# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/O'Connell, Daniel (1745?-1833)

​O'CONNELL, DANIEL or DANIEL CHARLES, Count (1745?–1833), French general, one of the twenty-two children of Daniel O'Connell of Darrynane, co. Kerry, and his wife Mary O'Donoghue, daughter of O'Donoghue Duff of Anwys, Kerry, was born, according to his own belief, on 21 May 1745. His mother was in some doubt as to the dates of birth of her numerous children, and an idea prevailed in the family that he was born two years later. At home he learned some Latin and Greek, and before he was sixteen went to the continent with his cousin, Murty O'Connell of Tarmon, co. Kerry [see O'Connell, Moritz, Baron O'Connell], and obtained the cherished wish of his boyhood—an appointment in the French army. On 13 Feb. 1760 he became a cadet in the French infantry regiment of royal Suédois, in which he succeeded to a commission in due course. Like other young exiles of his class and time, O'Connell appears to have been an honest, sensible, home-loving lad, the very antithesis of the rollicking youths depicted by Lever. He is described as tall for his age, handsome, fair, with dark hair, and of winning manners. With the royal Suédois he made the last two campaigns of the seven years' war, and afterwards became assistant-adjutant (sous-aide-major) of the regiment. A year later he succeeded his cousin Conway [see Conway, Thomas, Count, 1734–1800] as adjutant of the famous regiment of Clare of the Irish brigade, with which he arrived in the Isle of France (Mauritius), after a six months' voyage, in 1771. ‘It is with the utmost trouble that we support life here,’ he wrote to his eldest brother; ‘we are a numerous corps of troops, and provisions very scarce. No money at all. … I hope you have paid my debts. It's the only pecuniary request I purpose ever making you.’ This purpose was not fulfilled, as until late in life he appears to have been short of money, and his appeals to the generosity of the head of the house were many. Reductions in the brigade destroyed his prospects of promotion therein, and for some years he was a capitaine en second. He appears to have applied his enforced leisure to various studies. He was an excellent linguist, and retained the love of his native country to the last. Some criticisms written by him on a recently published ‘Ordonnance’ for the Discipline of the Army came under the notice of the military authorities, and obtained for him the cross of St. Louis, with a pension of two thousand livres (about 80l.) a year and the brevet of lieutenant-colonel, with which he was posted to his old regiment, royal Suédois, and served with it at the taking of Minorca and at the famous siege of Gibraltar, where he was severely wounded (cf. Mrs. O'Connell, Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, i. 275–300). After the sieges O'Connell was made a count, and given the colonelcy of the German regiment of Salm-Salm in French pay. Some years of prosperity followed, in which the count proved himself a good friend to a host of needy young relatives claiming his good offices. At a grand review of thirty thousand French troops in Alsace, in the summer of 1785, Salm-Salm was pronounced the best regiment in the field. Five years later a mutiny of his men left O'Connell in the anomalous position of a colonel without a regiment. He appears to have accepted the revolution, although detesting it, and remained in Paris through 1790 and 1791 as member of a commission engaged in revising the army regulations, which is the revised form now adopted in the republican armies. In 1792 considerations of duty or of personal safety led him to join the Bourbon princes at Coblentz, and, like many other French officers, he made the disastrous campaign of that year as a private in Berchini's hussars. In November the same year he was an émigré in London, almost penniless, but bent on concealing the fact that he had served against the republic, lest it should debar his future return to France. An alibi was procured, and attested at Tralee, to the effect that O'Connell had been in Ireland all the time, and was forwarded to Paris to prevent the confiscation of his property. O'Connell submitted to Pitt a scheme for reconstructing the Irish brigade in the service of King George, which was adopted. Six regiments were to be raised in Ireland, and officered as much as possible from the survivors of the old brigade in the service of France. O'Connell was appointed colonel of the 4th regiment of the new Irish brigade. But the government mismanaged the recruiting business, and the disabilities of the Roman catholic officers further complicated the arrangements. In September 1796 the regiments of Berwick, O'Connell, and Conway were ordered to be incorporated with those of Dillon, Walsh de Serrant, and Walsh junior, and two years later the brigade ceased to exist altogether. On the drafting of his regiment O'Connell retained his full pay as ​a British colonel, which he drew to the end of his life. In 1796 O'Connell married, at the French chapel in King Street, Covent Garden, Martha Gouraud, Comtesse de Bellevue (neé Drouillard de Lamarre), ‘a charming young widow,’ with three children. She came of a family of St. Domingo planters, and her first husband had lost estates in that island at the revolution. She had no issue by her marriage with O'Connell.
At the peace of Amiens O'Connell returned to France, with his wife and stepdaughters, to look after the West India property, which was unexpectedly recovered. In France they remained. On the renewal of the war with England they were detained by Napoleon as British subjects. At the restoration of the Bourbons O'Connell received the rank of lieutenant-general in the army of France, and it was supposed that a marshal's bâton awaited him in recognition of his having saved the life of Charles X at the siege of Gibraltar; but after the revolution of 1830 he refused to take the oaths of allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and was consequently struck off the rolls. He died on 9 July 1833, at the age of eighty-eight, at the château of Mâdon, in Blois, where he had long resided. His nephew, Daniel O'Connell ‘the Liberator,’ said of him that ‘in the days of his prosperity he never forgot his country or his God. Never was there a more sincere friend or a more generous man. It was a surprise to those who knew how he could afford to do all the good he did to his kind.’ He was buried in a vault in the village cemetery at Coudé, in which parish Mâdon is situate. Much of his property was left to his nephew, the ‘Liberator.’
Two portraits of O'Connell are known: one in his youth, in the gay uniform of Clare, a scarlet coat, with broad yellow facings, green turnbacks, and silver epaulettes; the other late in life, of the period of the restoration, in a blue uniform and the ribbon of St. Louis.
[Mrs. O'Connell's Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade, London, 1892, and the reviews of that work in ‘Times,’ 14 July 1892, and ‘Athenæum,’ 9 April 1892 and 25 Aug. 1894, pp. 253–4, furnish the most authentic information about Count O'Connell, taken almost entirely from his own letters and other family sources. The name of the book is misleading, as O'Connell was never a colonel in the Irish brigade in the French service; and Henry Dillon, and not O'Connell, was the last colonel of the so-called Irish brigade in British pay. All previous biographies—including those in Biogr. Universelle (Michaud), vol. xxxi. and in O'Callaghan's Irish Brigades in the Service of France, Glasgow, 1870, pp. 275–300—are wrong as to dates and regiments. The Bouillon Correspondence, preserved among the Home Office Papers, throws light on the period of the French emigration.]
H. M. C.