James Foulis and His Resting Place in St. Matthews

Ringsend and District Historical Society member Trevor James has been looking at some of the people buried in the only cemetery in the locality at St. Matthews Church Irishtown. This is the first of a series of articles on some of the more fascinating burials. Today we look at Sir James Foulis

 

Sir James was a Scot, the son of Sir James Foulis of Colinton, Edinburgh, 5th Baronet, and his wife Mary Wightman. He was born about 1745 and became the 6^th baronet on the death of his father in 1791. He married Margaret Dallas in Edinburgh on 14 June 1791. They had no children. The Foulis family had been very active in Scottish politics and they had supported the Royalist cause during the Civil War between King Charles 1 and the Roundheads led by Oliver Cromwell.

 

Sir James joined the Midlothian Fencibles as an officer and was stationed in Ireland in the 1790s. At that time the United Irishmen were on the rise and there were huge tensions in Ireland. The government was clamping down very severely on possible rebels but they were afraid that militia where Catholics were numerous might not be loyal and these were sent to serve in England and were replaced by Scottish and Welsh cavalry, The Midlothian Fencibles were one of these militias. One of their regimental songs at the time runs:

 

"Ye Croppies of Wexford. I'd have you be wise

And not go to meddle with Mid-Lothian boys.

For the Mid-Lothian boys, they vow and declare.

They'll crop off your heads as well as your hair."

 

And crop off their heads they did. There were many outrages, tortures and mass executions committed by all these volunteer troops, but particularly by the Orange yeomanry of the countryⁱ. These were so savage that Major General Sir John Moore famously said, "If I were an Irishman, I would be a rebel!"

 

Following the uprising and the defeat of the rebels at Vinegar Hill, any captured men faced summary court-martials and were quickly executed. Sir James Foulis was in many cases the President of the court martials and he endeavoured to give the rebels a fair and impartial trial and spoke on behalf of some of them at their court-martials. For example, in the case of John Breen and others, the court-martial recommended the death penalty but Sir James added that because the evidence indicated that, “they apparently acted with reluctance, and evidently under compulsion, and they could not have acted otherwise while under the influence of the rebels, nor have attempted to escape without imminent danger to their own and their families lives”, the court should show mercy to these men.ⁱⁱ

 

Sir James remained in Ireland after 1798 and settled in Meath where he was the commander of a cavalry corps there. He sold Colinton in 1800 to Sir William Forbesⁱⁱⁱ, presumably as he had decided to settle in Ireland. Initially he had an estate near Navan. He wrote a number of pamphlets on ‘the Catholic Question” emphasising the need to understand the Catholic position^iv. He was also a member of a number of committees with Daniel O’Connell on the education of the poor^v. Because of his perceived impartiality he seems to have been well respected, at least by Catholics.

 

One 1798 rebel, Thomas Cloney, had been falsely accused of a murder at Vinegar Hill. He was to be executed when Sir James intervened and had him deported instead. Thomas later returned to Ireland where his family’s extensive property provided an income for him. He recounts in his autobiography how grateful he was to Sir James and how he had unsuccessfully tried to trace him^vi. However, he finally traced Sir James on the day after he had died on June 3^rd 1821 in a house in beside Harold’s Cross bridge^vii. Sir James was then in very reduced circumstances and living on a pension of £150 a year^viii, but, as a mark of respect, Thomas arranged for several of the prominent people of Dublin to attend in their carriages which, along with the carriages of his friends, made a fine funeral. Thomas also says in his autobiography that,

“if God grants me a little time to live, I will, with the assistance of other Irishmen who have experienced Sir James’s humanity or been well acquainted with his character, place over his grave a lasting monument of our respect and gratitude to prove that his venerated remains do not rest in the country of the stranger but in one ever ready to appreciate the virtues of the brave, the generous, and the humane”.

 

There is a stone over his grave which reads,

 

Sacred to the memory of

 

Sir JAMES FOULIS Bart.

 

late of Colinton, Nth. Britain

 

Obit 3d June 1824

 

at 79

 

Who placed it there is unknown.

 

 

ⁱ McGee, Thomas D’Arcy. A Popular History of Ireland from the Earliest Period to the Emancipation of the Catholics (Two Volume Set)

ⁱⁱ Dublin Evening Post 27 August 1807

 

ⁱⁱⁱ Margaret Warrender 1890, Walks near Edinburgh, Edinburgh, David Douglas

 

^iv Conspiracy detected and converted, 1803; Death of the Duke D’Enghien,1807

 

^v Dublin Evening Post 16 Jan 1821

 

^vi Cloney, Thomas. A Personal Narrative of Those Transactions in the County Wexford, in which the Author was Engaged, During the Awful Period of 1798. J McMullen 1832’

 

^vii                       1 Parnell Place on death certificate or 4 Parnell Place in Saunders’s Newsletter 25 Feb 1832

 

^viii                     Army widow’s pension record, 10 Aug 1824

 ^{(c) Trevor James}