Four hundred then and ninety-two beside
Had passed away, when St. Thaddeus died.
When Dr. Murray received the Bishop of Ivrea's letter, he placed it in the hands of the late venerated President of Maynooth College, from whose MSS. it is now copied, together with the very literal translation of the verses made by one of the junior students at the time. Dr. Renehan undertook to collect all the notices of Blessed Thaddeus in our Irish annals, and to give the best answers he could to the bishop's questions. He even visited Ivrea in the summer of 1850, in the hope of finding traditional records of the life of Blessed Thaddeus, but to no purpose. He found the task more difficult than might be expected. All the knowledge regarding the saint's family, see, etc., that can be gathered from Irish or British sources is found in these few lines from Ware on the Bishops of Cloyne:
“Thady M'Carthy (succ. 1490).—Upon the resignation of William, Thady M'Carthy, by some called Mechar, succeeded the same year by a provision from Pope Innocent VIII., as may be seen from the Collectanea of Francis Harold”—Ware's Bishops (Harris), p. 563.
The Blessed Thaddeus's name is unhonoured then, in his own country; his biography, if ever written, is at least not recorded by the Irish historians. Even the scanty information which the industrious Ware supplies, was gleaned not from our annals, but from Harold's Collectanea, probably notes and extracts taken from documents in the continental libraries. Dr. Renehan had, therefore, little to add on our saint's life. He was, however, fully satisfied that Blessed Thaddeus of Ivrea was no other than the Bishop of Cork and Cloyne, mentioned by Ware. His arguments may be seen in a rough outline of his answer to the Bishop of Ivrea's letter, among the O'Renehan MSS. in Maynooth, almost the only authority we had time to consult for this notice. Sometimes the very words of the letter are given in inverted commas:—
I. The Pilgrim of Ivrea was an Irish bishop who died in the year 1492. “The most diligent search through our Irish annals will not discover another bishop to whom even so much of the poet's description will apply but Thaddeus M'Carthy, Bishop of Cloyne. About that date there were indeed in Ireland five bishops named Thaddeus: 1. Thady, Bishop of Kilmore, since [pg 379] before 1460; but his successor Furseus died in 1464, and Thomas, the third from him, died before 1492. 2. Thady M'Cragh, of Killaloe, succeeded in 1430, full sixty years before our saint's death at Ivrea. His third successor died in 1460. 3. Thady, Bishop of Down, was consecrated in Rome, 1469, died in 1486, and his successor, R. Wolsey, was named before 1492. 4. Thady of Ross died soon after his appointment in 1488, succeeded by Odo in 1489. 5. Thady of Dromore, appointed only in 1511, and the see was held by George Brown in 1492. The date (1492) is alone enough to prove that B. Thaddeus of Ivrea was not any of the preceding bishops, and there was no other of the name for full sixty years after or before, but the Bishop of Cork and Cloyne, the date of whose death fits exactly all the requirements of the case. Ware quotes from Harold that he was appointed by Innocent VIII. (sed. 1484-1492,) that he succeeded W. Roch, resigned 1490, and further, that Gerald, who succeeded, resigned in 1499, after obtaining a pardon from Henry VII. in 1496”—(Lib. Mun., i. p. 102)
II. Another line of the old fragment seems to name the see of the B. Thaddeus, whom the poet describes as lamenting his death abroad, far from the “solum Chariense”, or “Clovinense”, which we interpret far “from Kerry”, the burial place of his family, and “from Cloyne”, his episcopal see. “Cloyne” is variously Latinized, even by Irish writers, “Cloynensis”, “Clonensis”, “Cluanensis”—and often “Clovens” or “Clovinen”, in Rymer's Foedera.[7] What more natural than that a poet would describe the pilgrim as longing to be buried either in his cathedral church of Cloyne or with his fathers in Kerry?
III. The passage which seems to us most decisive, is that which points to the royal extraction and name of this holy bishop: “Regia progenies, alto de sanguine Machar”. Observe how in the notice from Harold Bishop M'Carthy was called also “Mechar”. Clearly both were one and the same name. Thus [Gaelic: Mac Careaw], Anglicised M'Carthy, is pronounced Maccaura, with the last syllable short, as in Ard-Magha (Armagh), and numberless like words. Hence Wadding,[8] in speaking of the foundation of Muckross Abbey, Killarney, by Domnal M'Carthy, Prince of Desmond, quotes to this effect a Bull of Paul II., in 1468, in which Domnall's name is spelled “Machar”, a form identical with that in the contemporary fragment. In truth, there is no Irish family name like “Machar” at all but “Meagher”, which is invariably spelled with “O”, [pg 380] especially in the Latinized form; and the “O'Meaghers” had no claim to royal blood.
IV. The Blessed Thaddeus was “regia progenies”. Now there was no royal family name in Ireland like that in the inscription except the truly royal name, made more royal still by the saintly Bishop of Cloyne. Without insisting with Keating that the ancestry of the M'Carthy family could be traced through twenty-eight monarchs who governed the island before the Christian era, we may assert with the Abbe MacGeoghan, in a note (tom. iii. p. 680), strangely omitted by his translator, “that if regard be had to primogeniture and seniority of descent, the M'Carthy family is the first in Ireland”.
Long before the founders of the oldest royal families in Europe—before Rodolph acquired the empire of Germany, or a Bourbon ascended the throne of France—the saintly Cormac M'Carthy, the disciple, the friend, and patron of St. Malachy, ruled over Munster, and the title of king was at least continued in name in his posterity down to the reign of Elizabeth. “Few pedigrees, if any”, says Sir B. Burke, “in the British empire can be traced to a more remote or exalted source than that of the Celtic house of M'Carthy.... They command a prominent, perhaps the most prominent place in European genealogy”. Plain then is it that in no other house could the “regia progenies” be verified more fully than in the M'Carthy family.[9]