BURKE), MARQUESS OF (1604-1657 or 1658), son of Richard, 4th earl of Clanricarde, created in 1628 earl of St. Albans, and of Frances, daughter and heir of Sir Francis Walsingham, and widow of Sir Philip Sidney and of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, was born in 1604. He was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Burgh in 1628, and succeeded his father as 5th earl in 1635. He sat in the Short Parliament of 164o and attended Charles I. in the Scottish expedition. On the outbreak of the Irish rebellion Clanricarde had powerful inducements for joining the Irish—the ancient greatness and independence of his family, his devotion to the Roman Catholic Church, and strongest of all, the ungrateful treatment meted out by Charles I. and Wentworth to his father, one of Elizabeth's most staunch adherents in Ireland, whose lands were appropriated by the crown and whose death, it was popu larly asserted, was hastened by the harshness of the lord-lieut enant. 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 Protes tants, making "his house and towns a refuge, nay, even a hospital for the distressed English." In 1643 he was one of the commis sioners appointed by the king to confer with the Irish confeder ates, and urged the wisdom of a cessation of hostilities in a docu ment which he publicly distributed. He was appointed com mander 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 in fluence rejected the cessation of hostilities, arranged with Lord Inchiquin in 1648, he besieged the town and compelled its ac quiescence. In 1649 he reduced Sligo. On Ormonde's departure in Dec. 165o 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 op posed the offer of Charles, duke of Lorraine, to supply money and aid on condition of being acknowledged "Protector" of the king dom. In May 1652 Galway surrendered to the parliament, and in June Clanricarde signed articles with the parliamentary com missioners 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 re main in England for the rest of his life, and in £ Soo 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. 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." (See also CLANRICARDE, EARL OF.) Memoirs of the Marquis of Clanricarde (1722, repr. 1744) ; Memoirs of Ulick, Marquis of Clanricarde, by John, i th earl (1757) ; Life of Ormonde, by T. Carte (185I) ; S. R. Gardiner's Hist. of the Civil War and of the Commonwealth; Cal. of State Pa pers, Irish, esp. Introd. and Domestic; Hist. IKss. Comm., mss. of Marq. of Ormonde and Earl of Egmont. (P. C. Y.) CLANRICARDE, EARL OF, Irish title, held, since 1916, by the marquess of Sligo. In 1543, Ulick (d. (q.v.), chief of the "MacWilliam Eighter" branch of the De Burgh family (q.v.), surrendered his territory lying in the neighbourhood of Galway to Henry VIII., receiving it back to hold, by English custom, as earl of Clanricarde and Lord Dunkellin. Richard, the 4th earl (1601 3 5) who fought on the English side in O'Neill's rebellion, ob tained the English earldom of St. Albans in 1628, his son, Ulick (q.v.), receiving the Irish marquessate of Clanricarde in 1646; but at the death of the latter, without heirs, the English honours and the marquessate expired, and the Irish earldom went to his cousin, Richard, 6th earl (165 7-66) . The 9th earl, John, forfeited his estates, for his support of James II. but they were restored to him in 1702, and his great-grandson, the 12th earl, was created marquess in 1789. He left no son, but the marquessate was again revived in 1825, for Ulick, 14th earl, who was lord privy seal, and was created Baron Somerhill, in the United Kingdom, in 1826. On the death of Hubert, George, 2nd marquess (183 2–I 916 ) Ulick's son, all his honours became extinct, except the earldom of Clanricarde (c. 1800), which passed to his kinsman, the mar quess of Sligo.