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Life
1732-1812 [vars. Blacquière; Blaquière]; b. London of Huguenot stock; Irish Chief. Sec., 1772, MP, 1773; advocated tax on absentees; Privy Councillor, 1774; Commissioner of Paving Board; Baronet de Blacquiere, 1800; only Chief Secretary to tontinue residing in Ireland after his term of office; bur. St. Anne’s, Pearse [formerly Brunswick] St., Dublin; a Huguenot but instrumental in foundation of Catholic Committee, with Lord Trimleston and others; served as model for Sir Ulick O’Shane in Maria Edgeworth’s Ormond; note also Blacquiere Bridge, Phibsborough [Royal Canal]; he was known as ‘Queerblack’ in satirical playbills at the time of the Union. [No ODNB.]
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Criticism
A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (1982), p.86, notes that Maria Edgeworth modelled Sir Ulick in Ormond (1817) on Sir John de Blacquiere; Joan Tighe, ‘Sir John Blacquiere in Dublin’, in Dublin Hist. Rec., vol. 24, no. 2 (1971), pp.3-14. [Eager]; Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London: Allen Lane 1988), p 229.
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Quotations
Speech on the Foundling Hospital (Irish House of Commons, 1790): ‘The number of infants received in 1789 was 2,180, and of that number 2,087 were dead or unaccounted for. In ten years 19,367 children had been entered upon the books, and almost 17,000 were dead or missing. The wretched little ones were sent up from all parts of Ireland, ten or twelve of them thrown together in a kish or basket, forwarded in a low-backed car, and so bruised and crushed and shaken at their journey’s end that half of them were taken out dead, and were flung into a dung-heap.’ (Connolly, The Reconquest of Ireland [Chap. 7], rep. with Labour in Ireland, 1917, p.247.) Connolly remarks: ‘That last touch “flung into the dung-heap” is characteristic of the thought and practices of the ruling class of the time. The children were only children of the poor, and the poor - whether Protestant or Catholic - were only esteemed, perhaps are only esteemed to-day, by the rich, as in Kropotkin’s words, “mere dung to manure the pasture lands of the rich expropriator”’.
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Notes
Blacquiere Bridge on Royal Canal, Dublin, is erroneously cited as Blancière Bridge in Thomas Connolly, ed., Scribbledehobble (Northwestern UP 1961), being the Ur-Notebook of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
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