The town of Portarlington,
which lies on a bend in the River Barrow not far from the
border with neighbouring Co. Offaly, is now a quiet
backwater of Co. Laois. (Note, Co. Laois is also
known as Queen's Co. and Leix, and Co. Offaly is also
known as King's Co).
In
the last paragraph below, is mentioned the survival of
Portarlington's church records. After the revocation
in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, which had ensured
religious tolerance, French Protestant refugees flocked
to what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland in search of places in which they could live in
peace. One of the many places they settled was
Portarlington, and nowhere did their culture, religion
and language survive more tenaciously.
Portarlington was surrounded by bogs and forest and
therefore sufficiently isolated from the rest of the
countryside to maintain a separate identity.
Second, the settlement was large enough to be self-sufficient
and third, the place had a distinctive character in that
an astonishingly high proportion of its families were of
noble origin. The establishment of the French
communities took place at a time when, in another Irish
paradox, Roman Catholic Irish soldiers were fleeing to
France after the Jacobite defeat at the hands of King
William III, and it was one of William's senior
lieutenant's, the Huguenot Henri Massue, Marquis de
Ruvigny, later styled Earl of Galway, who got the
Portarlington project under way.
Portarlington had been laid out
for English settlers with a market square and four
streets leading from it. But the little town had
suffered severe damage during the war, and de Ruvigny
personally financed the construction of over 100 houses
of unique design. The entrances and gardens were to
the rear and blank walls faced the streets.
The first wave of French
immigrants arrived in 1692, many of whom were pensioned-off
soldiers and their families. Most came from the
officer class, which, at that time, was made up of sons
of noble families. There were six ensigns, one
cornet, 16 lieutenants, 12 captains and one lieutenant-colonel.
The most elegant and magnificent of all, with his
scarlet cloak and silver-buckled breeches was Robert
d'Ully, Vicomte de Laval, a man of the royal blood line
of King Henri de Navarre.
However, the nobles of that era
could hardly have been expected to fend for themselves,
and a second group of "labourers," 13 families
in all, arrived from the Swiss cantons where they had
taken refuge, and gave the colony a more balanced
character.
So by the start of the 18th
century the foundations of a lasting settlement were laid.
There were stories from visitors from neighbouring areas
of noblemen sipping a strange drink called :tea"
from china cups under trees in the village square; of the
wine of Bordeaux being favoured over the whiskey of the
surrounding countryside.
Henri Massue became the
undisputed leader of the Huguenot community in Britain
and Ireland and was directly involved in the settlement
of Portarlington in 1692.
A number of forces combined to
change the situation, too lengthy to go into here.
(Please read about high-church bishop William Moreton,
from England, and the minister of the Eglise Francaise de
St. Paul (Church of St. Paul), Reverend Benjamin de
Daillon, and army chaplain Antoine Ligenier de
Bonneval in your library reference books).
Suffice it to say, there was a
major split in the religious community which lasted
26 years, and the turning point came when 37 families
left for Dublin to worship at the French Calvinist
churches in the capital, where their distinct language
and customs were overwhelmed in a city which was quickly
growing to become of the populous in Europe.
Meanwhile, Portarlington was becoming increasingly
Anglican, and therefore, more an Anglo-Irish town.
Today, there are still Irish
and Catholic families in the county who bear names such
as Blanc and Champ, and families in other parts of the
province of Leinster, both Catholic and Protestant, whose
Huguenot forebears gave them names such as Dubois,
Perrin, Du Moulin and De Mange.
All that remains of the
Portarlington French connection now are its meticulous
records, a few of the old noble houses and an annual
French Festival at which the wine of Bordeaux is imbibed
in great quantities and snails and frog legs are eaten in
abundance.
Huguenots made a remarkable
contribution to Irish history. The less noble branches of
the immigration, notably the weavers who established the
Irish poplin industry, now vanished like the immigrants
themselves, contributed greatly to the economy of a
country which had been ravaged by more than half a
century of warfare prior to their arrival. Their
memory survives in a
county of moorland and bog, pasture and parkland, in the
heart of Ireland's Central Plain; a county of level land,
except in the northwest where the Slieve Bloom mountains
once housed rebel Gaelic chieftains.
Portarlington is now a
backwater marked by cooling towers of a peat-powered
electricity plant. The county town, Portlaoise (formerly
Maryborough) houses a giant prison, but the best place in
which to lock yourself away with the memories of the
French and their descendants is the town of Abbeyleix,
planned in the 17th century by the local landlord,
Viscount de Vesci, a nobleman of Norman descent.
Here you will find Morrissey's pub, one of the most
convivial and best-preserved bars in Ireland, a place to
raise a glass of Bordeaux to the French who have passed
on. Morrissey's bar and grocery was founded by E. J.
Morrissey in 1775. Almost all the old furnishings
remain. In 1876 an additional story was added to
the house and according to the manager in 1997,
John Lanigan, this was the last time the place was
touched.
Abbeyleix was the town in which
workers made the carpeting for the "Titanic."
There is evidently a new Huguenot memorial inscribed with
names in Dublin, as well as a Huguenot museum.
The records of Portarlington's
Eglise Francaise de St. Paul were kept in French from
their first entry in 1694, until finally being superseded
by English in 1816. Fortunately, these records were
retained locally rather than sent to the Public Record
Office in the Four Courts in Dublin, many of whose
priceless papers were destroyed in a fire during the
civil war in the 1920s.
As a result, more is known
about the French who peopled Portarlington than is known
of the Irish and Anglo-Irish who inhabited the rest of
the county.
This history was posted by Jean
Rice on IrelandGenWeb. Per "Irish Counties,"
by J. J. Lee.
Other Portarlington
web sites
HUGUENOTS IN
IRELAND
