Patrick Comerford
As Donegal celebrates its 450th anniversary this year, I wonder whether any connections are being made with Donegal House in Lichfield. But Donegal House in Lichfield and Donegall Square in Belfast take their name not from the town and county in the north-west Ireland but from the family who lived for generations at Fisherwick Hall, 6 km (4 miles) east of Lichfield, and a similar distance north of Comberford and Tamworth.
The street patterns of central Belfast and their names date from the second half of the 18th century, and many of the names are derived directly from Arthur Chichester (1739-1799), 5th Earl of Donegall and later 1st Marquess of Donegal. He owned a quarter of a million acres in Ireland and was the principal landlord of Georgian Belfast. Yet he had his main residence at Fisherwick Hall, near Lichfield, where the gardens were laid out by Capability Brown.
I have had a long-standing interest in the Chichesters of Fishwerwick because Arthur Chichester bought Comberford Hall, including the Manors of Wigginton and Comberford, on 1 August 1789 from Thomas Thynne (1734-1796), Viscount Weymouth – who was about to become the 1st Marquis of Bath – and his son, Thomas Thynne.
Lord Donegall became the greatest landowner of his day in Ireland. His estates included 11,000 acres at Dunbrody, Co Wexford, almost 90,000 acres in Co Antrim, 160,000 acres in Co Donegal, the whole town of Belfast, and the townland of Ballynafeigh, Co Down, totalling over quarter of a million acres in all.
However, Arthur Chichester chose to live not in Ireland but at Fisherwick Hall near Lichfield. He tore down the Skeffington family’s old Tudor manor house, replacing it with a vast Palladian mansion set in a park of 4,000 acres, all designed and constructed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.
He was accused of ‘draining a manufacturing country of £36,000 a year and having raised fines’, paid by tenants to get leases, ‘sufficient to impoverish a province, and transported them out of the kingdom to build palaces in another land, where he is unknown and disregarded.’
Lord Donegall is said to have rebuilt Comberford Hall, replacing the original half-timbered Tudor manor house dating back to the late 15th century, at the same time as he rebuilt Fisherwick Hall. However, Mrs Valerie Coltman, who lived at Comberford Hall for many years, believed it is more likely that Comberford Hall was rebuilt more than 70 years earlier in 1720.
He also gave his name to Donegal House in Bore Street, Lichfield, although the house was built in 1730 by a local merchant James Robinson.
Within a year of buying Comberford Hall, Lord Donegall had raised £20,000 from the banker Henry Hoare, using the manors and lands of Comberford and Wigginton as security. In 1791, he received additional titles of Marquess of Donegall and Earl of Belfast in the Irish peerage and of Baron Fisherwick of Fisherwick, Staffordshire in the British peerage. The mortgages he raised on Comberford and other Staffordshire properties probably paid the fees and administrative costs involved in receiving these elevated titles.
Meanwhile, underneath the veneer of aristocratic splendour, domestic life for the Chichester family of Belfast and Fisherwick was in turmoil.
His eldest son, George Augustus Chichester (1769-1844), would eventually inherit the family titles as 2nd Marquess of Donegall and Earl of Donegall and Earl of Belfast. In his youth George was known as Lord Chichester, a courtesy title. At an early age, he developed a gambling addiction. One source says he ‘was licentious and profligate in proportion to his status and fortune.’
Arthur paid his son’s debts several times but eventually allowed him to be sent to the debtors’ prison. While in jail, George was offered financial assistance by Sir (James) Edward May (1751-1814), to secure his release in return for marrying his daughter Anna. May has been described as ‘a moneylender who also ran a gaming house’. He secured Lord Chichester’s release in 1795, and George was now obliged to return the obligation and marry Anna.
Five days before his 26th birthday, George Chichester married 18-year-old Anna May on 8 August 1795. But Anna was an illegitimate child and was also underage. In her circumstances, marriage required the consent of the Lord Chancellor and the permission given by her Welsh guardians was insufficient. Years later, the marriage was declared unlawful.
Anna’s father Edward May, had married Anna’s mother, Eliza Bagg in Saint George’s Church, Holborn, in 1773. But Eliza was already legally married. She was neither divorced nor widowed, and her first husband, a man named Lind, was living in the East Indies. Eliza May was never charged with bigamy, but their children – two sons and two – were deemed illegitimate.
George Chichester succeeded as 2nd Marquess of Donegall when his father died in 1799. He and Anna fled to Belfast in 1802 to escape his debtors once again and brought the May family with them, including Edward and Eliza and their four children.
Edward May became the agent for the Chichester family estates in Belfast. He was MP for Belfast in 1801-1814, was twice Sovereign (Mayor) of Belfast (1803-1806, 1809-1810), and in 1811 he also succeeded to the title of baronet first given to his father in 1763.
As Sir Edward May, he pioneered land reclamation on the edges of Belfast Lough, and gave his name to Edward Street, Great Edward Street, which merged with Victoria Street, May Street, May’s Dock and May’s Market. On his orders, the gravestones and memorials in Saint George’s Churchyard were destroyed or removed in 1806 and large parts of the graveyard were sold off in 1811 for the development of Church Lane and Ann Street.
When May died on 23 July 1814, it emerged that Eliza and Edward had not been legally married and that Eliza was a bigamist. All their children were deemed illegitimate, including their younger son, the Revd Edward May, who had become the Vicar of Saint Anne’s, Belfast, only weeks after his ordination in 1809.
The elder son, Stephen Edward May, had taken his father’s seat as MP for Belfast in 1814. He also presumed he had succeeded as the third baronet and was styling himself Sir Stephen Edward May. But in the eyes of the law, he had been born out of wedlock and the title was removed from him. Feeling he had been shamed publicly, he resigned as MP and the title reverted to his uncle, Sir Humphrey May, as the third baronet.
The revelations about the May bigamy also meant that Anna May, Lady Donegall, was illegitimate. In addition, she had been underage when she married, and it emerged in 1815 that under the terms of legislation in 1753 her marriage was invalid. Not only was she under-age when she married, but the marriage was under special licence without calling banns, and her marriage had not received the consent of the Lord Chancellor.
The couple’s adult children now faced being cut out of the succession to the Chichester family titles and estates in Ireland and in England and being disinherited. The eldest son, who had been using the courtesy title of Earl of Belfast, became plain Mr George Chichester.
Lord Belfast failed in his efforts to sort out his legal position in the consistory court and in chancery, and the Lord Chancellor referred the case to the House of Lords in 1821. The case was not heard, but a Marriage Act amendment bill in 1822 retrospectively legalised past formal breaches of the marriage laws, and finally Lord Belfast’s legitimacy was resolved 27 years after his parents’ irregular and forced marriage.
Celebratory dinners were held in Belfast and other places in August and September. On 8 December 1822, he married Lady Harriet Butler (1799-1860), a daughter of Richard Butler (1775-1819), 1st Earl of Glengall. She had been partly brought up by the Empress Josephine in France, she had a fiery temper and the couple were known as ‘Bel and the Dragon’.
Lord Belfast came to a new, but ultimately disastrous, financial arrangement with his father, and the Chichester properties in Belfast were sold in a vain attempt to ward off mounting debts.
His father, the 2nd Marquess of Donegall, died in 1844, aged 75, and Lord Belfast succeeded as the 3rd Marquess of Donegall. But by then, the debts of father and son had mounted to over £400,000 – the equivalent of about £64 million today. He had already lost control of almost all his property and influence in Belfast, and now saw the town sold off forcibly through the encumbered estates court in 1850. He died in October 1883. Both his sons had died before him, and his titles and remaining estates passed to his brother, Lord Edward Chichester (1799-1889), Dean of Raphoe.
Meanwhile, when the 1st Marquess of Donegall died in 1799, Comberford Hall and his other Staffordshire estates, including Fisherwick, again heavily mortgaged, passed to a younger son, Lord Spencer Stanley Chichester (1775-1819). He also inherited Dunbrody Abbey, Co Wexford, with a townhouse in Saint James’s Square, London, 20,000 acres on the Inishowen Peninsula in Co Donegal, the townland of Ballymacarrett, Co Down, the lands through which the Lagan Canal passed … and the family’s Gainsborough portraits.
But Spencer Chichester’s gambling debts also caught up with him. In 1801, he sold some of his lands in Lichfield, Alrewas, Whittington, Wichnor, Comberford, Coton, Tamworth and Hopwas, including two public houses and various burgage tenements in Lichfield, to the Lane family of King’s Bromley.
By January 1805, Spencer Chichester was seeking legal opinion on his title to the Manor of Comberford and Wigginton. Eventually, he was forced to sell Fisherwick, where the great house was demolished. This branch of the Chichester family, crippled by the gambling debts of profligate sons, found it impossible to pay off their loans, and were forced to sell Comberford Hall and the manorial rights and lands that went with it.
Lord Spencer Chichester’s son, Arthur Chichester, was given the title of Baron Templemore in 1831, and his branch of the family eventually inherited the Donegall titles.
Athur Chichester of Fisherwick, Marquis of Donegall, and many of his family members are remembered to this day in street names throughout the city centre in Belfast.
Arthur Street, Arthur Place, Arthur Lane, Arthur Square and Upper Arthur Street take their name from Arthur Chichester.
Chichester Street leads from Donegall Square east to Victoria Street, and then onto Oxford Street. Chichester Avenue, Chichester Close, Chichester Court, Chichester Gardens, Chichester Park and Chichester Road are off Antrim Road.
Fisherwick Presbyterian Church … moved from Fisherwick Place to Malone Road in 1901 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)Fisherwick Place takes its name from Fisherwick Hall near Lichfield. It is a small street running from Great Victoria Street to College Square, and the corner with Howard Street is dominated by Church House, the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
Church House stands on the site of Fisherwick Place Presbyterian Church, which was founded in 1823. When Church House was built on the site, the church moved to a site on Malone Road, and the new church opened as Fisherwick Presbyterian Church in 1901.
Marquis Street was originally known as Ferguson’s Lane after the family of Sir Samuel Ferguson, the Belfast-born lawyer and poet. Its name was changed in deference to the Marquis of Donegall.
The name Donegall appears in several places in Belfast, including Donegall Square, Donegall Road, Donegall Place, Donegall Gardens, Donegall Lane and Donegall Parade.
But it is worth noting tha the spelling of the name throughout Belfast is with two Ls, the way the Chichester family spelt it in their titles since the 17th century.
When the first Marquess of Donegall built a new church in Belfast, he named its Saint Anne’s Church in honour of his first wife, Lady Anne Hamilton, daughter of the Duke of Hamilton, whom he married in 1761. It has since been replaced by Saint Anne’s Cathedral.
Charlotte Street and Little Charlotte Street, in a loyalist heartland off Donegall Pass, are named after either his eldest daughter, Lady Charlotte Anne Chichester, who was born in 1762 and died in infancy, or his second wife, the widowed Charlotte (née Spencer) Moore. They were married on 24 October 1788, she had no children and she died less than a year after their marriage, on 19 September 1789.
The name of My Lady’s Road near Ormeau Road is intriguing. When the 2nd Marquis of Donegall went to live at Ormeau House about 1807, the former Anna May did not appreciate the journey along a row of dilapidated cottages with broken windows. A special way was made for Lady Donegall and became known as My Lady’s Road. Ormeau Avenue and Ormeau Road take their name from Ormeau House.
Templemore Avenue, Close, Park, Place and Street and the Templemore Baths in East Belfast take their name from the title held by Lord Spencer Chichester’s descendants. But during last weekend’s visit, I never managed to visit Lichfield Avenue, off Bloomfield Road in East Belfast.
