Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 16.djvu/84

 property belonging to one or other of the abbeys concerned. This entry is omitted by the ‘Four Masters,’ according to a practice not unusual with them of suppressing inconvenient facts.

In 1064 they record his death, and add that ‘Maelisa assumed the abbacy.’ Thus the duration of Dubhdalethe's primacy was fifteen years. Ware, however, states that, according to the ‘Psalter of Cashel,’ it was only twelve, ‘which,’ he says, ‘affords some room to suspect that Gilla Patrick MacDonald, who is expressly called archbishop of Armagh in the “Annals of the Four Masters” at 1052, ought to intervene between Amalgaidh and Dubhdalethe, which will pretty well square with the death of the latter in 1065 [1064].’ But in fact Gilla Patrick is only termed prior by the ‘Four Masters,’ and more exactly by the ‘Annals of Ulster,’ secnab or vice-abbot. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his ‘Life of Maelmogue or Malachy, Primate of Armagh’ (1134–7), refers in severe terms to the usage ‘whereby the holy see [Armagh] came to be obtained by hereditary succession,’ and adds, ‘there had already been before the time of Celsus (d. 1129) eight individuals who were married and without orders, yet men of education.’ One of these must have been Dubhdalethe, but St. Bernard was in error in viewing the influence of the hereditary principle at Armagh as unusual. The comharbs of St. Finnian, St. Columba, and other famous saints succeeded according to certain rules in which kinship to the founder played an important part. And thus it was that Dubhdalethe succeeded his predecessor on the day of his death, and that Maelisa, on the death of the former, ‘assumed’ the abbacy.

Dubhdalethe was the author of ‘Annals of Ireland,’ in which he makes use of the christian era. This is one of the earliest instances in Ireland, if we accept O'Flaherty's opinion, that it only came into use there about 1020. He considered him as contemporary with Mugron, abbot of Hy (d. 980), and as he must therefore have been at least sixty-nine years old when he became primate, and may naturally be presumed to have compiled his ‘Annals’ at an earlier period, he may have been actually the first to use it. His ‘Annals’ are quoted in the ‘Annals of Ulster’ (1021), p. 926, and in the ‘Four Masters,’ p. 978. He is also reported to have been the author of a work on the archbishops of Armagh down to his own time.

[O'Conor's Scriptt. Rer. Hib. iv. 290; Annals of the Four Masters, ii. 587, 887; Ware's Works (Harris), p. 50; Colgan's Trias Thaum. p. 298 b; Lanigan's Eccles. Hist. iii. 428, 448.]  DUBOIS, CHARLES (d. 1740), treasurer to the East India Company, lived at Mitcham, Surrey, where he had a garden filled with the newest exotics at that time in course of introduction. As regards botany, he seems to have been chiefly a patron rather than a worker; thus he appears as one of twelve English subscribers to Micheli's ‘Nova Genera,’ 1728. His name, however, occurs as having contributed observations to the third edition of Ray's ‘Synopsis,’ 1724. His dried plants occupy seventy-four folio volumes, the entire number of specimens being about thirteen thousand, and are in excellent preservation; they form part of the herbarium at the Oxford Botanic Garden. He died 21 Oct. 1740. Brown established his genus Duboisia in commemoration.

[Gent. Mag. (1740), x. 525; Nichols's Lit. Illustr., i. 366–76 (mentioned in letters); Daubeny's Oxford Bot. Garden, p. 49.]  DU BOIS, DOROTHEA (1728–1774), authoress, was the eldest daughter of Richard Annesley [q. v.], afterwards sixth earl of Anglesey, by Ann Simpson, daughter of a wealthy merchant of Dublin. She was born in Ireland in 1728, one year after her father had become Lord Altham. In 1737 he succeeded to the earldom. At this time the earl made provision for his countess and her children, assigning 10,000l. a year to Dorothea; but about 1740 he repudiated his marriage, declared his children illegitimate, and turned them all out of doors. An action brought by the countess in 1741 resulted in an interim order for a payment by the earl of 4l. per week; but this payment was never made, and the ladies suffered the greatest distress. About 1752 Dorothea secretly married Du Bois, a French musician, and became the mother of six children. In 1759 she heard that her father had made a will leaving her 5s., in quit of all demands, as his natural daughter; and in 1760, on recovery from the birth of her sixth child, she undertook a journey to Camolin Park, Wexford, where he was lying ill, to induce him to acknowledge his marriage with her mother. She was repulsed with much indignity by the woman then claiming to be the earl's wife. In 1761 the earl died, his estates devolving on the son of the wife in possession. Lady Dorothea then laid the whole story before the world in ‘Poems by a Lady of Quality,’ which she dedicated to the king, and published by subscription at Dublin in 1764. In 1765 her mother died. In 1766 Dorothea published ‘The Case of Ann, Countess of Anglesey, lately Deceased,’ appealing for help to prosecute her claims; with the same object she