The Latin Question

From the Montgomery Manuscripts. The Montgomerys were
Scottish settlers in County Down,
some of whose lands made their way to
Harriett Wombwell.
The manuscripts abound with Latin references.

The thesis of the younger John Hadzor provides a further interesting insight into the linguistic context of the story and is a salutary reminder that Latin remained the international language of the European academic world, and was used as the language of diplomacy as well as in the Roman Catholic liturgy. 

Once Henry VIII had successfully nationalised the church however, things were to change, and it was not long before Latin was banned, and translations were made over time of all relevant texts and procedures into English, most famously with the King James Bible. There were also however Welsh, Irish, and even Cornish versions of the Bible produced, all causing friction of one kind or another.  

The oddity of all of this was that whilst it was an operating principle of the Protestant establishment to remove Latin from the religious sphere, the language was to be maintained with fierce dedication in other arenas, for which there was certainly a convincing rationale whilst it maintained its status as a common language for scientists, academics, and diplomats.

As time went by however, Latin simply disappeared as a functional language, making it even more interesting to consider why the British continue to this day to teach the language in public schools.  

A clue is offered in the manuscripts of the Montgomery family, whose general distaste for the native Irish and Anglo-Normans were discussed in an earlier entry. Their fondness for Latin quotation and reference is inescapable and the mark of a family for whom Latin is a badge of education and culture, all at a time when the British were reinventing their identity as inheritors of the ancient Greek and Roman civilisation. 

This however was not really the problem. The issue at stake is that families like the Montgomerys with their dismissal of the 'mere Irish' and the 'degenerate' Anglo-Normans, had adopted a colonial mindset, in which knowledge of Latin, the poetry of Virgil, and the campaigns of Caesar were of far more import than the living language, culture and traditions of the people who actually lived on their lands. 

The results of the linguistic politics of the day were to lead to the extinction of Cornish, and an elimination of the languages of Ireland, Wales and Scotland to the point where the majority of the people living there would no longer be able to speak their own native language. Once the British managed subsequently to oversee the transformation of English into a global lingual franca, there was little perceived need for mastery of other languages either. 

This linguistic hegemony whilst convenient unfortunately laid the foundation for the development of a monolingual and subsequently monocultural outlook that would fatally compromise the integration of the British into the European Union.

To cut a long story short, we can safely assume that the services held in the Downpatrick Church of Ireland with the later Hadzors in attendance would have been conducted entirely in English. 


The fanciful notion meanwhile – that the British were somehow direct heirs of the ancient Greek and Roman intellectual legacy – is conveyed somewhat in the given Christian name of one of those very Downpatrick church-goers, Dr. Seneca Hadzor, the great-grandfather of Harriett Wombwell. 

The Children of Lieutenant John Hadzor

The four children of Lieutenant John Hadzor and Susanna O’Eana were:

i. Betsy Hadzor
ii. Mary Hadzor
iii. Rose Hadzor. Rose died in 1816 and is recorded in Blackwood as having married a Thomas Potter. He was born in 1743, died in 1785, and was buried in Killinchy (Blackwood).
iv. John Hadzor 

Downpatrick Church of Ireland Parish Church (St Margaret’s). Frequented by the Hadzor and West families.  

© Copyright Albert Bridge and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. Copied from: http://www.geograph.ie/photo/517321

It should be pointed out in passing that the names and spellings of names vary throughout the records. In particular, Susanna seems to be used as an alternate version of Juana. In this story, we have kept to ‘Susanna’ throughout, and regardless. 

With that in mind, the only one of the children for whom further information is available is John Hadzor junior, who followed his father into the medical profession, studying at Edinburgh University, an opportunity that his father had no doubt spotted whilst serving on the garrison at Edinburgh Castle. John Junior's thesis is still in the archive of the University and was grandly entitled Dissertatio medica inauguralis, de ventriculi inflammatione.  

He graduated as M.D. in 1753, and died in Downpatrick in 1763. He was buried at Downpatrick Parish Church on the 11th April.

No more is known of the line of Lieutenant John Hadzor, beyond what can be gleaned from his final will and testament.

Lieutenant John Hadzor's Final Campaigns

Between 1735 and 1739, Lieutenant John Hadzor would have been in the garrison at Edinburgh castle casting a wary eye over the ever unreliable Scots. The next major engagement for the regiment was at the battle of Dettingen in 1742, in which the British allied with Hanover and Hesse to defeat the French. George II led the troops, the last time a British monarch was ever personally to enter battle.

1745 saw the regiment in action at the Battle of Fontenoy of which the best that can be said is that the British, Dutch and Hanoverian alliance made an orderly retreat. For their French opponents, the battle represented revenge for their defeat at Dettingen. 

The British in any case had more pressing and urgent business to attend nearer home in the shape of another Jacobite rebellion. John's last campaign therefore took him back to Scotland to the Battle of Culloden in 1746, where the rising of Bonnie Prince Charlie was brought to an unceremonious end to be followed by a suppression of Gaelic language, culture and the Clan system, not dissimilar to that witnessed earlier in Ireland. Shortly after John was replaced as regimental surgeon by James Grainger, as reported in a study of Grainger's own life and work by John Gilmore.

As we see, the John Hadzor who returned to Downpatrick was a British gentleman, and fully entitled to wear a sword. The Hadzors had come full circle, and their Anglo-Norman roots and identity and history of rebellions though alive in the memory no doubt, were very much to be consigned to history. 

Lieutenant John Hadzor in Gibraltar

Lieutenant John Hadzor was born around 1695, just five years after the Battle of the Boyne, and died in 1749. He married Susanna O’Eana, whose surname is native Irish and further suggestive of a family that had transitioned from Catholicism into The Church of Ireland. 

John, however went further still, and in 1712, he embarked on a long-term career in the British Army, completing his service in 1746 as regimental surgeon in Colonel Pulteney's Regiment of Foot (aka the Somerset Light Infantry). The regimental records make it relatively easy to track John’s career:

John’s first commission was as an Ensign in the garrison at Gibraltar, where the regiment was stationed from 1711-1728 without home leave. Gibraltar was formally ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and John may have been active in helping resist the Spanish siege in the first six months of 1727. 

Three hundred years since John Hadzor served in Gibraltar, final agreement has still not been reached on the status of the territory. What prevented Gibraltar going the same way as many crown territories and becoming self-governing and even independent remained and remains a clause in the Utrecht treaty, stating that should the UK give up Gibraltar, it must be ceded back to Spain. 

Much of the heat generated by the Gibraltar issue was removed with membership of the European Union and the opening of the land border with Spain in 1985. What would happen to Gibraltar and its border in the event of the UK leaving the EU was given the same amount of consideration by the leave campaigners as they gave to the border in Ireland. In other words, no consideration. In the referendum, 96% of Gibraltar voted 96% to remain in Europe.

The border between Spain and Gibraltar was problematic from the start, and the British naturally took an interest in North Africa just across the straits, as illustrated by books of the time by Captain Braithwaite and John Windus. Both books contain a detailed list of original subscribers, and in both cases, the subscribers include John Hadzor, who was evidently a man of education, and erudition as well as surgical skill. There is every chance of course that during the regiment's long stay in Gibraltar that John would have been involved in such excursions to North Africa as the British sought to secure the straits for their own strategic purposes.


John Hadzor's stay in Gibraltar neatly coincides with the reign of George I (1714-1727), the first Hanoverian King. who came to the throne on the basis of being the nearest Protestant in the line of succession to the Crown. 

The facts that in blood terms George was actually 52nd in line and could not speak English did not prove to be an impediment, as citizenship tests were not on the contemporary agenda. The key point was that he was not Catholic. In 2011, a revision of the law generously conceded that the British Monarch could from now on marry a Catholic. As for the monarch himself or herself being anything other than the the Head of the Church of England, that remains in 2017, yet another theocratic obsolescence in the British constitution.

The Hadzors of Downpatrick: A Tree

With the help of Blackwood and other sources, including the extant will of Lieutenant John Hadzor, the Hadzor family tree in Downpatrick looks something like this:

The John Potter who is named in Harriett Wombwell's auction proceedings for 1881, now emerges as a son-in-law of Dr. Seneca Hadzor. Elizabeth Hadzor and Godfrey West, who appear at the bottom of the tree, were Harriett Wombwell's grandparents.

Linen Hall Library, Belfast, July 2016

The Linen Hall library in Belfast dates from 1788, and houses a

Blackwood's page for Seneca Hadzor.

wealth of historical and archival information about Ireland. One unique collection to be found there is the Blackwood pedigrees, comprising over ninety volumes of handwritten family trees and notes painstakingly put together by Reginald Blackwood (died 1961), a former Director of the Library. 

The records have never been digitilised, and it would seem that the only way to gain access to them is to head to Donegall Square and examine them in person. What then emerges is truly a labour of love and dedication, and it was astonishing to find in one of the volumes, records that follow the Hadzor family of Downpatrick all the way through to Hetty Jane Owen’s grandmother, Maria Harriett Robinson.

A second outstanding resource is Ros Davies’ County Down website, which has collated a wealth of information about County Down. Records on Family Search, the Mormon Salt Lake City genealogy database have provided further detail, and together all these sources and others to be provided in due course have helped put together the tale of the Downpatrick Hadzors and related families.

It was of some comfort, sitting in the calm of Linen Hall Library to find that the problem of the relationship between Dr. Seneca Hadzor and Lieutenant John Hadzor had given Blackwood pause for thought. 

Twenty-seven years separate their respective births, and John was born seven years before Seneca Hadzor’s marriage to Ruth Bankes in 1702. This led Blackwood who had originally put down John as a son of Seneca to append a note, querying whether he might not actually be a brother. If so, the answer would probably be that he was a half-brother, from a previous marriage of Seneca’s father. An alternative of course would be that Blackwood had it right the first time and that Lieutenant John Hadzor was indeed Seneca's son, but from a previous marriage.  

Both Seneca and John were doctors, both served in the British army in Gibraltar, and both lived in Downpatrick. It is quite impossible to suppose that they were not extremely closely related.

Seneca Hadzor and Ruth Bankes

From the County Down Vestry Records.

The earliest record of the Hadzors in Downpatrick dates back to 1704, when Seneca Hadzor was a churchwarden at the Downpatrick Church of Ireland. He married Ruth Bankes at Lisburn Cathedral, County Antrim in 1702, and hence may not have originally been from the Downpatrick area. 

Whatever branch of the family they were from though, the Downpatrick Hadzors had at some point nailed their colours to the Protestant and new English cause. The recorded children are almost all daughters, who married on into other families, and by the nineteenth century, the Hadzor name and their Anglo-Norman origins had faded into the background. 

From the perspective of this family history however, it is Seneca Hadzor and Ruth Bankes who mark the start of the direct line down through to Hetty Jane Owen, the wife of Charles Albert Eldridge.

The Dust Settles

12th July re-enactment of the Boyne in Bangor, 2015.
From the BBC

The Hadzor family had by the end of the seventeenth century by and large ruined themselves, first by resisting any type of English monarchical authority, and then by throwing their fortunes behind the Catholic and Jacobite cause. There are records of Hadzor family members choosing exile in France and Spain, of emigration to the USA, and of name-changes. 

For those branches that remained, and there were not many, it would seem that some took the pragmatic option of adopting the Protestant faith, and switching their allegiance to the English establishment, sincerely or otherwise. Indeed, the foundation of The Church of Ireland, represented a specific compromise or ruse intended to achieve exactly this through developing a new establishment that was Protestant in theory, but maintained favoured elements of Catholic observance along with an Irish name. It had taken a good five hundred years from when they first arrived, but from now on they were to behave themselves as good and loyal participants in the Protestant Ascendancy. The tale will be picked up in Downpatrick.

The Battle of the Boyne

The Battle of the Boyne. By Benjamin West Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2970408

The death of Oliver Cromwell, and the restoration of the monarchy under the slightly lighter touch of the hedonistic Charles II followed. The conflict was far from being done and dusted, however. Charles was exceptionally prolific in providing his mistresses with children, but not his wife. The heir to the throne thus continued to be his younger brother, James, an avowed Catholic. James came to the throne in 1685, and was to rule until 1688. The final straw for the rebellious English establishment was when James produced a male heir. As far as they were concerned, the entire Protestant establishment was now under threat. Such were the complexities of denominational politics of the time that the daughter of James – Mary, was herself a Protestant, and married into the Dutch Royal Family to William of Orange, himself a Protestant, albeit from a somewhat different dissenting tradition. The English Establishment, for whom overthrowing monarchs had become something of a habitual pastime, sensed an an opportunity, and in another extraordinary decision effectively invited William to invade their own country (not that William was not already willing and prepared). 

James was overthrown and initially fled to France before sensing an opportunity to revive his fortunes by taking the fight to Ireland. He landed there in 1689. The Irish parliament persuaded James to declare a bill of religious freedom for both Catholics and Protestants, as James attempted to build up his forces. William noted the threat, and acted decisively. The English army once more crossed the Irish Sea.

Three Hadsors of the Dublin branch of the family felt encouraged enough by the dispute to join the Jacobite cause, and yet again their optimism was misguided. The final showdown came at the Battle of the Boyne on July 1st, 1690, and there a Lieutenant James Hadsor met his end. 

Two other Hadzors were also involved in this final act - Richard and Thomas. Both were subsequently charged with high treason. 

The Battle of the Boyne brought an era to a close. It is perhaps something of an irony that the break with Europe as initiated by Henry VIII, now required a European intervention in the shape of the Dutchman, William of Orange, to preserve it, but the facts are as they are. James II was the last Roman Catholic Monarch of England, and his attempt to reverse the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, collapsed on that fateful day by the Boyne river. With the wisdom of hindsight, the English parliament passed a bill stating that no Roman Catholic could from now on ascend to the throne, nor be married to a Catholic. It took over two centuries for the latter provision to be relaxed. 

The former ruling still stands in all its glorious antiquity and absurdity as we continue to discuss the future of the United Kingdom.

The Glorious Revolution and Battle of Boyne are celebrated to this day on July 12th on Orangeman's Day in a commemoration that has its own long and controversial history, yet another example of how whilst the Irish cannot forget history, the English by and large cannot remember it.

Writing in the Independent back in 1992, and with remarkable prescience, Johnathan Israel puts the case that the so-called Glorious Revolution was not much more than a quick and fairly bloodless foreign invasion that has been portrayed as if were a carefully considered parliamentary decision and yet another great moment on the march to democracy. He concludes as follows:

No, what has happened here seems to be the most glaring example of the harm done by our traditionally insular approach to so-called 'British' history, which is rarely studied with anything like adequate reference to Scotland, Ireland and the American colonies, let alone continental Europe.

The deeply ingrained and undiminished segregation of 'British' - in reality English - history from European history, which pervades its teaching and study in our schools and universities creates a narrowness of vision that has become a powerfully constricting cultural factor. The basic assumption is that everything important in British history can be explained in terms of British causes. But it is an assumption which, as the story of the Glorious Revolution and its interpretation shows, is a fallacy.

John Hadzor's Castle.

Maghernacloy Castle today. From:
The Buildings of Ireland Web.

In around 1618, the 3rd Earl of Essex granted John Hadsor of Keppok lands around Moymuck, lands that just so happened to have belonged previously to the MacMahon clan. Maghernacloy Castle was built on these lands, very possibly by John himself. It would seem that the Hadzors and Macmahons were still in some kind of alliance, in so much as they agreed that whatever their own differences might have been, they were nothing as compared to the breach between themselves and their common enemy, the English government.   

Maghernacloy castle as it turned out was just one of the Hadsor possessions that would pass into Cromwellian ownership. According to article on the Duchas website, it was the Macmahons who were in possession when the final assault came. They refused to surrender until the upper story had been destroyed by cannon fire. The article continues to report that:

Before the chieftain surrendered he packed all his wealth of money and valuables in a chest and had it drawn by two bulls to a well known as the Lughbawn and thrown in. It is told that in later years a few people collected with grappling irons and chains and tried to recover the hidden treasure. When they got the chest up to the water level a little man riding a white horse came galloping past attracting the men's attention. They let the chest slip back into the well, and it has never been recovered since. People in the locality still tell of steps that ascended the stone stairway at night and a light that moved along the roof,and other strange disturbances which continued until the intruder was confined to a room and the door built up.

http://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4723811/4715543

In such ways did Irish lands transfer themselves from the native Irish clans to the English aristocracy, back to the Anglo-Norman families and through the Irish back to the English colonists.

The Hadzors meet Cromwell

Whilst the Catholics have never forgotten Cromwell's brutality,
the Protestants recall the massacres of 1641 when the Irish rebels
turned on the settlers.  Image: Stuart Caie/Flickr

Whilst John Hadsor prepared to take up arms against the Crown, his elder half-brother Richard Hadsor had come to completely different conclusions about what course the future was likely to take. He went to London and became a Middle Temple lawyer. With his first-hand knowledge of the Irish scene, he was soon to find himself in Whitehall, and eventually elevated to the lofty position of Crown Counsel for Academic Affairs. From this position, he sought moderate and more political solutions to the quandary, solutions that by all means acknowledged English rule but also maintained the special status of the Anglo-Normans Irish. Hadsor pleaded for better governance, for openness to the idea that Catholics could also be loyal British citizens, and more. He died in 1635, still a loyal servant of the crown his half-brother, John, was shortly to engage in battle with.

Divided amongst themselves, and even within their own families, it is difficult to see how in the long-term the post 1641 Anglo-Norman government could ever have sustained itself against the assault that was bound to come once the English had dealt with their own internal affairs. When that assault finally arrived in 1649 under the personal command of Oliver Cromwell, it was of a ferocity, scale, and ruthlessness that even the Irish could not have expected. The massacres at Drogheda and Wexford have been etched into Irish memory ever since, but were only two of many brutal sieges and battles in which mercy was not a watchword. The defeat was total and utter, and by the time the campaign finally came to an end in 1652, the population of Ireland had been reduced by at least 20%. The Catholics were stripped of their lands, in many cases exiled, in some cases executed, and even banned from practising their religion. Before the wars, Irish land ownership had stood at 60%. It was now down to 20%. Such is the dark context to the origins of Harriett Wombwell’s Irish lands.

John Hadsor was one of those whose lands were unceremoniously appropriated, and it is thought that he was exiled to Connacht. It was not exactly the outcome that Richard Hadsor had so assiduously devoted his career to achieving, and possibly a blessing that he did not live to see it.

The 1641 rebellion

Charles I on the Scaffold, 1649

And so Henry VIII, the first King of Ireland, was succeeded by Edward VI who was to seal the fate of Lady Jane Grey, by making her his successor. Lady Jane resisted all final attempts to make her pledge allegiance to Catholicism, and her head was duly removed from her shoulders. Mary restored the Catholic order and was able to spend at least some years in supervising the burning of heretics at the stake. Her sister, Elizabeth, when she acceded wasted little time in reversing the equation and re-establishing the new Protestant order. In the person of James I, the crowns of England and Scotland were united, and on his death, Charles I inaugurated his own policy of trying to impose Anglican orthodoxy across his three kingdoms. Not all the English establishment however shared the convictions of Charles regarding the divine right of Kings. And thus it was that in 1649, yet another head was to topple off the executioner's block. It had been rather an eventful period.

English policy towards the Irish remained relatively consistent throughout these years coupling military measures against the Irish with attempts to change the demographics of the island through colonization from both England and Scotland.

The old Anglo-Normans of Ireland, watched and waited and considered. Nothing was certain, nothing can have seemed entirely irrevocable. Was it better to side with the new monarchy, and traipse obediently on a Sunday to the Church of Ireland, or was there still hope that the old order would reassert itself, and Catholicism triumph? And what with new settlers and colonists being transplanted across the water, was there any hope of survival if some resistance was not mounted? 

The Hadzor family members would have been asking the same questions, but not necessarily finding the same answers. In the case of John Hadsor of Maymuck and Cappoge, the only remedy he could see was in rebellion. He signed up to the Irish Catholic Confederation and took part in the great Irish rebellion of 1641. For just a short period, the old families were to be back in control of their own affairs, and free to practise their own religion.  

The murders and massacres however that had formed the accompaniment to the debate left scars on all sides that were not to be so easily healed. Shortly after Sir Henry Tichborne broke free of the 1642 rebel siege of Drogheda, the government forces stormed their way into Slane castle, slaughtering the inhabitants. One young lady had her unborn baby cut from her womb and, for good measure, dashed against the castle walls. This was Katherine Fleming, the wife of 'Hadsor of Cappoge.' 

For John Hadsor, the omens were not propitious. 

A Sectarian Divide

Saul Church in County Down. Some of our  ancestors lived in Saul, and were practising members of the Church of Ireland. 

 By Man vyi - Own work (own photo), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1129742

It is safe to assume that Henry VIII was not overly concerned about whether the native Irish population themselves wished to secede from the European project of the day (Does this strike a contemporary chord?). Nor in fact was he particularly interested in the opinions of the old Anglo-Norman families of Ireland. However,  ever pragmatic, he could see that in dissolving the monasteries he would reap considerable resources with which to replenish what was a considerably impoverished treasury.

The Irish and Anglo-Irish were also now to be divided by denomination. It is from this point more or less that the Protestant Ascendancy commences, together with the broad association of Protestantism with the English, and Catholicism with the native Irish.

In its attachment to Rome for spiritual guidance and instruction, Western Christianity had always had a European dimension, exemplified most powerfully perhaps in the Crusades. Henry however, now sought to co-opt religion into a nationalist paradigm that would be essentially English in character and application.

It is hardly surprising that this new and radical departure was to meet resistance, not only from those who did not consider themselves to be English in the first place, but also from those who found it difficult to grasp how the spiritual heir of St. Peter could simply be arbitrarily replaced by an English monarch, who had, in effect, decided to establish his own personal theocracy.

There were those, and some of the Hadsor family members were amongst their number, who found -when not recycling their enemies' corpses into dog-food, and enjoying evenings of Irish music and drinking parties with the McMahons - that the new order proposed by the English was not necessarily to their taste. And so we meet our second John Hadsor.