Duffry Hall had been built by Caesar's grandfather Patrick, the Protestant son of the exiled Dudley, who with the aid of his uncles had succeeded in recovering more than half of his father's sequestrated lands and a great deal more besides. In 1663 Patrick was with his father in Holland where he was painted by Frans Hals in the uniform of a Cavalier. It was said to be on the occasion of his 20th birthday, though it would seem that as he was 27 in 1663 and fighting with the local iron works in Enniscorthy, the painting actually dates from 1656. In 1663 Patrick had married his second cousin Katherine Bagenal and such of his time as was not devoted to his duties as justice of the peace, High Sheriff of Wexford, Deputy Lieutenant and M.P. for Enniscorthy was taken up with building operations. The Hall, which was beautifully situated on the southern slopes of the Blackstairs mountains was described as the most magnificent seventeenth century building in Co. Wexford . In 1723 Caesar inherited Tintern and shortly afterwards started to re-edify Duffry where his brother Adam was living. In 1769 it was described in Finn's Leinster Journal as being not over 35 years built. "Large and spacious with all kinds of offices for servants, stabling for 30 horses, coach house for 4 carriages, an excellent dog kennel, well watered barn, cow house, etc". In 1769 "Sir" Vesey's nephew, Adam, moved in as tenant. He was followed on his death in 1799 by his son, the dubious Rev Dudley Colclough, who had previously been living in Enniscorthy Castle. It was the Rev. Dudley who two weeks before the rebellion broke out in Wexford, said he thought that all this talk of rebellion was highly exaggerated . It was left derelict when Jane Kirwan evicted the Rev. Dudley's children after his death in 1830. Unfortunately it remained inhabited for only five generations. When Mrs Biddulph-Colclough sold the Duffry in 1907 the original building had disappeared and now no trace of it now stands except the ruin of the entrance porch.

Caesar's father, also a Dudley, was M.P. for Enniscorthy and Colonel of the Militia and though a Catholic was given the right to carry arms - one sword, one gun and one case of pistols. He married in 1691 Mary Barnewall, grand-daughter of Viscount Kingsland (a peerage which became dormant when its holder died in the Southwark Workhouse having married 'a woman'; when the woman died a public subscription was raised to provide a suitable monument to her in St Dunstan's Church, Fleet Street, because she was a Viscountess). Mary bore him eleven children and immediately after his death married a Mr Ben Flaherty of Dublin. Dudley's concern during his lifetime was to keep at bay the proprietors of the Enniscorthy Iron Works which had been established in 1643 on land compulsorily acquired from his grandfather without payment and who considered that they were entitled to use the Duffry Hall trees as fuel in their blast-furnaces. In their attempts to have him expropriated as a Papist they pleaded that his interference with their timber cutting was "...to their great damage after their setting up iron-works at great expense and bringing over hundreds of English workmen and their families in parts which were lately waste and unpeopled with much resultant profit to the customs."

Dudley's death in 1712 and the inheritance of the property by his Protestant son finally defeated them and they made no attempt to displace his grandson Adam during any of his spells of Popery. Dudley's son "The Great Caesar" was a man of such character that 100 years later Patrick Kennedy would be able to learn about every detail of Caesar's life from his neighbours at Duffry. Kennedy's 'Legends of Mount Leinster', 'Evenings in the Duffry' and 'By The Banks of The Boro' give wonderful pen pictures of a man who was a popular magistrate, a landlord on friendly terms with his tenants, a champion hurler and wrestler, an intellectual philosopher, an M.P., patron of bards, and friend of clerics of all persuasions. His portrait shows him to have the Colclough nose, but apart from that he is well built and good looking with a humorous face. Caesar is said to have taken a team of Duffry Hurlers to Greenwich to play a Cornish team before King George I. The Wexford team wore the Colclough colours of blue with a yellow sash, and their supporters urged them on with the cry of "Up The Yellow Bellies", the nick name for Wexfordmen ever since.

Caesar's first wife whom he married in 1717 was Frances Muschamp, daughter of Sir Thomas Vesey, Bishop of Ossory, but she died only two years after the birth of a daughter who died in infancy. Two years later he married her cousin Henrietta, daughter of Agmondisham Vesey so bringing the names Agmondisham and Vesey into the family roll of Christian names. Henrietta's first child died young as did three of her others but the surviving sons were all sent for some obscure reason of Caesar's to Westminster School. The eldest of these, Vesey, within eighteen months of leaving school and becoming an undergraduate at Trinity College got himself married to a widow many years older than himself. She was Mary, daughter of Sir John Bingham and a descendant of Charles II by way of Lucy Walters and Patrick Sarsfield, Lord Lucan. Her first husband, Hugh Montgomery, had died in 1741, two years after the wedding, and three weeks after writing his will. Shortly after marrying Mary he had developed a mysterious wasting disease which had finally proved fatal. Hugh had been a very successful property speculator and at the time that he married Mary was building one of the finest houses in Dublin, now known as Clanwilliam House, on Stephens Green. On the central axis of the Square, it combined the latest fashions with the finest quality. The architect was Sir Richard Castle. The decorators were the Lafrancini brothers. It oozed money and style. She would probably have known of Vesey (and his expectations of over 20,000 acres in Wexford), as her half brother Sir John Bingham was married to his cousin, Anne Vesey. She actually first met Vesey in November 1744, when she was already more than two months pregnant. Although she was 10 years his senior they got married by special licence on December 11 1744, a fortnight after their first meeting. They moved into No 12 St. Stephen's Green, North, lent to them by Vesey's uncle Thomas. There Vesey died six weeks after the wedding and there Mary's son also called Vesey was born in the following June. Mary died shortly after his birth. Though the child had two baptisms, one in Dublin and one at Tintern, they seem to have left him with an inordinate amount of original sin on which to build.

Scarcely had the will been attested and the deeds of marriage settlement executed when Caesar died and Vesey found himself in charge of the Tintern estates and all their attendant responsibilities of being M.P. for the County of Wexford, High Sheriff (at the age of 22), Portreeve of Enniscorthy and the rest. In June 1772 the Enniscorthy Council recorded in their minute-book that the King had conferred a baronetcy on the portreeve, Vesey Colclough, but this involves a considerable amount of doubt and some mystery. The original baronetcy was extinct and the letters patent produced to the Enniscorthy Council have disappeared and if they existed at all may well have been a product of the skilled forger, possibly the notorious 'Dick the Penman', who produced for Vesey the sets of bogus title-deeds which became the basis of his finances. Anyway, 'Sir' Vesey had no lawful issue to inherit. If he had merely assumed the dignity and had any lawful heirs they would certainly have been permitted to record their claim when the Register of Baronets was established for any such titles in use at that date were registered without question or proof and from such are descended many of to-day's baronets.

Sir John Barrington in his 'Personal Sketches' says:-

One of Vesey's money-making devices was, after validly exercising in favour of his son Caesar the powers of appointment contained in the marriage settlement and the will of Caesar of Duffry and Tintern, in respect of the remainders after his life-estate, purported to exercise them again in favour of money-lenders as security for loans, using forged title-deeds to conceal the fact that the appointment had already been made. Having found how easy and cheap it was to get convincing title-deeds forged he had many sets made on the strength of which he mortgaged over and over again an estate in which he had only a life interest. In the case of Colclough v Bolger, the first of many brought after his death to fight off his victims, the judge with great restraint described him merely as

"a dissolute and intemperate character led astray by the steward of the Tintern estate, Garrett Cavanagh, a greedy, extravagant and impecunious man who was his constant guide in dissipation."

Another of his cronies was Caesar Colclough the barrister who may not have been party to his criminal activities but must have known what was going on and as a lawyer was in a position to give him sound if immoral legal advice.

When his intolerable conduct finally drove Catherine to leave him Alicia Harrington, on whom he fathered two sons, and Elizabeth Carter, were amongst the women who joined his harem in the Abbey, but only these two were mentioned in the will which Caesar drafted for him and in which Caesar himself was made the residuary legatee. For Alicia's sons, Anthony and George Washington, Vesey purchased commissions in the army and they both had distinguished military careers. Anthony having been commissioned in the 1st Life Guards as medical officer became Inspector General of Army Medical Services. His wife, Sarah Pearson, came from a landed family near Clondalkin in Co. Dublin. George Washington when first commissioned had Lieutenant Arthur Wellesley as his senior officer and with Wellesley he remained during the whole of his service. He married one of the Duke's illegitimate daughters and their son in due course became a major-general and having been seconded to the Turkish army in command of their artillery during the Crimean War, was awarded the Khedival medal. Anthony's sons, too, benefited in their careers from avuncular influence.

After Vesey's death John, in a letter to his brother Caesar in France, complained that their father had filled the Abbey with strumpets and bastards. The late Ulick Sadleir, Deputy Ulster King at Arms, had so many inquiries at Dublin Castle from Vesey's descendants believing themselves to be heirs to a baronetcy and to vast estates in Wexford that he tried to catalogue all Vesey's illegitimate offspring but he gave up when the number reached thirty. He considered that a major cause of Vesey's financial troubles was that he made adequate financial provision for all his children except the first two. Unfortunately this list has not yet been found amongst Sadleir's papers in the Genealogical Office. Amongst the Colcloughs for whom at present no parents can be identified only a few are candidates for Sir Vesey's line. Robert of Limerick, Caleb of Cork, John of Dublin and John of Waterford, whose daughter was transported to Australia, John of Carrick on Suir, James of Dublin and the two Patricks of Kildavin are possibilities. Anne, Henry, James, John and his brother Rodolphus, and William, all of Kilkenny, are more likely to be of Adam of Boley's line.

On leaving 'Sir' Vesey, Catherine had taken refuge with Thomas Francis Colclough and his family at Ballyteige Castle. Thomas Francis had succeeded his father John not only in the ownership of the Castle but also in his business as an attorney in Wexford, where he owned a certain amount of property. He was able to give Catherine a small house in the Bull Ring at Wexford where she lived until moving into the magnificent Georgian house with its private theatre after Vesey's death. Florence Colclough writes that in the early days of their marriage Vesey and Catherine had held splendid entertainments in the George's Street House and had fitted out the theatre for those gala evenings. The two boys were sent to a succession of boarding schools, including that of the Rev. Samuel Francis of Enniscorthy, but were thrown out of each of them after a couple of terms because Sir Vesey refused to pay their fees, and years later, when he came of age, Caesar had served on him writs for the fees still unpaid. Eventually Adam of Duffry Hall took Caesar into his family to be educated with his own younger sons at the village school, whilst John joined his mother at Wexford and attended a school there.

Thomas Francis seems later to have employed John in his Wexford office for many letters relating to conveyances and other legal matters which were being handled by Thomas Francis are signed 'John Colclough' and there was no other 'John Colclough' in Wexford at that time, Thomas Francis's own younger brother John having gone to Montserrat many years before and dying there. In any case John seems to have had a remarkably sound legal training and handled with quite amazing skill the legal jungle left on his death by his father with the assistance of Garrett Cavanagh and Caesar the barrister. With great difficulty he managed to evict Alicia, Elizabeth and the rest of the harem and all their brood from the Abbey. He fought off all the claims by 'Sir' Vesey's creditors and was able to hand over to his brother an unencumbered estate in good condition with proper provision for their mother. He acquired more property in Georges Street, and handled all the building contracts for that and for the restoration of the Abbey and its extension, controlled the whole estate and put it on a very profitable basis, though assisted by a number of not very competent or honest stewards, among whom was Kennedy, part of whose defalcations may have contributed to the costs of transporting his nephew's family to America (after one of his successors had evicted them from the Tintern holding in which he had installed them) and in the setting up of the Boston saloon that was the basis of the Presidential fortune. John also succeeded in establishing a bank in New Ross for the more efficient handling of the funds not only of the Tintern estates but of all the neighbouring landowners as well. The bank was originally composed of four partners, Anthony Cliffe, John Deane, John M'Cord (who was agent at Tintern and whose daughter married Bagenal Colclough of St Kierans & Alabama) & John Colclough. Cliffe died before the bank was opened in 1803 and Caesar stepped in as a director in absentia with an investment of £1,000.00 for a quarter share. The primary source of the funds which John was able to command was the £13,000 for which he sold the representation of the Borough of Enniscorthy which 'Sir' Vesey had bought from Dudley many years before and forgotten to mention to Caesar, his legal adviser, when his will was being drawn up. £8,000 of this had been claimed by John under the terms of Catherine and Vesey's marriage settlement.

During the Rebellion of 1798, while John Henry Colclough was busy with tactical plans, or trying to keep his head down at Ballyteigue, Catherine Colclough was gathering her family at the house in George's Street. John, her son, and M'Cord the agent at Tintern were both sympathetic with the rebel cause, if not actually out in open rebellion. In Georges Street however Florence and Harriet Colclough, the daughters of the Rev Thomas Colclough, were helping her aunt hide the family valuables under the stage of the theatre. Harriet's husband was Col. Jonas Watson, Commander of the Crown Forces in Wexford and while on a reconnaissance he was shot with a rocket. Harriet was naturally devastated and Catherine decided the time had come to move the family to safety in England. They arranged a passage on a ship that was lying off shore and bound for Bristol and the next day made their way through hostile crowds to the quay. They had just got on board ship's tender, to their great relief, when Harriet discovered that her new born baby had been left in the Georges Street house by the nurse. Naturally enough ignoring the advice she went back into the crowd, which by then was turning very nasty. However soon the dreadful circumstances of poor Harriet's plight circulated and a pathway was cleared to allow the frantic woman to run the couple of hundred yards to the house, seize the baby and return to the boat. After the troubles were over Harriet returned with her six children to Ireland and in 1803 we find John making over some of the Tintern leases of land in Wexford to her.

At around this time John undertook a considerable building programme. The Irish Tourist, published in 1819, describes how the late Mr John Colclough had replaced the peasants cabins with neat slated dwellings and outhouses, to the advantage of the area and in 1812 John Bernard Trotter writes how the cabins in the village of Tintern were falling into decay . At the abbey itself, after escaping death when the bedroom ceiling fell on his bed, John decided to construct a new house within the nave walls of the abbey. By the time he died he had built a modest two storey, three bay house with attic bed rooms lit by circular windows in the gables. The gable walls were built into the first archway of the Abbey and the rest of the nave created a courtyard between it and the tower. This was to become a home for his elderly mother. The writer Atkinson was shown the 'luminous and respectable apartments' in 1814 whilst on his tour of Ireland. The second and third arches of the nave were covered in later. The delay must have proved inconvenient as they linked the main house with the kitchen which was in the vaulted undercroft of the Lady Chapel. The chapel itself was given a massive gothick window, but John died before it was roofed. It was left to Caesar, to construct what became a splendid library and to fill in the two remaining archways between 1815 and 1818, with the assistance of the architect Thomas Cormick.

John's political activities secured the return of his brother Caesar in a contested parliamentary election for Wexford in May 1806, but being a prisoner in France at the time Caesar could not take his seat, and the only result of his being elected was to add to his value as a prisoner of Napoleon. John himself stood at the general election which followed immediately on Caesar's victory and was duly returned. Parliamentary seats, prior to the Reform Acts at least, were regarded as the property of the great landowners, to be bargained for, bought and sold, and members elected owed a duty to their proprietors but nothing to their constituents. Caesar was acceptable although quite unknown - a prisoner in France who had left Wexford as a schoolboy and never been back - because on the death of Sir Vesey he had become a great landowner and automatically part of the 'establishment', and John was at first accepted as his deputy. The Marquis of Ely, who knew John and felt that he could not be trusted to play the landowners' game, pressed him not to stand and offered to buy him a constituency elsewhere at the next election but his offer was rejected. When others, too, found John had views of his own, arrangements were made to dispose of him. He was to be arrested on a visit to his constituency and charged with treason. So convincing were the affidavits of the posse of informers detailed (and paid) to give evidence against him that he would certainly be hanged even though he was voting in the lobbies at Westminster on the dates of the sworn acts of treason in Ireland. Fortunately warning reached him as he was about to embark at Fishguard and he returned to London and was able to circumvent the plot. He took the warning seriously for in August 1789 he had been arrested, taken to Dublin and thrown into the Castle Street prison next to the tower and had been kept there without trial until the following November.

At the 1807 election the gentry of Wexford put up as their candidate against John one William Congreve Alcock, a neighbour of John's and brother of his fiancée. Alcock was not a person of great mental stability and when his committee pointed out to him that his own tenants were supporting John and that it was his duty to call and demand that he should reject their support failing which he would 'call him out' Alcock did as he was told. His committee arranged in anticipation for him to have some practice in pistol-shooting and for an optician to make him a special pair of telescopic spectacles for the purpose. Alcock was expendable. If he were killed Colclough would have to flee the country failing which he would be tried for murder and there was sufficient influence on Alcock's committee to ensure that he would be hanged. If Colclough were killed those same influences would be sufficient to secure Alcock' acquittal which in fact happened. Alcock however went mad and died in a lunatic asylum but not before he had established the constitutional principle that to be of sound mind is not a requisite for membership of Parliament; a committee of his constituents failed in their application to the court for a declaration that the seat was vacant after he had to be removed from the Commons in a straight-jacket. To ensure that somebody was killed each of the combatants was given two pistols but with the aid of his telescopic spectacles Alcock put his first shot through Colclough's heart. The whole of the local bench of justices, eleven of them in all, were amongst the crowd of spectators who had turned up with prior knowledge of the plan.

The extent of the mourning - the body was 'waked' in the theatre in Georges Street for a whole week and over 4,000 people attended the funeral - and the public indignation and outcry at the killing more than convinced the perpetrators of the wisdom of their action in getting rid of Colclough. The bank which John had set up came under severe pressure, but a number of prominent merchants issued a manifesto undertaking to accept the notes of the bank at full nominal value. However in early 1808 a run developed and it failed with liabilities of £200,000 (the total capital invested was only £4,000.00!). In John's will he left provision for his son James by Catherine Doyle, who lived by the gates of Tintern. It seems that his remarks about his father's strumpets may be a case of pot and kettle!

James had a short but very eventful life. He was a remarkable swordsman, but did not have the patrimony that had bought his cousins their commissions. When in l818 the egregious Sir Gregor MacGregor was raising his private army, consisting mostly of Irishmen, to seize Portobello in the Isthmus of Panama from the Spanish he recruited James as his ADC. On the 9th of April 1819 the attack was made and the Spaniards driven out leaving MacGregor and his army in possession. Three weeks later a counter-attack was made and the Spaniards retook the town. MacGregor had made the Government House his headquarters and the Spaniards surprised him and his staff there. Most of the staff managed to escape by jumping from a window 20 ft into the sea whilst Colclough single-handed held up the attackers at the entrance to the building, killing the Spanish Colonel and a Captain and another officer. Then with a bullet-wound in his hand and a sword- thrust through his body Colclough followed MacGregor and the others through the window into the sea. In his wounded condition he fell rather than jumped and broke an ankle in the process. The others had managed to get into a small boat and return to their transport-ship, The Hero, but Colclough had to swim a long way to join them. Not wanting to be bothered with the care of a gravely wounded man his companions dumped him on a deserted beach near Port au Prince in the island of San Domingo and sailed away. He was found by one Father O'Flynn, who took him in and tended him until his death three days later at the age of 26. Only The Gentleman's Magazine and Carrick's Morning Post recorded the passing of this extraordinary hero.

Caesar enjoyed life in the family at Duffry except for constant friction with his eldest cousin and namesake, Caesar the barrister, who was twelve years older than him and when at home tried to make the young Caesar's life unendurable. The mutual hatred of the two Caesars culminated in a duel which they fought while the young Caesar was still a student at Trinity. (It was mentioned in the evidence in Rossborough v. Boyse but no other information is available about it.) Before he was 17 Caesar went to Dublin to seek work as a journalist and was evidently successful but it is not to his journalistic activities that the record of his life in Dublin relates. He found lodgings at 23 Parliament Street and possibly with a view to being better equipped to deal with his cousin when next they met, he joined the volunteers as a cheap way of learning swordsmanship and pistol shooting. His military enthusiasm was such that he was given an almost immediate commission and by the time he entered Trinity College at the age of eighteen he was already a captain. With a full-time job as a journalist and his military activities he somehow managed to spend a great deal of time in the tool-shop and engineering works in Fishamble Street run by William Keenan, Francis Murphy and Joseph Wyatt, whom he had met in the volunteers and who remained throughout his life close friends. He visited them whenever he could get to Dublin and they were the witnesses of the will which he made without his wife's knowledge in July 1824. As a result of their training of him they were able to report that he was a skilled craftsman in woodworking and most fields of engineering and was a particularly competent lathe-hand - and those skills stood him in good stead when in later years he was a prisoner in France. He managed, too, to acquire a remarkable knowledge of chemistry which he demonstrated in his skilled alterations to a stolen passport which enabled him as an escaping prisoner of war to cross the frontier from France into Switzerland, and later as a member of the Parliamentary Committee on the London Gaslight Bill.

As soon as 'Sir' Vesey heard that Caesar was earning a living he began pestering him for money, as also did some of Vesey's creditors. By 1786 he felt that he was earning sufficient to enable him to enroll as an undergraduate at Trinity College but having to earn a living at the same time and coping too with those incessant demands for money made his undergraduate existence pretty miserable. He had nothing left to pay for clothing and books and in one letter to his brother he said "often a penny cake from the bakers on the corner of King Street and Grafton Street is my sole sustenance for the day".

On his 21st birthday he had to run from College without a degree to avoid imprisonment for debt. He managed to dodge the army of process-servers pursuing him with writs, both for his own debts and his father's, and to get to London, where, after a time, he found employment as a journalist. He intended to seek admission to the Bar but had no money to pay the fees and it was only by 1790 that he had saved enough to become a student at Lincoln's Inn. By 1790, however, the French Revolution was well under way. The Bastille had fallen six months before and there was a flow of émigrés into London with tales so extraordinary that Caesar's employers felt that the time had come to have their own correspondent in Paris, and that was the end of Caesar's law studies. As a Wexford man he spoke fluent French - those from the coastal regions all did to facilitate their dealings with the French smugglers who brought them their supplies of wines, brandy and silks. His friend the Rev. Z. Cornick, who had been at Trinity with him, accompanied him to Dover and arranged to send money to him as required, and did not see him again for 25 years. On the day of his return to England he was driving from Dover to London when he overtook a horseman. Recognition was immediate and mutual - it was Cormick!

From the moment Caesar set foot in France as a press-reporter his life was in danger from the Guillotine as a spy. It was still in danger four years later when on the death of his father his status changed from that of a working journalist to a great landed proprietor and still in 1806 when with his return to Parliament he became a member of the British legislature, a hostage in Napoleon's hands. During the whole of his 20 years in France he was under constant surveillance both by the French secret service and the British whose secret agents had been informed that he was a secret emissary of the United Irishmen sent to France to organise an invasion during the coming rebellion reported accordingly. In the Public Records Office there is a letter dated June 1793 from the Irish Chief Secretary to the Secretary of State in London which says

" I have received an account that a Mr. Colclough of Wexford is now in Paris, which he is to leave immediately for this country coming by way of Geneva and London and that he is likely to have papers from Lord Edward Fitzgerald and probably Thomas Paine."

Caesar was in a prison cell at the time and had never met either Tom Paine or Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Most of the British residents in Paris had signed an address to the National Convention congratulating the French Nation on its victories over the enemies of liberty, but this was a matter of prudence rather than conviction, and Caesar was amongst the signatories.

The only information which survives concerning his doings after leaving London in 1790 is contained in a series of letters to John and, after John's killing, to his mother, which were read in court during the various hearings of Rossborough v Boyse. In August of 1793 he wrote that he obtained a passport from the Committee of Public Safety but having reached St Germain-en-Laye he was placed under arrest and was committed to the Chateau where James II of England had died in 1701. Imprisoned with him were five other English and Irish including Bingham. He next reported from Lausanne that "after an imprisonment of nine months, an illness of four months, an indigence of seventeen months, and nine days of travelling through every risk and inquietude" he had reached Switzerland. Concerning his escape he wrote

"The Committee of Public Safety offered a reward for all inventions to save manual labour in agriculture. I embraced this occasion and made a model of the old machine of Uncle Adam but could not go to present it as it was death to go to Paris...I presented my machine at the Commons, demanded exception as a workman, succeeded in getting a passport for all the interior of the Republic and came to Paris. I gave my model to the Commissioner, got a receipt, and then found out a Swiss who had passports to sell but only one of these answered my description and that was for a woman of 21 years of age, with black eyes. As such I came and was not discovered until I got to the frontier where I found means to corrupt persons and escape. With oxalic acid the sex and eyes were obliterated and made me masculine and the eyes blue. The name Anne de Grax also but this was again written in by me as men are called Anne in France."

When he escaped he left behind "a magazine of affairs all paid for the value of £250. An electrical machine made for the Dauphin, music and instruments, tools, lathe, et cetera." The first letter announcing his escape was written from Lausanne in June 1795, the further details being in a letter of the 26th of August. In the earlier letter he said that he had received a letter from John "...which would have caused a suspicion and brought me to the guillotine, but it was not examined and came to me open by the penny post." ( and that was the year in which Rowland Hill was born!)

The next seven years he spent travelling about Europe but made Lausanne his headquarters and spent most time in Germany and Switzerland. With the Peace of Amiens in 1802 he returned to France to visit friends in Ardeche and the Vivarais mountains, but on the resumption of hostilities was arrested and imprisoned in Vaux. He had discovered lead and antimony deposits in Ardeche and begun the exploitation of these and was also developing the use of coal amongst the inhabitants. The people of Ardeche petitioned so strongly for his release that he was granted parole and remained at large until 1806 when, John having secured his return to Parliament without his knowledge or approval, his parole was withdrawn and he was again imprisoned, remaining in close confinement for the next eight years until Napoleon's departure for Elba.

 

 

Chapter VIII

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Some notes on The Grogan Family of Johnstown Castle.

Mary Reynolds, married John Grogan (1653-1720), in the 1682. Their son, Larry was born in 1701, the fourth son and sixth child of John Grogan the first of his line at Johnstown, by his second wife. The piper, who is likely to have been the Laurence Grogan who was admitted attorney of the Court of Exchequer in Dublin in May 1726, also died young, in Barbados, according to family tradition: the will he drew up in May 1728 was proved in the diocese of Ferns in March 1729.

Larry's grandfather Cornelius, a merchant in Wexford town in Cromwellian times, had married a Mary MacDonnell, a relation of the earl of Antrim's. (Randal MacDonnell (1609-83), 2nd earl and 1st marquis of Antrim, lived in Wexford town during the 1640s, which was the base for his privateering operations.) But the Grogans apparently also acquired a Cromwellian connection. Though Larry's father, John, came into the Johnstown Castle estate through marriage with his first wife, Mary Reynolds, in 1682, the forename 'Overstreet' in several generations of their descendants suggests that the family was related to the Colonel Overstreet to whom Johnstown had been granted under the Cromwellian land settlement. John Reynolds , a Wexford Merchant, had rented and then somehow acquired Johnstown from the Overstreets.

Cornelius Grogan, 1738-98, joined the United Irishmen in a revolt against the British Crown. He was the eldest son of John Grogan of Johnstown Castle, Wexford, and his wife Catherine, dau. of Maj. Andrew Knox of Rathmackee. John was a member of the Irish Parliament, Cornelius was High Sheriff of Wexford from 1783-90.

Cornelius, unmarried of at least 5 siblings was executed in 1798.
The castle was confiscated in 1798, but his brother John Knox Grogan (b July 1736), who was wounded in the rebellion of 1798, was granted the castle in 1810. He had married Anne Coote (Dau of Chidley Coote of Ash Hill) Oct 26 1785 Their daughter Anne having been born Oct 24 1785 (who m John Greene of Greenville, Co Kilkenny and had 2 children John b 1807 & Anne b 1810). In Jan 1803 he married Elizabeth Fitzgerald in Laois. They had 3 sons, John Knox Grogan, b 1803, Hamilton Knox Grogan b 1807 & George Gilbert Grogan b 1809. Hamilton Knox Morgan Grogan married Sophia Maria Rowe (b 1805) (who M secondly Thomas Esmonde and d 1867). His daughter, Jane Colclough Grogan Morgan (b 1834), married George Arthur Hastings Forbes, 7th Earl Granard in June 1854, and she died in January 1872.