Four Victorian weddings and a funeral

Bellingham Castle is now a romantic wedding venue and hotel between Drogheda and Dundalk, and the 19 luxury bedrooms include the sumptuous Bute Suite that recalls one of those four society weddings over a century ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Four weddings and a funeral in one family circle provide telling stories of how Irish society was changing at the end of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, in the decades immediately before World War I and the Easter Rising in 1916.

The first wedding took place secretly in 1870, when Lady Blanche Noel (1845-1881) married her music teacher, the Irish-born Thomas Murphy. She was born Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Noel, at Exton Hall in Rutland on 25 March 1845, and at her baptism she was a godchild of Queen Victoria.

Her baptismal names illustrate how her parents were deeply influenced by the Tractarian movement. Her father, Charles Noel (1818-1881), second Earl of Gainsborough, was a prominent Whig politician who embraced Roman Catholicism in a very public conversion in 1850. Her mother, the former Lady Ida Hay, was a cousin of Queen Victoria and one of her bridesmaids; and her grandmother, Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence, was an illegitimate daughter of King William IV.

Lady Blanche and her sister, Lady Constance, were received into the Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX on New Year’s Day 1850. As a child, Blanche was schooled privately, learning Italian, French, German and Spanish, and some Latin and Greek, and travelling through Italy and Germany. After her mother’s death, she was left to her own teenage ways at the family home, Exton Hall. She sang in the choir in the family’s private chapel, and had daily music and signing lessons from Thomas Murphy, the young, tall, well-educated and handsome Irish-born organist in the chapel who was also the private music tutor to the Noel sisters.

In their hours together in the chapel after Matins and Vespers, Blanche and Thomas fell in love. Lord Gainsborough was aware of nothing until a visiting friend noticed their intimacy. In his indignant disapproval, one story says, he allowed the marriage to take place in his private chapel; another account says the couple eloped to London where they married, and that Blanche was disowned and disinherited by her father.

It is likely Gainsborough objected not because Murphy was Irish but because he was a commoner who brought no titles or estates into the family. Whatever his objections, Blanche and Thomas were married in the chapel at Exton on 6 March 1870. But one of Gainsborough’s conditions for consenting to the wedding in his chapel was that the couple should immediately leave England. The love-struck pair sailed for America and Blanche never saw her family again. There is little truth to the story that they travelled in the steerage compartment, and that when they arrived ‘she and Murphy bummed around New York. They had no money and hadn’t eaten for 24 hours. She sold her earrings for a loaf of bread and said it was the best meal she ever had.’

The couple settled in Bartlett, New Hampshire. There, Murphy taught music and French at a boys’ school and was the organist in a local church, while Blanche earned a reputation as a writer with magazine essays, short stories and travel logs. Gainsborough appears to have had regrets eventually about the way he treated his daughter. In 1874, he provided her with an annuity of £60, and invited her back to Exton Hall – if only she left her husband.

Blanche accepted the annuity but refused her father’s conditions for her return to Exton. She was not present for a second family wedding in the same chapel in 1874, when her sister Lady Constance (1847-1891) married a more acceptable Irishman, Sir Henry Bellingham (1846-1921). The Bellinghams were once a powerful and influential family in Co Louth, and for over 100 years, without interruption, a Bellingham sat in the Irish House of Commons as MP for the county. At Oxford, Sir Henry, who became the fourth baronet, became a friend of Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning, and while he was still in his 20s he made a very public conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1873, a year before his marriage.

Nor was Blanche present at a third family wedding in 1880, this time in Ireland. Her widowed brother, Charles Francis Noel (1856-1926), by then known as Viscount Campden, married Mary Elizabeth Dease in Coole, near Castlepollard, Co Westmeath. Unlike Blanche and her Irish husband, Charles and his Irish bride returned to live at Exton.

In New Hampshire, Blanche had a reputation for feeding and clothing local poor children. The couple had no children, and Blanche died just four days short of her 36th birthday after four days illness; she had remained a fervent Catholic all her life. Her funeral took place on 24 March 1881 in the Catholic Cathedral in Portland, Maine, and she was buried temporarily in a vault in the Calvary Cemetery before her body was brought back to England and buried beside her mother in the Noel crypt in Exton.

Gainsborough, who had remained a widower, died on 13 August 1881 a few days after Blanche had been reburied in the family crypt. On his deathbed, he agreed that Thomas should continue to receive Blanche’s small annuity. He was 62 and was buried beside his wife in the crypt. His titles and estates passed to his eldest son, Charles, who had married Mary Dease the previous year.

Thomas Murphy moved first into a boarding house and then to Boston, where he died on 11 October 1890. He was buried alone at Calvary Cemetery. His younger sister-in-law, Lady Ida Noel, who had become a nun as Mother Mary Emmanuel, also died that year. His other sister-in-law, Lady Constance Bellingham, died at Bellingham Castle a year later in 1891.

In 1895, Henry Belligham married his second wife, another prominent English Catholic, Lelgarde Harry Florence Clifton. But he still grieved Lady Constance, and in 1902, when a 200-year-old great royal oak at the castle gates fell in a storm he had it carved for the Calvary erected in her memory at the gates of Bellingham Castle.

The fourth society wedding in the family circle was celebrated in 1905, when Henry’s younger daughter, Augusta, married John Crichton-Stuart, fourth Marquess of Bute, then said to be the wealthiest man on these islands. The Princess Maud, a chartered steamer, took the guests across the Irish Sea to the harbour at Annagassan, Co Louth, for the wedding at Bellingham Castle. Even the bride’s sister Ida, who had become a nun in England as Mother Mary Emmanuel, was present at the wedding.

But when the wedding party and guests left as they had arrived, by steamer from Annagassan, the Edwardian world they left behind was falling apart, never to be put together again. Within a decade, World War I had broken out and the events were already in train that would lead to the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising in 1916.

Exton Hall remains the home of the Noel family; the chapel where Lady Blanche and Lady Constance married their Irish husbands is a unique Catholic niche in the country house wedding market in England. Bellingham Castle is now a romantic wedding venue and hotel between Drogheda and Dundalk, and the 19 luxury bedrooms include the sumptuous Bute Suite that recalls one of those four society weddings over a century ago.

This paper was first published as Chapter 47, ‘Four Victorian weddings and a funeral’ in Marriage and the Irish: A miscellany, edited by Salvador Ryan (Wordwell: Dublin, 2019, 283 pp), pp 163-165

A small church in Westmeath is a reminder of bygone Victorian values and marriages

Coole Church in Co Westmeath was built in 1841 by the Dease family … Mary Elizabeth Dease married the future Earl of Gainsborough here in 1880 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

When Mary Elizabeth Dease married an English aristocrat and cousin of Queen Victoria in the little church in the small village of Coole, near Castlepollard, Co Westmeath, on 2 February 1880, few of the local farmers and villagers could have realised that this was one of the great fashionable and social weddings that marked the beginning of the decline of the Victorian era.

It is a story that is interwoven intimately with the stories I told last week of the elopement of Lady Blanche Noel and her Irish-born music tutor Thomas Murphy in 1870, the wedding of Sir Henry Bellingham and Lady Constance Noel in 1874, and the grand society wedding of Ida Bellingham and the Marquis of Bute at Bellingham Castle in 1905.

Last Sunday [7 August 2016], three of us visited Longford to see the renovation and restoration of Saint Mel’s Cathedral. On our way back to Dublin, we stopped at Coole, where Mary Elizabeth Dease was married, and Turbotstown House, her family home at Coole on the road between Edgeworthstown and Castlepollard, about 12 miles north-west of Mullingar.

Mary Elizabeth Dease was married in her home church in 1880. It did not have the status of a parish church, but was a ‘chapel of ease’ built to serve her father’s estate, Turbotstown House, and the neighbouring shopkeepers, publicans, villagers, tenant farmers and estate workers.

It was a status symbol in the late 18th and early 19th century for the large estates in neighbouring counties of Meath and Westmeath to have their own estate churches at the castle gates. Following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Dease family of Turbotstown was not going to be outdone by their neighbours, such as the Pakenhams, Earls of Longford, who lived nearby at Tullynally Castle, the O’Reillys and Nugents of Ballinlough Castle, and the Levinge family of Knockdrin Castle.

A plaque to the Dease family in Coole Church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The Dease family lived at Turbotstown and the Coole area from before 1272, and claimed to be descended from the Celtic royal family of the Decies in Co Waterford who had migrated to Meath and Westmeath, with Saint Declan of Ardmore as their patron saint. They held on to their estates throughout the Penal Laws although they were Roman Catholics. The family included famed scholars, soldiers, priests and bishops. Thomas Dease, who was a founding member of the Irish College in Paris, later became Bishop of Meath (1621-1652). The present Turbotstown House occupies the site of an earlier castle marked on the Downe Survey Map of the area (1654-1656). In the following century, Dr William Dease was a founding member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in 1784.

As the fourth son in a large family, Garrett Dease may not have expected to inherit Turbotstown, but a series of coincidences, including a fall from a horse and a childless marriage, the family estates passed to him in 1771. He married into the family of Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh, and eventually when he died in 1790 Turbotstown House and the Coole estate were inherited by his son, Gerald Dease (1790-1854).

Gerald Dease probably brought the architect Francis Johnson (1760-1829) to Coole to redesign and rebuild Turbotstown House sometime after 1810. Johnson also designed the GPO in Dublin, the Chapel Royal in Dublin Castle and the Armagh Observatory. He was working nearby at Tullynally Castle at the time and so became involved in designing Turbotstown House too. The central rotunda is a device that Johnston included in a number of his designs for country houses at this stage of his career.

The main part of the house was built or rebuilt in 1810-1840, so work continued long after Johnson’s death. Turbotstown House is set back from the road in extensive mature grounds with a substantial complex of outbuildings to the rear and the west, the remains of a walled garden to the west and the main entrance gates and the remains of a gate lodge to the south.

This 19th-century country house is built in a Greek Revival style and retains its early character and form. It is a detached, three-bay two-storey country house, with a projecting single-bay entrance front with a raised parapet over it and a single-bay cut limestone tetra-style Greek Ionic entrance porch at the centre of the main façade. Above the entrance porch there is a central Wyatt window on the first floor.

With the restoration of Turbotstown Castle completed, Gerald Dease set about building a church on land he donated.

Inside the church built in Coole in 1841 by Gerald Dease (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The church Gerald Deasebuilt in Coole in 1841 is set back from the road, and is typical of the plain, T-plan chapels built in great numbers in the Irish countryside at the time of Catholic Emancipation (1829).

However, its design has slightly higher quality details, probably because of the patronage of the Dease Family. The round and segmental-headed openings are in contrast to the usual lancet or point-arched openings in churches of the same era in Co Westmeath and give the church a vaguely classical appearance.

The church has a two-bay nave and single-bay transepts to the east and the west (liturgical north and south). It is built of coursed rubble limestone over a chamfered dressed limestone plinth, with flush dressed limestone quoins to the corners.

There is a projecting cut-stone string course to the north (liturgical west) gable of the nave, and a cut-stone date plaque to the north face of the west transept. The segmental-headed openings to the east and west sides of the nave have dressed limestone surrounds and stained glass windows.

The main window in Coole Church commemorates the Dease family of Turbotstown House (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The round-headed opening to the nave gable has flush dressed stone surrounds and a stained glass window, with a round opening over the gable that has a chamfered limestone surround. The segmental-headed door-cases have flush dressed limestone surrounds and the replacement timber glazed doors have concrete canopies overhead.

The church was extensively renovated around 1976 by the parish priest at the time, Father Patrick Fagan. The pitched natural slate roofs, which were re-slated during those renovations, have over-hanging eaves with a wrought-iron cross finial above the entrance gable at the north or liturgical west end. The church remains an appealing small-scale mid-19th church, and retains its early character to the exterior despite extensive alterations in the 1970s.

When Gerald Dease died in 1854, Turbotstown House and the Coole estate were inherited by his eldest son, James Arthur Dease (1826-1874). James married Charlotte Jerningham, a cousin of Lord Stafford, and they had a large family of 12 children, 10 daughters and two sons.

James was only 48 when he died in 1874, and he never lived to see the wedding in the church in Coole on 2 February 1880 of his eldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth Dease (1855-1937), who married Charles Francis Noel (1856-1916), then known as Viscount Campden.

Charles was a brother of Lady Constance Noel, who married Sir Henry Bellingham of Bellingham Castle, Co Louth, in 1874, and of Lady Blanche Noel, who scandalised her father in 1870 when she eloped with her Irish-born music tutor, Thomas Murphy. When he married Mary Dease in Coole it was his second marriage: his first wife, Augusta Berkeley, had died at the birth of a daughter, Lady Agnes Noel, in 1877.

So this was the third Irish marriage among the Noel siblings. Their mother, the former Lady Ida Hay, had been a bridesmaid in 1840 when her cousin Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, and Mary Elizabeth’s parents-in-law caused a sensation when, at the height of the Tractarian Movement, they joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1850.

A year and a half after the wedding in Coole, the bride’s father-in-law, Charles George Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough, died on 13 August 1881, and Mary Dease became the Countess of Gainsborough as her husband succeeded to his family titles as 3rd Earl of Gainsborough. They lived at Exton Hall in Rutland, where Exton Park was the largest estate in England’s smallest county.

The Saint Matilda window in Coole Church commemorates Matilda (Maud) Naish (née Dease) and her family (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Mary Dease had nine younger sisters, including four who became nuns: Ida Mary (died 1930), Elizabeth Mary (died 1951), Mabel Mary (died 1939), and Kathleen Mary Dease (died 1936); two other sisters never married: Anna Marie, who died an infant in 1872, and Teresa, who died in 1924. The other three sisters who married were: Matilda Mary (Maud), who in 1884 married John Joseph Naish (1841-1890) of Ballycullen House, Askeaton, Co Limerick and Lord Chancellor of Ireland; Madeline Mary, who married Charles Liddell in 1894; and Alice Mary Dease, who married Philip Charles Chichester in 1915.

One of these unmarried sisters, Teresa Dease, continued living in Coole. There in 1905 she opened a school to train young girls as domestic servants. She later closed the school and on the same site started Saint Joseph’s Hospital for physically disabled boys in 1916.

The plaque in Culmullen Church commemorating Maurice James Dease VC (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2015)

Meanwhile, when the future Lady Gainsborough’s father, James Arthur Dease, had died in 1874, his estates were inherited by her young brother, his elder son, Major Gerald Dease (1854-1934), who was then only a 19-year-old.

The second son, Edmund Fitzlaurence Dease (1856-1934), who wrote the History of The Westmeath Hunt (1898), married Kate Murray from the Cork distillery family. Their son, Lieutenant Maurice James Dease (1889-1914), was educated at Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit public school in Lancashire. He was killed in one of the first battles of World War I, the Battle of Mons in Belgium on 23 August 1914, while providing cover to allow his comrades to escape to safety. He was not yet 25, and he became the first person to be awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for bravery in World War I.

Maurice James Dease was buried at Saint Symphorien Military cemetery, 2 km east of Mons. He is commemorated by a cenotaph in the church grounds in Coole, and on a plaque in the Church of Saint Martin of Tours in Culmullen, Co Meath. He was also named on a bronze plaque inside the church in Coole, but this was removed during Father Fagan’s renovations in the 1970s.

His father and uncle survived him for 20 years, until 1934. Although Maurice Dease had a sister who married, there was no male heir in the Dease family, and Turbotstown House and the Coole estate were sold in 1926. That year, Mary Dease’s husband, Charles Francis Noel, 3rd Earl of Gainsborough, died at the age of 70, and he was buried in a large tomb erected by his wife in the Noel family’s private chapel at Exton Hall, dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury.

Lady Gainsborough continued to live at Exton Park in Rutland. When she died at the age of 82 on 17 November 1937, she was buried with him. The inscription on her tomb says: ‘Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God. She who scatters the seed of happiness around verily shall it be flowering in her heart.”

Nearby in the crypt of the chapel, are the tombs of her sister-in-law, the tragic Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Murphy (1845-1881), and her parents-in-law, Charles Noel (1818-1881), and the former Lady Ida Hay (1820-1867), Queen Victoria’s cousin and bridesmaid.

The Dease family had managed to hold on to their lands and privileges in Co Westmeath, surviving the changes of the Reformation, the Cromwellian era, the Battle of the Boyne, the Penal Laws and the Great Famine. But the Victorian and Edwardian eras had come to a close, and the events of World War I and the Easter Rising 1916 had irreversibly changed the social order in both England and Ireland. The presence of the Dease family in Co Westmeath had come to an end after seven centuries.

The school founded by Lady Gainsborough’s sister, Teresa Dease, closed in 1981 and is now in ruins. But a banner proclaims that the church, built by the Dease family in 1841, is celebrating its 175th anniversary in 2016. Inside the church is a late mediaeval font that was once located in the neighbouring Church of Ireland parish church, and that was donated when Saint Nicholas’s Church closed.

● When the church was built in Coole by the Dease family in 1841, it was named Saint Mary’s. It was still known as Saint Mary’s when Mary Dease was married there in 1880. However, the banner on the church celebrating the 175th anniversary of its building names it as the Church of the Immaculate Conception, a dogma not declared by the Roman Catholic Church until 1854, 13 years after the church was built.

The Saint Teresa window in Coole Church commemorates Teresa Dease (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The love story that forced Queen Victoria’s god-daughter and an Irish composer to run away from her father’s home

A wedding in the private chapel at Exton Hall … three Victorian weddings caused joy and pain for Irish and English families (Photograph © Steven Bradshaw/Exton Park

Patrick Comerford

My visits earlier this week to the beach and harbour at Annagassan, to Bellingham Castle and to the charming Co Louth village of Castlebellingham drew my attention to the story of the Bellingham baronets, the story of the great society wedding at the castle in 1905, and to the way the family’s fortunes went into decline following the events 100 years ago in World War I and after the Easter Rising in 1916.

But as I researched these stories, another story of romance and family fortunes and misfortunes unfolded. This was the story of Queen Victoria’s cousin and god-daughter who eloped with an Irish-born organist, who was disowned by her father who was one of the leading politicians of the day, and who died in exile while she was still in her mid-30s.

When the future Sir Henry Bellingham (1846-1921) left the Anglicanism of his birth and family in 1873 at the height of the Tractarian controversy and became a Roman Catholic, his move caused a stir in polite and aristocratic circles throughout these isles. He had become a friend of both Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning, and a year later, in 1874, he married Lady Constance Julia Eleanor Georgiana Noel, the daughter of another high-profile aristocratic convert to Catholicism, Charles George Noel (1818-1881), Lord Campden and future 2nd Earl of Gainsborough.

The marriage was celebrated in the Noel family’s private estate chapel in Exton Hall. Her father was a prominent politician, and Lord and Lady Campden had embraced Roman Catholicism in a very public conversion a quarter of a century earlier in 1850.

Their public conversion was all the more controversial because Lady Campden, the former Lady Ida Hay (1821-1867), was a first cousin once removed of Queen Victoria. She was a cousin of Queen Victoria because her mother, the former Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence (1801-1856), was an illegitimate daughter of King William IV and his Irish-born mistress, Dorothea Jordan (1761-1816) from Waterford.

The family kinship was very public and caused no embarrassment to Queen Victoria, who invited Lady Ida to be one of her bridesmaids when she married Prince Albert in 1840. A year later, on 1 November 1841, when she was still only 20, Lady Ida married Charles George Noel (1818-1881), who had assumed the title of Viscount Campden less than three months earlier and who had been Whig MP for Rutland for just a few short months.

He was the only child of Charles Noel (1781-1866), 1st Earl of Gainsborough, and his second wife Elizabeth Grey. His mother died two weeks after he was born, and he was educated privately and at Trinity College, Cambridge.

Ida and Charles had five children:

1, Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Noel (1845-1881).
2, Lady Constance Julia Eleanor Georgiana Noel (1847-1891), who married Sir Henry Bellingham.
3, Charles William Francis Noel (1850-1926), who became 3rd Earl of Gainsborough.
4, Edward Noel (1852-1917).
5, Lady Edith Horatia Emma Frances Noel, who became a nun and died in 1890.

The first two children had been born when their parents publicly embraced Catholicism and were received into the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX on New Year’s Day, 1 January 1850. Soon after, Lord Campden set about building a private chapel on his estate.

The family lived at Exton Park, a large country estate that was the home of the Noel family and the Earls of Gainsborough since the 16th century. Rutland is England’s smallest county, totalling only 382 sq km (96,000 acres). A century ago, the Exton Park estate made up 14.6% of Rutland, some 14,000 acres, the family owned the village and all the residents were either estate workers or tenants. The family still owns a number of properties, including Exton Hall, and today the estate covers about 6,000 acres.

Famous visitors to Exton Park in the past have included Shakespeare and Handel, and the Noel family once used the Upper Lake on the estate for re-enactments of naval battles – an enthusiasm that helps to explain the choice of Horatia and Emma as middle names for Lord Campden’s youngest daughter.

The family had lived in the old hall until 1810, when Exton burned down with all its contents, including the library, the paintings and the family portraits.

A new Exton Hall was built, and was then rebuilt in the mid-19th century. The Revd Baptist Wriothesley Noel (1798-1873), one of the most popular Evangelical preachers of the day, had become friends with the architect Henry Roberts through their mutual concern for the welfare of the poor. He introduced Roberts to his eldest brother, Charles, who had inherited Exton in 1838 and reacquired the family titles three years later. Roberts quadrupled the size of Exton Hall, adding tall Jacobean turrets, chimneys, gables and windows. It was almost quadrupled in size in 1850 with additions by the architect Charles Alban Buckler.

In 1850, just as the new hall was taking shape, the son and heir, Charles Noel, and his wife Ida converted to Roman Catholicism. It was a surprise to the family as his grandfather had rarely missed an opportunity in Parliament to oppose Catholic Emancipation.

Soon after his conversion, Lord Campden planned a new private Roman Catholic chapel for his estate. The foundation stone was blessed by Bishop Richard Butler Roskell of Nottingham and laid by Lord Campden on the feast of Saint Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 29 December 1857.

In 1860, while he was still known as Lord Campden, he was urged to stand in the by-election in Co Cork against the Liberal candidate and newly-appointed Attorney-General for Ireland, Rickard Deasy (1812-1883). Although he had once been a Whig MP for Rutland, albeit briefly, Campden was picked as the Tory candidate by Sir John Pope Hennessy (1834-1891), then Conservative MP for King’s County, who was anxious to build on the success of the Catholic-Tory alliance in the 1859 election.

But his recent conversion to Catholicism made Campden a suspect figure among Irish Conservatives, who were less than enthusiastic about supporting his campaign, and he lost to Deasy by 2,000 votes. In London, The Times started running stories about ‘the Great Campden Controversy.’ On 10 March 1860, it reported: “Everyone is asking the delicate question who is accountable for Lord Campden’s election expenses. Cork County cannot be fought with less than £5,000 or £6,000 aside.” Eventually, Hennessy was ordered to pay £1,000 “for the balance of the expenses incurred on behalf of Lord Campden at the recent election.”

In 1866, Charles Noel succeeded his father as Earl of Gainsborough and took his seat in the House of Lords. But the new Lady Gainsborough, the former Lady Ida Hay, enjoyed her new standing as a countess for little more than a year; she died on 22 October 1867 and was buried in the crypt of the new chapel built by her husband.

The church, which abuts the east wing of the Exton Hall and was designed by the architect Charles Alban Buckler, was completed in 1868 and was dedicated to Saint Thomas of Canterbury. With its completion, a private chaplain was appointed, along with a resident organist, Thomas P Murphy, whose duties also included teaching music to the Noel children as their private tutor.

A wedding in the chapel where Lady Constance Noel and Sir Henry Bellingham were married in 1874 (Photograph: © Steven Bradshaw/Exton Park)

In 1874, the chapel was the venue for Henry Bellingham’s wedding to Lord Gainsborough’s second daughter, Lady Constance Noel (1847-1891). Lady Constance may have missed her mother’s presence at her wedding, but another absence that would not have gone unnoticed that day was that of her elder sister, Lady Blanche Elizabeth Mary Annunciata Noel.

Lady Blanche was born at Exton Hall on 25 March 1845, and just as her mother had been one of Queen Victoria’s bridesmaids in 1840, Blanche now became a godchild of Queen Victoria.

She was born on the Feast of the Annunciation, and her additional names at baptism, Elizabeth Mary Annunciata, show how her parents were already deeply influenced by the Tractarian movement.

As a child she was schooled privately, learned to speak Italian, French, German and Spanish, learned some Latin and Greek, and travelled to Italy and Germany. As a teenager, she missed her mother and was left to her own devices at Exton Hall.

She was said to have been gifted with a sweet, flexible voice, sang in the choir in the chapel, and was in daily contact with Thomas Murphy, the young, tall, well-educated and handsome Irish-born organist in the chapel who was also the private music tutor to Noel daughters. In the hours they spent singing together in the chapel after Mattins and Vespers, Blanche and Thomas fell in love with each other.

Lord Gainsborough was aware of nothing until a visiting family friend noticed this intimacy and warned him about his daughter’s choice in love. At first, he refused to even contemplate the possibility, but eventually he expressed his indignant disapproval.

One story says Gainsborough allowed the marriage to take place in his private chapel. Another source claims they eloped to London where they married, and that she was disowned and disinherited by her father.

Did Lord Gainsborough object because Thomas Murphy was an Irishman? This seems unlikely: her sister Lady Constance later married Sir Henry Bellingham from Co Louth; his son and heir, Charles, would marry an Irishwoman in Ireland; and his wife’s grandmother, Dorothea Jordan, was born in Waterford. Indeed, a decade earlier, Gainsborough had stood as a Tory candidate in the by-election in Co Cork. On the other hand, Murphy would later try to disguise his Irish background when he declared in census returns in New Hampshire in 1880 that he and both his parents were born in England.

Perhaps Gainsborough objected because Murphy was a commoner and brought no titles or estates into the family. Whatever his objections were, Lady Ida and Thomas Murphy were married in the new chapel at Exton on 6 March 1870.

But one of Gainsborough’s conditions for consenting to the wedding in his chapel was that the newly-wed couple should immediately leave for America. After they married, the love-struck pair set sail for America and Lady Blanche was never to see her family again. There is probably little truth to the story that they travelled in the steerage compartment of a ship, and that when they arrived “she and Murphy bummed around New York. They had no money and hadn’t eaten for 24 hours. She sold her earrings for a loaf of bread and said it was the best meal she ever had.”

The couple found themselves to North Conway through a priest they knew, and they finally settled in Bartlett, New Hampshire. Murphy was hired to teach music and French at the Kearsarge Schools for Boys in North Conway, and was the organist in a local church.

Lady Blanche soon earned a reputation as a writer. Her first published article, on Papal Rome, appeared in 1871 in the Catholic World, and over the next years she contributed half a dozen essays to the magazine. Her short stories and travel logs appeared in many magazines, including Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, The Galaxy, Scribner's Monthly, The Galaxy, The Catholic Review and other publications, as well as the Catholic World. She also published sketches of her travels in Lippincott’s Magazine. She was a frequent contributor to English magazines too, and the editor of the Graphic invited her to write a series of short articles on American manners and customs.

Four years after she went into exile, Gainsborough appears to have had regrets about the way he treated his daughter. In 1874, he settled her with an annuity of £60, and offered her the opportunity to return to Exton Hall, but the offer was conditional on her leaving her husband.

Lady Blanche Murphy accepted the annuity but refused his conditions for her return to Exton. She was not present for the wedding in the same chapel in 1874 of her sister, Lady Constance, to another Irishman, the more acceptable Sir Henry Bellingham of Bellingham Castle, Co Louth.

Nor did she attend the wedding in Ireland in 1880 of her widowed brother, Charles Francis Noel (1856-1926), now known as Viscount Campden. On 2 February 1880, he married Mary Elizabeth Dease in Saint Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Coole, near Castlepollard, Co Westmeath. The bride’s father, James Arthur Dease (1826-1878), of nearby Turbotstown House, was a Justice of the Peace and a Deputy Lord Lieutenant for Co Cavan. Unlike Blanche and her Irish husband, Charles and his Irish bride returned to live at Exton Hall.

A maternal aunt also also left Lady Blanche some money, which she used with her annuity and the payments for her articles to buy a cottage in Bartlett, New Hampshire. The cottage, now known as the Lady Blanche House, was originally known as the Ledge Farm. There she had a reputation for feeding and clothing local poor children, and spent hours in the open air and in the local woods. Despite her father’s initial reaction to her marriage, from the time of her wedding to the day of her death, she was in constant correspondence with her family and her many friends in England.

Blanche and Thomas Murphy had no children, and Lady Blanche lived at their cottage in Bartlett for just 11 months. She was just four days short of her 36th birthday when she died after four days illness on 21 March 1881.

A writer in the Boston Courier wrote: “Though her marriage had been romantic, there was nothing of the sentimentalist about Lady Blanche Murphy. After the time of Mr Murphy’s teaching in the school had expired they kept house, she doing most of the house work herself, while yet managing to do a great deal of writing.” Her last articles, on ‘The Tomb of the Conquistador’ and ‘The Great Monasteries of the Athos’ (sic), were published after she died.

Lady Blanche Murphy remained a fervent Roman Catholic all her life. Her funeral took place on 24 March 1881, at the Catholic Cathedral of Portland, Maine, with the Bishop of the diocese presiding at a solemn Requiem Mass. She was buried temporarily in a vault of the Calvary Cemetery, before her body was brought back to England and buried beside her mother in the crypt of the private family chapel in Exton.

Lord Gainsborough, who had remained a widower, died in London on 13 August 1881 a few days after Blanche had been reburied in the family crypt. On his death bed, he gave his consent that the small annuity he had provided for Blanche in America should continue to be sent to his son-in-law. He was 62, and he was buried beside his wife in the crypt in his private chapel at Exton Hall. He was succeeded in his titles and estates by his eldest son, Charles Francis Noel, who had married Mary Dease in Co Westmeath the previous year.

Thomas Murphy continued to live in their cottage at Bartlett after Lady Blanche died. He kept the farm but he went to live in a boarding house in North Conway. He then moved to Boston, where he died on 11 October 1890 and he was buried alone at Calvary Cemetery. His younger sister-in-law, Lady Ida Noel, who had become a nun as Mother Mary Emmanuel, also died that year. His other sister-in-law, Lady Constance Bellingham, died at Bellingham Castle, Co Louth, in the following year, 1891.

A wedding in the chapel at Exton Hall (Photograph: Exton Park)

The marriage of Lady Blanche and Thomas Murphy, and her father’s reaction to their romance, serve to illustrate how Victorian mores and values were beginning to crumble in the closing decades of the 19th century. His obsessive grief following her death shows too how he knew that the old order could no longer be shored up. The old certainties that were dying in English and Irish society would be swept away a few decades later with World War I and with the Easter Rising and the events that unfolded in the decade that followed.

Perhaps it is because of this love story between an English lady with royal connections and a handsome Irish composer, perhaps it is because of Lady Blanche’s unique writing ability, perhaps it is because of both, that the cottage Lady Blanche and Thomas Murphy lived in at Bartlett was awarded a New Hampshire historic marker, number 109. The Lady Blanche Cottage has been owned by Dick Goff and Glenora Heath since 2006.

In the great fire at Exton in 1810, the family portraits and paintings were lost and the hall’s library perished. But In 1986, the Noel family contacted the Leicestershire and Rutland Record Office after a substantial number of long-forgotten records were found in rusty deed boxes in the stables and muniments room at Exton Hall. The find uncovered during building work at the hall turned out to be the entire estate and family archive dating back to the 12th century but long thought destroyed.

The collection now fills close on 700 boxes in the record office. The papers have been meticulously catalogued and are now searchable online.

Today, Exton Hall is the home of Anthony Baptist Noel, who succeeded as 6th Earl of Gainsborough, 6th Viscount Campden and 6th Baron Noel in 2009. The chapel where Lady Blanche Noel married Thomas Murphy and where Lady Constance Noel married Sir Henry Bellingham is one of only two fully functioning Roman Catholic churches in the county of Rutland and it seats about 120 people.

The chapel is semi-public, providing Exton with a useful Roman Catholic niche in the country house weddings market in England. But to get married in the chapel either the bride or the groom must be a Roman Catholic. Some of Lord Gainsborough’s ‘old certainties’ are still in place.

Exton Hall remains the home of the Noel family and the Earl of Gainsborough

Despite wars and a century of change, Bellingham Castle retains its grandeur

Bellingham Castle … restored in recent decades to its past grandeur (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

When the guests arrived at Annagassan Harbour in Co Louth in 1905 for the wedding of Augusta Mary Monica Bellingham and John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquis of Bute, at Bellingham Castle, the world of the Edwardian aristocracy must have seemed secure and certain.

The wedding party at Bellingham Castle left as they arrived – from the harbour at Annagassan. It was a world that could have inspired Brideshead Revisited – or even Downton Abbey – with titled aristocrats, dowager mothers, Gothic castles, and a family story to rival that of Lady Sybil Crawley in Downton Abbey … the story of Lady Blanche Noel, Queen Victoria’s cousin, who eloped with Thomas Murphy, the Irish-born organist in her father’s private chapel. Even the bride’s elder sister Ida, who had become a nun in the Holy Child Order at Saint Leonards-on-Sea (Mother Mary Emmanuel), was present at the wedding.

It was a story I heard about during my visits earlier this week to Annagassan Harbour, Bellingham Castle and the pretty Co Louth village of Castlebellingham earlier this week.

But as the wedding party sailed away from Annagassan Harbour, the world of the bride’s father, Sir Henry Bellingham, was about to fall apart and would never be put together again. Within a decade, World War I had broken out and the events were already in train that would lead to the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising in 1916.

With the death of his uncle, Sydney Bellingham, in 1900, Sir Henry Bellingham, who had inherited the family title in 1889, now inherited the family castle and estate, and was secure in enjoyment of Bellingham Castle and his ancestral lands at the Castlebellingham estate.

The Calvary at the castle gates was erected by Sir Henry Bellingham in memory of his wife, Lady Constance (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Sir Henry had already experienced tragedy in his life with the death of his wife, Lady Constance Bellingham, in 1891. She was only 43 and they had been married just 17 years.

Perhaps Sir Henry found new happiness in 1895 when he married his second wife, 25-year-old Lelgarde Harry Florence Clifton (born 1872), the younger daughter of Augustus Wykeham Clifton and his wife Bertha Clifton, 22nd Baroness Grey de Ruthyn.

But Sir Henry still grieved his first wife, Lady Constance, and in 1902, when the 200-tear-old great royal oak at the castle gates fell in a storm he had it carved for the Calvary erected in her memory at the gates of Bellingham Castle. For a century or more it was a landmark on the main road between Dublin and Belfast.

The wedding party at Bellingham Castle for the marriage of Augusta Bellingham and the Marquis of Bute in 1905

Sir Henry was the father two sons, Edward and Roger. Both sons became army officers and as they celebrated their sister Augusta’s wedding in 1905, they could hardly imagine what was to befall them.

Edward Bellingham, who would eventually succeed to his father’s estate and titles, was born on 26 January 1879 and was educated at the Oratory School, London, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. In 1899, he was commissioned in the Royal Scots, and then fought in the Second Boer War. During World War I, he was a major in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He was wounded and mentioned in despatches three times.

His experiences of the gassing at the Battle of Hulluch on 27-29 April 1916 are vividly recalled by the historian Turtle Bunbury here. He was decorated with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) in 1916, and became a temporary brigadier-general. In 1918, he became a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), and a year later he was promoted lieutenant-colonel.

His brother, Roger Charles Noel Bellingham (1884-1915), married Alice Naish in 1910. He became an aide-de-camp to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Aberdeen, from 1912 to 1914. Like his father, he supported Home Rule and was popular in Co Louth. With the outbreak of World War I, he became a captain in the Royal Field Artillery and probably hoped to return home to raise his young family and to enter a political career in Ireland.

Captain Roger Bellingham was 30 when he was killed in action on 4 March 1915. His name heads the list of names on the recently-renovated War Memorial Cross in the centre of the village. It was only 10 years since his sister’s lavish society wedding. The world that seemed secure to Edwardian society a decade earlier had been shattered and would never be put together again.

For a while, Sir Henry Bellingham continued to engage in local politics and civic life in Co Louth and the educational life of the nation. A keen supporter of Irish language movements, he remained a Commissioner of National Education for Ireland, a Senator of the Royal University of Ireland, and Lord Lieutenant of Co Louth, an office he had held since in 1911.

The War Memorial in the centre of Castlebellingham was erected in 1920 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

At the end of World War I, Sir Henry published a letter in the Dundalk Democrat on 8 March 1919, proposing the erection of a war memorial in the village to commemorate those from Kilsaran and Dromiskin who had died in the war.

He invited names to be included on the list, commissioned a cross in the style of a Celtic cross, with ornamentation inspired by the Book of Kells, and by early 1920 the cross was ready for dedication. The list of names on the war memorial was headed by his son, “Lt. R. Bellinghan, R.F. Artillery.”

The cross was dedicated on 5 February 1920 by the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Logue, after a solemn Requiem Mass in the Roman Catholic parish church in Kilsaran. On that day, 200 ex-servicemen marched in military formation under the command of General Edward Bellingham from Kilsaran to the monument.

Cardinal Logue told the assembled crowed of 500 that the people of Ireland “had received very little return … for all their youth had suffered, for the deaths of so many brave men, and for the sacrifices that the people had made.”

The old order was changing, and nothing would bring it back.

At the age of 74, Sir Henry died on 9 July 1921, when the Irish War of Independence was at its height. His funeral Mass in Kilsaran was attended by Cardinal Logue, who led the graveside prayers, and James Macmahon (1865-1954), the last Under-Secretary for Ireland.

Sir Edward Bellingham was the last of the Bellingham baronets to live in the castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The family title and the castle were inherited by Sir Henry’s son, the diplomat Brigadier-General Sir Edward Henry Charles Patrick Bellingham (1879-1956), as the fifth baronet.

After his father’s death, Sir Edward returned to live at Bellingham Castle. He also succeeded as Lord Lieutenant of Louth in 1921, but was the last person to hold this office, which was abolished in 1922 with the establishment of the Irish Free State. In 1925, Sir Edward was elected to the Senate of the Irish Free State with the ninth highest number of first preference votes nationwide of the 76 candidates, and he sat as a Senator until the Senate was abolished in 1936.

At the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Royal Air Force. After the war, he served in the Commission of Control in Germany until 1947. In his last years he was vice-consul at the British embassy in Guatemala. He bred pedigree pigs and Aberdeen Angus cattle. He died in 1956 and his widow, Charlotte Elizabeth, died in 1964. He was the last Bellingham to live at Bellingham Castle.

He was succeeded as sixth baronet by his nephew, Sir Roger Carroll Patrick Stephen Bellingham (1911-1973), who was only a five-year-old when his father, Captain Roger Bellingham, was killed in action in World War in 1915. However, Sir Roger never inherited Bellingham Castle, which had been acquired by the Irish Land Commission.

Sir Roger was educated at the Oratory School, London, studied medicine at UCD and the University of Edinburgh (MB, ChB), and practiced as an anaesthetist. His son, Sir Noel Peter Roger Bellingham (1943-1999), succeeded as the seventh baronet in 1973. He was an accountant, and when he died in 1999 at the age of 55, the title passed to his brother, Sir Anthony Edward Norman Bellingham, the eighth and present baronet. He is a distant cousin of the former British Prime Minister – they share direct descent from King William IV’s illegitimate daughter, Lady Elizabeth FitzClarence, a first cousin of Queen Victoria.

Bellingham Castle remained the home of the Bellingham baronets until the mid-1950s. The castle and the entire estate were bought by Dermot Meehan in 1958 from the Irish Land Commission for a total of £3,065, and he spent several years converting the house into the Bellingham Castle Hotel.

Meehan sold the hotel and 17 acres in 1967 to John Keenan for £30,636.61. The Meehan family retained the remainder of the estate, including 70 acres of mature parkland, the coach stables, cottages and the walled gardens. In recent years, Mark Meehan has restored the coach stables to its former glory, planted hundreds of trees and continues to develop the estate.

The hotel and those 17 acres, was offered for sale at €1,500,000 in 2011. In December 2012, the Corscadden family, who own and run Cabra Castle Hotel in Kingscourt, Co Cavan, and Ballyseede Castle Hotel in Tralee, Co Kerry, bought Bellingham Castle. Since then, they have renovated the 19-bedroom castle and transformed it into an hotel and wedding venue and it re-opened in 2014.

The village green and a colourful pub in Castlebellingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Today, people travelling along the M1 link the name of Castlebellingham with the Applegreen Service Stations near Dundalk, and the village of Castlebellingham has become a much quieter and sleepier place since it was bypassed by the motorway.

The village green, fringed by colourful, quaint pubs, is idyllic in the summer sunshine. The war memorial has been restored in recent years as part of the 1914-1916-1918 centenary commemorations. Foley’s Tea Rooms, a quaint coffee shop in a thatched cottage, is hundreds of years old. The Wayside Cavalry commemorating Lady Constance Bellingham is still a prominent local landmark. And Bellingham Castle is hosting wedding parties once again, albeit weddings that are less lavish than the society wedding of 1905.

But the absence of Lady Blanche Murphy from the wedding of her sister, Lady Constance Noel, and Sir Henry Bellingham in 1874 also told a story of how the values and mores of Victorian society were changing. And that is a story for tomorrow morning [Friday 5 August 2016].

Estate cottages are part of the village charm in Castlebellingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

A romantic Edwardian wedding story points to the former grandeur of Bellingham Castle

Bellingham Castle, Castlebellingham, Co Louth … recently restored and renovated as a wedding venue and hotel (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

When three of us visited Annagassan on Monday afternoon [1 August 2016], we were reminded how this tiny harbour in Co Louth played its role in one of the great romantic weddings of the Edwardian decade.

In 1905, Augusta Mary Monica Bellingham of Bellingham Castle married John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquis of Bute. The Princess Maud, a steamer, was chartered to take their guests across the Irish Sea to Bellingham Castle for the wedding, and the wedding party arrived and left through the harbour at Annagassan.

We decided to find out more about the Bellingham family and Bellingham Castle, and moved on to the neighbouring village of Castlebellingham, where we found a wedding was taking place on Monday afternoon in the Bellingham Castle Hotel.

In recent years, Bellingham Castle has been transformed into a romantic wedding venue, with 19 luxury bedrooms and the appropriately-named sumptuous Bute Suite, which recalls that society wedding over a century ago.

Bellingham Castle, or Castlebellingham House, stands on the site of an earlier medieval castle, and has been the ancestral home of the Bellingham family since the 17th century. Henry Bellingham, who bought the estate in 1660, was a junior army officer during the civil war. He bought the lands of Gernonstowne, Co Louth, from a fellow soldier who had been granted them in lieu of arrears of pay, and the purchase was confirmed by King Charles II.

The Bellingham family takes its name from Bellingham, a village in Northumberland, north-east of Newcastle upon Tyne. Sir Edward Bellingham (1506-1549) was Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1548-1549.

This branch of the family came to Ireland with Henry Bellingham in the 1650s, although the village was not known as Castlebellingham for at least 40 years after the lands in Co Louth were bought by the family.

The castle was occupied by Jacobite troops and burned down in the autumn of 1689 by James II in a revenge attack. Colonel Thomas Bellingham was a guide for William III before the Battle of the Boyne, and it is said King William’s armies camped in the grounds of the castle on the night before the Battle of the Boyne.

Remembering the royal oak planted by Colonel Thomas Bellingham at the castle gates in 1693 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Three years later, Thomas Bellingham planted a royal oak on a mound close to the castle gates in 1693. When it was blown down in 1902, a wayside cross was made from its wood, and since then another tree has been planted on the mound.

Bellingham Castle is a detached, multiple-bay two-storey over-basement former country house, built in 1712. The house was completely remodelled 1798, when a third storey was added, and ca 1820, when it took the shape we see today with its crenellated parapet, turrets and towers.

The Gothic embellishments and towers and turrets of Bellingham Castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The Gothic embellishments, which are echoed in the entrance gates, can be seen on every elevation. The little details, such as the gargoyled boss to the base of a turret on the east elevation and the decorative label stops on the hood mouldings of some windows, help to create an interesting contrast to the Georgian classical windows on the main elevations.

The double pile main block has principal east (entrance front) and west (garden front) elevations on the long sides, and a single-storey wing to north. The crenelated parapets and turrets were added ca 1820, and there are square corner turrets, an octagonal bartizan, a crenellated entrance porch with octagonal corner turrets, two three-storey buttressed bows, a square turreted crenelated tower and parapets that hide the shallow pitched roofs.

The bartizan to the east elevation has a painted stone gargoyle boss, there are wrought-iron balconettes, a tower with painted stone mullions, panelled doors, and stone traceried fanlights.

The house played a central part in the development of the village to which it gives its name. Much of the village is occupied by estate houses and in previous generations many of their residents worked on the estate in its heyday.

However, the name Castlebellingham does not appear on any documents until about 1710. Over time Castlebellingham became an important place in Co Louth. Fairs were held every year, a church was built beside the castle, and with it came a graveyard that included the Bellingham family vault.

The Bellinghams became one of the most powerful and influential family in Co Louth, and for over 100 years (1660-1775), without interruption, a Bellingham sat in the Irish Parliament as an MP for Co Louth.

A brewery was built near the castle around 1770 by O’Bryen Bellingham. However, the main brewery in the village was founded half a century later by Captain John Woolsey. His mother was a Bellingham and the family was closely related to the Cairnes brewing family and the Jameson distillers. The brewery in Castlebellingham, once employed about 70 people and was the main supplier of beer to the troops during the Boer War. The brewery is still remembered in the name of the Brewery Tavern, Brewery Road and the Malthouse Apartments.

The first of the Bellingham baronets was Sir William Bellingham (1756-1826), the fourth and youngest son of Colonel Alan Bellingham and Alice Montgomery, daughter of the Revd Hans Montgomery of Grey Abbey House, Co Down. His elder brother, O’Bryen Bellingham, stayed at home and founded the first brewery in Castlebellingham.

Sir William Bellingham was baptised in Saint Peter’s, Drogheda, in 1756. As the fourth and youngest son, he could not have expected to inherit any estates in Ireland, and after graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1778, he moved to England where he carved out a successful career in politics.

In 1783, he married Hester Frances Cholmondeley (1763-1844), daughter of the Revd Robert Cholmondeley and granddaughter of George Cholmondeley, 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley. From 1784 to 1789 he was MP for Reigate, Surrey.

As a commissioner for the Royal Navy, he oversaw the provisioning of George Vancouver’s expedition along the West Coast of North America. Although he never saw the Pacific Ocean, Bellingham Bay in Vancouver and the city of Bellingham, Washington, were named in his honour.

He became the private secretary of William Pitt (1759-1806), Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister (1783-1801 and 1804-1806), and was made a baronet in 1796, with the designation of Castle Bellingham.

‘The Widows Houses’ were built for the widows of estate workers (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

North of the castle, beside the church and churchyard, ‘The Widows Houses’ were built by Sir William around 1826 as a charitable foundation to house the widows of former estate workers.

The houses may have been designed by William Vitruvius Morrison (1794-1838). They were four self-contained units, each with one ground-floor room and one first-floor room in a half-dormer attic. They show have high quality design and craftsmanship, with Gothic windows, lattice glazing, decorative bargeboards and finials. There are decorative modillions, a religious Della Robbia-revival plaque and a carved inscription that reads: “John III.16, John XIV. 6, Acts IV.12”.

This is a unique and valuable part of the architectural heritage of Co Louth. The entire building was sold earlier this year, and I wonder about its future.

When Sir William died in Beckenham, Kent, in 1826, his body was brought back to Castlebellingham and he was buried in the family vault in Kilsaran.

The title then passed to his nephew, Sir Alan Bellingham (1776-1827), as second baronet. Sir Alan was the son-in-law of a Church of England priest, the Revd Rees Edward Walls. By 1824, before he ever inherited the title, Alan Bellingham had run into financial difficulties and leaving his family in Ireland, he fled his debtors to France, taking up residence at Châtillon-sur-Loire.

He inherited the title in 1826, but he died in financial exile in France a year later at the age of 51 in 1827, and the castle, estates and title passed to his eldest son Sir Alan Bellingham (1800-1889), the third baronet.

Saint Mary’s Church was built by the castle gates in 1852 to replace an older parish church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

During his time, Saint Mary’s, the Church of Ireland parish church, was built by the castle gates in 1852 to replace the older parish church for Kilsaran. The church stands on an elevated site opposite the former village green. This is a cruciform church with a three-bay nave, north and south transepts, a chancel to the east, and a square two-stage tower. The church was designed by Welland and Gillespie and shows high quality craftsmanship, with carved stone details on the buttresses, door and window surrounds and elegant stained glass windows.

Sir Alan’s youngest brother, Sydney Robert Bellingham (1808-1900), who was the fourth son and only 15 years old, left for Canada alone to seek his fortune. There he became a successful businessman, lawyer, journalist, and military and political figure. In 1878, he returned to Ireland and to Castlebellingham, which he had inherited in 1874 after the deaths of his elder brothers.

Sydney Bellingham returned from Canada to live at Southgate House, Castlebellingham Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Sydney Bellingham and his wife Arabella lived at Southgate House, Castlebellingham, where he died in 1900, without children. One of the decorated windows on a house in the village is inscribed ‘SB, 1808-1896’ in his memory. In his will, he left the Castlebellingham estate to his nephew, Sir Henry Bellingham, the fourth baronet.

‘SB, 1808-1896’ … a window sill recalls Sydney Bellingham (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The fourth baronet, Sir (Alan) Henry Bellingham (1846-1921), was born at Dunany House, Castlebellingham, was educated at Harrow and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated BA (1869) and MA (1872), and in 1875 he was called to the bar by Lincoln’s Inn. Two years earlier, while he was still in his 20s, Henry Bellingham made a very public conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1873, and became a friend of Cardinal Newman and Cardinal Manning.

A year later, in 1874, he married Lady Constance Julia Eleanor Georgiana Noel, a daughter of Charles Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough, in the private estate chapel in Exton Hall. Her father was a prominent Whig politician who embraced Roman Catholicism in a very public conversion in 1850; her mother was a first cousin once removed of Queen Victoria and one of her bridesmaids; and her grandmother, Elizabeth FitzClarence was an illegitimate daughter of King William IV. Her sister, Lady Blanche Noel, caused a society scandal when she married Thomas Murphy, the Irish-born organist in their father’s private chapel.

In 1889, Henry Bellingham succeeded to the family title; two years later, his wife Lady Constance died in 1891.

In 1895, Sir Henry married his second wife, another prominent English Roman Catholic, Lelgarde Harry Florence Clifton, younger daughter of Augustus Wykeham Clifton and his wife Bertha Clifton, 22nd Baroness Grey de Ruthyn.

Sir Henry was prominent in political life in Co Louth. He was a Conservative Home Rule MP for Co Louth (1880-1885) until the constituency was abolished. He was a Justice of the Peace, High Sheriff of Co Louth in 1897 and a Deputy Lieutenant for the country.

In 1900, he inherited the Castlebellingham estate from his uncle, Sydney Robert Bellingham. He was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Co Louth in 1911, an office he held until his death in 1921.

Bellingham was a keen supporter of Irish language movements, a Commissioner of National Education for Ireland, a Senator of the Royal University of Ireland, and in 1909 received an honorary doctorate from the RUI, later the National University of Ireland.

As a prominent Roman Catholic, he became a Private Chamberlain to three successive popes, Pius IX, Leo XIII and Pius X. He set out the circumstances that led to his conversion in a small publication in 1914, Reminiscences of an Irish Convert. He was also the author of a work on Social Aspects: Catholicism v. Protestantism, and articles in the Dublin Review.

The Calvary erected by Sir Henry Bellingham in memory of his first wife (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The Royal Oak planted outside the castle gates by Colonel Thomas Bellingham in 1693 fell in a storm in 1902. Sir Henry used the wood from the tree to erect the impressive Calvary at the castle gates in memory of his first wife, Lady Constance. The inscription reads:

Bone Pastor, Panis Vere,
Jesu, nostri miserere
This Crucifix is erected in public
homage to our Divine Redeemer,
by Sir Henry Bellingham Baronet,
in pious memory of his beloved wife,
Constance,
daughter of Charles 3rd Earl of Gainsborough
and also of those Benefactors in this Parish,
who have also fallen asleep in Christ.
Pie Jesu Domine dona eis requiem.

The religious panels inset on many houses in the village are a reminder of Sir Henry Bellingham’s religious sentiments (Photographs: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Sir Henry was also responsible for a collection of inset religious panels that can be seen on the upper façades of many of the village buildings. These are also a reflection of Sir Henry’s religious sentiments, and they are unique in Ireland. In addition to the many panels, there are biblical quotations cut into the stone window sills of some buildings.

In 1905, his younger daughter, Augusta, married John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquess of Bute, in the society wedding that brought world attention to Bellingham Castle, and the guests were brought on board a chartered steamer that sailed into Annagassan Harbour. His elder daughter, Mother Mary Emanuel (Ida Bellingham), was a nun in the Holy Child Order at Saint Leonard’s-on-Sea. His sister was the mother of Sir Evelyn Wrench (1882-1966), editor of The Spectator and founder of the English Speaking Union. His nephew, Benjamin Plunket (1870-1947) was Bishop of Meath (1919-1925).

In 1905, Bellingham Castle was the venue for the romantic wedding celebrations of Sir Henry’s daughter, Augusta Mary Monica Bellingham, and John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquis of Bute and one of the wealthiest men in these isles at the time. No expense was spared as the guests were entertained to a lavish celebration. A steamer, the Princess Maud, was chartered to take the guests and the Isle of Bute pipe band across the Irish Sea to Annagassan Harbour and on to Bellingham Castle.

As the society event of the year if not the decade, the wedding attracted the world’s media attention, from California to New Zealand.

The surviving footage from the wedding is believed to be the one of the earliest wedding films in the world. Bellingham Castle is seen clearly and there are scenes of Kilsaran Church and of Annagassan.

The wedding party and guests departed as they had arrived, by steamer from Annagassan Harbour.

But as they left the tiny harbour on the Co Louth coast, the world they left behind in Ireland was about to fall asunder within a decade, with the outbreak of World War I and the unfolding of the events that led to the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising in 1916.

But more about that and the last Bellingham baronets at Castlebellingham tomorrow.

The wedding party at arrived and departed from the harbour at Annagassan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Walking the beach at Annagassan close to a key Viking settlement

The long stretch of beach at Annagassan, looking across to the Cooley Peninsula and the Mourne Mountains (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016; click on image for full-screen resolution)

Patrick Comerford

After Sunday’s visit to Silver Strand in Co Wicklow, I thought it would be interesting to continue to my exploration of beaches I have yet to visit but that were named by Catherine Murphy in The Irish Times on Saturday in her list of ’50 Great Irish Beaches.’

Monday [1 August 2016] was a bank holiday in the Republic of Ireland, and three of us decided to drive north of Dublin, and visit Annagassan in Co Louth, which featured as No 16 in that list of great beaches.

Annagassan is a small village on the southern shores of Dundalk Bay, at the point where the River Glyde and the River Dee flow into the Irish Sea, within sight of the Cooley Mountains and the Mourne Mountains.

We turned off before the Castlebellingham exit on the M1, and drove through fields of summer gold and green through Dunleer to the delightfully sleepy and picturesque village of Annagassan.

The colourful harbour at Annagassan … close to one of the most important Viking sites in Europe (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

We parked at the harbour with its colourful fishing boats and trawlers taking a bank holiday rest. The tide was so far out that the harbour seemed silted up. From the south side of the harbour walls, we walked along the long and expansive stretch of sand, with only the three of us to take in the views of the bay and across to the Cooley Peninsula and the Mourne Mountains.

We stopped for lunch at the award-winning Glyde Inn, sitting at the outside terrace and enjoying the views of the sea and sand despite an unseasonable chill in the air.

The menu – headed ‘The Glyde Inn, Linn Duachaill’ – paid tribute to Annagassan’s Viking heritage, including ‘Viking Burger’ and ‘Viking Favourites,’ but heavily favoured local seafood and fish. I had a toasted quinoa salad, the two others had Clogherhead hake, served with a prawn and herb risotto and spicy pepper relish, and ‘Clogherhead Fish ’n’ Chips.’

Other items on the agenda were enriched with local names, including Bellingham and Dunany – even the local beer was also labelled ‘Linn Duachaill.’

Eating out on the terrace at the Glyde Inn … looking out to the sea and the mountains (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

The Vikings first settled in Annagassan in 841 AD and built Linn Duachaill, a substantial longphort or ship enclosure that is believed to have been the first Viking settlement in Ireland.

Both Carlingford and Greenore in north Co Louth have Norse names, and there is a tradition that Drogheda was founded on the site of a Viking settlement. But Linn Duachaill, near Annagassan, was identified in 2010 in an archaeological dig funded by the Louth Leader Partnership, and is now regarded as one of the best preserved Viking settlements in Europe.

Viking activity in Co Louth is documented in the Irish annals from the 820s and the foundation of a permanent settlement on the coast at Linn Duachaill is recorded in the year 841, the same year as the longphort in Dublin was established.

From this settlement, the Vikings prepared their forces and plundered the surrounding areas. But their activities were also responsible directly for the foundation of new, inland monasteries, such as Louth Abbey, founded by monks who fled inland to avoid Viking raids on coastal areas.

For half a century, the longphort of Linn Duachaill was an important base for launching raids into the Irish interior and on Britain. However, in 891, the local Irish people expelled the Vikings from Linn Duachaill.

After two decades, the Vikings returned and Linn Duachaill served as a base until around 927. At an early stage, it may have rivalled Dublin as a Viking base on the east coast of Ireland. However, its location was not entirely ideal for developing a town. Soon it was being eclipsed by Dublin, and when their fleet finally left, the Vikings abandoned Linn Duachaill.

Since the mid-18th century, antiquarians, archaeologists and historians have speculated about the precise location of the longphort of Linn Duachaill. In 2004, Eamonn P Kelly of the National Museum, Micheál McKeown, a local historian, and Dr Mark Clinton of An Taiusce, a field archaeologist, formed a research group with the aim of identifying the site.

Local placenames provide evidence that suggested that Linn Duachaill was located in the townland of Linns, just north of Annagassan. The townland is bounded on one side by the sea and on the other by the river Glyde and its confluence with the river Dee, effectively forming a steep-sided peninsula. The high point of the peninsula is at the southern end above the confluence of the rivers.

Some scholars believed that the D-shaped earthwork known as Lis na Rann may have been the Viking fortification referred to in the annals as Linn Duachaill. However, the earthwork is only 80 metres x 35 metres, and seemed too small for a site of such importance when it is compared with other longphort sites, such as Dunrally, Co Laois, Knoxspark, Co Sligo, and Woodstown, Co Waterford.

Lis na Rann is at too high an elevation on the steep river bank to have served as a fortress that could protect a Viking fleet. But the research group thought Lis na Rann could have been part of a larger Viking fortification, functioning as a strong point or citadel.

They thought the longphort was located within the tidal limit of the River Glyde, which extends as far as a weir on the boundary of the townland of Linns. It was also considered essential that the elevation of the riverbank should be low enough to allow ships to be taken ashore or launched. These topographical factors drew their attention to an area of low elevation to the south of the weir.

Further research showed that archaeological finds in the past in the low-lying area, including two items of fine metalwork of Irish type, were probably from ecclesiastical objects dating from the eighth or ninth century. Similar items of Irish metalwork found in Viking graves in Norway and at Kilmainham and Islandbridge in Dublin, and also at Woodstown, Co Waterford and Knoxspark, Co Sligo. These items are evidence of raiding and trading by Vikings in Ireland.

In the 19th century, dredging of the River Glyde and the River Dee uncovered more objects with Viking links, including a Viking axe and an iron slave chain that may be evidence of Viking slave raids upriver from Linn Duachaill.

The five-arch bridge spanning the river at Annagassan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

All this evidence pointed archaeologists to the low-lying area on the riverbank south of the weir, and Micheál McKeown organised field-walk was organised and directed by when the field was ploughed in 2008. All the indications were that this was a key area of the longphort of Linn Duachaill.

The evidence indicates that Linn Duchaill was a significant Viking settlement with ship-building, carpentry, smelting and an artificial island used to defend the place against the local people.

Now local people and visitors alike dress up in Viking costumes for the Viking Festival each year, when they re-enact Viking battles and sing Viking songs. The Viking Festival normally takes place in August, although the festival takes place a little later this year, with 10 September.

From the Glyde Inn we walked back through Annagassan to the bridge, and then down to the peaceful harbour with those brightly-coloured fishing boats that ply the waters of Dundalk Bay.

Over a century ago, the harbour at Annagassan played its role in one of the great romantic weddings of the Edwardian decade.

In 1905, Augusta Mary Monica Bellingham, daughter of Sir Alan Bellingham of Bellingham Castle, married John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquis of Bute, and then one of the wealthiest men in these isles.

No expense was spared in treating the bride and guests to a lavish celebration. The Princess Maud, a steamer, was chartered to take their guests and the Isle of Bute pipe band across the Irish Sea to Bellingham Castle for the wedding, and the wedding party arrived at Anngassan Harbour.

As the society event of the year, the wedding attracted the world’s media attention, from California to New Zealand. Surviving footage from the wedding celebrations still exists and is believed to be the one of the earliest wedding films in the world.

Bellingham Castle is seen clearly in the footage, as well as scenes at Kilsaran Church and the village of Annagassan. The wedding party and their guests left as they had arrived, by steamer from Annagassan.

To find out more about the Bellingham family and Bellingham Castle, we decided to move on to the neighbouring village of Castlebellingham. But that’s a story worth telling tomorrow [Wednesday] and the day after[Thursday].

The long sandy beach at Annagassan (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)