have married one who was at once an ordinary Servant Maid and an Irish Papist Bitch who had neither Charms of Beauty nor genteel behaviour nor agreeableness of conversation".

On the accession of James II, John King converted to Catholicism. William III's subsequent victory and the rise of the Protestant Ascendancy affected John King's circumstances, not least when he succeeded his brother as 3rd Baron Kingston in 1693. For the next fifteen years, his right to the title and estate was subject to a bitter legal dispute with other family members but, in 1708, he finally won outright ownership of both the Mitchelstown and Boyle estates on the promise that he would conform to Protestantism and raise his children in the Protestant faith. One assumes that Peggy O'Cahan, the wife of the 3rd Baron Kingston, and mother of Lady Sophia Desart, was thus something of an enigma amongst the fledgling Anglo-Irish Ascendancy.

Despite their early exposure to Catholicism, the children of John King and Peggy (nee O'Cahan) do not appear to have been much influenced by that religion. James King, 4th Baron Kingston, quickly abandoned the Catholic faith on succeeding to the lands and estates in 1728. He was appointed Grand Master of the Freemasons of England the following year and founded the first Irish lodge of the Freemasons at Mitchelstown in February 1731.

The 2nd Lord Desart and his wife, Lady Sophia, had three daughters. Sophia married Richard Cooke in June 1772; Catharine married Sir Charles Burton, 2nd Bart, of Pollacton, County Carlow, in August 1778 and Lucy married William Weldon in May 1792. These were first cousins of Dorothea Herbert and she has left us with this insight into the lives of the three sisters: "Mrs. Cooke was as good a Creature as possible but had a couple of Mischief making Servants who constantly tattled and put her out of Temper. She was a fine figure of a woman, large and handsome, though not so beautiful as her sister, Lady Burton, whom she greatly resembled. These two and Mrs. Weldon were co-heiresses to the late Lord Desart's alienable property."

In addition to these three girls, the 2nd Lord Desart recognised an illegitimate son, Joseph Cuffe. The identity of his mother is unknown but Dorothea Herbert again jumps to the rescue in giving us an idea of his character. "Those three [ie: Lord Desart's daughters] had a Natural Brother, Mr. Joe Cuffe, he lived mostly at Desart but getting sickly they prevail'd on my Mother to bring him here [to the Herbert's home at Knockgraffon, County Tipperary]. He was a mighty good Creature and much pleased with his new abode. I was then a very young child but a great pet of his and as he had a great taste for Music, drawings and the Belles Lettres, he strove to engraft a like taste on my Young Mind - he lent me all his books, gave me some chosen volumes and began to teach me to draw, but falling into a deep decay he left this and died soon after to the great grief of all the family who respected and loved him as much as if he had been Legitimated into it".

The 2nd Lord Desart was not a particularly wealthy man. His father had spent a considerable portion of the family fortunes on the construction of Desart and the purchase of the Callan estates from the Earl of Arran. In 1765 he sold 2108 acres of this estate, including the town of Callan, to James Agar, sometime MP of Kilkenny. Four years later, Agar was fatally wounded in a duel with the great orator Henry Flood which took place near the Dunmore Caves north of Kilkenny City. Agar's son, George, became MP for Callan in 1777 and was created Baron Callan in 1790.

John Cuffe, 2nd Lord Desart died at Desart at the relatively young age of 37 on 25th November 1767, sixteen years to the day after he first took his seat in the House of Lords. The circumstances of his death were nearly as peculiar as those of his ghostly grandmother, Nicola Gorges (nee Hamilton). He "died of a violent Fever caught by sitting for his Picture, and what is more remarkable two Dogs and a Horse that were drawn in the Picture caught the Disorder - the Dogs died - the Horse was never any good after and the painter lost his sight - supposed from some poisonous paint - Lord Desart's funeral Procession occupied the space of three miles". He was subsequently waked in the Irish way, as he had requested, with a lament created by two women from the Grange Cuffe area named Mrs. Shearman and Mrs. Carroll.

His widow, Sophia, 2nd Lady Desart, died 9 months later on 2nd August 1768 at Merrion Street in Dublin. In the event that he had no legitimate male issue, his younger brother, 30-year-old Otway Cuffe, later 1st Earl of Desart, succeeded as 3rd Lord Desart.

Notes:
(18) Her husband was Richard Thornhill of St. Stephen's Green. Dublin.
(19) Her uncle was thus James King, 4th Baron Kingston (1693 - 1761), a man perhaps best known for founding Kingston College in Mitchelstown as a refuge for elderly people of the Protestant faith who had fallen on hard times. In 1751 he married, Isabella, widow of the distinguished naval officer, Sir Chaloner Ogle, Admiral of the Fleet in 1749.


Otway Cuffe, 1st Earl of Desart (1737 - 1804)Up arrow

Otway Cuffe was the second surviving son of John and Dorothea Cuffe. He was born on 25th November 1737, ten years after the marriage of his parents and three years after his father's elevation to the peerage as the 1st Lord Desart. His father died when he was 12 years old and his older brother John duly succeeded as the 2nd Lord. On 11th July 1752, seven weeks before his brother's marriage to the widow Sophia Thornhill, the 15-year-old Otway Cuffe crossed the seas to study at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was the first of his family to have studied at that University since Henry Cuffe, the Elizabethan gentleman executed with the Earl of Essex 150 years earlier. Over the next 150 years, Christ Church was to be the destination for a number of his sons, grandsons and great-grandsons.

On 31st January 1756, shortly after he left Oxford, Otway Cuffe was admitted to the Inner Temple where he embarked on a legal career. Despite this, it seems as though Otway had plans for a military career. It is stated in the "Harcourt Papers" that he had applied for promotion to the army but the Lord Lieutenant, "though anxious to assist", was unable to procure the appointment. However, in November 1767 the death of his brother without legitimate male issue, ensured that Otway Cuffe's entire circumstances were altered on his 30th birthday, as he became 3rd Lord Desart and inherited the family estate at Desart Court. Four weeks after his brothers' demise, he took his seat in the Irish House of Lords.

By the mid 18th Century the city of Dublin had already experienced phenomenal change and growth. In the late 1740s the banker Luke Gardiner - the future Lord Mountjoy - had made fashionable that part of the town situated to the north side of the river Liffey, in particular Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), and Mountjoy Square. The world's first purpose-built maternity hospital, the Rotunda, which had been built on the proceeds of several charity masquerades and the premiere of Handel's Messiah in 1741, stood at the northerly end of Sackville Street. A large cobble stone square was built in Trinity College Dublin, surrounded by new buildings for the dons and students to live and study in. As citizens and visitors flooded in to admire the Duke of Leinster's new house, Leinster House, they must also have cast their eyes at the stonemasons hard at work developing what we now know as Merrion Square. In the countryside too, Otway Cufffe's contemporaries were building grand stately homes and designing estate villages wherein their employees could live and work. (20) The Age of the Ascendancy was in full swing as the Anglo-Irish Protestant community in Ireland began to assert their own unique identity, a race apart from their kinsmen across the Irish Sea in England, English in manner yet Irish in style.

Otway Cuffe's niece, Dorothea Herbert, later claimed that, although "a good man", Lord Desart had "lived forty years a Bachelor and let the place [ie: Desart Court] go to wreck whilst he mostly resided in England". This comes as a surprise for Otway appears to have been an enlightened individual who did much to enhance the state of County Kilkenny during his time at Desart. In this regard he must have been much aided by a new high road, commenced in 1750, which linked Kilkenny and Callan. "This formed the principal entrance into the city of Kilkenny from the numerous mansions of the Anglo-Irish families in the south and southwestern parts of the county. The road led directly from Tipperary to Inchiholaghan. The 3rd Lord Desart stood as Mayor of Kilkenny from 1771 to 1772 and again from 1779 and 1780. During this time he introduced street-lighting and "scavenging" (ie: rubbish collecting) programmes to the city and, in 1773, oversaw the restructuring of the Linen Market there. His interest in horse racing was such that, in 1767, he was appointed Steward of the Kilkenny Races.

But these were troubled times too for, in 1776, the American colonies issued their Declaration of Independence and a long war with the British Redcoats ensued, which ultimately led to the birth of the United States of America. At this point, it is worth taking a detour across the Atlantic Ocean to North America. Among the new arrivals in the continent after independence was an ambitious young Kilkenny man, James Hoban, later architect of the White House. Hoban had been born in 1762, in one of the tenant cottages at Desart, and educated in the estate school established by the 2nd Lord Desart. Showing much prowess at drawing, young Hoban then moved from Kilkenny to school in Dublin where he was awarded the prestigious Duke of Leinster's medal by the Dublin Society. He subsequently served as an apprentice to the Cork-born architect Thomas Ivory who, later worked on redesigning Westport House for the 3rd Lady Desart's father.

Hoban arrived in Philadelphia in 1784 and began looking for contracts almost immediately. In April 1787 he moved to the rapidly developing city of Charleston where he befriended Major Pierce Butler, an influential South Carolina plantation owner whose family owned a large estate at Ballintemple in County Carlow. Hoban is reputed to have designed many of Charleston's most celebrated architectural treasures, including its splendid Palladian Court House. In May 1791 President George Washington visited Charleston and dined with Pierce Butler. The purpose of his visit appears to have been to examine Charleston's buildings in search of inspiration for the new President's House. It has been suggested that Butler then introduced Washington to Hoban. Certainly in August 1792 Hoban was awarded the contract and so designed and built the White House. The building was in fact badly damaged by the British during the War of 1812 after which Hoban was again contracted to oversee its restoration and extension. At this time the building was recovered with white stucco to disguise the burn marks, hence the present name. Hoban completed the portico of the White House shortly before his death in 1830.

One cannot help but wondering whether Otway Cuffe was aware of James Hoban's stellar career in America, or indeed how far the Cuffe family can be said to have contributed to Hoban's career, through the early development of a school on the Desart estate.

On 6th January 1781, Otway Cuffe was "advanced to the dignity" of Viscount Desart, probably in recognition of his political influence as patron of half the borough of Kilkenny. Four years later, he married 30-year-old Lady Anne Browne. Lady Anne was a wealthy lady 25 years his junior. The Brownes, Earls of Altamont, descended from the great Pirate Queen, Grace O'Malley. (21) Lady Anne Browne's parents were, Peter Brown, 2nd Earl of Altamont, who in 1752 married Elizabeth Kelly, heiress to one of the largest Jamaican sugar plantations.

In 1785 the marriage of Otway Cuffe to Lady Anne Browne must have brought a considerable fortune to the House of Desart. It also afforded them an intimate association with one of the great families in Ireland. Anne's brother, John Browne, 3rd Earl of Altamont, succeeded to the title on the death of their fath