The O'Brien Dynasty

In 1902 a gatehouse was taken down at Lemenagh and carried across County Clare to be set up again in the gardens of Dromoland. It had been built in the fifteenth century for a cadet branch with a reputation for rebellion. It came to rest on the lawns of a nineteenth century house belonging to a British peer of the same blood. Nobody needed a gate there. That was rather the point. The family was putting its whole long argument with history into one piece of stone, where visitors could walk past it on the way to the door.

Nine hundred years lay between that gatehouse and the man whose name the family still carried.

The Single Stream, 1014-1543

The O'Briens came of the Dál Cais of North Munster, and for five centuries they were the largest Gaelic obstacle standing in the way of Anglo-Norman and then Tudor expansion westward. Theirs was never quite an ordinary regional lordship. It was a political project built on the memory of the High Kingship and on hard physical control of County Clare, the Shannon estuary at one end and the limestone of the Burren at the other.

The height of it was Brian Boru, dead in 1014. His victory at Clontarf broke the Viking hold on Ireland, but his death left the High Kingship, in Jonathan Bardon's phrase, a trembling sod. What followed was instability, and the O'Briens withdrew into Thomond, the country they had come from. Their grip nearly went altogether in 1151, when the High King Turlough O'Connor divided Munster in two, Thomond and Desmond, precisely in order to cut O'Brien power down. It was an amputation. In time the family learned to live inside the smaller shape and to use it.

Succession was governed by tanistry, and tanistry rested on the derbfine, the four generations of male kin from whom a king could be drawn. The arithmetic was generous. There was never a shortage of men with a claim, and that was both the strength of the system and the trouble with it, since every generation produced rivals as reliably as it produced heirs. Naming a tánaiste, the expected successor, was the mechanism for settling the question in advance. It worked often enough to be kept. It did not always work quietly.

For centuries the family remained unconquered. At Dysert O'Dea in 1318 they stopped Norman expansion into Clare for generations. By 1466 Tadc an Chomad O'Brien had turned that standing into revenue, imposing the black rent, an annual tribute paid by the English colonists of the Pale and of Limerick for the privilege of being left alone. The habit of charging a stronger power for access to a position the O'Briens happened to hold would outlive the Gaelic order by three hundred years.

Their seats mapped the strategy. Bunratty, raised in the fifteenth century, watched the estuary and served as the chief house of the line. Clare Castle, older, held the gateway to the interior and did the administrative work of the derbfine. Lemenagh, a fifteenth century tower house, stood forward in the Burren as a frontier post and as the seat of the junior lines. By the sixteenth century the Tudor state was pressing on all three, and the family began to calculate.

The Bargain of 1543, 1543-1603

Surrender and Regrant was the hinge. In 1543 Murrough O'Brien, the last King of Thomond, submitted to Henry VIII and gave up the title Ó Briain in exchange for the Earldom of Thomond and the Barony of Inchiquin. The trade looks like a matter of names. It was not. Land that had been held communally under Gaelic tenure became individual property under English feudal law, and authority that had rested on Brehon custom now rested on Letters Patent kept in a box.

It also split the family in two, deliberately and permanently.

The Earldom took the anglicising road. Donough O'Brien, the fourth Earl, dead in 1624 and remembered as the Great Earl, turned Protestant, rebuilt Ennis and Kilrush along English lines, and was judged more English than Irish by those watching. He stayed loyal to the Crown through the Nine Years' War and was rewarded with unchallenged authority in Clare, which he exercised against his own relations when the Crown required it.

The Barons of Inchiquin went the other way, at least at first. From Inchiquin Castle they held to Roman Catholicism and to the older cultural ties. Between the two branches the family now had a foot in the rising British state and a foot in the fading Gaelic one. Whichever way the century fell, an O'Brien would be standing on the right side of it.

Three Ways to Survive, 1551-1660

A third line came out of a document. The 1551 will of the first Earl of Thomond carved a separate inheritance for Donough MacMurrough O'Brien, the branch that would hold Lemenagh and then Dromoland. The will set English primogeniture directly against Gaelic tanistry, and the family spent decades in court over it. Dromoland earned the name Hill of Litigation. The lawsuits were an education. By the time they ended, the O'Briens knew Common Law from the inside.

They needed it. The years from 1641 to 1660 took the three branches in three directions.

The Earls of Thomond stayed Protestant and stayed loyal, and in doing so supplied the legal scaffolding for English authority in Clare. The Barons of Inchiquin produced Murrough of the Burnings, who earned the name at Cashel in 1647, signed the Inchiquin Truce the following year, and turned Catholic again in exile once the wind changed. At Lemenagh, Máire Rúa O'Brien married John Cooper, a Cromwellian officer, while attainder hung over the estate.

The folklore has never quite forgiven her for it. Her biographer Máire Mac Neill named the thing more accurately: legal literacy. The marriage was not a surrender but an instrument. It stood between an inquisition post mortem and her Catholic son Conor, and it kept the inheritance in the family. A woman in Clare in the 1650s had very few tools. She used the one the conquerors had brought with them.

The Sorting, 1660-1691

The Williamite war finished the sorting, and the price of permanence was conformity.

Donough O'Brien of Dromoland, grandson of Conor and Máire Rúa, turned Protestant around 1680, moved to Dromoland in 1685 and took a baronetcy in 1686. The rebel branch had become landed gentry inside two generations. He held to the Williamite side, and when Catholic land came up forfeit he bought it, Rathfolan among it.

Daniel O'Brien, third Viscount Clare, chose the other king. He raised Clare's Dragoons for James II, lost fifty-six thousand acres to attainder, and left with the Wild Geese.

Further out, William O'Brien, second Earl of Inchiquin, was made Governor of Jamaica in 1690 and took his share of the Assiento. It was the old arrangement in a new ocean. His ancestors had charged the Pale for peace. He charged the Empire for service, and the money came home the same way.

The Long Convergence, 1691-1900s

The parallel streams ran dry one by one. The Earls of Thomond died out in 1741. The male line of the Earls of Inchiquin failed in 1855. What had been three families became one again, and Lucius William O'Brien, fifteenth Baron Inchiquin, inherited the barony and gathered the whole inheritance under Dromoland.

Whatever else the strategy had been, it had worked. The O'Briens held Clare from the kingship to the landlordship without a break in occupation. They moved from Brehon law to Common Law early, while the move was still voluntary. They conformed, each time, in whatever direction the dominant power required, and they were careful to keep at least one man on the losing side as well, in case the losing side won later.

Which brings the story back to the gatehouse on the lawn at Dromoland, hauled there in 1902 by a family that had outlasted every system built to end it. The arch had once let men in and kept men out. On the grass at Dromoland it did neither. It simply stood where the visitors could see it, older than the house it now belonged to, and still, after nine hundred years, in County Clare.