Col. Edmund Bacon Hutton was the youngest son of William Hutton of Gate Burton, Lincolnshire. He served in the Royal Dragoons and was ADC to Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (Lord Spencer). He married Lady Katherine Arabella Beaujolois Bury in 1875.
He succeeded his father in the earldom in 1793. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Dorset for nearly fifty years, from 1808 to 1856. On 20 May 1824, he appointed himself Colonel of the Dorset Militia. He resigned the colonelcy at the beginning of 1846. He never married and on his death in May 1856, aged 83, the viscountcy and earldom became extinct. However, he was succeeded in the two baronies of Digby by his first cousin once removed Edward Digby, who became the 9th and 3rd Baron
Born in New York in 1846, Joyce moved to Ireland and was editor of the Midland Tribune, publishing 'The King's County: Epitome of its history, topography etc. ' in 1883. He moved to the Leinster Leader in 1884, before returning to the US in 1886. He died in Philadelphia in 1922.
Born c.1800 in Croghan, County Tipperary, and near to the town of Birr, County Offaly, Mary Monaghan married William Perkinson in or around 1825.
President of the Irish Republic, 1921-1922,
Fianna Fail Leader, 1926-1959;
Taoiseach, 1937-1948, 1951-1954, 1957-1959;
President of Ireland, 1959-1973
Reverend John Mulock D.D., was born in 1729. He was awarded a B.A. by Trinity College, Dublin in 1749. He succeeded to the Ballyard, or Bellair, estates in 1757 upon the death of his uncle, John Mulock [Mullock]. He married firstly, Emily Frances, daughter of Hurd Wetherall of Castle Wetherall, King’s County, with whom he had four children; Hurd Augustus, John, Sarah, and Frances Emilia. After Emily’s death, Rev John Mulock married Anne Homan on 18 February 1764, with whom he had three children; Thomas Homan Mulock, Mary, and Elizabeth. Anne Homan was the daughter of Richard Homan of Surock, County Westmeath, through whom Rev John Mulock acquired some of the Homan estates. He is credited with improving large tracts of land and with planting the trees on Bellair Hill. He also sponsored a dispensary and a school in Bellair, to cater for the children of the families who were engaged in the flax growing and linen weaving industry.
Rev John Mulock made his will dated 17 November 1899, making certain bequests to his grandchildren (children of his son, John Mulock) and devised the residue of his estates to his son, Thomas Homan Mulock. He died in 1803.
Middleton Westenra Biddulph was born on 17 August 1849 at Rathrobin, Mountbolus, King’s County (Offaly). He was one of six children, and the eldest surviving son of Francis Marsh Biddulph (1802–1868) and Lucy Bickerstaff (d. 1896). She was born in Preston, Lancashire and they married in 1845. The Bickerstaff connection was to be an important one for the surviving sons of Francis Marsh Biddulph, and led to a substantial inheritance in the 1890s for Middleton W Biddulph, and his brother Assheton, who lived at Moneyguyneen, Kinnitty.
The Biddulph ancestors were from Staffordshire, and later Wexford, and had arrived in King’s County from as early as 1694 or 1660. Lt Col. Biddulph held about 1,000 acres, of which perhaps 600 to 700 acres he farmed with the balance leased to his long-standing Protestant tenants. His landholding was principally in the townlands of Rathrobin and those adjoining of Clonseer, Cormeen, Kilmore and Mullaghcrohy, all near Mountbolus, in the civil parish of Killoughy and the barony of Ballyboy.
Middleton Biddulph went to Foxcroft House boarding school in Portarlington, aged 11, thereafter to the Royal School in Banagher, and joined the army when he was eighteen, enlisting with the Northumberland Fusiliers (Fifth Regiment). Initially an ensign or cornet, he rose in the ranks quickly and was a Lieutenant by 1871, Captain in 1881 and Major from 1885. Before retirement in 1896 he held the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. He spoke French, German and Hindustani and stations included: Hythe March (1872), St Helier’s, Chatham (1879) Portsmouth (1881), Agra (1880), Mullingar (1882), Newcastle (1886), Colchester (1887) and Aldershot (1891). It was while he was at Mullingar with the Ist Batt. Northumberland Fusiliers that he was appointed adjutant of the Ist Northumberland and ordered to proceed to Alnwick. It appears that he met his future wife, Vera Flower, following on from an introduction by her brother Stanley Smyth Flower (1871–1946), who was also an officer in the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers. They married in 1891. Vera Josephine Flower was a daughter of Sir William Flower, Director of the British Museum of Natural History, South Kensington, London. They did not have children.
When Biddulph retired from the army in the mid-1890s, he returned to Rathrobin and rebuilt the old house with the benefit of the Bickerstaff inheritance over the period 1898 to 1900. He employed Sir Thomas Drew as architect and William Beckett of Dublin as the builder. Once the new Rathrobin House was completed, Lt Col. Middleton Biddulph got on with his duties as a landlord and was a regular attender at the Petty Sessions, the Board of Guardians, and the County Infirmary, served as High Sheriff in 1901, and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of the County in 1910. He was also on the board of the King’s County Joint Committee for Technical Instruction and the King’s County Farming Society. He and his wife left for England in June 1921 as the military campaign of the IRA in the locality intensified, and Rathrobin House was destroyed by Republican IRA forces in April 1923. While he seemed to have planned to return to Ireland after this, an attack on his land agent, Violet Magan, and his own declining health delayed plans to do so, and he died in Chelsea in May 1926.
The branch of the Mulock family that lived in Bellair originated near Ballynakill, Meelick [Miloc] in East Galway. The Mulock family were Irish landowners, originating in the North of Ireland. Thomas Mulock [Mullock] from Ballynakill, Galway married Margaret Conran. Their eldest son, John Mulock [Mullock], acquired freehold interests of considerable extent and value in the lands of Ballyard (afterwards called Bellair), Kilnagarna, Castlerea and others, in the King’s County. John Mulock died without issue, and by his will of 1755, the Ballyard estate was devised to his nephew, the Rev. John Mulock and his heirs. Through his marriage to Anne Homan, The Rev. John Mulock acquired lands in Surrock, Westmeath. The Rev. John Mulock is credited with improving large tracts of land and with planting the trees on Bellair Hill. He also sponsored a dispensary and a school in Bellair to cater for the children of the families who were engaged in the flax growing and linen weaving industry. Rev. John Mulock died in 1803 after leaving his estates to his son Thomas Homan Mulock, who later left the estate to his nephew, Thomas Homan Mulock Molloy in 1843. After his death in 1889, his son, William Bury Homan Mulock, inherited the estate. In his will, William Bury Homan Mulock bequeathed Bellair House and the remainder of the estate to his niece, Lady Nina Hester, but she refused it and gave it to her niece Sheila Claude Beddington Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt.