Killadoon, Celbridge, Co Kildare
Mark Bence-Jones. A Guide to Irish Country Houses (originally published as Burke’s Guide to Country Houses volume 1 Ireland by Burke’s Peerage Ltd. 1978); Revised edition 1988 Constable and Company Ltd, London.
p. 168. “(Lucas-Clements/IFR; Clements/IFR) A three storey block of ca 1770, joined to a single two storey wing by a curved sweep; if the original intention was to build a balancing wing and sweep, the idea must have been abandoned fairly soon; because there is now a three sided bow on the other side of the house which would have clashed with the sweep and which appears in a C18 view. Built for Rt Hon Nathaniel Clements, MP, the banker, politician and amateur architect, one would naturally assume that it was so his own design, yet apart from having the “patternbook” tripartite doorway with a fanlight, a baseless pediment and engaged columns which he seems to have favoured, it lacks the characteristics of the houses known to be by him or convincingly attributed to him. Apart from the doorway, the five bay entrance front is quite plain, as is the six bay garden front, whch now has some relief in external shutters of the ground floor windows. The wing has a six bay front and there are small oculi in the sweep. All this plainness, however, seems like deliberate understatement; for it is, in fact, a house of great quality. The interior is very well finished; the rooms, though few in number, are of noble proportions. The hall has a Doric frieze and a neo-classical chimneypiece of stone, with fluted Doric columns. The staircase, in a separate hall to one side, is of good joinery. The dining rom has a modillion cornice and doorcases with entablatures carved with acanthus; painted in shades of chocolate, red and oyster. The library, extending into the bow at the side of the house, has a cornice of mutules. The drawing room, which has a gilded modillion cornice, remains almost exactly as it was when redecorated ca 1820s by Nathaniel Clement’s grandson, 2nd Earl of Leitrim, with a beautiful French wallpaper in faded green and gold, gilt pelmet boards and the original red curtains and flounces.”
Not in national inventory
From Country Life.
https://theirishaesthete.com/2015/08/03/killadoon/
Nathaniel Clements’ engagement in speculative building, together with his reputation as an arbiter of taste, led to several buildings being attributed to him by the Knight of Glin. These included Brookelawn and Colganstown, County Dublin; Williamstown and Newberry Hall, County Kildare; and Beauparc and Belview, County Meath. All can be dated to c.1750-65, and all share certain stylistic similarities, not least reliance on Palladianism which by that date was fast falling from fashion. While respecting the Knight’s notion of Clements as an architect, and one responsible for the houses listed above, Maurice Craig in Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size (1976) proposes that he was ‘eclectic’ not least because ‘he picked and chose his elements from pattern-books and combined them so that they compose well enough together: but they do not interact on one another.’ However, given his many other professional and financial interests, it must now be accepted that Clements was not an architect as we would understand the term. Rather he was an influence, or as Malcomson proposes, ‘a role model’, someone to turn to for advice. Furthermore, the design of his Ranger’s Lodge provided the prototype for a new generation of villa-farms that were not grand country houses but residences at the centre of working estates. All this is applicable to a house which has long been ascribed to Nathaniel Clements because it was built for his eldest son and heir Robert who in 1795 was created first Earl of Leitrim. Killadoon, County Kildare, shown in the pictures here today, surely ought to have been designed by Nathaniel Clements but even Mark Bence-Jones in his 1978 Guide to Irish Country Houses argued that ‘apart from having the “pattern-book” tripartite doorway with a fanlight, a baseless pediment and engaged columns which he seems to have favoured, it lacks the characteristics of the houses known to be by him or convincingly attributed to him.’ In fact, as Malcomson shows, Nathaniel and Robert Clements had a troubled relationship and he proposes that the older man’s input into the house’s design ‘must have been limited.’ The need for a thorough re-examination of 18thcentury architectural attribution remains.
The text below originally appeared here in 2015. Tomorrow at Sotheby’s in London many of the items in the accompanying photographs will be offered for sale; thankfully not all, since some key pieces such as the 1770s sofas, the Axminster carpet from c.1820-30 and 19th century beds with their original hangings have been offered on loan to the state for public display. Nevertheless, the contents of another historic Irish house are being broken up because there is little or no official support for owners of such properties struggling to survive and eventually they are left with no option but to sell.
It is worth pointing out – again – that legislation has existed on the Irish statute books for many decades which is supposed to ensure that valuable paintings, furniture and so forth remain in this country. The Documents and Pictures (Regulation of Export) Act dates from 1945 and was, in theory at least, supplemented by the National Cultural Institutions Act of 1997. The idea behind these pieces of legislation is that before any item over a certain fairly low value can leave the country, the parties responsible are required to seek permission from government-appointed authorities (until July 2015 usually one of the main national cultural institutions.*) However, there is no known instance where such an export licence has been refused; auction houses have long understood that this is a mere paper-filling formality. Tomorrow’s sale, for example, also includes a mahogany dining table attributed to Mack, Williams and Gibton and dated c.1815. It was listed in an inventory made of the contents of Carton, County Kildare in 1818 and has remained in the house until now when, after 200 years, it will be offered for sale tomorrow.
Vendors vend, buyers buy, auctioneers auction. Across millennia collections have been assembled and dispersed. There are no villains here, no one deserves to be castigated for acting in an untoward fashion. But there is, as has been the case for too long, evidence of clear neglect on the part of the Irish state towards what becomes of our patrimony, and an obvious want of concern over how this has been steadily whittled down, year by year, house by house. One must ask what is the function of legislation observed in name only? Surely the purpose of enacting the laws mentioned above was to ensure that a reasonable effort would be made to retain valuable works of art and collections in Ireland? That is currently not the case. A general election takes place here in a few weeks’ time: readers might like to ask any candidates they encounter for an opinion on the national heritage and what might be done to retain whatever is still here. Otherwise expect more sales.
Despite the many advances made in Irish architectural history over recent decades, some areas remain in need of further investigation. Among the most obvious of these is the question of attribution. There are significant houses across the country yet to be assigned to any architect, and others which need to have their accreditations reassessed. In the latter category are those properties given accreditations by the late Knight of Glin in the early 1960s when he was engaged on his uncompleted thesis on the subject of Irish Palladianism. At the time there was far less information available on or interest in architectural history than is now the case, and therefore the Knight was to a large extent dependent on instinct when allocating various houses to different architects, about whom little or nothing was known. Often he had to rely on his eye rather than on documentation, and as he admitted towards the end of his life, mistakes were made. To date insufficient effort has been made to correct these and as a result attributions made half a century ago still stand. An obvious opportunity for correction occurred with the appearance of the relevant volume in the Royal Irish Academy’s Art and Architecture of Ireland series published earlier this year, but the editors failed to avail of this opportunity. A reassessment of the Knight’s attributions still awaits requiring someone able to combine scholarship with connoisseurship. Until such time, in particular the output of gentlemen architects like Francis Bindon (whose name has appeared here on more than one occasion) will remain unclear. On the other hand, thanks to another book published in 2015 we are now in a much better position to assess the oeuvre of another talented 18thcentury amateur, Nathaniel Clements.
In 1754 John Carteret Pilkington published the third and final volume of his late mother Letitia’s celebrated memoirs in which he described Nathaniel Clements as being ‘a certain great man in Ireland, whose place of abode is not remote from Phoenix Park…whose acquirements have justly raised him from obscurity to opulence [and] whose extensive plans in building have excited an universal admiration of his taste in architecture.’ As Clements’ new biographer Anthony Malcomson noted, it was perhaps something of an exaggeration to claim he had raised himself from ‘obscurity’ but as a fifth son he would have been expected to make his own way in the world, especially since his father died when he was only seventeen. That father, Robert Clements had inherited an estate in County Cavan but in 1707 had secured the important, and lucrative, post of Teller to the Irish Exchequer. This job passed to his eldest son Theophilus who badly bungled his own financial affairs as was discovered when he died in 1728. Nevertheless, both the family and Nathaniel Clements were by this time sufficiently well connected for the Tellership of the Exchequer to pass to him, a job he held for the next twenty-seven years during which time, as Pilkington commented, he made himself exceedingly rich. His substantial income was boosted by money received from non-residents in receipt of an Irish pension for whom he acted as agent for decades (Malcolmson estimates that by the mid-1740s his annual income from this job alone was £1,500). He also held numerous other offices, all of which brought in additional funds. Much of this was used to acquire land, the most reliable form of investment in a period when banks failed regularly (as did that established by Clements and a couple of partners in 1759). By the end of his life he had bought up some 85,000 acres spread across three counties and producing an income of around £6,000 each year.
Another area of investment in which Clements engaged was housing, beginning with his participation in the development of Dublin’s Henrietta Street. The man behind this project, and others on the northern banks of the Liffey, was Luke Gardiner to whom Clements was related by marriage. Named after Henrietta, Duchess of Bolton, an old friend of Gardiner, whose husband acted as Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant in 1717-20, the street was from the start intended to be the capital’s premier address, its two sides lined with houses of princely splendor. As so often the case throughout 18th century Dublin, the exterior of the buildings, mostly standard red-brick and occupying sites of varying proportions, gave – and continue to give – insufficient notice of what lay behind the facades. Clements was responsible for constructing a number of houses on the street, beginning with Number 8 which was finished around 1733 and let to Colonel (later General) Richard St George. Three or four others then followed before he moved to Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, the initial development of which was likewise overseen by Gardiner. Here Clements built several more properties including a family residence that came to be known as Leitrim House. But having become ranger of the Phoenix Park in 1750 (having previously acted as deputy-ranger) he embarked on building himself a smart and substantial new villa. The Ranger’s Lodge was a five-bay, two-storey over full-height basement house on either side of which quadrants connected to L-shaped single-storey wings. Clements and his socially-ambitious wife hosted opulent parties on the premises intended to impress their contemporaries and to cement the couple’s place in Ireland’s hierarchy. In June 1760 for example, it was reported that the Clementses ‘gave an elegant entertainment to several of the nobility and gentry at his lodge in the Phoenix Park, which was illuminated in the most brilliant manner.’ Five years after Nathaniel Clements’ death in 1777, his son Robert sold the lodge to the government which then converted – and subsequently – enlarged the building for use as a Viceregal residence. Today the same property is known as Áras an Uachtaráin and occupied by the President of Ireland.
Nathaniel Clements’ engagement in speculative building, together with his reputation as an arbiter of taste, led to several buildings being attributed to him by the Knight of Glin. These included Brookelawn and Colganstown, County Dublin; Williamstown and Newberry Hall, County Kildare; and Beauparc and Belview, County Meath. All can be dated to c.1750-65, and all share certain stylistic similarities, not least reliance on Palladianism which by that date was fast falling from fashion. While respecting the Knight’s notion of Clements as an architect, and one responsible for the houses listed above, Maurice Craig in Classic Irish Houses of the Middle Size (1976) proposes that he was ‘eclectic’ not least because ‘he picked and chose his elements from pattern-books and combined them so that they compose well enough together: but they do not interact on one another.’ However, given his many other professional and financial interests, it must now be accepted that Clements was not an architect as we would understand the term. Rather he was an influence, or as Malcomson proposes, ‘a role model’, someone to turn to for advice. Furthermore, the design of his Ranger’s Lodge provided the prototype for a new generation of villa-farms that were not grand country houses but residences at the centre of working estates. All this is applicable to a house which has long been ascribed to Nathaniel Clements because it was built for his eldest son and heir Robert who in 1795 was created first Earl of Leitrim. Killadoon, County Kildare, shown in the pictures here today, surely ought to have been designed by Nathaniel Clements but even Mark Bence-Jones in his 1978 Guide to Irish Country Houses argued that ‘apart from having the “pattern-book” tripartite doorway with a fanlight, a baseless pediment and engaged columns which he seems to have favoured, it lacks the characteristics of the houses known to be by him or convincingly attributed to him.’ In fact, as Malcomson shows, Nathaniel and Robert Clements had a troubled relationship and he proposes that the older man’s input into the house’s design ‘must have been limited.’ The need for a thorough re-examination of 18thcentury architectural attribution remains.
*In July 2015 An Taisce took a successful case in the High Court against the state delegating responsibility for the granting of export licenses to cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Ireland. However, this does not appear to have made any difference to such licenses being granted.
http://www.turtlebunbury.com/history/history_family/hist_family_clements.html
Clements of Killadoon, Co. Kildare
In the mid 17th century, a Leicestershire family emigrated to Massachusetts and so escaped the ravages of the English Civil War. Only one son, Daniel Clements, remained behind, serving a commission in the army of Oliver Cromwell. For his military services in Ireland he was rewarded with an estate in Cavan. His descendents rapidly scaled the heights of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy gaining the Earldom of Leitrim in 1795. Meanwhile, in America, Daniel’s sister Mary was arrested for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.
Daniel’s grandson Nat Clements was one of the great amateur architects of Georgian Ireland. Perhaps his best-known legacy is the Irish President’s residence, Arás an Uachtaráin, in Phoenix Park. In 1767 Nat’s eldest son Robert took the first lease on a property at Killadoon, Co. Kildare. A series of prudent marriages and the will of the assassinated 3rd Earl of Leitrim boosted the fortune of the Killadoon branch, but the subsequent land acts considerably reduced the size of the estate in the 20th century. Killadoon is presently home to Charlie Clements, representing the tenth generation of the Clements family since Daniel’s arrival in Ireland.
FROM LEICESTERSHIRE TO AMERICA
The Clements of Killadoon descend from Robert Clements (1595–1658), a prosperous English wine merchant living at Croft, six miles south of Leicester City, in the reign of James I. By his first wife Lydia, Robert was father of eight children – Job, John, Robert, Sarah, Lydia, Daniel, Abraham and Mary.
During the 1620s, the Clements had a fleet of three ships that plied the Atlantic Ocean between England and North America. By the late 1630s, it seemed inevitable that the escalating division between Royalists and Republicans in England would result in Civil War. The Clements appear to have been opponents of Charles I at this time.
Lydia Clements died in March 1641 causing much distress in the family. Her son Job appears to have journeyed to America at this time with some freinds and, having scouted around New England, deduced that it was a suitable place to live. He subsequently convinced his distraught father to sell their estate in England and voyage to America with him. Robert Clements was subsequently hailed as a co-founder of the frontier settlement of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
MARY OSGOOD & THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS
In due course, several of Job’s brothers and sisters also crossed the ocean, except for two brothers Abraham and Daniel (see below) and his youngest sister Mary Clements who, born in 1637, may have been considered too young to travel in 1642. Mary was left in Coventry with a Mrs. Biddle. She finally sailed for New England in 1652.
On November 15th 1653, Mary was married by arrangement to another early Haverhill settler, Captain John Osgood. Mary’s father, Robert Clements, now a New England magistrate, personally conducted the marriage ceremony. Over the next twenty years, Captain Osgood became a man of prominence in the state, having his own cavalry troop and acquiring considerable lands around Andover.
In the summer of 1692 the towns of Massachusetts were immersed in a hysteric frenzy that became known as the Salem Witch Trials. The origin of this horrific affair probably stems from an African slave called Tituba who entertained the young white children with his stories of voodoo. This initially amounted to little more than floating an egg white in a glass of water and predicting future husbands. However, for unknown reasons, certain girls started having fits, making strange noises and contorting their bodies in an alarming manner. Doctors were summoned and the town elders, Puritans to a man, began to speak in increasingly high voices of witchcraft. The girls were apprehended and asked to provide the names of any witches living locally. Over the next three months, 141 people were arrested. 19 of these were hanged, including Tituba, while seven died in prison and one was crushed to death. In September 1692 Mary Osgood, hitherto regarded as “a remarkably pious and good woman”, was suddenly accused of witchcraft. Her accuser appears to have been Dudley Bradstreet, a friend of her husband. As one of the leading women in Andover at the time, her arrest caused much astonishment to the local community but the frenzy of what became known as the Salem Witch Trials was at full steam with nearly twenty people already executed. Her own son Peter Osgood, then Constable of Salem, oversaw her transportation to trail in Salem where she was asked to confess that she had indeed been had been “dipt” by Satan. The confession came on her husband’s advice, it being considered the only feasible way she might escape execution by burning. However, in the end, the awfulness of a confession that one had given body and soul to Satan, outweighed in Mrs. Osgood’s mind the desire for life and she recanted, and with others signed the following petition:–
“Our nearest and dearest relations seeing us in that dreadful condition, and knowing our great danger, apprehended there was no other way to save our lives…. Indeed, that confession that it is said we made was no other than what was suggested to us by some gentlemen, they telling us that we were witches, and they knew it and we knew it, which made us think that it was so, and our understanding, our reason, our faculties almost gone we were not capable of judging our condition. As also the hard measures they used with us rendered us incapable of making our defence, but said any thing and everything which they desired and with most of us, what we said was but in effect a consenting to what they said. Sometime after, when we were better composed, they telling us what we had confessed, we did profess that we were innocent and ignorant of such things. Mary Osgood, Deliverance Dane, Sarah Wilson, Mary Tyler, Abigail Barker, Hannah Tyler.” [1]
Mary was discharged in January 1693. Captain Osgood died the following August, apparently through sheer stress of the trials. His widow lived on until October 1710. The story of the “Salem Witch Trials” formed the basis of Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible”.
DANIEL & ABRAHAM CLEMENTS
While the majority of Robert and Lydia Clements children emigrated to North America, two sons stayed behind, Abraham and Daniel. It is thought they had both been conscripted into King Charles I’s army but later joined Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth (or Republican) army. It is not clear when or why they made this decision. Perhaps it was in response to the destruction of nearby Leicester City, a Republican stronghold, by Prince Rupert’s Royalist forces in May 1645. In 1646, the brothers both went to Ireland with Cromwell’s army, arriving into the port of Waterford in the south of Ireland.
Daniel Clements was a Cornet, or junior officer, in Colonel Chidley Coote’s cavalry regiment.[2] He later transferred to the regiment of Chidley’s brother, Colonel Thomas Coote, with whom he was stationed in Belfast. Unconfirmed sources suggest he was present at the siege of Drogheda in September 1649. In 1657, by way of a reward for his military service, Daniel received a grant of about a thousand acres at Rathkenny, County Cavan.
Abraham Clements also settled in Cavan and married Jane _____. His only child was a daughter, Lydia, who married Joseph Pratt. He left no sons so the name did not carry on through his blood-line.
ROBERT CLEMENTS, TELLER OF THE IRISH EXCHEQUER
Daniel died in June 1680 and was succeeded by his son Robert who, like so many Cromwellian settler families, was attainted by the Irish Parliament of James II in 1689. However, with the accession of William III and Mary, he was restored to his estates and appointed Deputy Treasurer of Ireland. Robert, who lived at Abbotstown near Castleknock, served as High Sheriff for County Cavan (1694), MP for Carrickfergus (1692) and as Teller of the Irish Exchequer in the reign of Queen Anne. He married Elizabeth Sandford, daughter of Colonel Theophilus Stanford and had four sons and a daughter.[3]
The eldest son Theophilus Clements, a bachelor, succeeded to Rathkenny and 1722 and served as MP for Cavan from 1713 through to his death, aged 41, in 1728. In 1724 he presented the Borough of Cavan with its Silver Mace.
The second son Robert became MP for Newry in 1715 and was forebear to the Lucas Clements family of Rathkenny, Co. Cavan.
The third and youngest brother Nathaniel (“Nat”) Clements (1705 – 1777), a Dublin banker, architect and politician, was a close friend of the property developer Luke Gardiner. When Gardiner retired from public office in 1755, Nathaniel succeeded him as both Deputy Vice-Treasurer and Deputy Paymaster-General of Ireland. The two men worked together on the development of Dublin’s north side and Nat designed an imposing house for himself in Henrietta Street. He also worked in conjunction with Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, the most distinguished architect in Ireland, and his successor, Richard Castle. In April 1751, Nat was appointed Chief Ranger of the Phoenix Park, to which purpose he built a house in the Park known today as Arás an Uachtaráin, home to the Irish President. Nathaniel Clements is credited with the design of many other buildings of note such as Newbery Hall and Williamstown in Carbury, Lodge Park in Straffan and Colganstown outside Newcastle, Co. Dublin.
In 1729 Nat married Hannah Gore, daughter of the Rev. William Gore, Dean of Down. Her uncle Sir Ralph Gore of Belle Isle, Co. Fermanagh, was a close friend of Speaker William Conolly and succeeded him as Speaker of the House of Commons in 1729. He was subsequently appointed Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer. Hannah was also a cousin to the “Nine Gore” brothers who sat in the Commons during the 1740s. Nat and Hannah had two sons – Robert and Henry.
ROBERT CLEMENTS, CONTROLLER OF CUSTOMS
Nat and Hannah’s elder son Robert seems to have inherited the Gores bent for politics and devoted considerable time and expense to ensuring his position in the government of the day. He also expended considerable effort petitioning for an Earldom, which title he was eventually granted through a combination of skilled political manoeuvring, social positioning and sheer persistence. Over the years, he held a succession of offices: Controller of the Great and Small Customs of the Port of Dublin for 46 years from 1760 until his death; Ranger of Phoenix Park 1777-87 and Searcher, Packer & Gauger at the Port of Dublin in 1787. In each role, he created connections and established relationships with the prime movers in both government and society. In 1765 he married Elizabeth Sandford of Maynooth which brought him further estates in County Kildare.
In 1767, Robert leased 140 acres at Killadoon outside Celbridge from Tom Conolly of Castletown. Tom’s great uncle, Speaker Conolly had purchased the property from the Plunkett family in 1724. In 1769 Robert leased a further 112 acres at Killadoon and commenced building a new house. His architect father does not seem to have had a say in the design, attributable perhaps to an unexplained rift that had evolved between the two men. The agricultural observer Arthur Young visited Robert in June 1776, shortly after Killadoon’s completion. He described it as “an excellent house, and planted much about it with the satisfaction of finding that all his trees thrive well. I remarked the beech and larch seemed to get beyond the rest.” Young felt Robert was “a good farmer, growing cabbages to feed the sheep and potatoes to feed the pigs”. In 1795, as a reward for his assistance in securing a parliamentary seat for the Lord Lieutenant’s private secretary, Robert was finally given the Earldom he had sought since his youth. The 1st Earl of Leitrim died in 1804, having been one of the most prominent supporters of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland.
His butler John McMahon/MacMahon was born in about 1735. It may have been Robert Clements influence that secured McMahon’s appointment as Comptroller of the Port of Limerick. McMahon later made an expedient second marriage into the wealthy Stackpoole family. The Gentleman’s Magazine of 10 April 1860 (p. 533) has an obituary to General Thomas MacMahon, who died at Great Cumberland Street, Hyde Park, and refers to ‘the gallant General’ as ‘a son of the late John McMahon, esq, sometime Comptroller of the port of Limerick; his mother was one of the Stackpooles of the county of Cork. He was born in December 1779 and entered the army towards the close of the last century.’ The Cumberland link is his is confusing because I assume he was also connected to this lady: ‘In North Cumberland street, Dublin. Catherine, wife of John MacMahon, Esq. aged 66 years’ Limerick and Clare Examiner, 4 February 1852 … it may help to follow the Clare-Limerick connection via the landedestates.ie database plus links like this and this. I took an interest in this when researching the Victorian canal engineer John MacMahon.
HAL CLEMENTS & THE SEVEN YEARS WAR
On May 15th 1756, Great Britain, in alliance with the German states of Prussia and Hanover, declared war on France. Within weeks, the French had managed to secure the support of Austria, Russia, Sweden and Saxony. The war quickly spilled across the Atlantic Ocean to North America where French and British troops were attempting to wrestle control of one another’s’ territory. Amongst those troops sent to assist the British in America was 23 year-old Henry Theophilus Clements, the younger son of Nat Clements the architect. Henry – known as Hal – was a junior officer in Lord Blakeney’s Inniskilling Regiment, the 27th Foot.
In August 1757, a sizeable French army under the Marquis de Montcalm laid siege to the British stronghold of Fort William Henry on the southern banks of New York States’ Lake George. A short distance away, lay a significant British force commanded by Hal Clements future father-in-law, General Daniel Webb. General Webb is a somewhat controversial figure in 18th century military history, contributing to one of the more memorable scenes in “The Last of the Mohicans”. Faced with a French assault, Fort William Henry’s commander, Colonel Monro, sent urgent messages to Webb for assistance. Webb declined the request, despite strong words from his second-in-command, Sir William Johnson. “General Webb, just what in the hell are you doing sitting here when Fort William Henry is under attack? We’ve got men fighting and dying up at the lake. They have got to have help. Now!” Webb remained unmoved and Monro was obliged to surrender. The following day Monro’s retreating garrison was attacked by Panaouska, war chief of the Abnakis. Nearly a hundred British soldiers were killed and scalped within minutes.
The assault on Fort William Henry had been orchestrated from Fort Carillion, a French fortress on the Ticonderoga peninsula. In July 1758, Hal Clements was one of 16,000 British Redcoats who attempted to oust the 3200-strong French garrison from Fort Carillion. Under the command of General Abercromby, the assault was an unmitigated disaster. The British lost over 1900 men, a third of whom were members of the Highland “Black Watch” Regiment. Despite being outnumbered 4 to 1, the French prevailed.
The Seven Years War came to an end with the treaty of Paris in February 1763. Having obtained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, Hal duly returned to Ireland. Seven years later, he greatly enhanced his personal fortune when he married Mary Webb, daughter and heiress of the afore-mentioned General Daniel Webb. He was appointed High Sheriff of Co. Cavan in 1766 and Leitrim in 1773. He sat in Parliament from 1769 until his death in 1795, variously representing the borough of Cavan and county of Leitrim. In 1777, he succeeded his father as Deputy Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, an office that greatly increased his personal wealth but which was abolished in 1793. He principally resided at Woodville near the Lucan spas outside Dublin where he often entertained the Lord Lieutenant. Woodville previously belonged to John Hawkins, the Ulster King of Arms.
Mary Clements provided Hal with three daughters before dying young in the winter of 1777. Hal married his second wife Catherine Beresford in August 1778. His timing couldn’t have been better. Catherine’s father John Beresford, a brother of the 1st Marquess of Waterford, had lately been appointed to the lucrative post of Taster of the Wines in the Port of Dublin. Over the course of the 1780s and 1790s Beresford became the central figure in a powerful trio of Irish ministers (the others being John Foster and John Fitzgibbon) who governed Ireland on behalf of successive lord lieutenants in the lead up to the Act of Union. Beresford’s position as Chief Commissioner of the Irish Revenue from 1780 gave him control of extensive patronage, of which his son-in-law was content to take advantage.
Colonel Hal Clements died on 26th October 1795 and was succeeded by his 14-year-old son Henry John Clements.
HENRY JOHN CLEMENTS (1781-1843)
Henry John Clements was 17 years old when rebels struck at Killadoon during the 1798 Rebellion but the house survived the looting. A committed Tory, Henry represented Counties Leitrim (1804 – 1818) and Cavan (1840 –1843) in the House of Commons. He was also a Colonel in the Leitrim Militia. In December 1811 he married Louisa Stewart (d. 27 April 1850) and settled at Ashfield Lodge, Cootehill, Co. Cavan.
Louisa’s father was James Stewart, MP, of Killymoon, Co. Tyrone. Stewart was a leading advocate for the abolition of penal laws against the northern Presbyterians. In 1772 he married Lady Elizabeth Molesworth, one of the heiresses of the substantial Molesworth estates. In 1763, Lady Elizabeth was badly injured in a fire at the family’s London townhouse that killed her widowed mother, two sisters and six servants, and sent her only surviving brother insane. By 1840, however, the Stewart family were in such terrible financial difficulty that Louisa’s siblings were obliged to seek refuge from their creditors in Boulogne. Following the death without issue of her only brother, Colonel William Stewart, in 1850, the Molesworth rents passed to her.
Louisa’s husband, Colonel HJ Clements had died seven years earlier at the age of 62 and thus, on her death in the winter of 1850, the Molesworth estate passed directly to her eldest son, Henry Theophilus Clements.
HENRY THEOPHILUS CLEMENTS (1820-1904)
Henry Theophilus Clements was a man on whom destiny kept bestowing great fortunes. He was born at Ashfield Lodge, Co. Cavan, in 1820. After an education in England and on the Continent, he followed family tradition and became a gentleman and magistrate in his home county. Following the death of his father in 1843, he inherited Ashfield and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant, JP and High Sheriff for Cavan (1849). He later became a Colonel in the Leitrim Rifles and High Sheriff for Leitrim (1870). When he was 30-years old, his mother died and left him the Molesworth estates.
On 3rd December 1868, the 48-year-old Colonel was married at St Gabriel’s, Pimlico to Gertrude Markham, youngest daughter of David Markham, Canon of Windsor and Rector of Great Horkesley in Essex. Her brother was Sir Clements Robert Markham, the celebrated explorer and President of the Royal Geographical Society.
On April 2nd 1878, Henry’s second cousin, the 3rd Earl of Leitrim, was assassinated near Milford in co. Donegal. The murder was in part a reaction to Lord Leitrim’s callous policy of evicting tenants and in part because the disreputable landlord had allegedly “debauched” a servant girl whose father was among the assassins.[4] As it happened, the Earl had fallen out with his own immediate family and so he bequeathed his vast property, consisting of nearly 96,000 acres in Leitrim, Donegal, Galway and Kildare, to a rather surprised Colonel HT Clements. On hearing this news, the Colonel promptly volunteered the Donegal estates to Robert Clements, the new Earl.[5] The Colonel subsequently employed Sir Thomas Drew, RHA, to add a substantial new wing to Lord Leitrim’s magnificent lakeside house at Lough Rhynn, completed in 1889. His inheritance also included the Clements estate at Killadoon, granted in fee to the 2nd Earl of Leitrim in 1853.
Colonel HT Clements died on 7th January 1904 leaving two sons and two daughters, Gertrude (1873–1949) and Selina (1885–1961).
HENRY JOHN BERESFORD CLEMENTS (1869–1940)
Born in 1869, the Colonel’s eldest son Henry John Beresford Clements was educated at Eton and earned the unusual epitaph of being the world’s most acknowledged expert in the field of “armorial book-binding”. This was a 14th century practice, greatly developed in subsequent centuries, whereby the family arms of private individuals were placed on book covers. Henry’s collection, bequeathed to the Victoria & Albert Museum after his death, is the largest of its kind in the world. As a young man, he served in the Great War, in India and on the Western Front. He was sent home twice – once with frostbite, once with a wounded leg – and finished the war, like so many of his forbears, with the rank of Colonel. He was also involved in the judicial and administrative running of counties Leitrim and Cavan, serving variously as High Sheriff, DL and JP, as well as JP for Co. Kildare.
“According to one of his employees, Thomas Boyle, Henry was a `very good employer’. Although he spent most of his time at his Killadoon estate, near Celbridge, Co. Kildare, Clements with his family and their servants spent about a month at Rynn each year. Boyle recalls that there were 46 workers on the payroll at the time, including Mr Steward the estate manager, Revd JG Digges the chaplain, Mr Hardy the steward and a housekeeper. In addition to a weekly wage of ten shillings (about €0.65), all the married workers received a partly furnished house, grass for a cow or donkey, ground for sowing potatoes a good sized garden and turbary rights – and seven tons of good farm manure. Thomas recalls the workers’ concern over Lloyd George’s Agricultural Wages Act of 1917: they were sure that Clements would dismiss a lot of the men rather than pay the newly mandated rate of 27/6 a week. Apparently not one man was dismissed – and while there were new contributions to be made for house rent, grazing, etc, the deductions amounted to less than 5 shillings a week”. [6]
Henry married Eleonore Wickham (d. 1955) of Binstead Wyck, Yorkshire. Her father William Wickham, MP, was a keen biologist and Fellow of the Linnean Society while her great-grandfather, also William Wickham, was a master spy for the British during the French Revolution and, like the Scarlet Pimpernel, helped numerous aristocrats escape the guillotine.
They had three sons (Henry, Charles and Robert) and three daughters (Eleonore, Cecily and Violet). The youngest son Bob Clements, or Riobard Mac Laghmainn, is of particular interest as became a prominent supporter of the Irish Republican Army during the 1930s. Born in 1900, he became a Nationalist while studying at Trinity College Dublin during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919. He was interred at the Curragh during the Second World War, during which time he learned how to speak fluent Irish. In later years, he lived at Killadoon. He was still speaking soft, fireside recollections when Charlie and Sally Clements moved into the house in 1991.[7]
Henry’s younger brother Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Clements, DL, JP, was born on 29th September 1879 and educated at Harrow and Trinity College Oxford. He served with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in the Great War, was wounded and retired from the army in 1924 to live at Ashfield Lodge in Cavan. On 14th April 1932 he married Wilhelmina, only daughter of Lt Col William Lennox-Conyngham, OBE, of Springhill, Moneymore, Co. Derry, by whom he had a son Marcus and daughter Kate.
Henry’s eldest son Lieutenant Colonel Henry Theophilus Clements was born in November 1898 and educated at Eton. After a short spell at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich, he saw action in France during the Great War. He served again in World War Two, commanding the 144th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery in the Allied assault on Italian occupied Sudan in 1941. He was later Chairman of the Irish branch of SSAFA (the Soldiers’, Sailors’, Airmen and Families Association). He lived at Lough Rynn while his younger brother Robert, a solicitor, and sister Cecily, lived at Killadoon. He died unmarried on 6th August 1974, having made over Lough Rynn to his cousin Marcus (see below) in 1963. In his will, he bequeathed Killadoon to his sister Cecily, known as Kitty, for life with remainder to Charlie, eldest son of his cousin Marcus.
Lieutenant Colonel Marcus Clements died on 17th February 1952 and was succeeded by his 17-year-old son, also Marcus, then a student at Eton. Ashfield Lodge was sold shortly afterwards and sadly demolished. His widow remarried Colonel Bob McClintock, DSO, youngest son of the Arctic explorer Admiral Sir Francis McClintock. Nearly all of the original Lough Rynn Estate had by now been sold off by the Land Commission – mostly to descendants of the tenants of the previous century. The Clements’ continued to live at Lough Rynn up to the 1970s, but on a much reduced estate. In 1990, the remainder of the estate was bought by Mike Flaherty, an Irish-American businessman.[8]
Marcus went on to study agriculture at Cirencester and, in May 1959, married Joanne Fenwick. Her father, Commander Charles Edward Fenwick, RN, was head of India’s naval fleet after Indian independence was granted in 1948 and later served as an attaché with NATO in Brussels and Greece. They have three sons – Charles (1960) who is married to Sally and now runs Killadoon; Nat (1964), a decorative art specialist and Hal (1965), a wallpaper specialist – and two daughters – Fiona (1961) and Selina (1967). In 1961 Marcus’s sister Kate married Frank Mashahiro Okuno of Yokohama, Tokyo, with whom she had Richard (1962), Marcus (1963) and the late Mary Okuno.
With thanks to Fiona Clements.
NB: Those interested in the Clements story might like to seek a CD of a book written by an American relative (and Republican politician) Percival Wood-Clement (1846-1927) of Rutland Vermont, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_W._Clement According to Fiona Clements, ‘Percival was passionately empirical about his research, and photo-copied as many original documents as he could find, including the deed of sale between the founders of Haverhill and the Passaaquo and Saggahew Indians.’
FOOTNOTES
[1] Charles W. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Spirits (1867).
[2] Chidley was the second son of Sir Charles Coote, a bloody-minded “New English” planter, killed leading a cavalry charge against Confederate forces at Trim in 1642. Chidley’s descendents were the Eyre-Cootes of Kilmallock, Co. Limerick. In 1808 Sir Eyre Coote was appointed Governor of Jamaica. In “In His Own Words: Colin Powell”, published in 1995, General Powell, US Secretary of State under the Bush administration, claimed kinship with the House of Coote by way of a secretive liaison between the Governor and a slave girl called Sally.
[3] I am indebted to Anthony Malcolmson’s expert insight into the “Killadoon Papers” and “Ancestors & Descendants of Robert Clements of Leicestershire & Warwickshire, Eng., first settler of Haverhill, Mass”, P. W. Clement. 2 vols,. 1927.
[4] The murder was to prove the inspiration for Shane Leslie’s story, “Lord Mulroy’s Ghost”.
[5] This arrangement was later confirmed when Parliament passed the Leitrim Estate Act 1879. the 4th Earl rapidly set about regaining the trust of the Leitrim people. His son Charles Clements (1879 – 1952) was the 5th and last Earl of Leitrim. He was second only to Colonel Fred Crawford in organizing gun-running for the Ulster Volunteer Force between 1912 and 1914. In 1915 his wife, the Countess of Leitrim, caused quite a stir when she argued for compulsory recruitment of the Irish for the Great War. She stated that in “so many ways they [the Irish] are like children & they don’t understand an invitation where they would quietly obey an order”. Anglo-Saxons & Celts: Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England, L.P. Curtis (New York, 1969).
[6] Fiona Slevin, Lough Rynn: Lives & Times.
[7] The IRA in the Twilight Years, 1923 – 1948, Uinseann MacEoin (Argenta, 1997).
[8] Flaherty developed the gardens and opened them to the public. The current owners are developing a hotel and golf resort on the site.
In Living in Ireland by Barbara and Rene Stoeltie
Irish Historic Houses 