The Choices of Seneca Hadzor

English army lists and commission registers, 1661-1714

Dr. Seneca Hadzor has already been noted for his service in the Downpatrick Church in 1704. Just one other record has been located, listing his promotion to lieutenant in 1710 in Nicholas Price's Regiment of Foot. This regiment went to Spain in 1711, and most probably therefore also to Gibraltar. The regiment was disbanded in 1712, and perhaps Seneca Hadzor returned home at this point. He would have been forty-four years old at this time. For just a very brief period, his service may have overlapped with that of Lieutenant John Hadzor. Whether John was his son or his brother, it must have been Seneca who was responsible for setting John up for his long career in the British army. Seneca lived on to 1746, and was around seventy-eight years old when he died. He was old enough to have seen and understood the fall-out from the Battle of the Boyne. Doubtless, he had also absorbed the implications of the Hadzor deaths in battle, the confiscations of property, and the accusations of treason they had faced. His conclusion was that the days of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland were over, and that it was time to bow down and integrate into the new order. And there can hardly have been a better way of doing this than by becoming loyal servants of the British military establishment.