Portarlington - French Town

To the passer-by the small Midland town of Portarlington, straddling the River Barrow, might appear to offer little but some attractive Georgian houses, some good bars, and the sight of a turf burning power station. Yet it is a town with a very special history. Portarlington was a Huguenot town, settled by French Protestants after the Williamite wars, and such was their impact, that of all Huguenot colonies in Ireland, Portarlington’s remained the most distinct. When Portarlington recently commemorated its unusual origin, the first name signed in the visitors book was that of Champ (Fr—Field), descendant of the original soldier who took to a butcher’s trade in his exile.

The persecution of Protestants in France must be regarded as one of the most painful episodes in that country’s history. A brief period of tolerance was afforded in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, but that was after a partic-ularly brutal series of wars culminating in the famous Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day, four hundred years to the day, before Portarlington’s commemoration. It is no over—simplification to say that France’s loss was Ireland’s gain. After Saint Bartholomew, but more especially after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 by Louis XIV, the Protestants of France were forced to flee their country which had deprived them of all liberty. The Huguenots not only offended the religious zeal of Louis XIV, but also offended his ideal of a united and uniformed French nation. They were clannish, prosperous, the merchants and tradesmen of the provincial towns, and evoked the same hatred as did the Jews in Weimar Germany. Yet, when the Huguenots fled, they brought their talents and professions with them and enriched the countries which offered them refuge.

Their arrival in Ireland was often through an indirect route. Many fled to Holland and there met up with the armies of William of Orange, and this King ‘of immortal memory found in their number two of his most able generals, Marshal Schomberg and the Marquis de Ruvigny. Both men played vital parts in William’s victory at the Boyne. ‘Voila vos persecuteurs!’ Schomberg is reported to have shouted at his troops on seeing the Irish armies of James II and their Catholic French officers. Although Ruvigny was killed at the Boyne his son inherited the King’s favour and his father’s regiments. And when peace came, what was to happen to these Frenchmen without a home? The English Parliament was embarrassed and annoyed at William’s frequent favours to Huguenot and Dutch, and so it was decided to settle the regiments in Ireland on confiscated Catholic land. Certainly Huguenots were already living in Ireland, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral had laid aside a special chapel for them as early as 1666, but the early settlers were usually civilians. Portarlington in its early days was a settlement of the military, trying to eke out a living from pensions and holdings in the bog.

As early as 1666 Portarlington had been planted with English settlers on the Catholic land of the O’Dempseys, and indeed the new name evolved from that of its patron, Lord Arlington. A map of 1678 in the National Library shows a small fort with four streets radiating from a market square, a neat frontier town one might suppose. Yet the Williamite wars had wrecked the enterprise; the English had abandoned all to the Irish. Indeed the English were forever the minority. In 1700, after the French had arrived, their small number of five families was outnumbered by over sixty French.

The grant of Portarlington to the Marquis de Ruvigny after the previous owner, Sir Patrick Trant, had lost all for his Jacobite sins, was nevertheless a personal grant from King William to a friend. Such gifts angered the English Parliament which wished to sell off Irish land as payment for war debt, and the Act of Resumption was passed revoking all leases to tenants of the Marquis. This was strange treatment indeed in the eyes of the Huguenots who were very poor and had not yet fully settled to a life of peace and trade. A pamphleteer wrote in 1699:

I cannot but take notice of the deplorable condition of the poor French Protestants at Portarlington. It must be a very extraordinary hardship to people who have any bowels of compassion to see such a number of miserable people, who were a long time afflicted with severe persecution in their own country, to find such treatment in the country to which they fled for refuge….

Yet soon the colony found favour, and the leases made good in law. This was no doubt on account of the fact that the Protestant government of Ireland needed as many co--religionists as it could find to develop and govern the counties. It is one of those great historical ironies that the Huguenots, outlaws in France, should find themselves joined to the then establishment of Ireland within a matter of years.

The colony prospered, for the Huguenots were people of quality unlike other settlers who mainly wished for the privilege of land and the opportunity to live on the edges of the government writ. Small farms were cut out of the bog, houses in the French style were built and two churches endowed—a small one for the remaining English residents, and a larger one for the French. The beautifully written registers intact and in the present French church, were opened in 1694 and the first entry was a baptism, a son born to Francois Maire and his wife Françoise. The entries are all in French and so continued right up until 1816, and fortunately for us they are not simple bald entries, but are quite detailed. Most baptisms show the time of birth to within half an hour, the place of birth, and in the early entries, the home in France of the parents. Most of the fathers had important positions in the army such as ‘Marechal de Logis’ and ‘Escuyier Capitaine dans le Regiment de Churchil au service de Sa Majeste de la Grande Bretagne’. Indeed, from impressions of the early part of the Huguenot settlement, a picture is created of a closely knit community, living on past glories to some extent, with the old men sitting under the trees in the square wearing their scarlet cloaks and sipping tea. Tales of escape from France were handed down in families. Madame de Champagne reminded the readers of her ‘Journal’ that she fled with her family from La Rochelle in three empty wine casks in a consignment for Falmouth, and was tossed about for eight days in a Bay of Biscay storm.

The original church was Calvinist in approach, ‘a la forme ancienne de nos églises de France’ but gradually slipped into conformity, and a translation of the Church of Ireland prayer book was made for the congregation in 1702. Indeed, many Huguenots entered the ministry of the Church of Ireland and rose to quite high positions. A notable date for the Portarlington church was 1715, when a presentation of silver vessels was made for ‘L’Eglise françoise conformiste a Portarlington’ by Princess Caroline of Anspach, wife of the future George II. All these vessels, inscribed in French and bearing the royal shield with supporters, are still used at Holy Communion in the church. There were two silver gilt maces also made for the town, but one is lost, and the other is now in London.

Although many of the houses were refaced at the end of the eighteenth century, the courtyards, rear abutments show an unmistakable French influence. In present day Patrick Street, a few houses remain where there is just a door at the front, and the windows look on to the rear, the courtyard and the sunshine. Neat pavements, steep rooved houses surrounded by orchards of Jargonelle pears, some of which were growing not all that long ago, became notable features of the town. The names of their owners still show on the tombstones in the churchyard; names such as Franquefort, Des Voeux, Tabuteau, Blanc, La Combre and Champ. The last three are still extant.

At one time as many as sixteen schools offered an education in French and French manners to those families who could not afford to send their offspring to France itself. Amongst the pupils of Arlington school is reputed to have been the young Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington. I was told by an enthusiastic inhabitant that it was at the Huguenot schools of Portarlington where the Duke first grew to dislike the French, he did not have to wait for the Revolution. The English language was forbidden the children and so must have been very irksome to those not born in the privileged town.

Like the schools, the French influence has died out. Portarlington was a town of officers, a civilised town where culture and service or learning was more important than industry. A little lace, glass and linen was produced but the isolation of the town discouraged more. Obviously this lack of trade brought decline to Portarlington in the nineteenth century. The canals came too late and the patrons of the schools moved to England after the Act of Union, but too much has remained to be forgotten completely: the French registers up to 1816, the archi-tecture, the culture, the memory of being something special and rather beautiful in Ireland’s history.

In August, 1972, the town remembered Saint Bartholomew’s Day with an exhibition and lecture. A service of reconciliation for all faiths turned the lessons of history towards the future. The whole town was ‘en fête’ and in a shop someone was heard to say, ‘Eh alors, comment allez-vous?’

Reproduced courtesy of Ireland of the Welcomes
Vol. 23 no.3, May – June 1974

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