[Illustration: CASTLE-CAULFIELD, COUNTY OF TYRONE.]
The subject of our prefixed illustration is one of no small interest,
whether considered as a fine example--for Ireland--of the domestic
architecture of the reign of James I, or as an historical memorial of the
fortunes of the illustrious family whose name it bears--the noble house
of Charlemont, of which it was the original residence. It is situated
near the village of the same name, in the parish of Donaghmore, barony of
Dungannon, and about three miles west of Dungannon, the county town.
Castle-Caulfield owes its erection to Sir Toby Caulfield, afterwards
Lord Charlemont--a distinguished English soldier who had fought in Spain
and the Low Countries in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and commanded a
company of one hundred and fifty men in Ireland in the war with O’Neill,
Earl of Tyrone, at the close of her reign. For these services he was
rewarded by the Queen with a grant of part of Tyrone’s estate, and other
lands in the province of Ulster; and on King James’s accession to the
British crown, was honoured with knighthood, and made governor of the
fort of Charlemont, and of the counties of Tyrone and Armagh. At the
plantation of Ulster he received further grants of lands, and among them
1000 acres called Ballydonnelly, or O’Donnelly’s town, in the barony of
Dungannon, on which, in 1614, he commenced the erection of the mansion
subsequently called Castle-Caulfield. This mansion is described by Pynnar
in his Survey of Ulster in 1618-19, in the following words:--
“Sir Toby Caulfield hath one thousand acres called Ballydonnell [_recte_
Ballydonnelly], whereunto is added beside what was certified by Sir
Josias Bodley, a fair house or castle, the front whereof is eighty feet
in length and twenty-eight feet in breadth from outside to outside, two
cross ends fifty feet in length and twenty-eight feet in breadth: the
walls are five feet thick at the bottom, and four at the top, very good
cellars under ground, and all the windows are of hewn stone. Between
the two cross ends there goeth a wall, which is eighteen feet high, and
maketh a small court within the building. This work at this time is but
thirteen feet high, and a number of men at work for the sudden finishing
of it. There is also a strong bridge over the river, which is of lime and
stone, with strong buttresses for the supporting of it. And to this is
joined a good water-mill for corn, all built of lime and stone. This is
at this time the fairest building I have seen. Near unto this Bawne there
is built a town, in which there is fifteen English families, who are able
to make twenty men with arms.”
The ruins of this celebrated mansion seem to justify the opinion
expressed by Pynnar, that it was the fairest building he had seen, that
is, in the counties of the plantation, for there are no existing remains
of any house erected by the English or Scottish undertakers equal to
it in architectural style. It received, however, from the second Lord
Charlemont, the addition of a large gate-house with towers, and also of a
strong keep or donjon.
From the ancient maps of Ulster of Queen Elizabeth’s time, preserved in
the State Paper Office, Castle-Caulfield appears to have been erected
on the site of a more ancient castle or fort, called Fort O’Donallie,
from the chief of the ancient Irish family of O’Donghaile or O’Donnelly,
whose residence it was, previously to the confiscation of the northern
counties; and the small lake in its vicinity was called Lough O’Donallie.
This family of O’Donnelly were a distinguished branch of the Kinel-Owen,
or northern Hy-Niall race, of which the O’Neills were the chiefs in the
sixteenth century; and it was by one of the former that the celebrated
Shane or John O’Neill, surnamed the proud, and who also bore the cognomen
of Donghailach, or the Donnellian, was fostered, as appears from the
following entry in the Annals of the Four Masters, at the year 1531:--
“Ballydonnelly was assaulted by Niall Oge, the son of Art, who was the
son of Con O’Neill. He demolished the castle, and having made a prisoner
of the son of O’Neill, who was the foster-son of O’Donnelly, he carried
him off, together with several horses and the other spoils of the place.”
We have felt it necessary to state the preceding facts relative to the
ancient history of Ballydonnelly, or Castle-Caulfield, as it is now
denominated, because an error of Pynnar’s, in writing the ancient name as
Ballydonnell--not Ballydonnelly, as it should have been--has been copied
by Lodge, Archdall, and all subsequent writers; some of whom have fallen
into a still more serious mistake, by translating the name as “the town
of O’Donnell,” thus attributing the ancient possession of the locality
to a family to whom it never belonged. That Ballydonnelly was truly,
as we have stated, the ancient name of the place, and that it was the
patrimonial residence of the chief of that ancient family, previously
to the plantation of Ulster, must be sufficiently indicated by the
authorities we have already adduced; but if any doubt on this fact could
exist, it would be removed by the following passage in an unpublished
Irish MS. Journal of the Rebellion of 1641, in our own possession,
from which it appears that, as usual with the representatives of the
dispossessed Irish families on the breaking out of that unhappy conflict,
the chief of the O’Donnellys seized upon the Castle-Caulfield mansion as
of right his own:--
“October 1641. Lord Caulfield’s castle in Ballydonnelly (_Baile I
Donghoile_) was taken by Patrick Moder (the gloomy) O’Donnelly.”
The Lord Charlemont, with his family, was at this time absent from
his home in command of the garrison of Charlemont, and it was not his
fate ever to see it afterwards; he was treacherously captured in his
fortress about the same period by the cruel Sir Phelim O’Neill, and was
barbarously murdered while under his protection, if not, as seems the
fact, by his direction, on the 1st of March following. Nor was this
costly and fairest house of its kind in “the north” ever after inhabited
by any of his family; it was burned in those unhappy “troubles,” and left
the melancholy, though picturesque memorial of sad events which we now
see it.