Ulick Burke, 1st Marquess of Clanricarde

Who was Ulick Burke, 1st Marquess of Clanricarde?

Ulick Burke, 1st Marquess of Clanricarde, was an Irish nobleman and figure in English Civil War.

He was the son of Richard Burke, 4th Earl of Clanricarde, by his wife Frances Walsingham. In 1622, Ulick married his only wife Anne Compton, the daughter of William Compton, 1st Earl of Northampton and his wife Elizabeth Spencer. They had a single child, Margaret Burgh who married Charles MacCarty, Viscount Muskerry.

Ulick was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Burgh in 1628, and succeeded his father as 5th earl in 1635. In 1636, he inherited Somerhill House on the death of his father. He was a staunch opponent of the policies of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Wentworth, who had attempted to seize much of the great Burke inheritance for the Crown; there was also personal ill-feeling since the dispute was thought by many to have hastened the death of Ulick's elderly father. He sat in the Short Parliament of 1640 and attended Charles I in the Scottish expedition. Charles, unlike Strafford, liked and trusted Ulick.

Somerhill was sequestered by Parliament in 1645, following the Battle of Naseby. During the Irish Confederate Wars, he supported the Royalist James Butler in defending Ireland for Charles I against the Parliamentarians by uniting Catholic and Protestant nobles. He did not join the Catholic Confederate Ireland, but instead helped to broker a military alliance between the Confederates and English Royalists. He commanded the forces of this alliance during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, after Ormonde fled the country, and soldiers of his Connaught army helped to win a minor victory at the battle of Tecroghan. Only a few months later however his army was wiped out during the battle of Meelick Island. Burke was a skillful diplomat but not a great soldier. Like Ormond, Clanricarde was distrusted by most Catholics in Ireland and thus was thus not capable of halting the Parliamentarian conquest of the country.