_General Wolfe_ (Vol. iv., pp. 271. 323.).--Some of the inquiries made
at p. 271. respecting General Wolfe have been subsequently answered, I
find, in p. 323., but no mention appears of his family beyond his father
and mother; a deficiency which I can in some degree supply by ascending
to his great-grandfather, Captain George Wo_u_lfe (sic), of whom we are
told by Ferrar, in his _History of Limerick_, there printed by A.
Watson, in 1787,--
"That on the capitulation of the city of Limerick in October,
1651, to the Parliamentarian general Ireton, twenty of the most
distinguished of its defenders were excepted from pardon, and
reserved for execution. Amongst them were two brothers, George and
Francis Woulfe: the former, a military officer; the latter, a
friar, who was hanged,--but the captain made his escape. He fled,"
says Ferrar (p. 350.), "to the north of England, where he settled;
and his grandson, General Edward Woulfe, was appointed colonel of
the 8th regiment of foot in the year 1745. He transmitted his
virtues with additional lustre to his son Major-General James
Woulfe, whose memory will be for ever dear to his country, and
whose name will be immortalised in history."
Captain Woulfe married, and changed his religion; to which his brother
the friar fell a martyr, exhibiting on the scaffold, it is related, far
more intrepidity than many of his fellow sufferers of military rank.
Ireton, however, finally pardoned several of those originally excepted
from the capitulation. Woulfe's family was at that period one of the
most eminent in the county of Clare, where it still retains a
respectable rank; and one of its members was the late Chief Baron,
Stephen Woulfe, a gentleman equally beloved in society as respected on
the bench. Another was a chemist of some eminence in London, at the
close of the past century. They retained the _u_ in the name, which most
others, like the captain's descendants, laid aside; as Bonaparte did
during his triumphant campaign in Italy, in order to un-Italianise and
Frenchify his patronymic B_u_onaparte. The Chief Justice Wolfe, who was
so barbarously murdered in Dublin at the outbreak of young Emmet's
rebellion in 1803, was of a different branch. Edward, the general's
father, had distinguished himself under Marlborough, as did the son in
1747, at the battle of Lawfelst on the continent. My own family, I may
add, has been brought into close connexion with that of the subsisting
Irish branch of the general's stock by intermarriage.