| Notes |
- As to the date of death of Sir William Stewart, 3rd Baronet, 1st Lord Mountjoy, the Irish Time of November 10, 1940 states "He undertook, with Sir Stephen Rice, in 1688, a mission from Lord Deputy Tyrconnell to James II, then at Paris, and was, immediately on his arrival in that city, thrown into the Bastille, and there confined until the year 1692. Upon his release, he waited upon William III in Flanders, and was killed at the battle of Steinkirk in August of the same year". An article in "The Stewarts", Volume VI, by Walter A Stewart, September 1, 1933, page 378, states "Released at the end of March 1692, Mountjoy had but a very brief space of time to enjoy his freedom. He joined the English army in the Netherlands and was killed in August 1692 at the battle of Steinkirk".
"The 3rd Baronet, another Sir William Stewart, was born six weeks after his father's death, and succeeded at his birth to all the estates that had belonged to the Ist Baronet, except that of Fort-Stewart. His uncle, John Stewart had been left the Ramelton and Fanad estates in the Ist Baronet's will, but he evidently predeceased Sir Alexander. He appears to have been captured by Sir Charles Coote's forces in a sortie from Londonderry in April 1649 (J. S. Reid: History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, 1867 edition,- Vol. 11., p. 109), and subsequently, on trying to escape from captivity, to have been put to death in October of the same year (J. T. Gilbert: Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland, r64i-i6.52, Vol. 11., p. 294). Sir Alexander's widow married about 1655, Sir Arthur Forbes, afterwards Ist Earl of Granard, who was granted the wardship of her son, Sir William Stewart. The latter, on reaching manhood, took an active part in public affairs, besides applying himself seriously to a military career. He was Captain of the King's Company of the Regiment of Guards in Ireland 1677, and in 1684 was appointed proprietary Colonel of a regiment of Foot, as his father and grandfather had been before him. In March 1682-83 he was raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Lord Stewart of Ramelton and Viscount Mountjoy, the latter title being taken, as shown by the Ormonde MSS., for no particular reason except that the place of that name was in the county in which Sir William Stewart lived. . Later, the Stewart family held a lease from the Crown of the Castle of Mountjoy, situated on the southwest shore of Lough Neagh, Co. Tyrone, together with 300 acres of land adjoining, and this lease was renewed from time to time and still had some years to run when the senior line died out in 1769. In 1684, Lord Mountjoy was appointed Master-General of the Ordnance in Ireland for life, his being the last life-appointment to this post. In those days such offices were not obtained without payment, and when the holder was desirous of retiring, the Government selected some suitable candidate who was given permission to arrange terms for the purchase. It thus appears from the Ormonde MSS. that Lord Mountjoy paid his predecessor, Francis Aungier, Ist Earl of Longford, the sum of 3500 pounds, a great deal of money in those days, as the price of making way for him.
In 1686, Mountjoy, who had been promoted to Brigadier-General, went as one of the party of Volunteers from Britain to join the crusade against the Turks who were then being expelled from Hungary. He took part in the siege of Buda and its recapture from the Infidels. Two years later, the Revolution of 1688 broke out and Mountjoy's position became a very difficult one. As a devout Protestant, his loyalty to King James became almost impossible to reconcile with loyalty to his religion and sympathy with his co-religionaries, who looked up to him, at any rate in the North of Ireland, as their leader. For this reason, the Lord Lieutenant, Richard Talbot, Ist Earl of Tyrconnel, a Roman Catholic and zealous in that interest, desired to rid himself of Mountjoy. His flrst intention was to send Mountjoy, with his Regiment, to England, in anticipation of the invasion of William of Orange, and His Lordship was therefore ordered to march his Regiment to Dublin, with a view to its embarkation. Up till then -Mountjoy's Regiment had been quartered in and around Londonderry, and, on its withdrawal, the Regiment of the Roman Catholic Lord Antrim (Alexander MacDonnell, 3rd Earl), was sent to that city in its stead. Then took place, on 7th December 1688, the famous episode of the closing of the gates of Derry by the 'prentice boys, and Lord Antrim was unable to enter the city. In face of this unexpected turn, Tyrconnel saw no other course but to send Mountjoy with six Companies of his Regiment back to Derry. His Lordship accordingly returned, and, after a brief parley, the gates were opened and he was admitted and the keys of the city were handed over to him. John Mackenzie, in his Narrative of the Siege of Derry," a contemporary account written by an eye-witness, says:-" Our Governor freely did resigned his charge to him (Lord Mountjoy) and we all "resolved to follow his orders and directions. Accordingly, "his Lordship heartily concurred with the citizens, advised them to repair the carriages of the guns, fix the old arms "that lay in the stores, and everything else that might be found necessary for the preservation of the city." With Mountjoy were admitted to Derry two Companies of his Regiment composed wholly of Protestants, the other four Companies which had accompanied him being allowed to enter later, since, according to Mackenzie, 11 rather than " lose so many good arms, we were induced to receive " them; and having well purged them of Papists, we unanimously concur and keep our joint guards, by detachments out of these six Companies and our own six town Companies."
It would thus appear that a very important part of the garrison of Derry during the historic siege was drawn from Lord Mountioy's regiment. Of the two companies first admitted, one was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Lundy, stated to have been a native of Ayrshire, and later notorious as the " Traitor Lundy." The other was commanded by Captain William Stewart, who was in all probability William Stewart of Fort-Stewart, Lord Mountjoy's first cousin. It is of interest to note that the latter married in 1693, Mary, eldest daughter of Ezekiel Hopkins, Bishop of Derry at the ime of the siege, who endowed the cathedral with some new pieces of plate and a richly carved organ-case, which are still shown with much pride to visitors to the Maiden city.
Notwithstanding the landing of William of Orange in England, and the retirement of King James to France, the King and his lieutenant, Tyrconnel, appear to have hoped to be able to hold Ireland with the help of France and to establish it as an independent country under French protection. Mountjoy was clearly looked upon as a formidable obstacle to the realisation of such a plan, and it therefore
became amatter of cardinal importance to deprive the Protestants of his leadership. In the "Londeriad," the well known epic poem of the siege of Londonderry, by Joseph Aickin, flrst published in Dublin in 1699, King James is represented as speaking as follows to the King of France:-
' the Lord Mountjoy, I fear him more,
Than all the subjects on the Irish shore,
Him the Scots party have chosen for their guide,
And sworn to flght in no command beside.'
Tyrconnel accordingly decided to resort to a ruse in order to get rid of Mountjoy, and he turned the latter's anxiety for the safety of the Protestants to account for this purpose. He pretended to agree with Mountjoy that it would be folly to attempt to defend Ireland against an Anglo-Dutch invasion and to be anxious to prevail on King James to adopt this view. To this end he proposed that Mountjoy should proceed to St Germains in order to explain the position to James. Mountjoy, though well aware of the possibility of treachery, decided that it was his duty to accept the mission and, accordingly, he returned to Dublin and took ship for France. He did not however, leave without obtaining solemn written assurances from Tyrconnel, safeguarding the Protestants against molestation. Yet, no sooner was he gone, than these assurances were repudiated, and on 23rd February 1688-89, shortly after his arrival in Paris, Mountjoy was arrested by order of Louis XIV. and committed to the Bastille, whence, in spite of repeated attempts of the English Government to negotiate his exchange, he was not released till March 1692. He had previously been offered his liberty if he would abjure his religion, but he had rejected this suggestion. (See N. Luttrell, Historical Relation, Vol. I., p. 547, Oxford, 1857). It may, however, be said for King James that he seems to have shown some reluctance to agree to Mountjoy's arrest, as in a despatch from the Comte d'Avaux, French Ambassador in Ireland, to Louis XIV., dated 23rd April 1689, the following passage occurs:-" If Your Majesty had not ordered the arrest of Lord Mountjoy and had allowed him to.leave France, as the King of England wished, the latter would never have been master of Ireland, Lord Mountjoy having great power there throughout the whole North and being moreover, a good officer and a man of wit." Nevertheless, when King James was in Ireland himself, he showed great resentment towards Mountjoy, prompted probably by the stubborn resistance to his arms which he met with from Derry and Enniskillen. Both Mountjoy and his second son, Alexander Stewart-though the latter can hardly have been a full-grown man at the time-were in the list of those attainted by King James' Parliament held in Dublin. Mountjoy's attainder is thus referred to by Lord Macaulay (History of England, Vol. III., London, 1858) " Among the attainted Lords was Mountjoy. He had been induced by the villany of Tyrconnel to trust himself at St Germains: he had been thrown into the Bastille: he was still lying there: and the Irish Parliament was not ashamed to enact that, unless he could within a few weeks make his escape from his cell, and present himself at Dublin, he should be put to death." King James lodged in the Castle of Newtown-Stewart on his way to Londonderry and again on his return from Lifford after the abandonment of the siege, but this did not prevent both the Castle and the town from being burned by his troops on their retirement. The town was not rebuilt till 1722 while the Castle has remained a ruin to this day. It is understood that there is a probability of its being scheduled shortly, under the Ancient Monuments' Act. A petition by William Stewart, 2nd Viscount Mountjoy (S.P. Dom., 8th April 1696), states that:-" The Irish army burned and destroyed the Castle of Newtown-Stewart, and all the furniture therein also the town of Newtown-Stewart, and the Castle and town of Ramelton, and wasted all the Petitioner's estate." It is an interesting circumstance that, though Mountjoy himself was lying in the Bastille, his name at least was prominent at the relief of Derry, for the vessel which broke the boom across the Foyle, and caused the siege to be raised, bore the name of " Mountjoy." Incidentally, it may also be mentioned that, when the dramatic feat of landing a large cargo of arms for the Ulster Volunteers took place at Larne on 24th April 1914, the name of "Mountjoy " was again that given to the vessel employed.
Lord Mountjoy was eventually released from the Bastille in exchange for Lieutenant-General Richard Hamilton, who commanded the besieging forces before Derry and who was captured at the battle of the Boyne. Released at the end of March 1692, Mountjoy had but a very brief space of time to enjoy his freedom. He joined the English army in the Netherlands and was killed in August 1692 at the battle of Steinkirk. His name appears, in the original despatch, first on the list of those who fell in this action. (S.P. Dom., 1691-2, pp. 392 and 429.) " The Jacobites regarded this death as the just punishment of his readiness to serve the usurper and saw in it conflrmation of the suspicions they had had regarding his fidelity to the cause of the Stuarts, whilst the Orange party declared that resentment at the ingratitude of those princes had brought him over to the "good cause." (Ravaisson, Archives de la Bastille, Vol. IX., p. 203.)
Mountjoy was a prominent member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, formed in 1684 as a counterpart of the Royal Society of England and regarded as the forerunner of the Royal Dublin Society which was founded in 1731 and still exists. He read a number of papers on scientific subjects before that Society and succeeded Sir William Petty as President in 1686. In the Correspondence of Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Vol. I., p. 251 (London, 1828) there is a letter from Clarendon to John Evelyn, dated 14th February 1685-6, in which the following reference is made to Mountjoy in this connexion:- Royal Society of Ireland . . . Their President is the Lord Viscount Mountjoy, Master of His Majesty's Ordnance ',in this Kingdom; he is a man of great worth and honour, "of vertu and an encourager of ingenuity; he is very much my friend and is now in England. I hope you will find him i(out and get him to Gresham College, and there own to him the honour he does the Society (i.e., the Royal Society of England) in being their protector here." Lord Mountjoy was succeeded as 2nd Viscount and 4th Baronet by his eldest son, William. (Source - "The Stewarts, Volume VI, Stewarts In Ireland, Walter A. Stewart, London, September 3, 1933)
" William Stewart, born in Ireland in 1650, six weeks, after his father was killed in the battle of Dunbar in Scotland, grew up under the tutelage of his stepfather, Arthur Forbes, earl of Granard. He early entered the, Military service, in the reign of King Charles II, and by the time he was 27 years he was captain of the King's company of the regiment of Guards in Ireland. He was raised to the peerage of Ireland in March, 1682-83, as "Lord Stewart of Ramelton and Viscount Mountjoy." There had been a previous Lord Mountjoy, an Englishman named Charles Blount, whom Queen Elizabeth sent over to Ireland as lord deputy in 1601, with the queen's instructions to whale the stuffing out of the recalcitrant Irish chief, Hugh O'Neill, earl of Tyrone, which he did in a ghastly way.
It will not be to the point here to derail William Stewart's, Lord Mountjoy's, military and political career, our object being merely to picture and set him apart from his cousin William or any other William Stewart of his day, and to pinpoint his children. He married, about 1671, Mary Coote, eldest daughter of Richard Coote, Lord Coloony. He was in command of the garrison of Londonderry when the, English parliament voted to dethrone King James II and elected his daughter Mary and her husband, William, prince of Orange in the Netherlands, queen and king of England, and perhaps of Scotland and Ireland. The Stuarts, so called, had drifted so far from their moorings through marriages with French and Spanish women that most of the folks at home didn't care much about them. In fact, many were disgusted with them for imagining that the pope of Rome could take care of them. Lord Mountjoy was on a spot. He was a Protestant, trying to be loyal to a king who was not. To solve his problem for him the lord lieutenant of Ireland, acting on behalf of James, who had decided to put up a fight for his throne and to depend on the Irish people to do most of the fighting, sent Mountjoy to France on a fake mission. There the king of France, wise to the scheme, locked Mountjoy up in the Bastille on Feb. 23, 1688-9. There the good man stayed for three years, until James was thoroughly beaten. But he never went home. When released in March, 1692, he joined the army of William fighting in Flanders and was killed in the battle of Steinkirk in August, that year, at the age of 41 years. His children comprised six sons and two daughters who lived to maturity. " (Source - Stewart Clan Magazine, Tome H, Volume 37, Number 6, December 1959)
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