The Sun.
London, England, 1852-11-18 00:00:00

THE DUKE'S PARENTAGE.

Singularly enough, the name of the deceased warrior,
as well as the date and place of his birth, have all of
them proved to be alike matters of controversy. The
historians of Napoleon have argued long, and some of
them fiercely, as to whether he first saw the light in 1768
or in 1769, and have sifted the equally important ques-
tion as to whether his surname should be spelt more cor-
rectly Bonaparte or Buonaparte. Biographers have
been puzzled in a similar manner, it must now be ob-
served, in reference to the introductory details of
the life of Wellington. Every one has agreed, of
course, that he was born in 1769, and that he
first drew breath in Ireland : but people seem
to be altogether divided in opinion as to the pre-
cise day, and as to the exact locality, rendered remark-
able by that most notable occurrence. Hitherto, it has
been asserted without hesitation, that Arthur, the fourth
son of the Earl and Countess of Mornington, was born
on the Ist of May, 1769, at Dangan Castle, county
Meath. Researches in the cotemporary periodicals of
the Irish capital, and in the register of St. Peter's Church
in that metropolis, have very recently proved, beyond
all further doubt, that the subject of these remarks was
christened, in the sacred edifice just mentioned, on the
30th of April, 1769—Isaac Maun officiating upon the,
occasion as archdeacon. Additional evidence, adduced
from the pages of a magazine then published in Dublin
from month to month, appears to us to corroborate the
before-mentioned circumstance—insomuch, that we may
now assert, as facts conclusively proven, that the day of
Arthur Wellesley's birth was the 29th of April, 1769,
and that the place of his birth was in St. Andrew's
parish, in the city of Dublin, at No. 114, Grafton-street,
then known as Mornington House, but now as her Ma-

jesty's Stationery Office, opposite the Provost's dwell-
ing, Trinity College. Our lamented hero derived his
origin from a house in which two ancient families were
combined, both being English by extraction, and Irish
by settlement. One of these families migrated across
the Bristol Channel from Sussex, and the other at a later
period in the sixteenth century from Rutlandshire. The
latter have been variously mentioned by the names of
Colley, or Cooley, or Cowley ; the former no less vari-
ously as Wesley, or Westley, or Wellesley. In each
instance the orthography seems to have been accepted
in the manner last specified, if we may judge from the
circumstance of one of the Duke's brothers having been
created Baron Cowley, and another Marquis of Welles-
ley. Nevertheless, it is not unworthy of remembrance,
that he himself was first gazetted a soldier in the British
army as the Hon. Arthur Wesley, and as such he first
attained distinction. In addition to the foregoing par-
ticulars, it may be mentioned that it was in 1728
that Richard Colley, of Castle Carbery, county
Kildare, assumed the name and property of
Garret Wesley, of Dangan Castle, county Meath,
by right of succession ; that, in 1746, this Richard
Colley was raised to the Irish peerage by the title of
Baron Mornington ; and that, in 1750, his son was ad-
vanced to the rank of Earl of Mornington. A curious
reflection occurred once upon a time to the late Poet
Laureate, Robert Southey, in reference to this memor-
able family of the Wesleys—a reflection, too, coming
rather appropriately, as it happened, from an author
whose eclectic sympathies had rendered him the cele-
brant both of the war in Spain and of Methodism. It
appears that, some time prior to his decease in 1728,
Garret Wesley offered to adopt Charles, the brother of
the celebrated John Wesley—Charles being, at that time,
a boy in the great school at Westminster. The offer
was rejected by the father, for some reason altogether
unimaginable, and thereupon Richard Colley was chosen
to succeed to the estates of the discomfited gentleman,
and was thereby enabled to attain the dignity of a
patrician. Remembering these things, Southey re-
marked, with some show of reason, by a very startling
deduction, that, supposing the generous proposition had
not been declined, there might have been no Methodists,
and our arms in the East might still have been threat-
ened from Seringapatam ! As it was, matters fell out
differently, and the second Baron, after acquiring cele-
brity as a musical composer, and becoming first Earl of
Mornington, died in 1781, leaving behind him nine chil-
dren by his wife, Anne, the daughter of Arthur Hill, the
Viscount Dungannon. It is probable from this, that
our great captain was christened Arthur, from his ma-
ternal grandfather.
Colley Cibber is said by some ingenious genealogists
to have been amongst the ancestral relations of the de-
ceased—Cibber's mother having been the daughter of
one of the Colleys of Rutlandshire.
Speaking of the family of the Wellesleys, Mr. J.
Bernard Burke, a high authority on such matters, has
taken occasion in the course (p. 9) of Mr. Timbs's very
entertaining little volume " Wellingtoniana " to remark
that " the name was originally written de Wellesley and
subsequently became corrupted into Wesley ;" adding,
"the late Marquis Wellesley resumed the correct ortho-
graphy."
It is a circumstance tolerably familiar to the world by
this time, that directly a man renders himself illustrious,
genealogists start up prepared to prove, upon the clearest
evidence, that royal or imperial blood flows in his veins,
—illustrating it by some "tree" of stupendous and be-
wildering ramifications. It happened thus with regard
to the Emperor Napoleon, and we all remember his
reply—that he was the Rodolph of his own family. The
following statement, however, is sufficiently curious to
be transcribed entire—undertaking, as it does, to demon-
strate the existence of a remote relationship between his
Grace the late Duke and her Majesty Queen Victoria,
by indicating his direct descent in an unbroken line
from the Royal House of Plantagenet. The descent
is thus explained :

Edward 1., King of England, had by his Queen,
Eleanor of Castile, several children, of whom the eldest
son was King Edward 11., and the youngest daughter,
the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, wife of Humphrey de
Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, Constable of Eng-
land. King Edward 11., as is, of course, well known,
was direct ancestor of the Royal Plantagenets, whose
eventual heiress, the Princess Elizabeth of York, daugh-
ter of King Edward IV., married King Edward -VII.,
and was mother of Margaret Queen of Scotland, from
whom Queen Victoria is eleventh in descent.
Reverting to the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet, daugh-
ter of King Edward 1., and wife of Humphrey de
Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, we find that she
was mother of a daughter, Lady Eleanor de Bohun,
who married James Earl of Ormonde, and was ances-
tress of the subsequent peers of that illustrious house.
Pierce, the eighth Earl of Ormonde, (sixth in descent
from the Lady Elizabeth Plantagenet) left, with other
issue, a daughter, Lady Helen Butler, who married
Donogh, second Earl of Thomond, and was mother of
Lady Margaret O'Bryen, wife of Dermod Lord Inchi-
quin, and ancestress of the later barons of that title.
The Hon. Mary O'Bryen, daughter of Dermod, fifth
Lord Inchiquin, married Michael Boyle, Archbishop of
Armagh and Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and had by
a daughtcy, Flianor-Boyle' whol3eca,nle tit-Er-wife of
the Right Hon. William Hill, M.P., and grandmother
of Arthur Hill, first Viscount Dungannon, whose daugh-
ter Anne, Countess of Mornington, was mother of Arthur,
first Duke of Wellington, who was, through these des-
cents, nineteenth in a direct unbroken line from King
Edward."