Count of Tyrone - O'Neills of Martinique

O'Neills of Martinique

By the later nineteenth century, the heads of a O'Neill family of Martinique had come to call themselves comte de Tyrone, and their younger brothers, after the French fashion, vicomte de Tyrone. One of these vicomtes, François-Henry O'Neill, married one Hermine de la Ponce; her father published the family claim to be lineally descended from Earl Hugh O'Neill and his son Shane in the Annuaire de la noblesse de France in 1859 (he uses comte to translate Earl, as is proper in French). Ponce translated this into English, and published it first in the Irishman newspaper, then in the Kilkenny and South-East Ireland Archaeological Society, in 1866, translating comte back into English as Count. Hence the title of Count of Tyrone. This descent was questioned at the time; part of the Kilkenny paper defends its claims against criticism. Nevertheless, two genealogies from before the First World War summarized the information provided; later sources say it "does not bear examination" and has never been proved.

Ponce gives an account of Earl Hugh's sons which arranges their fates quite differently than later sources; in his version, Brian O'Neill was not murdered as a schoolboy, but grew up to be killed at Barcelona in 1641; Shane O'Neill had a son Patrick, and both of them survived to join Owen Roe O'Neill on his expedition into Ireland. Patrick married there, and his son James settled in Martinique during the reign of James II.

The only evidence Ponce presents linking this Patrick O'Neill with the Earls of Tyrone is a single sentence in Gaelic and Latin, identifying the second head of the Martinique family as "Henry, son of James, son of Patrick, son of Shane, son of Hugh, son of Matthew, son of Conn Bacach, son of Conn Mor..." from a parchment in the possession of the vicomte François-Henry O'Neill.

The descent of the Martinique O'Neills is as follows;

• James O'Neill, (1660-?), settled in Martinique, son of Patrick.
• Henry O'Neill (1688–1756)
• Jacques-Henry O'Neill (c. 1728 - c.1789)
• Paul-François-Henry O'Neill (1749-?)
• Jacques O'Neill (1783–1849)
• Louis-Jacques-Tiburce O'Neill (1810-?) unmarried 1866, d. childless.

Louis-Jacques-Tiburce's younger brother was François-Henry O'Neill (1812-c. 1895), Ponce's son-in-law. he had three daughters; the eldest, Augusta Eugenie Valentine, married Hermann von Bodman, of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

Baroness von Bodman met with her surviving sister Marie Anne Marguerite O'Neill in a French notary's office in 1901, with various O'Neill claimants, and issued a paper recognizing Jorge O'Neill of the Lisbon and Clanaboy O'Neills, as successor to Tyrone: as Peter Berresford Ellis observes, this was not in their power either under the law of the Kingdom of Ireland or under brehon law. In brehon law, the men of the O'Neills could decide their next leader, but the considerable rights of women under the brehons did not include a voice in that decision. Under Irish law, the Earldom descends by patent to heirs male; any right to it François-Henry O'Neill had possessed would either pass to the next surviving line of male heirs at his death, or be extinguished if there weren't any.