Free Stones of Aran by Tim Robinson Page A

desperation in defence dominates this scene of war—war on a horribly intimate and domestic scale, up and down stairs, in and out of chambers—and it is only through his son John, who made conditions for his own life, and survived to make his deposition of 1643, that we glimpse our quarry:
    The said Edmond continued siege to the said castle for three daies and three nights … murthered the said Alson and George … caused the castle to be fired … the said Peter Ward was then traytorously murthered, who togetherwith the said Alson and George was stripped and they three buried in or neere the castle walls, from whence … they were removed and enterred in the parish church. Yeet notwithstanding the Mass-preist caused their corps to be digged up againe and buried without in the churchyard, for noe other cause but that they saide no unsanctified or hereticall corps of protestants (as they tearme them) must remaine within their churches. This deponent likewise saith, that the said Edmond O’Fflahertie was abetted, councilled, and assisted in the said rebellious and traytorous designe, by [among others] Richd. Fizpatrick (seneschall of Ibrackane aforesaid, and then and now receaver to the Earle of Thomond within the said Barony). That he saw and observed the said parties in armes at the seidge of the said castle, and divers times consulting and advising howe to surprise the same …
    By the end of the Parliamentarians’ vengeful campaign of 1651–52 most of Clare had been left “totally ruinated and deserted by the inhabitants thereof,” and we do not know how Rickard the seneschal came through, or whether he suffered any penalty for his part (if he was actually involved) in the massacre of his neighbours and clients at Tromro. The next generation of Fitzpatricks was located, not in Clare, but in Aran. The earliest of them to be commemorated on the Cill Éinne monuments are the John Fitzpatrick who Hardiman says died possessed of a cellarful of riches, his wife Sara and son Rickard. One assumes, without proof, that John is the son of Rickard the seneschal, and therefore, cynically, that the latter had done well out of the war.
    Aran, of course passed into Protestant hands after the Cromwellians ’ victory. By 1686 John and his son Rickard were leasing the islands from a Sir Stephen Fox, former Paymaster of the Forces under Charles II. John was living in “Loughmore,” which is Ceathrú na Locha, the quarter of the lake, the nearest part of Inis Oírr to the Clare coast. Nowadays this would be regarded as an eccentrically reclusive address for a rich man, but at that period seaways were still more passable than land routes, and Inis Oírr, commanding a principal opening of Galway Bay, probably saw much traffic. Infestations of French privateers, though, weregrounds for abatement of rent. John died in February and Sara in November of 1709—but the year began in March until the calendar reform of 1754, so it was John, not Sara, who was widowed. Hence no doubt, Sara’s separate little monument, made redundant by Patrick and Margrett’s later and grander retrospective memorializing but for some reason left standing.
    In the next generation the family fortunes were assured by intermarriage with three of the fourteen great merchant families known as the Tribes of Galway. Rickard married Joan French of Spiddal (An Spidéal, a village nine miles west of Galway), a sister married George Morris (one of whose descendants, Lord Killanin , takes his title from the Parish of Cill Ainthín, west of Spiddle), and the second son Edmond married Annable, daughter of Richard Martin, the famous “Nimble Dick” who had obtained much of the vast territories confiscated from the O’Flahertys in Connemara and, although a Catholic, had been confirmed in possession of the largest directly owned estate in the Three Kingdoms .
    In 1713 Fox sold Aran to Edmond Fitzpatrick and Simon Digby, the Protestant bishop of Elphin, and Bishop Digby leased