This page opens with a lament quoted from an older, unnamed family manuscript, mourning the Hurly family's losses in the Confederate and Williamite wars, before the 1905 author turns to the family's traditional claim of Milesian (ancient Gaelic) origin and introduces the pedigree authenticated by Owen Connellan that follows.
Page 106
One of the manuscript volumes now before me begins:
It is not pride that makes me take my pen,
But to revive a fallen house again;
For all the glories of Knocklong
Are like a morning vapour gone.
My chief and great object has been to rescue, even in some degree, a once high and distinguished but fallen family from the state of degradation into which all the miseries of civil war have plunged its descendants, for I verily and conscientiously believe that no house or family in Ireland had suffered more severely, as the following pages will incontestably prove, than mine. In the cause of the Royal Martyr, Charles I., and of his weak and unfortunate son, James II., to adopt the language of Mr. O'Driscoll in his Views of Ireland, they were faithful to the religion of their ancestors, faithful to the house of Stuart, even in its despair. In both these instances they have been sufferers, and even ruined by their fidelity. The heads of most Irish families of rank either perished in the field, or found an honourable asylum in Spain and France and Austria, and found fame and honour far from the land of their nationality. Nothing remains in the land but a few ruined collateral branches of these once high and distinguished families and the mere peasantry. It is unhappily a matter of history that down to the close of the seventeenth century changes of property were great, violent, and irretrievable (Phelan's Remains, edited by Bishop Jebb). Some would say that the Hurley family was of English or Norman descent, but from the following pedigree made out and certified by O'Connellan, it is of Milesian origin. There are a few places in England called Hurley, one near London, where there was a Benedictine house, dependent on the Monastery of Westminster; another near Manchester; also families of the name. They may have come from Ireland and settled in England. It is indifferently written Murrilly, Imurrilly, Hurlee, Hurly, O'Hurley. I give here the pedigree made out and authenticated by O'Connellan.
The verse quoted at the head of this page is rendered here in italics, set off from the surrounding prose, to distinguish it as a quotation-within-a-quotation from the unnamed family manuscript the author is reading from; the original printing sets it off similarly. Spelling and punctuation otherwise follow the original.
Historical Note — Whose Voice Is This?
This page is a quotation within a quotation. The 1905 author is reading aloud from an earlier, unnamed family manuscript — itself apparently written some generations after the Cromwellian and Williamite upheavals it mourns. The opening verse and the framing that follows ("faithful to the house of Stuart, even in its despair") place that manuscript's own author among Irish Catholic gentry writing after 1691, looking back on confiscations under the Cromwellian settlement (1650s) and again after the Williamite War (1689–91), when adherence to James II cost many such families what remained of their land. The 1905 article is therefore a source about a source: a Victorian-era antiquarian quoting an eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century family history that was itself already nostalgic for the seventeenth century.
Modern Critique — The "Milesian Origin" Claim
The pedigree the author is about to present (attributed to the pedigree-maker O'Connellan, and, on the following pages, traced through the medieval Books of Lecan and Ballymote and the seventeenth-century historian Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh) roots the Hurly family in the Milesian genealogical scheme — the traditional Gaelic account, recorded in Lebor Gabála Érenn ("The Book of Invasions"), that traces all the major Irish dynasties back to the sons of Míl Espáine, a legendary Spanish ancestor. Modern historians and Celticists regard this scheme as origin-legend rather than history: a literary and political framework compiled by medieval Christian scholars to give Irish ruling families a biblical-style genealogy, not a documentary record of real individuals. That does not make it worthless — it is genuine evidence of medieval and early modern Irish learned tradition, and of what the O'Hurly family and their bardic historians believed and asserted about their own standing — but it should be read as tradition and identity-claim, not as a verified line of descent. The article's documentary genealogy, built later from wills, patent rolls, and inquisitions post mortem, stands on far firmer ground and is worth distinguishing clearly from this earlier legendary material as the series continues.
Historical Note — Owen Connellan
The O'Connellan credited here with making out and certifying the pedigree is almost certainly Owen Connellan (1797–1871), the Sligo-born Irish-language scholar who signs the pedigree itself at its conclusion later in this article. Born to a farming family in Tireragh, Co. Sligo, he began as a scribe at the Royal Irish Academy under the patronage of Sir William Betham, and over some two decades there personally transcribed large portions of both the Book of Lecan and the Book of Ballymote — the very manuscripts this article cites as its earliest sources for the O'Hurly pedigree. He was given the title of Irish Historiographer Royal after translating George IV's address to the Irish people during the king's 1821 visit, a title he continued to hold under William IV and Victoria, and from 1849 to 1863 he was professor of Celtic languages and literature at Queen's College, Cork. His best-known published work is his 1846 translation of the Annals of the Four Masters; he also co-founded the Ossianic Society in 1853. He died in Dublin in 1871. Connellan's certification of the O'Hurly pedigree carried real scholarly weight in 1905, though, as the note above explains, that weight applies to his standing as a transcriber and authenticator of manuscript tradition — not to the historicity of the Milesian material itself.
Glossary
- Milesian
- Referring to the legendary Gaelic ancestor Míl Espáine ("Soldier of Spain"), whose sons, in medieval Irish tradition, were said to have conquered Ireland from the Túatha Dé Danann and become ancestors of its ruling dynasties. Claiming "Milesian descent" was, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a conventional way of asserting ancient, noble, Gaelic (as opposed to Anglo-Norman or English) origin.