The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent | Page 3

went therein might drive it forwards. These
machines were set against castle walls whilst the men within them
attempted to make a breach with crows and pickaxes.'
Infernal machines are, after all, not confined to our own times, and this
same rascally ancestor of my own appears to have had predatory habits
more likely to be appreciated by his followers than by his foes.
Dingle is now a somewhat dilapidated town, but that was not always
the case, for it is mentioned in my dear old friend Froude's History of
England that the then Earl of Desmond called on the ambassador of
Charles V. at his lodgings in Dingle. The old records of the place
would be worth diligent antiquarian research, a matter even more
difficult in Ireland than elsewhere. Should all be brought to light, I
fancy the part played by my family would not grow smaller.
The Husseys spread away over the county, after having their lands
forfeited under both Elizabeth and Cromwell, which was the most
respectable thing to suffer in those times. In the reign of Queen Anne,
Colonel Maurice Hussey sold Cahirnane to the Herberts, and there is a
garden still called Hussey's Garden in the property. He built a mortuary
chapel for himself on the top of a small hill just outside the gates of
Muckross, where his own grave near that beautiful abbey can be seen to
this day.
This Colonel Maurice Hussey resided for some time in England, and
appears to have married an English lady; and it is odd that though a
Roman Catholic he was trusted by the Governments of both William
and Anne. There seems to have been something versatile about his
rather mysterious career, the key to which may be found in the surmise
that until the accession of King George he was a Jacobite at heart;
which throws some doubt on his assertion in a letter that there are very
few Tories--or outlaws--in Kerry, where the Whig rule was never
enforced with great severity. He was, however, committed to 'Trally

jail' (_i.e._ Tralee) on the fear of a landing by the Pretender, whence he
wrote pleading letters, in one of which he mentions that his son-in-law,
MacCartie, has taken the oaths of abjuration; and later, when released,
he seems to have been disturbed at the large number of German
Protestants, driven out of the Palatinate by Louis the Fourteenth, who
settled at Bally M'Elligott.
Any one who rambles about Dingle and investigates the older buildings,
so carefully examined by Mr. Hitchcock, will notice how frequent is
the emblem of a tree; and that is a conspicuous feature of the Hussey
armorial bearings.
With reference to the allusions made in Smith's book to my ancestors, it
may be pointed out that he repeated the popular tradition at the very
time when the Husseys, like the rest of their fellow Catholics all over
the country, were disinherited and depressed, and when he could gain
nothing by doing them honour.
As for my name, it seems to have really been Norman, and to have
been De La Huse, De La Hoese, and later Husee, Huse, and, finally,
Hussey.
Burke in his extinct Peerage states that Sir Hugh Husse came to Ireland,
17 Hen. II., and married the sister of Theobald FitzWalter, first Butler
of Ireland, and that he died seized of large possessions in Meath. His
son married the daughter of Hugh de Lacy, senior Earl of Ulster, and
their great-grandson, Sir John Hussey, Knight, first Earl of Galtrim,
was summoned to Parliament in 1374.
Moreover, the State Papers in the Public Record Office, quoted in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Irish Antiquaries for September 1893, p.
266, prove beyond question that Nicholas de Huse or Hussy and his
father, Herbert de Huse, were land-owners of some importance in
Kerry in 1307. Stirring times they must have been, of which we have
no fiction under the guise of history, though then men had to fight hard
to preserve their lives and maintain their dignity. We can imagine the
tussle, even in these degenerate days when no challenge follows the
exchange of insults, even in the House of Commons, and when the

perpetration of the most cowardly outrage in Ireland has to be induced
by preliminary potations of whisky. Of course, those old times were
bad times, but the badness was at least above board and the warfare
pretty stoutly waged. There is some sense in fighting your foe hand to
hand, but to-day when a battle is contested by armies which never see
one another, and are decimated by silent bullets, the courage needed is
of a different character, and the wicked murder of such combats is
obvious.
But let us quit war and confiscation for the equally stormy region