Patrick Comerford
A new book is always a pleasant present that brings a smile to my face. It is even more welcome when the book is unexpected and when it is signed by the author. And the pleasures are added to when I find that I am referred to a number of times in the text and that I am fully referenced in the citations and the footnotes.
José Antonio Peña Martínez worked for most of his life in the pharmaceutical, agro-chemistry and food technology sectors in Spain. But since he retired, he has concentrated on historical research, particularly focussed on Aragon and on his home town of Llíria, 25 km north-west of Valencia.
Over the past 20 years or so, he has written and published a series of historical studies and biographies, and his latest book is a study of the infamous ‘Rake of Rathfarnham’, Philip Wharton (1698-1731), who became Duke of Wharton and Earl of Rathfarnham. Wharton inherited the Rathfarnham Castle and neighbouring estates, including Knocklyon and Scholarstown, when his parents died in 1716. His property in England included a large estate at Winchendon near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, about 20 miles south of Stony Stratford, where I now live.
Philip Wharton also inherited his parents’ great influence and wealth, with an estimated income of £14,000 a year. But within less than a decade, while he was still in his early 20s, he had dissipated a heritage that had passed to him from the Loftus family.
Later, Philip Wharton married his second wife, Maria Theresa Comerford, in Madrid in 1726 – just three months after the death of his sadly neglected and abandoned first wife Martha Holmes and after a very public affair with Lady Mary Montagu (1689-1762). Maria Theresa’s mother was Henrietta Comerford, her father was Colonel Henry O’Beirne, an Irish colonel in the Spanish army, and her step-father was Major-General John Comerford (ca1665-1723), of Finlough in Loughkeen, Co Tipperary, of Waterford, and of Madrid.
Despite having converted to Catholicism when he married to Maria Theresa Comerford, Wharton founded a lodge of English Freemasons in Madrid in 1728. He continued his dissolute life, and his health broke down completely in the winter of 1730. He died a destitute in the Cistercian Monastery of Saint Bernard at Poblet, near Tarragona, at the age of 32 on 31 May 1731, and was buried in the church there the next day. At his death, all his titles, apart from that of Baron Wharton, became extinct.
Alexander Pope wrote of him in his first Moral Essay, probably noting Wharton’s death, in 1731:
Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,
Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise …
Wharton appointed his widow as his ‘universal heiress’. But there was nothing for the widowed duchess to inherit. Some time after her mother died in Madrid in August 1747, the former Maria Theresa Comerford moved to London, where she subsisted on a small Spanish pension.
She died at her house in Golden Square, Soho, on 13 February 1777, and was buried in Old Saint Pancras churchyard. There were no children to inherit her claims to her husband’s former wealth and titles in Ireland, including the estates and castles he had disposed of at Rathfarnham Castle, Knocklyon Castle and Scholarstown House. The south Dublin estates had been returned to the Loftus family ten years earlier in a legal victory in 1767.
I have long been interested in Philip Wharton and this duchess related to the Comerford family, and I have spoken about them in lectures organised by Rathfarnham Historical Society and Knocklyon History Society about 20 years ago.
In his new biographical study of Philip Wharton, José Antonio Peña Martínez is particularly interested in his role in establishing freemasonry in Spain and in the masonic symbolism on his tomb in Poblet, one of the largest and most complete Cistercian abbeys in the world.
I am hardly equipped to critically engaged with these aspects of Philip Wharton’s life, but I am pleased that substantive portions of the genealogical details take account of my papers 20 years ago in Rathfarnham and Knocklyon and on my biographical details of the former Maria Theresa Comerford on the Comerford Genealogy site.
José Antonio Peña Martínez has been interested in history and historical figures since childhood. His first book, Edeta. Our Iberian Past (2007), was followed by Llíria in the 13th Century (2008); Martin I the Humane, a King without an Heir (2010); The Compromise of Caspe. A Historical Perspective 600 Years Later (2014); Roger de Lauria, a Titan of the Seas (2016); Saint Teresa of Jesus Jornet Ibars. Her Historical Context (2018); Charles of Trastámara and Évreux. The First Prince of Viana (2019); and The Prince Without a Kingdom (2020), and Marie Curie. La cientifica en un mundo de hombres 2022.
His latest book, a new biography, El Misterio del Masón Enterrado en Poblet (The Mystery of the Mason Buried in Poblet), was published this year. Although I am not descended from Philip Wharton or his Comerford duchess, I am related to her Comerford stepfather. That side of the Comerford family continued to be engaged in Spanish politics and life well into the late 19th century.
Perhaps the exotic and eccentric life of her half-brother’s granddaughter, Doña Josefa Eugenia Maria Francisca Comerford MacCrohon de Sales or ‘Josefina’ de Comerford) (1794-1865), who was involved in Spanish political intrigues in the early 19th century. She was given the title of Condesa de Sales and is the one figure in the history of the Comerford family in Spain who stands out as a femme fatale. She might even make a good subject for another biographical study.
My school-level Spanish helped me to read this well-researched and delightfully illustrated book. book. The author José Antonio Peña Martínez thanks me for sharing my research with him. But I have been more than delighted to be in touch again with this Spanish dimension to my family history.
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