Waterford Merchants and their Families on Distant Shores: Traders in Spain and France from 1600 to 1800 , by Liam Murphy (review)

Abstract

briefly highlight. His book is recommended to any library or reader with an interest in the history, language, literature, and folk-lore of the six modern Celtic nations. Dr John B Davenport is retired Professor of History at North Central University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Waterford Merchants and their Families on Distant Shores: Traders in Spain and France from 1600 to 1800, Liam Murphy (Blackrock: Kingdom Books, 2019), 288 pages. Waterford was the second most important city in Ireland for hundreds of years after the Norman invasion, due to its extensive trading links with the continent. After the Cromwellian conquest, the city’s ruling Catholic merchants were forced to leave, having lost their right to trade and to hold civic positions.These emigrant merchants and their descendants set up trading houses in the port cities of France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands and many of them were remarkably successful in both trade and public life. Most were members of the Old English Catholic merchant class who dominated the city before the Cromwellian invasion. Some of them had set up trading posts on the continent well before Cromwell arrived in Ireland, but it was the brutal and anti-Catholic nature of the settlement in the 1650s that forced them to leave. Not only did they lose their power in Waterford – they lost the right to trade as merchants. The loyalty of so many of the Old English to Catholicism was a remarkable feature of seventeenth century Ireland. These people were loyal to the crown, but were not prepared to abandon their religion and instead chose persecution and the loss of everything they possessed. Among the common surnames of the merchants who fled the city at this time were Aylward, Comerford, Fitzgerald, Power, Walsh and White. Descendants of the initial emigrants had remarkable careers on the continent. Antoine Walsh, a slave trader in Nantes, brought Bonnie Prince Charlie to Scotland for the ill-fated Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Nicolas Geraldino (Fitzgerald) from Cadiz commanded the Spanish flagship in the Spanish/French victory over the British at Toulon during the war of the Austrian Succession. Other truly remarkable people among the Waterford Studies • volume 108 • number 431 364 Autumn 2019: Book Reviews Studies_layout_AUTUMN-2019.indd 132 21/08/2019 09:14 families included Jose Blanco White, a well known writer and indefatigable controversialist, who changed his religion twice, beginning life as a Catholic, converting to Anglicanism and ending as a Unitarian. Maria Gertrudis Hore, described as the most beautiful woman in the Cadiz of her day, was a leading writer in Spain in the eighteenth century. Liam Murphy tells the fascinating story of these Waterford families. His extensive research is based on a wide variety of sources in Spanish and French, as well as English. The book throws light on a hidden part of our history which deserves to be much more widely known. It begins by tracing the history of Waterford from its foundation by the Vikings to the establishment of a thriving continental trade in the late Middle Ages. Most of the wine imported into the country at this period came through Waterford. The real focus is what happens from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, as the Waterford merchant families were forced into exile in order to continue trading. They were astonishingly successful in this endeavour, establishing thriving businesses in Malaga, Cadiz, Seville, Tenerife, La Coruña, Bilbao, St Malo, Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Ostend and Bruges. As the families put down roots around the continent, they began to take part in the public and religious life of their adopted countries. Major figures like Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val were of Waterford descent. In 1850 Pius IX re-established the Catholic hierarchy in England and appointed Wiseman as Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, the first cardinal to reside in England since the Reformation. Cardinal Merry del Val served in the Vatican as secretary of state from 1903 to 1914 and as secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office from 1914 to 1930. At a more conventional level, many of the descendants of the Waterford merchants had distinguished careers in the Spanish and French armed forces. Antoine Walsh, who...