Sir Henry Tichborne

Tichborne, Sir Henry (son of Sir Benjamin Tichborne, ancestor of the English baronets of that name), was born in 1581. He was for some time governor of the Cattle of Lifford, and was knighted by James I. in 1623. On the rising of the Catholics in October 1641, he was commissioned by the Lords-Justices to raise a regiment of 1,000 men, and he occupied Drogheda on the 4th of November. His heroic four months' defence of the town against overwhelming forces of the Irish insurgents under Sir Felim O'Neill, until the siege was raised early in March, is fully narrated in a letter to his wife, written in 1651, which is generally to be found bound with Sir John Temple's History of the Irish Rebellion. After the northward retreat of the Irish, he followed them to Ardee, took Dundalk, and for a time occupied Carlingford. In 1642 he was made one of the Lords-Justices. On the Restoration, Charles II. constituted him Field-Marshal of his forces in Ireland. Clarendon writes of him as a man of "excellent fame." He died in 1667, aged 85, and was buried at Drogheda. [His grandson was knighted by William III. in 1694, and was in 1715 created Baron Ferrard of Beaulieu, in Louth.]

Sources

52. Burke, Sir Bernard: Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited, and Extinct Peerages. London, 1866.

54. Burke, Sir Bernard: Peerage and Baronetage.

80. Clarendon, Earl of: History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars. 8 vols. Oxford,1826.

323. Temple, Sir John, Rebellion of 1641. Dublin, 1724.