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From Ireland Home Page>>Co. Monaghan>>History of Monaghan for 200 years, Chap 1>>Chap 2>>Chap 3>>Chap 4 >>Chap 5 History of Monaghan for 200 Years 1660-1860
An examination of the literature written about the period of James and William wars in Ireland discloses that what we are in the habit of accepting for histories are generally political pamphlets, so that it is difficult to find out the truth of the several occurrences of that period. In order to avoid the confusion created by the writers and public men of the period calling each other rebels, the names Jacobite and Williamite will be used in these pages as distinctive enough. The troubles began in County Monaghan at the Hilary Session 1689, when Major John McKenna, the Sheriff appointed by James II’s Lord Lieutenant, came to take up office. The Protestant gentry who were Williamites, called on the Rev. Charles Leslie of Glaslough to come into the Sessions and oppose the King’s Sheriff, for the reason that he (Leslie) knew law, from which it appeared the other justices did not. Leslie came and lead the Magistrates in their refusal to acknowledge McKenna: the grounds of the opposition appears to have been that McKenna was a Catholic. McKenna’s reply being that he was of the King’s religion. The Magistrates issued a warrant against him. McKenna as Sheriff was the person entitled to execute the warrant to arrest himself. Those of the gentry who sided with William and whom the Jacobites termed rebels had the grounds for dreading that James II and the Irish Parliament might seek to restore the estates confiscated by Cromwell’s agents to their original owners and deprive the descendants of the Cromwellian soldiers and adventurers of property which they had enjoyed for twenty or thirty years. Besides many of the landowners had purchased the property from them, and some lands had changed hands more than once, so that it is not surprising so many should have joined the Williamites fearing a re-settlement of the land of Ireland. The incident of the refusing to acknowledge the Papist Sheriff passed over without any immediate consequence. However, shortly afterwards the Jacobite army took possession of the Town and Castle of Monaghan, whether there was a fight, or whether the Williamite garrison evacuated or surrendered without resistance there is no reliable evidence to show. The Williamites who left Monaghan went to Glaslough, and according to the Williamite accounts Major John McKenna the Sheriff with 400 followers tried to arrest them and several people of quality who were going to Derry, but on the Garrison of Glaslough sallying forth under Matthew Ancketell and Captain Richardson the Jacobites fled to a “Danish fort” where they were followed and scattered by two troops of horse and three companies of foot. The accounts vary as to the number of Jacobites killed. One Williamite historian says 6, another 90, and another 180 – however all agree that none of the Williamites was killed; but that Ancketell was killed after the battle by a man hidden in a bush. This has been called in local history the ‘Battle of Durmbanagher’ Some points require investigation before accepting any of these versions of the incident. The statement that a battle was fought in which no one was killed on one side and many killed on the other excites the reader’s suspicion. Some of the early accounts state that the fort was one mile from Glaslough, another fixes it at half a mile from the town, but all later writers in order to avoid anachronisms fix it at Drumbanagher beside the town. One of the early accounts dates this battle in 1688, a year sooner than the others. The Jacobite version is that the garrison of Glaslough went out to arrest the Sheriff, Major John McKenna at his residence which was at Monmurry (the site of the ‘fort’ on which his house was situated was marked on the early Ordnance Survey Maps and was one mile distant from Glaslough) and that some of his retainers resisted and were killed by the soldiers. The Williamites after arresting McKenna hanged him. The head was severed from the body and brought besmeared with blood in a trencher to his afflicted widow. All accounts agree that Ancketell was killed after the incident, the local tradition being that the assassin was a discharged servant of his own. The reader can do as the writers of the period did, select whichever version pleases him best. The
following letters were written by the agent of Lennard Barrett Clones estate
to the owner who lived in England about these times: - (Feb
21st 1685) (Jan
29th, 1688) The whole country passed under the Jacobites, who remained in control until after the coming of William’s army. During that period the ancient Monastery of Monaghan was restored, and a great ecclesiastical ceremony was performed at the opening of it by Dr. Tyrrell, the then Catholic Bishop of Clogher. In the Irish Parliament which met in Dublin in May 1689, the County Monaghan was represented in the House of Commons by Bryan McMahon, Esq., and Hugh McMahon, Esq., both of whom took their seats in July. Lord Blayney is returned as sitting in the House of Lords. The Borough was not represented, as the Charter had been called in and not restored when Parliament had been summoned. Eighteen Boroughs were in similar position for Charles II began to cancel some of the Borough Patents which had been affected by the Commonwealth Revolution and James II continued the disfranchisement of the Boroughs. Whether it was Charles or James disfranchised Monaghan is not certain, for the Borough does not appear to have returned any members to Parliament from 1661 until 1692.
King gives a list of those whom he alleges were attainted by the Irish Parliament, but there is evidence that many of the names were not in the original, but were inserted as likely to gain friendship for their owners from the Williamite Government. There are 153 County Monaghan men’s names in King’s list, and it is probably that all of them were connected with risings of WIlliamites in the north-west. (Names given in Appendix II) The list is sadly defective in not giving the part of the County in which the attaints resided. Those of them who lived in Ireland were given until 1st August to signify their loyalty to James II. Those who resided in England had up to October. The
following is the Oath of Allegiance required by James II And I also declare and believe that it is not lawful upon any pretence whatever to take arms against the King, and that I do abhor the traitorous practises of taking arms by his authority against his person or against those that are commissioned by him. So help me God.” Whether any of the County Monaghan attaints took the oath of allegiance and returned to their duty and loyalty and were pardoned does not appear. If any of them did so, care must have been taken afterwards to keep the fact secret from the Williamite Government, as it would have placed the parties who did it under suspicion and prevent them from getting any of the spoils. At all events this list shows the names of those who had joined the Williamites in the end of 1688 and beginning of 1689. There is no evidence of their property being handed over to Jacobites, but it is not at all improbably that some of the former owners tried to get back their lands. Rev.
Charles Leslie was not attainted, for he appears to have been a Jacobite all
the time. The fact of his opposing the appointment of a Catholic Sheriff does
not show that he favoured a change of dynasty. The Williamite historians assert
that he was recruiting in County Antrim for the Williamites at the time of the
Battle of Drumbanagher. It was necessary to show that he was absent from Glaslough
in order to establish their version of the alleged battle. The following interesting
account of the Rev. Charles Leslie is from the pen of Shane Leslie: The first Charles Leslie was one of the first journalists and the ablest pamphleteer of his times. The list of his works covers six pages in the British Museum Catalogue. With his father, he is one of the few County Monaghan men to be commemorated in the Dict. of National Biography. His life and Writings are described in a 500 page book by R. J. Leslie, issued by Rivington’s in 1885. The first edition of the Enclyclop. Britann. Contained an unwarranted legend, that the old bishop hoped before his birth that Charles should prove ‘the greatest scourge the Covenanters ever seen!” 1650 was an ‘annus mirabilis’. In it were born Leslie’s two great enemies, William of Orange and Archbishop King, both of whom his keen pen wounded and disgraced beyond the cure of party-physicians. In the same year, Cromwell, the aversion of his father, defeated David Leslie at Dunbar. The Leslies held out long for the Stuarts both in the Church and the Camp. Charles was the most rabid and devoted Jacobite in literature. He was ordained Deacon by Dr. Sheridan of Cloyne, ancestor of the great Sheridan, and served in the parish of Donagh, from whose pulpit, only destroyed in memory of man, the two greatest controversialists of the time preached – Leslie and Swift. Leslie disputed with voice and pen against everybody, against the Catholics in Monaghan and Tynan Church; against Socinians, Jews, Deists and Quakers. His only convert seems to have been a Quaker who relapsed! Everybody convinced only themselves. As his Biographer writes “So it was at Monaghan.” Protestants loudly proclaimed Leslie to be the victor. Romanists were as confident their bishop had the best of the argument. Archbishop King accused Leslie of being “the first to shed blood” in Ireland at the Revolution, referring to the battle of Drumbanagher; but during that skirmish he was in the Isle of Wight, as Clarendon’s Diary testifies. Refusing to take the oath to William, he became Clarendon’s Chaplain and administered to non-jurors in London. He preached at the commemoration of King Charles at Ely House “a most excellent sermon to about 60 persons, a great auditory at this time”. His powers won Dr. Johnson’s encomium that he was a reasoner not to be reasoned against. Hallam attacks him with the venom of a Whig, but Macaulay gives him his meed and place in history. Stephen in his History of English Thought, describes him as a ‘rationalist in principle’. His great rivals in his time were Defoe, who wrote ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and was the most vindictive journalist on the Whig side, and Archbishop King whose ‘State of the Protestants in Ireland’ Leslie demolished from Glaslough, left an indelible stain upon King’s memory. The book was suppressed and the manuscript seized at Glaslough. It was anonymous and is of the greatest rarity. He also exposed King William’s part in the Massacre of Glencoe in a bitter pamphlet called ‘Gallenienus Redivivus’, which secured the real story for history. Defoe issued a reply to exculpate William, but the historians have taken Leslie’s view. Leslie edited the ‘Rehearsal’, a Jacobite journal, which in two years ‘had nearly driven the review of Defoe out of the field’. The government then suppressed it with the same high hand with which they had prosecuted Sacheverell, like Leslie, a Jacobite and High Churchman. Leslie had been accused of coining the phrases High and Low Church. Of Sacheverall’s trial he wrote, “they brought me to trial in person of the doctor.” He had a tremendous conflict with Bishops Hoadly and Burnet. Burnet attacked him in Salisbury cathedral and after his death in his ‘History of His Own Times’. He replied to Burnet in ‘The Good Old Cause or Lying in Truth’, a very keen attack. In 1710 Leslie was outlawed, and a proclamation issued against him for ‘tending to bring in the Pretender.’ Leslie retired to the Pretender’s Court at St. Germain and pursued the policy of securing a Stuart succession. Though the Pretender was a Catholic, Leslie acted as Anglican chaplain to his household, and wrote the famous description of the Pretender, which the Tories reprinted in 1715 in his favour ending ‘He is a Stuart perfect in your language, and though driven by you into another nation yet his and his father’s court was still English.’ Queen Anne died and the House of Hanover prevailed. Sacheverall took the oaths but Leslie remained true to Stuart allegiance. He had been out of Ireland since 1691, and as he was outlawed, Glaslough was left to his son Robert, but King George I declared that ‘the old man should come home and die in peace.’ The university of Oxford then published his theological works and five hundred members of the Houses of Parliament subscribed. In 1721, he returned to Glaslough without withdrawing an opinion or soiling his conscience. The next year he died and was buried at Glaslough. The County Monaghan’s proportion of the sum required for the maintenance of the royal army of King James was £1,052 4s. 0d., which was collected by the following Barony Constables – Captain Hugh McMahon, Captain Bryan McMahon, Captain Farrell Ward, Doctor Henry Cassidy and Alexander McCabe, Esq. There were two County Monaghan regiments in King James’ army called after their respective Colonels. The officers of the first were principally County Cavan gentlemen, but the names of only a few of the officers of the second regiment are available. Many of the County Monaghan Jacobites served in Colonel Gordon O’Neill’s 1st Tyrone regiment, while others served in the County Louth regiments of Lords Bellew and Louth. There is no record of Major McKenna’s regiment which was said to be at the Battle of Drumbanagher. It’s non-existence goes to throw further doubt on the story of the alleged battle.
Names of the officers in the County Monaghan regiments After the overthrow of the Jacobites in Ireland about 2,000 gentry and farmers who had sided with James II were outlawed and their properties confiscated. The following are the County Monaghan names in the list: Claims were made by some proprietors of estates to be entitled to retain them under the Articles of the Treaty of Limerick and 782 succeeded, most of whom were in the centre of Ireland or had powerful connections in Dublin and London. The Treaty was violated and the Penal Code soon deprived the Catholics of the remnants of their properties. The
following are the names and dates of the judgements given in favour of the few
County Monaghan claimants who were adjudged within the Military Articles of the
Treaty of Limerick: The
following were found to have covered their estates by mortgages, probably made
to evade the Penal Laws and save the family properties: Patrick Matthews estates was sold by order of the court in 1703, and purchased by Capt. Wm. Fortescue, who was probably a relative or friend for £240. The
following are some of the forfeiting persons who failed to have their estates
restored: It
will be noticed that some of those who still held property had ‘englished’
their names – e.g. After
all the confiscations there were many Williamites still unsatisfied, and an enquiry
was instituted for persons who lived abroad and still held lands in Ireland. There
being no one to defend the interests of the owners of these estates, judgements
for high treason were easily obtained, and the estates so sought were confiscated.
The persons who held property in the County Monaghan and who came under these
judgements were the following: It is probably that some of these were amongst the estates which subsequently brought William into trouble with his parliament. There was no plantation of Williamites in Ireland. The army with which he conquered this country consisted principally of Continental soldiers – Dutch, Danes, Germans and Huguenots. Efforts were made by the Jacobites and Tory gentry in England to have them restored to their native countries after their return from Ireland. There was little land left to the older Irish proprietors most of them realising that they could not hold free-hold land owing to the penal laws, sold their estates, either left the country or became merged in the farming community. Some got grants or leases from the new owners of the lands which had formerly been their own, while some opened businesses in the towns. It will be seen later on how they fared. The
state of Clones after the Williamite war appears from the Lennard Barrett correspondence:
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