From the time of his arrival at Cairncastle in 1646 till his death in Belfast forty-eight years later, Patrick Adair played a major role, as pastor, negotiator, and chronicler, in the fluctuating fortunes of the Irish Presbyterian Church.
Because of his deep and active concern for the welfare of that Church – still in his day the feeble infant of the Kirk in his native Scotland – his ministerial career cannot be viewed in isolation from the civil history of the seventeenth century.
In this short account of his life we must therefore touch, however briefly, on contemporary occurrences, for some of which Adair is himself the only authority, as well as on such enactments as affected, for better or worse, the condition of the Presbyterians of Ulster three hundred years ago.
It is a remarkable fact that no biographical study of Patrick Adair, first historian of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, has yet been published. Neither has there appeared in this century, to my knowledge at any rate, any assessment, critical or otherwise, of his work. Remarkable, I say, because Adair was, in the words of a near-contemporary, …. A man of great natural parts and wisdom, eminent piety and exemplary holiness, great ministerial gravity and authority, endued with savoury and most edifying gifts for his sacred function, wherein he was laborious, painful and faithful; was a constant, curious and accurate observer of all public occurrences; and with all these rare qualities, had not only the blood and descent, but the spirit and just decorum of a gentleman.[1]
This glowing attestation was written two hundred and seventy years ago by the Rev. James Kirkpatrick. D.D., M.D. (Glasgow) author of Presbyterian Loyalty, which was printed – in Belfast, we are told – in the year 1713. Dr Kirkpatrick, who was also a faithful recorder of the events of his time, wrote from knowledge of Patrick Adair communicated to him by his father, the Rev. Hugh Kirkpatrick, who died in 1712. The first historian of the Southern congregations of the Irish Presbyterian Church, the Rev. James Armstrong, M.A (Dublin), D.D (Geneva), M.R.I.A., wrote in 1829 that Adair was “…. Deservedly the most conspicuous and influential minister amongst the Presbyterians of Ulster”[2] And, says Armstrong, “there has been no minister, at any period in the history of the Irish Presbyterians, engaged in such a continuous series of important transactions as Patrick Adair. An authentic biography of this excellent man, embracing a general view of the contemporary affairs of Ulster, would be a most valuable work”.[3]
An authentic biography of Patrick Adair is, as I said at the outset, still awaited. That is not to say, however, that no notices of Adair’s life and work have appeared in print. Much of Adair’s own manuscript history of the early Presbyterian Church in Ireland, covering the period 1623-1670 and generally referred to as The Narrative, is autobiographical. This manuscript, which was lost to public view for many years, was eventually discovered by the Rev. Samuel Martin Stephenson. M.D. (Edinburgh) who was, interestingly enough, the immediate predecessor at Greyabbey, Co. Down. of the Rev. James Porter who was executed in 1798. The Narrative, unfinished at the time of Adair’s death in 1694, was edited and published in 1866 by the Rev. William Dool Killen. D.D., continuator of Reid’s History of the Presbyterian Churchin Ireland. It is disappointing that Killen in his introduction to this valuable Narrative gives us scarcely any account of its compiler’s life.[4] In 1879 the Rev. Professor Thomas Witherow of Magee College, Derry, published an eight-page account of Patrick Adair, to which he appended extracts from the Narrative and from an unpublished sermon which he believed to have been preached by Mr Adair in Dublin in 1672.[5] A few years later the Rev. Classon Porter of Ballygally Castle, who was minister of the Old Congregation of Larne from 1834 till 1885, left us what is by far the fullest account of the minister of Cairncastle. Porter’s lengthy essay on Patrick Adair appears in a booklet published in 1884. By this time the Dictionary of National Biography had been set on foot (1882) and its first volume, published on New Year’s Day 1885, contains a notice of Adair by the Rev. Alexander Gordon. This notice, concise but all too short, takes up little more than a page of the volume. There have been other short articles on Patrick Adair, but the essays by Witherow, Porter and Gordon are the principal, and perhaps the most accessible accounts of his life.
Of immediate interest to us here is Adair’s connection with Cairncastle. How did he come to be settled in this area? What did he do while he was minister here? Was his Narrative or any part of it compiled here? Where exactly did he live? Did he hold any land? Did he marry and rear a family here? These are only some of the questions which will occur to the local historian and, with the materials available to me. I cannot pretend to be able to answer them as fully or as satisfactorily as I would wish to.
We are told that Patrick Adair was of the Adair family of Galloway. Classon Porter asserts, however, that the family was originally Irish, or, more correctly Norman Irish. This had already been stated by George Hill in the MacDonnells of Antrim.[6] reissued in facsimile by this Society in 1976, and the assertion is repeated by Alexander Gordon in D.N.B. Porter, Hill and Gordon were, as it happens, all Non-Subscribing Presbyterian ministers; they were also highly respected historical writers. I feel that Classon Porter’s remarks about the Adairs’ origin ought to be quoted in full:
The Adairs of the North of Ireland, of whom the eminent Presbyterian minister above named was one, and whose present head had been ennobled under the title of Lord Waveney, are commonly said to be of Scotch extraction. And they certainly did come from Scotland to Ireland in the seventeenth century. But it is equally certain, although not so well known, that, like most ‘Scots’ (so called), they had previously gone from Ireland to Scotland. Their family name originally was not Adair, but Fitzgerald, and their founder was a young man called Robert Fitzgerald, a son of the Earl of Desmond. This Robert Fitzgerald lived in the latter part of the fourteenth century, and was the owner of the lands of Adare, in the South of Ireland. Having, in a family feud, killed a person of distinction, he was obliged to leave his native country.
He took refuge in Galloway, in Scotland, where he assumed the name of Adare, or Adair, from his forfeited Milesian patrimony, and obtaining for himself, by means which were not uncommon in those days, a Scotch estate in place of the Irish one he had lost, he founded a family, which, for some time, was known as the Adairs of Portree, afterwards of Kinhilt, and, most recently (on their return to Ireland) , as the Adairs of Ballymena, in this country, where they have been for many generations respected and beloved.[7] Patrick, who was born in 1624,[8] was third son of John Adair of Genoch, Galloway.[9] Of his boyhood years we know only that he was present in Edinburgh High Church (St. Gile’s) on 23 July 1637, when Janet Geddes, robust Presbyterian that she was, threw her stool at the Dean, who was introducing Archbishop Laud’s new Service-book.[10] He went to the University of St. Andrew’s in 1644[11] and following a two-year theological course was duly licensed to preach. Very soon after, on 7 May 1646, he was ordained for Cairncastle by the ‘Army Presbytery,’ constituted at Carrickfergus on 10 June 1642.[12] ‘But although Mr Adair was ordained by a presbytery,’ writes Porter, ‘there can be little doubt that his ordination took place in the parish church of Cairncastle, and also that he continued to occupy that edifice until his ejection therefrom in 1661’.[13]
On a tablet in the porch of the meeting-house, listing the ministers who served Cairncastle Old Congregation (Non-Subscribing), Patrick Adair is the first recorded pastor, and the years 1661-1674 are correctly assigned to his pastorate there, even though he had no meeting-house for several years after his ejection. The year of Adair’s arrival in Cairncastle was marked by the completion (26 November 1646) by the Westminster Assembly of the Confession of Faith, which is still the subordinate standard of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. Porter, who had made himself well acquainted with the history of the area, tells us that Patrick Adair’s settlement in Cairncastle was brought about by James Shaw of Ballygally, ‘who then owned a considerable property in that parish where he resided, and who was himself, a few years previously, come over to Ireland from the west of Scotland, where he may possibly have known Mr Adair or his family. Mr Shaw at that time occupied a very prominent position among the Presbyterians of Ulster’[14] Richard Dobbs, in his account of County Antrim written exactly three hundred years ago, referred to the Shaw’s’ residence: ‘… hard by the shore stands the house of Ballygelly, belonging to Captain Shaw. A strong house, yet robbed lately by the Tories of Londonderry….’[15] When Dobbs wrote the people of the parish were ‘all Presbiterians’.[16] In 1648, two years after his ordination, Patrick Adair and his patron, James Shaw, who was a Presbyterian elder, were, with others, appointed on a committee to treat with George Monck and Sir Charles Coote, the Parliamentary generals in Ulster, for the establishment of Presbyterianism in the province. But, on the beheading of Charles l on 30 January 1649, the Presbyterian ministers of Antrim and Down broke with the Parliament and in February held a meeting in Belfast, at which they vehemently protested against the King’s death and agreed to pray for Charles ll, who for his part promised to establish Presbyterianism in Ulster. The Parliamentary generals replaced the Presbyterian ministers with Independents and Baptists, and, as Gordon says, ‘Adair had to hide among the rocks near Cairncastle’.[17]
That he had his liberty in the following year is evident, for in 1650, if not slightly earlier, he married Margaret, daughter of the Rev. Robert Cunningham of Holywood. [18]The Rev. William Adair of Ballyeaston and later of Antrim, who was born in 1651 and whom we shall again have occasion to mention was a son of this marriage.[19] William was in all probability born at Cairncastle. In March 1652 Patrick Adair, who was then a young married man with an infant son, took part in a public discussion between Presbyterian and Independent ministers at Antrim Castle, the seat of Sir John Clotworthy, afterwards first Lord Massereene.
‘ In this discussions,’ says Porter, ‘ Mr Adair acquitted himself in a very creditable manner, and on his return from Antrim seems to have been encouraged to appear more openly than before among his people.’[20] He was the spokesman of the ministers who in October and November of the same year declined to take the ‘ Engagement’ to be true to the Commonwealth against the King, and was with another minister deputed to meet Charles Fleetwood and the council in Dublin Castle in January 1653, to seek relief from the ‘Engagement’. But because of Adair’s outspokenness on that occasion no relief was obtained. Indeed, commissioners were sent from Dublin to East Ulster early in April to search houses of such Presbyterian ministers (of whom there were only seven) as had not fled the country, and seize any papers they could find. In Adair’s own words:
The soldiers narrowly searched all, but found papers with none but Mr Adair. They took from him every paper, though to never so little purpose – for they could not distinguish papers, there being none, among sixteen soldiers and a sergeant who took the papers that could read. Among the papers they took there was one bundle which contained the Presbytery’s Representation against the sectaries and that party, and another declaring the horridness of their murdering the King, with other papers much reflecting on their party. This bundle they took away with them in a cloak bag among others, though Mr Adair has used all means to preserve it, knowing they might take much occasion against the brethren upon sight of these papers… That night the sergeant kept one of the cloak bags in the chamber where he lay, about two miles from Mr Adair’s house, and in this was that bundle. The maid of the house, hearing a report that these were Mr Adair’s papers, resolved to restore some of them to him again. And so she went in the night when the sergeant and soldiers were asleep, and quietly brought a bundle of papers out of the cloak bag, not knowing what papers they were. This bundle was that which Mr Adair only cared for, and she sent it to him next morning.[21]
Classon Porter conjectures, perhaps rightly, that this incident took place in the town of Larne.[22]
In the following month Adair and six other Presbyterian ministers then in Ulster were called before the Parliamentary commissioners at Carrickfergus and were again required to take the ‘Engagement’ to the Commonwealth. This they refused to do and the commissioners then formulated a scheme for transplanting the Presbyterians of Antrim and Down to Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford, where it was thought, they would be rendered harmless to the government. A proclamation for this purpose was issued at Carrickfergus on 23 May 1653; but in Adair’s homely prose ‘this motion of the governors here in Ireland had no bottom to rest upon, and therefore their project…. Did evanish within a little time, and the ministers and people in this country began to have a great calm after all the former storms which they had endured.’[23]
In the months of April and May 1654 we find Patrick Adair in Dublin once more, pleading for the restoration to the Presbyterian ministers of the tithes which had been sequestered by the Cromwellian government. They got instead maintenance by way of annual salary, which was in accordance with the policy of the protectorate. Adair, who seems to have been put on salary in 1655[24], at first got only fifty pounds a year, but this was increased to a hundred in 1656[25]. His actual tithe entitlement at Cairncastle was sixty-three pounds a year: he fared rather better under the protectorate. He and his fellow ministers did not compromise themselves in accepting the maintenance. They preserved their independence and did not observe the Commonwealth fasts and thanksgivings.
Cromwell died in 1658 and the payment to the ministers fell into some disarray for a time. But Adair seems to have got all the arrears due to him. He was one of the ministers summoned to the convention at Dublin in February 1660 – ‘the only one called from the North’ says Classon Porter, ‘to give… advice in order to the settling of the Church in Ireland.’ [26]Dr Barnard in his study of the Cromwellian period says that Adair was one of eight chaplains chosen to advise on religious matters.[27] Hopes were high that a Presbyterian establishment would materialise, but these hopes were dashed by the restoration of Charles ll, who soon forgot his promise to the Presbyterians.
In January 1661, prelacy having been restored, Jeremy Taylor was consecrated bishop of Down and Connor. Taylor summoned the Presbyterian ministers to his visitation, but on their ignoring the summons he declared all their charges vacant and, as Adair says, ‘procured priests and curates for these parishes as he thought fit.’[28] Adair was ejected from Cairncastle parish church and never again entered it. Nothing daunted, he went to Dublin to seek relief for his brethren from the Duke of Ormond, Lord Lieutenant, who, to quote Adair himself, ‘perceived they had suffered for the King, and now they were like to suffer under the King.’[29]
The best terms Adair could obtain was permission for the ministers to ‘serve God in their own families without gathering multitudes together……’[30
Adair and his brethren were thus left effectively without means of support. ‘They lived upon any small thing they had of their own, among the people, without maintenance from them, and yet must see others bountifully gratified.’ The ejected ministers, continues the author of the Narrative, ‘generally took themselves to the houses that they had, either formerly of their own or had lately built in their several parishes, and judged it their duty, as far as possible, to stay among their people, and to take such opportunities for their education as the times could admit….’[31
More trouble was in store for Patrick Adair. In 1663 he was apprehended in his own house and secured a close prisoner in Carrickfergus jail for three nights. He was brought to Dublin on a charge of complicity in Thomas Blood’s plot for the overthrow of the restored monarchy. Sir John Clotworthy (who was now Viscount Massereene), having interceded on his behalf and testified as to his loyalty, Adair was discharged after three months confinement, with a temporary indulgence on condition of living peaceably. By degrees, he once again set about exercising his ministry among his flock, ‘preaching more publicly in barns and such places in this parish where the bulk of the people met, and at night administering the Sacrament to them.’[32]
About the year 1668 a meeting-house was built for him at Cairncastle.[33] It is believed that the present Non-Subscribing meeting-house, whose sundial by Andrew Snoddy bears the date 1779, is on the site of the place of worship built for Patrick Adair. Despite the severity of the Acts of Uniformity of the English Parliament, 1662, and of the Irish Parliament, 1665, Professor Reid tells us that ‘at the beginning of the year 1669 the Presbyterian Church in Ulster had attained considerable freedom.’[34] The Hearth-Money Rolls for the parish of Cairncastle for that year (1669) was printed, as many of you will recall, in Vol.5 The Glynns, published in 1977. At the time of the Hearth-Money Roll the Presbyterian minister, who’s name, it will be noted, appears as ‘Mr.Patr.Adare’, ‘lived in Ballyhackett townland.’[35] When Glasson Porter wrote a hundred years ago the house where Patrick Adair lived had until a recent period ‘presented a rather antiquated appearance, but it is now completely modernised. This house is not far from the parish church, in which Mr Adair preached, and from this circumstance, as well as the fact that it was on the Ballygally estate, it was for many years the residence of the ministers of Cairncastle, being a sort of manse, with a parish farm attached to it.’[36]
In September 1669 John, Baron Robartes, who subsequently became first earl of Radnor, was sworn in as Lord Lieutenant in place of the Duke of Ormond. He advocated a policy of toleration towards Nonconformists and this led the Presbyterians of Ulster to expect some indulgence. But being an austere man of the strictest probity, and intolerant of vice, Robartes was too strongly marked a character to go through life without making enemies, and the work he had to do, or felt he should do in Ireland was not of a sort to increase his popularity. He was recalled at his own request in the following April. ‘The short time of his government in Ireland,’ says Adair, ‘gave a dash to open profaneness, and some encouragement to the lovers of truth.’[37] The end of 1760 – the year Robartes was recalled – marks the rather abrupt termination of Patrick Adair’s Narrative, which he obviously intended to bring down to ‘a period of deliverance,’ to use Killen’s words, ‘when the history would reach a pleasing termination.’[38] The Narrative falls short by something over twenty-three years of the date of its author’s death.
Patrick Adair was in Dublin was in Dublin again in October 1671, trying to settle a dispute in the congregation of Bull Alley. He seems to have been absent for two months or so and did not return to Cairncastle till about Christmas. ‘Being unwell after his travels’[39] (on horseback), he did not attend the meeting of ministers held in January 1672; but about the middle of October of that year he was in Dublin once more, negotiating along with three other ministers through Sir Arthur Forbes (afterwards first earl of Granard) for a grant to the Ulster ministers. Charles 11 gave them six hundred pounds a year – about seven or eight pounds each. ‘It was,’ says Professor Reid, ‘strictly a pension not an endowment.’[40] In the course of this visit to Dublin Patrick Adair preached at Bull Alley on 10 November 1672 (Communion Sunday) his sermon on Christ in the Pharisee’s house (Luke, chapter 7), of which Professor Witherow gives an extract in his Memorials.[41] The trouble in Bull Alley must have been still unresolved, or have erupted again in 1673, for Patrick Adair’s services as a healer of quarrels were again requisitioned by the congregation in that year. This time he declined to visit Bull Alley and the schism was eventually healed when the congregation issued a call dated 8 April 1673 to the Rev. William Keyes, minister at Belfast.[42]
This event brings us almost to the end of Patrick Adair’s ministry at Cairncastle. for the removal to Dublin of Mr Keyes of Belfast ‘opened the way,’ as Glasson Porter puts it, ‘ for Mr Adair’s transportation to the latter town.’[43] Two events to which we are unable to assign dates occurred during Adair’s pastorate at Cairncastle; the death of his first wife and his remarriage to his cousin Jean, second daughter of Sir Robert Adair of Ballymena.[44] Regrettably, Classon Porter had to record that Patrick Adair’s congregational stipend at Cairncastle was much in arrears when the question of his removal to Belfast was mooted. On 7 April 1674 Patrick Adair’s neighbour, The Rev. John Anderson, M.A. (Edinburgh), of Glenarm, who had been appointed to take an account of the parish, reported ‘that the people (of Cairncastle) are considerably in arrear for every year of four, concluding All Saints 1672, and that (the) year commencing from that date and concluding at All Saints 1673 is not yet applotted, and no mention of the year current.’[45] Porter doesn’t say whether the arrears due to Mr Adair were paid or not; Mr Anderson, who had done Cairncastle congregation’s sums in 1674 removed to Antrim in 1685, ‘ his arrears on leaving Glenarm being upward of £120,’[46 or more than four years stipend. But Mr Anderson died in Scotland in 1708 leaving over four thousand pounds,[47 which is far more than Patrick Adair left at his death.
Adair had evidently become very attached to Cairncastle in the twenty-eight years of his ministry there. Asked what his thoughts were about the call to Belfast congregation, he declared himself ‘unclear to be loosed from Cairncastle.’[48] But loosed he eventually was, and his settlement at Belfast seems to have taken place towards the close of the year 1674. We must now in the interest of completeness mention the chief events of his careers from the time of his removal to Belfast, where he was to spend the last twenty years of this life. The Donegalls, especially Lady Donegall, were opposed to his settlement and refused to attend his ministrations. ‘Indeed’ says Porter, ‘ for some time Mr Adair’s position in his new charge at Belfast was apparently not a pleasant one, and he may have sometimes wished himself back again in Cairncastle.’[49] He wasn’t long settled in Belfast when his second wife Jean took ill and died (1675). The opposition of the Donegall family to his ministry gradually subsided and he was, writes Classon Porter, ‘placed altogether on a more comfortable footing with regard to them and the other members of his flock.’[50] His meeting-house was in North Street, and there he conducted services during the whole period of his Belfast ministry, the years 1769 to 1687 excepted.In June 1679 the Scottish Covenanters were utterly defeated at Bothwell Brig. Their abortive insurrection injured their co-religionists in this country, for thereafter the Ulster Presbyterians were treated with increasing rigour by the government. Their meeting-houses were closed; they were forbidden to assemble anywhere for public worship, and even the monthly meetings of their ministers had to be held secretly under the cover of darkness.[51]
This state of affairs continued till 1687, when James II from motives of state policy, issued his ‘Declaration’, which gave the Presbyterians renewed liberty. Patrick Adair resumed his clerical functions in Belfast and re-entered his meeting house in North Street, which had been closed to him for about eight years. The ministers resumed their monthly meetings and once again ventured to bring elders to those meetings. The increased liberty they enjoyed was confirmed on the accession of William III, who as Prince of Orange landed at Torbay, Devon on 5 November 1688. Patrick Adair was one of two ministers who early in 1689 were appointed by the committee of the Ulster Presbyterians to carry to England a congratulatory address to William. On 124th July 1690 William landed at Carrickfergus. At Belfast two days later he was presented with another congratulatory address from the Presbyterians of Ulster by a deputation of which the minister of the town, Patrick Adair, was one. ‘It was said,’ writes the historian Latimer, ‘that Mr Patrick Adair had several interviews with the King, who took great interest in his conversation and was evidently impressed by the information he communicated.’[52] Three days afterwards the King issued from Hillsborough his orders for the payment of his royal bounty of twelve hundred pounds a year to the Presbyterian ministers of Ulster. In this order he named Patrick Adair and his son William, who had been minister at Ballyeaston from 1681, two of the trustees for distributing the regium donum.
We find no further mention of Patrick Adair in connection with the public events of his time. His closing years were evidently devoted to the writing of his Narrative, for Gordon asserts that he wrote it ‘late in life’.[53] If that be so he can hardly have written any part of it at Cairncastle. He was at the General Synod of Ulster at Antrim in 1691[55 and he was again present at the same venue in 1692.[54] For the year 1693 we have no record, but at the General Synod held once again at Antrim in 5 June 1694 his name, in brackets, heads the list of the Antrim ministers as ‘ Mr Patrick Adair’…. being now dead.’[56] His will was dated 26 January 1693, but probate was not taken out until 6 July 1695, more than a year after his death. ‘In his will’ says Classon Porter, ‘Mr Adair mentions a sum of four hundred pounds belonging to him which was in the hands of Lord Donegall, and the interest of which he leaves to his wife as a jointure.’[57] This was his third wife, Elizabeth Anderson, a widow whom he married while he was minister at Belfast. Her maiden name was Martin. He had four sons: William, Archibald, Alexander and Patrick, and a daughter, Helen. Gordon says that Patrick junior was a minister at Carrickfergus and that he died in June 1717.[58] William, his eldest son by Margaret Cunningham, was an executor of his father’s will, and his third son Alexander, a witness to it.
In 1697 the Synod of Ulster voted an honorarium to the Rev. William Adair for his trouble in copying out, with the aid of an amanuensis, his father’s ‘collections’.[59] Dr Reid afterwards copied the greater part of his manuscript and made much use of it in his history of the Church.[60]The Rev. William Adair’s copy appears to be the one which the Rev. Classon Porter’s son, Classon Porter B.L. donated to the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland.[61] When Dr Killen published the Narrative in 1866 he followed Dr Reid’s copy, no doubt collating it with the Rev. William Adair’s manuscript. By which wife Patrick Adair had his second, third and fourth sons, and his only daughter, we do not know. Possibly they were all born at Cairncastle, for Adair was fifty years of age when he relinquished his charge there. He was buried in Belfast in accordance with the terms of his will; but (says Porter) ‘ we have not heard of any monument of any kind having been erected to this faithful pastor, this brave sufferer for what he believed to be the truth, this able negotiator, this honest man.’[62 No likeness of Patrick Adair has survived – if indeed any was ever drawn or painter.
To the frailties of human nature Patrick Adair was no more immune than many another. Killen says in the introduction to the Narrative that he ‘was not free from the prejudices of his party or the superstitions of his age.’[63] Two quotations from his Narrative will prove this to be so. In January 1653 when Adair was in Dublin seeking relief from the ‘Engagement’ on the grounds of conscience One Allen, Anabaptist, (remarked):’Papists would and might say as much for themselves, and pretend conscience as well as they’. Mr Adair answered – ‘sir, under favour, it’s a mistake to compare our conscience with hose of papists, for Papist’s conscience could digest to kill Protestant kings, but so would not ours, to which our principals are contrary.’ This harsh expression, reflecting on many there who had a hand in the King’s murder, procured a great silence, some drawing their hats down on their faces…. and others were angry.[64] It’s hardly surprising that Adair and his fellow minister were sent home empty handed.
The other quotation relates to Owen O’Connolly and his family. O’Connolly, a sketch of whose life has also been written by Classon Porter, was originally a Monaghan Catholic who became a Presbyterian under the tutelage of the Clotworthy family at AntrimCastle, where he was a servant. He was later an elder of the Church. O’Connolly had betrayed his own foster brother, Hugh Og MacMahon, Conor, Baron Maguire and others in Dublin on the morning of 23 October 1641, thereby saving DublinCastle at the onset of the insurrection. He afterwards joined the Independent sect and rose to a colonel in the Parliamentary Army, getting command of the regiment at Antrim. In October 1649 O’Connolly was mortally wounded in an ambush at Dunadry. Adair wrote: This man, from what could be observed, was of an ingenious nature, and truly sincere, yet he was then deceived by the pretences of that party (the Independents) and seemed violent that way. Therefore, though God had brought him to great respect and a considerable estate upon occasion of his former faithfulness at the breaking out of the rebellion, yet falling from his first principles, and going along with the declining party, the Lord would punish him with the temporal stroke of being thus cut off for a warning to others to beware of such courses. His wife died shortly after, and left a son and a daughter – his son a very idiot unto the greatest height, and the daughter, though thereafter married to a worthy gentleman (Mr Hugh Rowley), yet proved but more than half a fool, and a burden to her husband for many years, and without posterity.[65]
Much as he believed in the justice of the cause for which he suffered, Adair’s manifest antipathy to Catholics, Churchmen, Independents, Baptists, and indeed to all who were not of his own persuasion (with the possible exception of Primate Ussher), deprives his Narrative of that impartiality called for in an historical work, however accurate. He was a man of his time and for this fact we must make due allowance. Born the year before the death of James I and the succession of Charles I, he came as minister to this district two days after Charles had given himself up to the Scots near Newark, and a month before the Battle of Benburb, at which Owen Roe O ‘Neill defeated Robert Monro’s forces. He arrived in the midst of strife and saw much of it during his lifetime, dying almost on the eve of the penal laws, which ushered in another era in the troubled history of his adopted country. Three hundred years after Patrick Adair’s day we’re still living through troubled times in Ireland. May the One who died for us all and who holds all hearts in His hand give us the strength of will andforbearance to live peaceable together.
Additional Notes
A glance at the telephone directories show that the Adairs are very numerous in Northern Ireland and that a few of the name reside in the Republic. The name is now invariably spelt Adair, but Adare is the spelling in the Hearth- Money Roll and in Hill’s Macdonnells of Antrim. This old spelling might be adduced as evidence in support of the statements of Hill, Porter and Gordon that the name derives from Adare in Co. Limerick; but the Fitzgerald of Desmond origin of the Galloway family is a tradition which, according to the leading authority on Scottish surnames, Dr George Fraser Black, ‘seems hypothetical for belief’ (Surnames of Scotland, New York, 1965 reprint, p.6). Black says that ‘Chalmers and other think that Adair is but a different pronunciation of Edzear … or Edgar…’
The Adair’s Waveney title has been extinct since 1886 (Complete Peerage. Vol.12, pt2, 1959, p.435)
Adair of Cairncastle.
Mr Jim Maxwell, who grew up in Ballyhackett townland, in a letter to me quotes Classon Porter as stating in 1865 that Adair’s house was then occupied by a family named McKee. ‘The house almost adjacent to the parish church and known as Church Farm has been the residence of the Mc Kee family for several generations. However, ‘writes Mr Maxwell, ‘I cannot say for sure of it was occupied by them as long ago as 1865, and that it the house referred to by Classon Port.’ There is , seemingly, some slight conflict in Classon Porter’s statements about the precise location of Adair’s residence.
c. 1983 Seamus O Saothrai/James Seery
[1] Rev. James Kirkpatrick .An Historical essay upon the loyalty of Presbyterians.. (Belfast) 1713 p.166
[2] Rev. James Armstrong sermon at the ordination of the Rev.James Martineau… with an appendix containing a summary history of the Presbyterians churches in the city of Dublin (Dublin and London 1829) p.91
[3] ibid.,note
[4] Rev. Patrick Adair, A true narrative of the rise and progress ofthe Presbyterian Church in Ireland (1623-1670)… with an introduction and notes by W.D. Killen D.D.(Belfast etc; 1866) pp xiii-xiv
[5][5] Rev. Thomas Witherow Historical and literary memorials of Presbyterianism in Ireland (Belfast 1879) I,34-45
[6] Rev. George Hill An historical account of the MacDonnells of Antrim…. (Belfast 1873; reprinted, with an introduction
[7] Rev. Classon Porter Ulster biographical sketches (Belfast 1884) p.11. For notices of Porter’s life see (Rev. James Kennedy) Historical sketch of the first Presbyterian congregation of Larne….(Belfast,1889) pp20-23; D.N.R., s.v. Porter, John Scott.
[8] Rev. James Mc Connell. et.al. Fasti of the Irish Presbyterian Church (Belfast, var.dd.), entry no.26.
[9] ibid. Porter (p11) thought that John Adair was ‘ in all probability’ also a minister, but his name does not appear on Rev. Hew Scott’s Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae
[10] Narrative, pp xiii, 55-6 and note
[11]Fasti, op.cit. where Adair is stated to have been at GlasgowUniversity; but this is amended to ‘St. Andrews’ in the Corrigenda et addenda to Mc Connell’s work.
[12] Porter, op.cit., p.12 Two of Patrick Adair’s clerical relations preceded him to Ireland. The Rev. Archibald Adair, son of Ninian Adair of Kinhilt and uncle of Sir Robert Adair of Ballymena, was Dean of Raphoe as early as 1622 and became bishop of Killala in May 1630. He was deposed, fined and imprisoned in 1640 for allegedly being a favourer of the Covenant. ‘ Archbishop Ussher endeavoured to procure a mitigation of this iniquitous sentence, but without success’ Liberated in 1641, he was elevated to the bishopric of Waterford and died in 1746 (Reid’s History,I,264-5 and notes, 268-270, 293 and note). The Rev. William Adair, minister at Ayr, was among the ministers who came over from Scotland in March 1644 o administer the Solemn League and Covenant to Monro’s army in Ulster. ‘ There are good grounds for believing’ says Killen,’ that the author of this(Patrick’s) narrative had the use of a journal kept by Mr(William) Adair at this time, and that he was nearly related to him….. The Rev .W. Adair…. was the brother of Sir Robert Adair, Ballymena.’ He died in 1684 (Narrative. P.116, note; Reid’s History, i. 438, 439-440 and notes; Scott’s Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae, new edition, iii, 9)
[13] Porter, op.cit., p.12
[14] ibid., p.13
[15] ‘Description of the county of Antrim, by Richard Donns Esq.’, in Hill’s MacDonnells of Antrim. p.381
[16] ibid.
[17] D.N.B
[18]Fasti, op.cit., p.13
[19] ibid.
[20] Porter, op.cit., p.13
[21]Narrative. P.197
[22] Porter. Op.cit p.14
[23]Narrative. Pp201-2
[24] Rev. St John Drelincourt Seymour The Puritans in Ireland (Oxford 1921) p.206
[25] Porter. Op.cit p.15
[26] ibid.,p.16
[27] Toby Christopher Barnard Cromwellian Ireland (London 1975) p.133 and note
[28]Narrative p.251
[29] ibid., pp266,268
[30] ibid., p.268
[31] ibid., pp257,258
[32] ibid., p.288
[33] Porter, op/cit., p.18
[34] Rev. James Seaton Reid History of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland (Belfast, new edition, 1867),ii, 309
[35]The Glynns, vol.5 1977, p.16
[36] Porter, op.cit., p.13
[37]Narrative. P.292
[38] ibid., (Killen’s introduction) p.ix
[39] Porter, op.cit. p.18
[40] Reid, op.cit, ii, 335, note. The Southern ministers remained unendowed till the year 1718 (ibid.,iii 89)
[41] Witherow.op.cit pp41,45
[42] Armstrong.op.cit p.91
[43] Porter.op. cit p.18
[44]Fasti, op.cit. Gordon makes Jean Patrick Adair’s first wife (D.N.B.)
[45] Porter,op.cit p.19
[46]A history of congregations in the Presbyterian Church in Ireland 1610-1982 (Belfast 1982) p.499
[47] Rev. William Sunderland Smith Historical gleanings in Antrim and neighbourhood (Belfast 1888) p.43 note
[48] Porter op.cit p.19
[49] ibid., p.20
[50] ibid
[51] ibid
[52] Rev William Thomas Latimer History of the Irish Presbyterians (Belfast, second edition, 1902) pp 236-7
[53] D.N.B
[54]Records of the General Synod of Ulster from 1691 -1820 (Belfast 1890-1898) i,1
[55] ibid.,p.6
[56] ibid.,p.12
[57] Porter, op.cit p.21
[58] D.N.B According to the Fasti this Patrick was a son of William Adair, Corgie, Galloway (entry no.214)
[59]R.G.S.U op.cit.i.25
[60] Narrative (Killen’s introduction)pp.xi,xii.
[61] ‘The Adair narrative’ signed ‘J.W.K’ (Joseph William Kernohan. M.A.) in Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland annual report 1908,pp17-18
[62] Porter.,op.cit p.22
[63]Narrative (Killen introduction) p.xii
[64] ibid.,pp.195-6. Adjutant-General William Allen, to whom Adair addressed his blistering remarks, was, according to Barnard (Op.cit p.108) one of the leading Baptist officers in Ireland.
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