To a modern Western and non-aristocratic audience, genealogy is often simply a hobby or curiosity, albeit one with substantial popular appeal as witnessed by the success of television programmes like Britain’s Who Do You Think You Are? (and its near-twenty international adaptations) and the proliferation of direct-to-consumer ancestry DNA testing services, whose customers number in the tens of millions (Putman and Cole 2020). However, in the medieval and early modern periods, when kinship was a key expression of identity and kin groups held social and legal responsibilities, genealogy was a fundamental concern. Genealogies recorded, expressed and created individual and communal identities, and in a hierarchical and stratified world they created and confirmed nobility and socio-political superiority, through being recorded in manuscripts, performed orally and displayed in heraldic devices. Fundamentally, they offered a sense of place in the world, which modern genealogy consumers still want, albeit now more for emotional rather than political, economic or social reasons.

The medieval Irish genealogical tradition is unequalled in Europe for its chronological length and local depth, with the genealogies for the period between the beginning of the Irish historical record and the English invasion of Ireland (c.550-c.1200AD) recording approximately 12,000 persons, many of whom belonged to obscure and insignificant dynasties (Ó Cuív 1979: 40). Although these are the genealogies of the nobility, genealogy was a universal concern, intruding upon all walks of life, from saints’ pedigrees employed to establish alliances between significant churches to peasant oral genealogies used to press local land ownership claims (Ó Riain 1985). This early genealogical tradition survived the upheavals of the English invasion of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and continued into the early modern period (albeit with a notable gap in the thirteenth century) (Simms 1987: 6-7; Nicholls 1975), culminating in the middle of the seventeenth century with Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s (ob. 1671AD) monumental Leabhar Mór na nGenealach (“The Great Book of Irish Genealogies”) (Ó Muraíle 2003).

Apart from ecclesiastical genealogies, this written tradition concerns itself with the ramification of Irish ruling elites and pays almost no attention to matters outside Ireland. However, one substantial collection – the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies penned by Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh (floruit 1630-62AD) – differs in that it is prefaced with a pedigree of Felipe V of Spain; this is the only Spanish pedigree in an Irish genealogical collection and almost the only one in that vast corpus that deals with a foreign monarch (Pender 1951). Undoubtedly this inclusion had “political significance” (xviii), as its modern editor Seamus Pender noted in passing (although he never stated what he took that significance to be). Nonetheless, Pender drew comparison with the early eighteenth-century “Fermanagh Genealogies” (Ua Cadhla 1931), which contain a pedigree of James VI of Scotland. When James became the first of the House of Stuart to rule the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland (as James VI and I), his succession was welcomed by the Gaelic Irish intelligentsia, who hoped that the king of Scotland – who supposedly shared their Gaelic origins – would prove amenable to their cultural, religious and political desires (Ó Buachalla 1993). It was the beginning of an Irish allegiance to the House of Stuart, which – in the apt words of the subtitle to Éamonn Ó Ciardha’s seminal book – proved a “fatal attachment” (2002). Prefacing the “Fermanagh Genealogies” with James’ pedigree was an attempt to demonstrate his and his descendants’ right to the kingship of Ireland, just as Mac Fhirbhisigh did by including five different genealogies for James’ grandson, Charles II (Mac Craith 2006: 214). However, the same intent cannot be supposed for the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies, for although several Irish nobles had offered the crown of Ireland (or right to nominate a ruler) to the kings of Spain at various times in the sixteenth century (Maginn 2009: 236-41), there is no attempt to construct genealogical links between Felipe V and the Irish. If the author had desired to do so, an obvious ploy would have been to invent/highlight a prominent shared ancestor between Felipe and the Gaelic Irish, who claimed to be descended from the fictitious Míl Espáine (Míl of Spain).[1] Instead the ancestry of Felipe and the Irish diverges at a much earlier point, in the early biblical era.

Although Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh penned the vast majority of the manuscript’s pedigrees, he died prior to Felipe V’s bipartite reign (1700-24 and 1724-46), and so he could not have been the scribe of Felipe’s genealogy. It is uncertain by whom or precisely when the genealogy was entered into the manuscript, but it most likely occurred in the early eighteenth century while the manuscript was in the possession of members of the Ó Cléirigh family who had moved from Donegal to Bréifne (now south Ulster). Below, as context for the analysis of the genealogy, the outlines of the Irish genealogical tradition will be fleshed out and this manuscript’s ownership explored. It will be argued that it represents an indirect expression of Jacobite sentiment (i.e. support for a loosely-defined political ideology that had at its core a desired restoration of the Catholic House of Stuart to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland), through backing the Bourbon claimant to the Spanish throne in the early eighteenth century. As such, it is both unique within the vast Irish genealogical tradition and a hitherto unrecognised component of an extensive Irish Jacobite literature otherwise dominated by poetry and song (Ó Buachalla 1996).

The Role of Genealogy in Medieval and Early Modern Ireland

Medieval genealogy was a genre used for legitimising and creating hierarchy and social order; power, status and property were the concerns of the genealogist. Their writings were not fireside recordings of a knowledgeable elder/oral historian, but learned literary products, and their debt to biblical models confirms them as learned written products produced within ecclesiastical environments, and not the product of an oral culture (Ó Corráin 1997: 12-13). This was a literary genre with its own forms and conventions, rather than a simple record of ancestry. As Donnchadh Ó Corráin (one of the foremost scholars to write on the genealogical tradition) noted, written genealogies are “biological records only in a very limited sense of the word” and “genealogies of patrilineages are a way of ordering the multifarious socio-political data of a given society and organising its structure – and of necessity they are ideological statements” (Ó Corráin 1997: 2).

Often written with presentist aims, they were open to reworking, manipulation and abuse. This is hardly a modern realisation, for although the father of early Irish historical studies Eoin MacNeill may have discovered in the 1930s that the Uí Briain (O’Brien) kings of Munster and Ireland had falsified their pedigree and kicked sand over their lowly origins (MacNeill 1932: 38-40), as early as the twelfth century the poet and historian Gilla in Chomded Ua Cormaic was quite candid about abuses of the genealogical record. In his lengthy poem A rí ríchid réidig dam he wrote that among the “six ways of note that confound the branch of genealogy”:

míscribend do gne eolais

do lucht uilc in aneolais;

nó lucht an eolais ní ferr

gníit ar muín miscribend.

mis-writing in the guise of learning by the ignorant of evil intent; or the learned themselves, no whit better, who write what is false for gain (Ó Corráin 1997: 3-4).

Medieval and early modern genealogies could be both accommodating and exclusionary. Families of Viking origin were considered Gaill (“foreigners”) and found no place in the Irish genealogies or within the genealogical frameworks of ancestry during the Middle Ages, until they were admitted to the canon in the early modern period, possibly owing to a necessity to accommodate important Scottish Hiberno-Viking families, like McLeod and McCabe (Ó Corráin 1998).

After centuries of intermixing, a new set of Gaill, the Old English families of Ireland, followed a similar path and became “less foreign” in the early modern period, as religious affiliation began to make demands upon ancestry. For example, the Powers (de Paor), Eustaces and Plunketts, all of whom came to Ireland as part of the English invasion, found their ancestry reinvented. Now, each of those families was allegedly descended from Brian Boru’s son Donnchad (ob. 1064AD), who died in old age in Rome but not before supposedly fathering their ancestor (Casey 2020). All these families were primarily Catholic, which facilitated their accommodation into the wider family of the Catholic Gaelic Irish. In contrast, the influential seventeenth-century historian Geoffrey Keating, himself of Old English origin but thoroughly Gaelicised, baulked at this approach, finding it more to his liking to popularise (though not coin) the term Éireannach (“Irishman”) as someone born in Ireland and Catholic, and therefore Irish, regardless of paternal ancestry (Ó hUiginn 2015). The alliance between the Catholic Old English and the Catholic Gaelic Irish in the early modern period was uneasy, with the tectonic plates of identity grinding hard, and religion was eventually pushed to the top, subsuming other concerns.

Whether viewed as a swansong or culmination, Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh’s Leabhar Mór na nGenealach of the 1650s and 1660s is the largest, most impressive and comprehensive single product of the Irish genealogical tradition, now with a fitting magisterial edition and translation by Nollaig Ó Muraíle (2003). While Mac Fhirbhisigh may have been writing in a century that saw a terminal decline of Gaelic Irish political power, his endeavours were not antiquarian. Rather, like the slightly earlier Conal Mag Eochagáin (in his Annals of Clonmacnoise (1627AD)), interest in genealogies was a means of discussing the composition of contemporary Ireland’s ruling elites and the trajectory of Irish society (Casey 2013). In an inegalitarian, hierarchical and aristocratic world, concern for genealogy was a universal phenomenon and “above all, they [the genealogies] were used as a mechanism for asserting status within contemporary society” (Cunningham 2004: 112-13).

Brendan Kane has shown how the anglicised Donough O’Brien, fourth earl of Thomond commissioned two lavishly illustrated pedigrees during the 1610s (totalling nearly three hundred pages), which trumpeted his claims to premier status among the Irish nobility and sought to deny rival claims to either his social or material inheritance (2010: 158-80; Kane 2011). Likewise, Sir George Carew, one of the most important figures in the English victory over Hugh O’Neill and his Spanish allies in the Nine Years War, was obsessed with the genealogies of the Gaelic Irish and Anglo-Irish and drew up the pedigrees of hundreds of families, in his own hand. As Kane has brilliantly summarised: “The countless hours this pillar of the régime spent researching and scrawling pedigrees, then, was not mere antiquarianism. It was statecraft. For blood and honour were as much the stuff of politics as law and economics” (Kane 2018: 482). These were genealogies that recorded and manipulated the past with presentist aims, and it is within this context that the pedigree of Felipe V fits.

The Manuscript of the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies

The best-studied corpus of genealogies are those relating to early medieval Ireland, which are found primarily in manuscripts dating from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, but there are at least 17 different genealogical collections dating from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, including Mac Fhirbhisigh’s monumental collection and the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies (Ó Muraíle 1996: 155-6). The manuscript of the latter (Royal Irish Academy shelf mark 23 D 17, catalogue 790) was penned by Cú Choigcríche Ó Cléirigh (anglicised: Peregrine O’Clery), who flourished in the middle of the seventeenth century and whose will (dated 8^th February 1664AD) is also found in that manuscript (Mac Cárthaigh 2009). Cú Choigcríche achieved fame as one of the “Four Masters”, a team of seventeenth-century scholars, whose Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland (commonly known as the Annals of the Four Masters) was a monumental work of Irish history, from the Biblical flood to 1616AD (O’Donovan 1856). Like his fellow annalist Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, he was involved in the copying and compiling of many texts that survive only because of their endeavours and which have immeasurably enriched our knowledge of medieval Ireland. Among these are a number of secular and ecclesiastical genealogies.

The Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies is a substantial work (about one third the size of Mac Fhirbhisigh’s great collection), and Ó Muraíle raises the possibility that Mac Fhirbhisigh obtained material from Ó Cléirigh (1996: 235-6). Unusually, it contains Anglo-Norman as well as Gaelic genealogies, reflecting a “new ideology” in which the Old English were treated as an integral part of the kingdom of Ireland (1996: 179-80). The manuscript may have been produced by the Four Masters as one of the working documents they compiled while composing their Annals (Cunningham 2010: 72). It is now housed in the library of the Royal Irish Academy and although there is some uncertainty regarding its provenance, it appears to have been purchased for £6 by George Petrie on behalf of the Academy at the auction of Edward O’Reilly’s library of books and manuscripts in 1830. Ownership of the manuscript was contested in the early nineteenth century by the Ó Cléirigh family. Seán Ó Cléirigh (John O’Clery), who claimed to be descended from Cú Choigcríche, brought the manuscript (among others) to Dublin in 1817, where he may have worked as a scribe, copying old manuscripts for paying antiquarians.[2] He claimed that he had merely loaned – and not sold – it to O’Reilly, but after O’Reilly’s death (1818) his executor put the manuscript up for auction, ignoring a possible affidavit regarding ownership by Ó Cléirigh. That Ó Cléirigh-derived account of the manuscript’s history, furnished by Seán’s son (also named Seán), does not square with internal manuscript evidence, which suggests that it went through the hands of Patrick Lynch and Patrick Fitzpatrick before being acquired by O’Reilly (Pender 1951: xi-xv). The late Richard Sharpe (2015) argued that the Ó Cléirighs had indeed sold it, but sought to reclaim it during the next generation, at a time when antiquarian interest had driven up the price of older manuscripts considerably. Regardless of how the manuscript arrived in the Academy, the controversy throws light on an important period of ownership that is relevant to the pedigree of Felipe V, for according to the noted antiquarian John O’Donovan (who corresponded with the younger Seán Ó Cléirigh), Cú Choigcríche’s grandson Cairbre moved to the parish of Drung in Co. Cavan, and had a son, Cosnamhach (1693-1759), who was the grandfather of the Seán Ó Cléirigh who brought the manuscript to Dublin in 1817 (Pender 1951: xii). Chronologically, Cairbre or Cosnamhach appear to be good candidates for the authorship of Felipe V’s pedigree, and there is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the genealogy’s author was located in the Cavan-Leitrim area.

According to Pender, Felipe V’s pedigree was written “in an upright formal script” (1951: 1 n.1) that is found in only one other place in the manuscript. In that location, it is used in an entry on the sons of Brian Ballach Ó Ruairc (O’Rourke) (ob. 1562AD), who ruled Bréifne (an area corresponding to parts of modern counties Leitrim and Cavan) in the second half of the sixteenth century:

Áodh gallda, Áodh buidhe, Brían na múrthadh, Conn, Tadhg, Tighernan bán: clann Briain ballaigh m Eoghain mic Tigernáin m Taidhg mic Tigernain mhóir m Ualghairg, et cetera. Bátar an triur tóisech don chloinn sin ina ttighernadhaibh díaidh i ndíaidh ar an mBréifne.

Áodh Gallda, Áodh Buidhe, Brían na Múrthadh, Conn, Tadhg, Tighernan Bán [were] the offspring of Brian Ballach, son of Eoghan, son of Tigernán, son of Tadhg, son of Tigernán Mór, son of Ualghairg etc. There were three chiefs from that family [i.e. those sons] in the lordship of Bréifne, one after the other (Pender 1951: 105 (§1427)).[3]

The third figure in this list, Brian na Murtha (“of the ramparts”), was chief of Bréifne for nearly a quarter of a century. Known for his haughtiness, he was described by one English administrator as “the proudest man this day living on the earth” (McGettigan 2009), and after a long career characterised by antagonism toward the English, he was executed by hanging, beheading and quartering, after a show trial in London, in 1591 (O’Donovan 1856: sub anno 1591). Among the eight charges against him were that he gave succour to a large number of Spaniards who had been shipwrecked after the destruction of the Armada of 1588AD, and arranged for them to be shipped back to Spain. Of these, Francisco de Cuéllar, who became well-acquainted with Bréifne, was of the opinion that “this man, though a savage, is a very good Christian and a great enemy of heretics, and always at war with them” (McGettigan 2009).

The Spanish connection continued into the next generation, in the person of Brian na Murtha’s son Brian Óg, who joined the powerful Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Hugh O’Donnell in their rebellion known as the Nine Years War. As Emmett O’Byrne noted, Brian Óg’s “centrality to the O’Neill cause is evidenced in the fact that he was the recipient of one of the letters that Capt. Alonso Cobos brought from Philip of Spain in May 1596” (2009). He fought at the Battle of Kinsale (1601AD), when a combined Irish and Spanish force was defeated by Lord Deputy Mountjoy, making the rebels’ overall defeat inevitable. Nonetheless, Brian Óg battled on, before eventually dying in the Franciscan monastery of Ross Errilly (Co. Galway), while waiting to sail to Spain (O’Byrne 2009), a journey which many thousands more were to make in the aftermath of the Gaelic defeat (O’Scea 2015).

In sum, the genealogy of Felipe V was added to the manuscript by the same person whose only other work was to make an addition to a family with impeccable Catholic rebel credentials and extremely strong Spanish connections.

The Genealogy of Don Felipe V in the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies

Given the total lack of authentic Spanish genealogical material within the Irish tradition, the origins of the pedigree of Don Felipe V, first Bourbon king of Spain, in the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies must almost certainly be found in the world of printed literature (most likely in Spanish, owing to its use of the Spanish epithets el rico and el sabio for the Austrian Albert the Rich (ob. 1199AD) and Albert the Wise (1298-1358AD), respectively). Most likely the pedigree is derived from a pro-Bourbon work on Spanish history or an explicitly propagandistic tract that used Felipe’s genealogy as a means of establishing his claim to the crown. As there are numerous known examples of exiled Irish people maintaining contact with home and traveling back and forth between Ireland and Spain in the early eighteenth century,[4] it is likely that such links facilitated the genealogy’s transmission.

The Ó Cléirigh pedigree contains 124 individuals, and was recorded in the manuscript in four columns of approximately 31 names each, but edited by Seamus Pender as a piece of continual text, obscuring the possible structural significance of its organisation, just as it had been in John O’Hart’s earlier two-column edition (1892: 42-3). Restored to its columnar form, it appears as follows, where each subsequent individual is understood as the son of the preceding (e.g. the third entry, Henos, is the son of Seth son of Adam and the first entry of Column B, Plesron, is the son of the final entry of Column A, Plaserio):[5]

The pedigree begins with Adam, and the columns are arranged roughly to correspond to phases of descent, with Column A being populated by Biblical and Greek figures, Column B Trojan, Column C Frankish and Column D Habsburg. As is common in invented and repeatedly copied genealogies, groups of duplicates appear, for example “Priamo, Heleno” appears once in Column A and three times in Column B. By the final third of Column C, the pedigree starts to feature historical figures, from approximately Faramund son of Marcomer (Faramundo), supposed first king of the Franks (c.400AD), although early eighteenth-century readers would not have recognised such a historical/pseudo-historical divide.

The biblical phase in Column A, which is present in many genealogies pretending to comprehensiveness, anchors Felipe V securely in the human story. The Creation and first parents in paradise were established facts for early modern readers; even the lowliest peasant whose known line of descent might stretch back no further than four generations was still believed to share this common origin. In an inegalitarian world, in which genealogy was intended to preserve and promote inequality, the biblical phase paradoxically linked Felipe with even the lowliest ploughman or condemned galley slave. For barbarian peoples like the Franks or the Irish, forging a biblical pedigree for themselves offered more than just the opportunity to plug themselves into the authoritative sacred history of the Bible and the established origin of the human race, it offered the hope of salvation. When God made his covenant with Noah and his descendants, it applied equally to all, whether they stood on the shores of the Shannon or at the Pillars of Hercules. It is early within this section that the pedigree of Felipe V branches in a different direction to those of the Irish found in the rest of the manuscript. Their last common ancestor was Japheth son of Noah (Iapheth son of Noe), survivor of the biblical flood. The seventh-century Isidore of Seville popularised the idea that European peoples descended from Japheth, and his influence was already evident in Irish genealogies from that century (Ó Corráin 1997: 10). According to the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies, the Irish claimed descent from Japheth’s son, Magoc, while another of Japheth’s sons, Javan (Iauan), was the ancestor of the Greeks, according to the Roman-Jewish historian Josephus (and Felipe V is here said to descend from him).[7]

Felipe’s genealogy transitions from the Biblical to the Classical world within Column A and the latter dominates Column B, shifting from the authoritative history of the Bible to a second authoritative and prestigious history, that of the Graeco-Roman world. The siege of Troy occupied a critical position in the imagined history of western Europe, as one of the Roman origin legends – most famously recounted by Virgil in the Aeneid – told how the Trojan refugee Aeneas was an ancestor of the city’s founders. For non-Roman peoples in the successor states of Rome, a Trojan origin allowed them the opportunity to look “sideways to their contemporary neighbours”, distinguishing themselves from Rome, while still claiming a glorious heritage (Kiefer 2005: 241). This trope influenced peoples such as the early medieval Britons (inhabitants of Britain), who claimed descent from the fictitious Brutus, a supposed grandson/great-grandson of Aeneas (Morris 1980). It was a malleable trope, for example in the early modern period it was used to argue that obvious Romance languages like French were really of Greek origin (and not Latin-based), thus elevating the status of individual vernaculars within a “European-wide competition for linguistic and literary prestige” (Cohen 2004: 67).

In Column C of Felipe’s genealogy, we enter the Frankish world. While the sixth-century historian Gregory of Tours (ob. 594AD) speculated in his Historia Francorum (“History of the Franks”) that the Franks came from the Danubian province of Pannonia, a continuator of his chronicle, Fredegar (ob. 642AD), was the first to give them a Trojan origin (James 1988: 235-6). In the early eighth century, the Liber Historiae Francorum (“The Book of the History of the Franks”) synthesized the Frankish origins described in Gregory’s and Fredegar’s works, claiming that the Franks had fled Troy for the Danube (James 1988: 236). The overall process offered the Franks a classical pedigree, incorporated them into the “civilised” world of the Mediterranean and brought them closer – chronologically and geographically – to the believed middle eastern origin of the human race. The pedigree moves forward through the early Merovingian kings, where the second last name in Column C (Theoberto) is that of Theudebert II, King of Austrasia (ob. 612AD), grandson of Sigebert I of Austrasia (ob. c.575AD). While now entering what would now be considered history, nevertheless there is evidence for forgery, and the artificiality of the genealogy is evident from a mere three generations covering the 350 years between Theudebert (Theoberto) and Guntram the Rich (ob. 973AD) (Gontramo), a possible ancestor of the House of Habsburg. From Otto II Habsburg (ob. 1111AD) (Othon) onward, the genealogy becomes much more reliable, although it ends with a glaring and clearly deliberate anomaly, a three-generation filial sequence of Felipe III, IV and V of Spain. This, of course, was patently incorrect and would have been recognised as such by any contemporary observer. Felipe IV of Spain (ob. 1665AD) was succeeded by his infant son Carlos II (ob. 1700AD). The unfortunate Carlos II was a sickly child and chronically ill during his lifetime (which admittedly was longer than many contemporaries expected), and died childless. His designated successor, Felipe V, was his grandnephew, the grandson of his sister Maria Teresa (daughter of Felipe IV and wife of Louis XIV of France). Thus Felipe V, far from being Felipe IV’s son (as implied in the genealogy), was in fact his great-grandson through the female line. This anomaly was not accidental, but rather reflects an Irish perspective on the disputed succession to Carlos II.

Why Felipe V in an Irish Manuscript?

Donnchadh Ó Corráin’s observations on early medieval Irish genealogies from a millennium prior to Felipe’s reign, as active reality construction rather than biological statement, are equally pertinent here:

“Descent”, “kinship” etc. can be metaphors for other processes: alliance, subjugation of one dynasty by another, dynastic replacement, contiguity, establishment of hierarchy or an order of precedence. There are examples of all these in the Irish genealogical corpus. Origins, then, are not simply origins. In the world of early medieval Irish historiography, an origin is the demand the present makes upon the past, not knowledge of the past for its own sake – a much more recent historical pretence. To treat these texts literally as raw data reporting simple historical descent is to blinker oneself and, worse, to patronise as primitives the makers of the historical discourse (Ó Corráin 1997: 3).

While the pedigree as a whole can be read in a variety of ways, the immediate message becomes obvious in the last two entries. Column D, is the descent of the Habsburg line, and the insertion of Felipe V – a Bourbon – into a direct line of Habsburg monarchs should be read as a statement of the superiority of his claim to the Spanish throne over his Habsburg rival Archduke Charles, younger son of Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor (and who later became Emperor Charles VI). Since this is a genealogy rather than a king list, the bending of the genealogical “rules” only further emphasises his claim.[8] As such it should be read as a statement of support for Felipe’s claims over those of Charles – almost certainly written during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14) – but notwithstanding historical Spanish-Irish links (Downey and Crespo MacLennan 2006), why would an early eighteenth-century Irish writer care?

The answer lies with a claimant to a different throne, James Stuart – James VIII of Scotland and III of England and Ireland (to his followers), or the “Old Pretender” to his British and Irish opponents; the son of the overthrown Catholic monarch of those three kingdoms, James VII and II (ob. 1701AD). The adherents of the House of Stuart became known as Jacobites (from Iacobus, the Latin for James) and substantial numbers of Irish soldiers followed their king into exile on the Continent after their defeat by the forces of William of Orange (William III) in the early 1690s (most notably at the Battles of the Boyne and Aughrim and Siege of Limerick). Perhaps 12,000 soldiers with several thousand more dependants migrated, primarily to France (McGrath 2018: 121), where they often found themselves in financial straits and felt their loyalty and sacrifices were not fully appreciated (Corp 2001). Nonetheless, the Stuart cause was not abandoned in Ireland and longing for a Jacobite restoration became a prominent feature of Catholic ideology, finding its primary expression in the genre of poetry known as the aisling (“vision”), of which Aogán Ó Rathaille’s Mac an Cheannaí (“The Merchant’s Son”) is the best known and still taught in Irish schools. Jacobite songs, such as Mo Ghille Mear (“My Bright Lad”), also remain in the repertoires of modern Irish-language singers. From their royal court at St. Germain-en-Laye near Paris (and subsequently in Rome), where they maintained a government-in-exile, the Stuarts sought to retake Britain (their main aim) and Ireland, but knew they could not do so without substantial Continental military support. That support could only realistically be expected to come from a Catholic power habitually opposed to British interests, like France or Spain, and as Bourbon France was the Stuarts’ primary patron, it was only natural that Jacobite forces would support its Spanish allies during the War of the Spanish Succession. Britain was concerned with preventing France from obtaining control over Spain and its empire (and a possible union of their two crowns), and so allied with Austria, who were pushing for a Habsburg heir to Carlos II. The outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession saw the movement of substantial numbers of Irish to Spain, more out of obedience to their Stuart masters than affection for Spain (Downey 2014: 85), but their service in the Bourbon cause nonetheless saw them granted rights of citizenship (Villar García 2006: 192). Felipe’s propogandists’ portrayal of the war as a war of religion against the Protestant Anglo-Dutch alliance (ignoring that the Austrian claimant was Catholic) doubtless helped smooth Irish participation (Recio Morales 2014: 24-5).

Among the Gaelic Irish in Ireland, desire for a Stuart restoration was most commonly expressed in poetry and song, often acknowledging their Continental supporters, and indeed Felipe V was celebrated in Jacobite poetry, song and prose in Ireland (Morley 2018: 30). The writers promoting this Jacobite ideology did so with a keen eye to events and an awareness of changing geopolitical realities, often obtaining their information from the Protestant and pro-Establishment popular press (in which Spanish-Jacobite activity – both real and imagined – featured prominently) (Ó Ciardha 2002: 187-9). For example, toward the end of the War of the Spanish Succession (c.1715), Seán Ó Neachtain’s clear understanding of contemporary European politics could be seen in his treatment of James II’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Berwick. Berwick the war hero was the political and romantic hero of Ó Neachtain’s prose fictional history Jacobides agus Carina (Ó Ciardha 2002: 151-2), but with his effective abandonment of the Jacobite cause for a position at the French court, he was instantly dropped by Ó Neachtain and other Irish Jacobite writers.

Upon the death of Felipe’s grandfather, the Sun King, in 1715, the crown of France passed to the five-year-old Louis XV, and his regent, Philippe Duke of Orléans, initiated a rapid change in policy to prevent Felipe pressing claims to the French crown. France allied with its erstwhile enemies (Britain, the United Provinces and Austria), thus isolating Spain until the 1730s. From a Jacobite perspective, this meant pinning their hopes on Spain, now Britain’s chief opponent (Ó Ciardha 2002: 182 and 235), and Irish Jacobite literature was nimble and responsive as a consequence of this realignment of European interests. Pro-French sentiment declined and Felipe became the new hero and potential deliverer, celebrated by the most prominent poets, such as Seán “Clárach” Mac Domhnaill in his Ar thulaigh im aonar, and in popular toasts (Ó Ciardha 2002: 163 and 170-1; Morley 2002: 6-7), and his chief advisor, Cardinal Alberoni, supplanted Berwick in Jacobite affections (the latter was now a member of the French council of regency and actively opposed to Spanish interests) (Ó Ciardha 2002: 233; Ó Ciardha 2009). Indeed Felipe featured most strongly in Irish poetry during the Guerra del Asiento/War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-48), demonstrating that Jacobite poets knew where their best hopes of support lay (Ó Ciardha 2002: 274-6). This was not simply the product of wishful thinking, but a consequence of increased Spanish support and an accurate reading of the political climate. All through Felipe’s long reign, the idea of allying with Britain never appealed to him (although he was occasionally forced to do so) (Kamen 2001: 110-12), and after Queen Anne’s death (1714), Felipe donated 200,000 crowns toward a proposed Jacobite invasion (Ó Ciardha 2002: 113). A largely Irish military force was put at James III’s disposal in 1719, and a small lacklustre invasion force landed in Scotland only to be defeated within a few months, while another was destined for England (but failed to leave Spain) (Ó Ciardha 2002: 182-3). With the failure of the last major Jacobite uprising in Scotland in 1745 (during which Ireland remained quiet), a Stuart restoration was no longer a possibility. However, Jacobitism survived as a popular ideology with messianic overtones, in which the “true king” would return and right the social wrongs experienced by his Irish faithful.

Conclusion

Jacobite sentiment in Ireland, Britain and Europe was expressed in a variety of ways, depending on factors such as wealth, local circumstances, and strength of conviction. A Jacobite material culture existed in the form of objects such as cups engraved with Jacobite iconography and legends (Guthrie 2013), from which toasts were drunk, wishing long life to their king, damning his opponents, and even celebrating “the little gentleman in black velvet” (Claydon 2008) – the mole upon whose molehill William III’s horse tripped, causing the king to fall and break his collarbone.[9] Within the generally more materially impoverished Gaelic-speaking community, the primary modes for expressing Jacobite sentiment were poetry and song, written and performed in a language of which the authorities had little/no knowledge or inclination to access. Genealogy played a much smaller role in the expression of this sentiment, not least because with the demise of the professional Gaelic learned classes in the early seventeenth century the vast body of medieval source material (such as that to which Mac Fhirbhisigh had access) was unavailable, particularly because surviving manuscripts were finding their way into the hands of establishment and institutional collectors.

Genealogy continued to be important for the nobility in terms of de jure and de facto inheritances. Long-term exile resulted in the evolution of a parallel Jacobite peerage, in which the exiled Jacobite kings granted titles and promoted to the nobility men and women from among their followers on the Continent, who naturally were not recognised within the Williamite peerages of Ireland or Britain (Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval 1904). Nonetheless, genealogy does not feature prominently in discussions of Jacobitism in Gaelic Ireland, mainly owing to the lack of a written genealogical tradition from this period. Consequently, the pedigree of Felipe V is a rarity – one of only a handful of genealogies of non-Irish monarchs found in the Irish genealogical tradition, doubtless composed with recourse to printed sources, inserted into one of the most substantial surviving manuscripts of medieval Irish genealogies, and intended as a Jacobite statement that was conscious of geopolitical realities.

As Ó Corráin noted (above), a genealogy is a “demand the present makes upon the past”, and for a Gaelic Irish writer – in this case probably an Ó Cléirigh writing in Bréifne in the early 1700s – Felipe’s origins and claims to the Spanish throne were probably only a concern in so far as Bourbon France, the great European power of the late seventeenth century, was a supporter of the present Jacobite cause. Had the international balance of power and system of alliances been configured differently, the manuscript could easily have seen a near-identical pedigree in which the only change might have been in the final line, with the Habsburg Archduke Charles as Felipe IV’s heir.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Departamento de Historia, Geografía y Comunicación of the Universidad de Burgos, for making me a collaborator with the Bulevafuentes research group. I am also grateful to the library of the Royal Irish Academy for the opportunity to view the manuscript of the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies, and to Prof. Óscar Recio Morales (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Dr Ben Snook (Caterham School) for reading earlier drafts of this article and for their suggestions.

Notes

[1] As Donnchadh Ó Corráin (1997: 11) noted: “One of the nodal characters in this legend is Míl of Spain, a transparent literary invention (= Miles Hispaniae, “Soldier of Spain”). It was believed that the Irish discovered Ireland from Brigantia in Spain. As Rolf Baumgarten has recently shown, the source of this legend is a reading of Orosius (I ii 71 and 80) in the light of Isidore (Etymologiae XIV vi 6)”.

[2] For example, transcripts of the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies most likely in Seán Ó Cléirigh’s hand are National Library of Ireland MS G 87 (formerly Phillipps MS 13,247) and Royal Irish Academy MS 23 P 4 (catalogue number 975) (Pender 1951: xiii, n.2).

[3] My translation. Pender believed “this column, [was] a subsequent entry” (1951: 105 n.1).

[4] For example, Felipe V’s personal physician, John Higgins, annually sent his Limerick-based mother thirty doubloons, while Irish soldiers were granted leaves of absence to return to Ireland (Recio Morales 2006: 252).

[5] I have compared Pender’s edition with the manuscript and made some (very minor) changes, to restore the manuscript forms as far as possible.

[6] Clotario and Olotario are written as a single entry, with a comma separating them.

[7] Other sons of Noah were also considered ancestors of the Irish, at different times/in different texts (Ó Corráin 1997: 10-11).

[8] Alternatively, the genealogy could be seen to reflect Felipe’s renunciation of his claims to the French throne, at the Peace of Utrecht (1713-15). If the original genealogy (that upon which the Irish version was based) was produced after the peace, then presenting him as a Habsburg in the male line (and not a descendant of Europe’s most prestigious monarch) simultaneously cemented his claim to Spain and closed the door on future claims to his Bourbon heritage (i.e. the crown of France). I am grateful to Dr Ben Snook for this suggestion.

[9] Although he died a few weeks later, it was not the fatal injury that Jacobites liked to imagine it was (Claydon 2008).