William St Leger

Sir William St Leger (1586–1642) was an Anglo-Irish landowner, MP, official and soldier, active in Ireland.

Birth and origins[]

William was born in 1586, probably in County Cork, a son of Sir Warham St Leger and his wife Elizabeth Rothe. His father was a son of William St Leger and a grandson of Anthony St Leger, Lord Deputy of Ireland. That Anthony had come to Ireland from Kent, England, in 1540. His mother's family was from Kilkenny. It was her third marriage. She was widow of Humphrey Mackworth and of Henry Davells.^[1]

Tyrone's Rebellion[]

In 1600, during Tyrone's Rebellion, also called the Nine Years' War, his father with some English cavalry intercepted Hugh Maguire also accompanied by a small group of horsemen. The two leaders engaged each other in single combat. Fermanagh slew William's father but died on the same day of his wounds.^[4] William was 14 at the time.

Flight of the Earls[]

Despite being Protestant St Leger took part in the Flight of the Earls in 1607, when Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O'Donnell, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, together with more than ninety of their family and followers, the chief of the Gaelic and Catholic resistance in Ireland, fled to Europe. He later said that his involvement in the flight was accidental, in that he had sought the protection of Tyrone from legal proceedings being taken against him, and fled with him because he had nowhere else to go. St Leger spent several years abroad, living firstly in Brussels, Spanish Netherlands, Hugh had first gone. He then separated himself from the exiled earls and went to the Dutch Republic where he established himself at Dordrecht.

Marriages and children[]

St Leger married Gertrude de Vries at Dordrect in 1616. Her family was from the Rhineland.^[5] She and their two foreign-born children were naturalised in 1624.^[6] William and Gertrude had a son and a daughter.^[7] Later he married Gertrude Heywood with whom he had two sons.

1. William (died 1644), who fell in the Battle of Newbury fighting for the royalists^[8]
2. John (died 1696)

President of Munster[]

Having been pardoned by King James I and granted extensive lands in Ireland, he was appointed President of Munster by Charles I in 1627. He supported the arbitrary government of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, actively assisting in raising and drilling the Irish levies destined for the service of the king against the Parliament.

House of Commons[]

When Charles I summoned the Irish Parliament of 1634–1635, St Leger, already in his forties, stood for Cork County and was elected^[9] as one of its two "knights of the shire" as county MPs^[10] were then called.^[11] The Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth^[12] (the future Lord Strafford^[13]) asked to vote taxes: six subsidies of £50,000^[14] (equivalent to about £8,600,000 in 2020^[15]) were passed unanimously.^[16][17] The parliament also belatedly and incompletely ratified the Graces^[18] of 1628,^[19] in which the King conceded rights for money.^[20]

St Leger was re-elected for Cork County to the Irish Parliament of 1640–1649.^[b][24] Under Strafford's guidance the parliament unanimously voted four subsidies of £45,000^[25] (equivalent to about £8,200,000 in 2020^[15]) to raise an Irish army of 9,000^[26] for use against the Scots in the Second Bishops' War.^[27]

Irish wars and death[]

In 1642 when the great Irish Rebellion of 1641 reached Munster, he bore the chief responsibility for dealing with the insurgents in the province; but the forces and supplies placed at his disposal were utterly inadequate. St Leger was still struggling with the insurrection when he died at Cork on 2 July 1642.

Reputation[]

His reputation in the minds of Irish nationalist historians is that he executed martial law in his province with the greatest severity, hanging large numbers of rebels, often without much proof of guilt. In 1843 Daniel O'Connell quoted him as saying about the harsh policy adopted by the government in Dublin: "The undue promulgation of that severe determination to extirpate the Irish and papacy out of the kingdom, your Lordship rightly apprehends to be too unseasonably published"^[28] in a such sense that he approved of the policy of extirpation. O'Connell went on "This St. Leger was himself one of the chief extirpators".^[29] The quotation can also be read in another sense, in that St Leger's use of the words "undue", "severe" and "too unseasonably" point to his disapproval of such a policy. As a landowner, St Leger's Irish property would have been worthless without Irish labourers and tenant farmers to work on it.

In terms of geography, his reputation for cruelty in Munster (a whole province) is actually limited to a small area near Clonmel in early December 1641 where his force did kill several dozen people without due process, which led on to the killings in revenge of English or Protestant people in the same area. Whether St Leger ordered or approved of the murders by his force is unproven. Why he would want to provoke such an uprising in Munster, where 90% of the population was Irish and Catholic, and where Protestants like him numbered less than 10%, is still unclear.^[30][31]

William married twice and had 6 children. Sir William's daughter Elizabeth, by his first wife Gertude de Vries of Dordrecht, married Murrough O'Brien, 1st Earl of Inchiquin; his son John was father of Arthur St Leger, created Viscount Doneraile in 1703.

Notes, citations, and sources[]

Notes[]

Citations[]

Sources[]

External links[]

• "St. Leger, William (d.1642)" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
• Sir William St Leger - Family tree for Sir William St Leger by Nigel Batty-Smith
• Rebellion of 1641 in County Tipperary by Jim Condon