Donough MacCarty, 1st Earl of Clancarty

Donough was born in 1594,[1] probably at Blarney Castle, the habitual seat of his parents.[2] He was the second son of Charles MacCarty and his first wife Margaret O'Brien. His father was the 1st Viscount of Muskerry. His grandfather was Sir Cormac MacCarthy, who had received an English title to his lands during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Donough's mother was a daughter of Donogh O'Brien, 4th Earl of Thomond. Both sides of the family were important Gaelic Irish dynasties. His parents married about 1590.[3] He appears below as the younger of the two brothers:

1. Cormac, predeceased his father;[4] and
2. Donough (1594–1665).

He also had sisters among which:

1. Mary, married 1st Sir Valentine Browne and 2ndly Edward FitzGerald;[5]
2. Helen, married Colonel Edmund FitzMaurice, eldest son of Thomas, 18th Earl of Kerry;[6]
3. Elinor, married in 1636 Charles or Cormac MacCarthy-Reagh.[7][8]

Nothing seems to be known about MacCarty's youth and education. He married Eleanor Butler (1612–1682), eldest daughter of Thomas Butler, Viscount Thurles sometime before 1641.[9] This marriage made him a brother-in-law of James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond. They had five children, three boys and two girls.[10]

They had three sons:

1. Charles (1633 or 1634 – 1665), slain in the Battle of Lowestoft[11] predeceased his father;
2. Callaghan (c. 1638 – 1676), succeeded his brother's son as the 3rd Earl of Clancarty;[12] and
3. Justin (c. 1643 – 1694), fought for the Jacobites and became Viscount Mountcashel.[13][14][15]

and two daughters:

1. Helen (died 1722), became Countess of Clanricarde;[16]
2. Margaret (died 1703), became Countess of Fingal;[17]

Already in his forties, he sat in the Irish House of Commons in the Irish parliaments of 1634 and 1640 as member for County Cork.[18]

His elder brother having predeceased his father, he succeeded his father in 1640 at the age of forty-six as the 2nd Viscount Muskerry.[19] As he was promoted Earl of Clancarty only in 1657, he was known as Lord Muskerry during the events of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, the Confederate Wars and the Cromwellian conquest.

Ireland suffered 11 years war from 1641 to 1652, which are usually decomposed into the Rebellion of 1641, the Confederate Wars, and the Cromwellian Conquest. Muskerry was involved in all of those.

The Irish Rebellion of 1641 was launched by Phelim O'Neill from the northern province of Ulster in October 1641. Initially, Muskerry raised an armed force of his tenants and dependants to try to maintain law and order.[20] However, he was soon prompted to join the rebellion by the atrocities committed by the English President of Munster, William St Leger, against the Irish Catholic population in general.

In addition, many of Muskerry's relatives, who had lost lands to Protestant settlers in the Plantations of Ireland had already joined the rebellion – a factor that doubtless influenced Muskerry's decision. In 1642, being already 49, he put his armed men at the service of the Confederate Catholic Association of Ireland, an alternative, Catholic government based in Kilkenny, which had been formed by the rebels.

Muskerry was appointed to the "Supreme Council" of the Confederation of Kilkenny, their effective government. He was part of the team that negotiated with Charles I and his representative in Ireland, James Butler, Earl of Ormond, to secure an alliance between the Irish Confederates and English Royalists in the context of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Ormond was his brother-in-law. Muskerry was sympathetic towards royalism and disliked the more intransigent Confederates led by Giovanni Battista Rinuccini and Owen Roe O'Neill. Muskerry, who was already 49 at the time, was given the command of the Confederate Munster army. However, large parts of Munster were held by the Inchiquin's Protestant army.

On 4 June 1643 he commanded the Confederate Ulster army at the Cloghleagh where the Irish horse under Castlehaven, seconded from the Leinster Army, routed a detachment of Inchiquin's troops.[21]

In 1646 Muskerry commanded the Confederate army that laid siege to the army of the Parliament at Bunratty Castle and captured it mid-July 1646.[22]

Early in August 1647 Muskerry resigned as general of the Confederate Munster Army.[23] The Confederate Supreme Council gave this command to Viscount Taaffe, who lost the Battle of Knocknanauss on 13 November 1647 against English and Munster Protestant troops under Inchiquin.

In 1649, shortly after the execution of Charles I and the declaration of the Commonwealth of England, the Confederates did eventually approve a treaty with Charles II and the English Royalists. However, Ireland was soon invaded by the Parliamentarian New Model Army in 1649 under Oliver Cromwell, who had the aims of avenging the uprising of 1641, confiscating enough Irish Catholic owned land to pay off some of the Parliament's creditors, and eliminating a dangerous outpost of royalism.[24]

Muskerry fought the last three years of this campaign in his own lands in western Cork and Kerry, from where he raised troops from his tenants and guerrilla bands known as "tories". He tried to relieve the siege of Limerick in 1651 but was intercepted and defeated on 26 July 1651 by General Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill, later Earl of Orerry, in the Battle of Knocknaclashy (also called Knockbrack), near Banteer, east of Killarney, and never came near Limerick, which surrendered on 27 October. This was the last pitched battle of the war.[25]

Muskerry fell back into the mountains of Kerry. On 27 June 1652 he surrendered to Edmund Ludlow, handing over his last stronghold Ross Castle near Killarney and disbanding his 5000-men army.[26][27] He was allowed to embark to Spain.[28] He lost his estates in the Act of Settlement of 1652. His name is the eighth on the list of over 100 men who were excluded from pardon.[29] He found that he was not welcome in Spain because he had opposed Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, the papal nuncio. He therefore returned to Ireland in 1653, where he was put on trial in Dublin, being accused of having been responsible for the murder of English settlers in 1641 during their evacuation from his house at Macroom to Cork. However, it was established that he had tried to protect them and he was acquitted.[30]

After his acquittal he was again allowed to embark to Spain, but he seems to have gone to France where his family had already moved some time before the capture of Ross Castle. His wife lived with her sister Mary Butler, Lady Hamilton, in the convent of the Feuillantines in Paris,[31] and his daughter Helen was sent to boarding school at the abbey of Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs, near Versailles, together with her cousin Elizabeth Hamilton.

In 1657 Charles II sent Muskerry, together with Sir George Hamilton to Madrid on a fruitless diplomatic mission.[32] Charles II, in exile at Brussels in 1658 rewarded him with the title of Earl of Clancarty.[33]

At the restoration Clancarty, as he was now, and his family returned to the British Isles. He eventually recovered his estates under the Act of Settlement of 1662.

In 1665 his son Charles, Lord Muskerry, was killed in the Battle of Lowestoft, a naval engagement with the Dutch[11] during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). Charles left an infant son, also called Charles who became heir apparent.

Clancarty died in London on 4 August 1665.[34] Charles's infant son died on 22 September 1666.[35] The succession then reverted to Donough's second son Callaghan, who became the 3rd Earl of Clancarty.

• Irish nobility
• Eóganachta dynasty
• MacCarthy of Muskerry, for his father's family.

• Burke, Bernard (1866), A Genealogical History of the Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited and Extinct Peerages of the British Empire (New ed.), London: Harrison (for MacCarty)
• Carte, Thomas (1851), The Life of James Duke of Ormond, 2 (new ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press - 1641–1643
• Castlehaven, James Touchet (1815), Earl of Castlehaven's Review or his Memoirs of his Engagement and Carriage in the Irish Wars, Dublin: George Mullens
• Clark, Ruth (1921), Anthony Hamilton: his Life and Works and his Family, London: John Lane
• Coffey, Diarmid (1914), O'Neill and Ormond - A Chapter of Irish History, Dublin: Maunsel & Company
• Cokayne, George Edward (1893), The complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant, 5 (1st ed.), London: George Bell and Sons – L to M (for Mountcashel & Muskerry)
• Cokayne, George Edward (1913), Gibbs, Vicary (ed.), The complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant, 3 (2nd ed.), London: St Catherine Press – Canonteign to Cutts (for Clancarty)
• Cokayne, George Edward (1926), Gibbs, Vicary (ed.), The complete peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, extant, extinct, or dormant, 5 (2nd ed.), London: St Catherine Press - EARDLEY OF SPALDING to GOOJERAT (for Fingall)
• Firth, Charles Harding (1894), The Memoirs of Henry Ludlow, 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press
• Firth, Charles Harding; Rait, R. S. (1911), The Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 2, London: H. M. Stationery Office
• Lainé, P. Louis (c. 1830), Histoire généalogique de la maison de Mac-Carthy (in French), Paris?: A. Pinard
• Lodge, John (1789), The Peerage of Ireland, 2, Dublin: James Moore – Earls (for Drogheda)
• Murphy, John A. (1959), Justin MacCarthy, Lord Mountcashel, Commander of the Irish brigade in France, Cork: Cork University Press
• Ohlmeyer, Jane (2004), "Maccarthy, Donough, first earl of Clancarty (1594–1665)", in Matthew, Colin; Harrison, Brian (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 35, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–108, ISBN 0-19-861385-7 - Macan–Macpherson
• Seccombe, Thomas (1893), "MacCarthy or MacCarty, Donough, fourth Earl of Clancarty", in Lee, Sidney (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography, 34, London: Smith Elder & Co, pp. 436–438
• Wauchope, Piers (2004), "Maccarthy, Justin, first Viscount Mountcashel (1643–1694)", in Matthew, Colin; Harrison, Brian (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 35, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 111–112, ISBN 0-19-861385-7
• Webb, Alfred (1878), "MacCarty, Donough, Viscount Muskerry, Earl of Clancarty", Compendium of Irish Biography, Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, p. 303, right column, line 35

• Genealogy of Donough MacCarty, 1st Earl of ClanCarty on The Peerage website
• Portrait at Hunt Museum, Limerick