The Wests of Downpatrick

Most accounts agree that the presence of the West family in Downpatrick dates from the grants of land given by Thomas Lord Cromwell to Captain Richard West in reward for services rendered. 

Arthur Dobbs (1689-1765) became Governor of
Northern Carolina. He was a great-great grandson of
Richard West

In the West family, we therefore have representatives of the New English Protestant colonial class in Ireland. The family seems to have spread quickly, and by the eighteenth century there were branches in Quoile, Ballydugan, and Clogher.  Of the former two branches, quite detailed research is extant. Of the third branch, the Clogher line, less is known.

The luminaries of the West family were powerful people. Richard West was High Sheriff for Down in 1610 and Member of Parliament for Downpatrick in 1613. His son, Major Roger West was also High Sheriff for Down in 1657. 

Roger’s son, Henry was part of William of Orange’s army and died in the assault on Limerick in 1690, part of William’s cleaning-up operation after the Battle of the Boyne. The Wests thus had distinguished careers in the military and in politics and married into other powerful families of the Protestant Ascendancy, whether New English or older Anglo- Norman families, such as the Savages, who had elected to conform to the new order. The 1641 rebellion and indeed the Jacobite resistance to William of Orange would furthermore have very much pitted members of the West Family and the Hadzor family against each other.