asserted, was hastened by the harshness of the lord-lieutenant. Nevertheless at the crisis his loyalty never wavered. Alone of the Irish Roman Catholic nobility to declare for the king, he returned to Ireland, took up his residence at Portumna, kept Galway, of which he was governor, neutral, and took measures for the defence of the county and for the relief of the Protestants, making “his house and towns a refuge, nay, even a hospital for the distressed English.”[1] In 1643 he was one of the commissioners appointed by the king to confer with the Irish confederates, and urged the wisdom of a cessation of hostilities in a document which he publicly distributed. He was appointed commander of the English forces in Connaught in 1644, and in 1646 was created a marquess and a privy councillor. He supported the same year the treaty between Charles I. and the confederates, and endeavoured after its failure to persuade Preston, the general of the Irish, to agree to a peace; but the latter, being advised by Rinuccini, the papal nuncio, refused in December. Together with Ormonde, Clanricarde opposed the nuncio’s policy; and the royalist inhabitants of Galway having through the latter’s influence rejected the cessation of hostilities, arranged with Lord Inchiquin in 1648, he besieged the town and compelled its acquiescence. In 1649 he reduced Sligo. On Ormonde’s departure in December 1650 Clanricarde was appointed deputy lord-lieutenant, but he was not trusted by the Roman Catholics, and was unable to stem the tide of the parliamentary successes. In 1651 he opposed the offer of Charles, duke of Lorraine, to supply money and aid on condition of being acknowledged “Protector” of the kingdom. In May 1652 Galway surrendered to the parliament, and in June Clanricarde signed articles with the parliamentary commissioners which allowed his departure from Ireland. In August he was excepted from pardon for life and estate, but by permits, renewed from time to time by the council, he was enabled to remain in England for the rest of his life, and in 1653 £500 a year was settled upon him by the council of state in consideration of the protection which he had given to the Protestants in Ireland at the time of the rebellion. He died at Somerhill in Kent in 1657 or 1658 and was buried at Tunbridge.
The “great earl,” as he was called, supported Ormonde in his desire to unite the English royalists with the more moderate Roman Catholics on the basis of religious toleration under the authority of the sovereign, against the papal scheme advocated by Rinuccini, and in opposition to the parliamentary and Puritan policy. By the author of the Aphorismical Discovery, who represents the opinion of the native Irish, he is denounced as the “masterpiece of the treasonable faction,” “a foe to his king, nation and religion,” and by the duke of Lorraine as “a traitor and a base fellow”; but there is no reason to doubt Clarendon’s opinion of him as “a person of unquestionable fidelity. . . and of the most eminent constancy to the Roman Catholic religion of any man in the three kingdoms,” or the verdict of Hallam, who describes him “as perhaps the most unsullied character in the annals of Ireland.”
He married Lady Anne Compton, daughter of William Compton, 1st earl of Northampton, but had issue only one daughter. On his death, accordingly, the marquessate and the English peerages became extinct, the Irish titles reverting to his cousin Richard, 6th earl, grandson of the 3rd earl of Clanricarde. Henry, the 12th earl (1742–1797), was again created a marquess in 1789, but the marquessate expired at his death without issue, the earldom going to his brother. In 1825 the 14th earl (1802–1874) was created a marquess; he was ambassador at St Petersburg, and later postmaster-general and lord privy seal, and married George Canning’s daughter. His son (b. 1832), who achieved notoriety in the Irish land agitation, succeeded him as 2nd marquess.
Bibliography.—See the article “Burgh, Ulick de,” in the Dict. of Nat. Biography, and authorities there given; Hist. of the Irish Confederation, by R. Bellings, ed. by J. T. Gilbert (1882); Aphorismical Discovery (Irish Archaeological Society, 1879); Memoirs of the Marquis of Clanricarde (1722, repr. 1744); Memoirs of Ulick, Marquis of Clanricarde, by John, 11th earl (1757); Life of Ormonde, by T. Carte (1851); S. R. Gardiner’s Hist. of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth; Thomason Tracts (Brit. Mus.) E 371 (11), 456 (10); Cal. of State Papers, Irish, esp. Introd. 1633–1647 and Domestic; Hist. MSS. Comm., MSS. of Marq. of Ormonde and Earl of Egmont. (P. C. Y.)
CLANVOWE, SIR THOMAS, the name of an English poet first
mentioned in the history of English literature by F. S. Ellis in
1896, when, in editing the text of The Book of Cupid, God of Love, or The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, for the Kelmscott Press, he
stated that Professor Skeat had discovered that at the end of the
best of the MSS. the author was called Clanvowe. In 1897 this
information was confirmed and expanded by Professor Skeat in
the supplementary volume of his Clarendon Press Chaucer (1894–1897).
The beautiful romance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale
was published by Thynne in 1532, and was attributed by him, and
by successive editors down to the days of Henry Bradshaw, to
Chaucer. It was due to this error that for three centuries
Chaucer was supposed to be identified with the manor of Woodstock,
and even painted, in fanciful pictures, as lying
“Under a maple that is fair and green,
Before the chamber-window of the Queen
At Wodëstock, upon the greenë lea.”
But this queen could only be Joan of Navarre, who arrived in 1403, three years after Chaucer’s death, and it is to the spring of that year that Professor Skeat attributes the composition of the poem. Sir Thomas Clanvowe was of a Herefordshire family, settled near Wigmore. He was a prominent figure in the courts of Richard II. and Henry IV., and is said to have been a friend of Prince Hal. He was one of those who “had begun to mell of Lollardy, and drink the gall of heresy.” He was one of the twenty-five knights who accompanied John Beaufort (son of John of Gaunt) to Barbary in 1390.
The date of his birth is unknown, and his name is last mentioned in 1404. The historic and literary importance of The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is great. It is the work of a poet who had studied the prosody of Chaucer with more intelligent care than either Occleve or Lydgate, and who therefore forms an important link between the 14th and 15th centuries in English poetry. Clanvowe writes with a surprising delicacy and sweetness, in a five-line measure almost peculiar to himself. Professor Skeat points out a unique characteristic of Clanvowe’s versification, namely, the unprecedented freedom with which he employs the suffix of the final -e, and rather avoids than seeks elision. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale was imitated by Milton in his sonnet to the Nightingale, and was rewritten in modern English by Wordsworth. It is a poem of so much individual beauty, that we must regret the apparent loss of everything else written by a poet of such unusual talent.
See also a critical edition of the Boke of Cupide by Dr Erich Vollmer (Berlin, 1898). (E. G.)
CLAPARÈDE, JEAN LOUIS RENÉ ANTOINE ÉDOUARD (1832–1870), Swiss naturalist, was born at Geneva on the 24th of April 1832. He belonged to a French family, some members of which had taken refuge in that city after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1852 he began to study medicine and natural science at Berlin, where he was greatly influenced by J. Müller and C. G. Ehrenberg, the former being at that period engaged in his important researches on the Echinoderms. In 1855 he accompanied Müller to Norway, and there spent two months on a desolate reef that he might obtain satisfactory observations. The latter part of his stay at Berlin he devoted, along with J. Lachmann, to the study of the Infusoria and Rhizopods. In 1857 he obtained the degree of doctor, and in 1862 he was chosen professor of comparative anatomy at Geneva. In 1859 he visited England, and in company with W. B. Carpenter made a voyage to the Hebrides; and in 1863 he spent some months in the Bay of Biscay. On the appearance of Darwin’s work on the Origin of Species, he adopted his theories and published a valuable series of articles on the subject in the Revue Germanique (1861). During 1865 and 1866 ill-health rendered him incapable of work, and he determined to pass the winter of 1866–1867 in
- ↑ Hist. MSS. Comm.: MSS of Earl of Egmont, i. 223.
