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.