Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 41.djvu/377

 a British colonel, which he drew to the end of his life. In 1796 O'Connell married, at the French chapel in King Street, Covent Garden, Martha Gouraud, Comtesse de Bellevue (neé Drouillard de Lamarre), ‘a charming young widow,’ with three children. She came of a family of St. Domingo planters, and her first husband had lost estates in that island at the revolution. She had no issue by her marriage with O'Connell.

At the peace of Amiens O'Connell returned to France, with his wife and stepdaughters, to look after the West India property, which was unexpectedly recovered. In France they remained. On the renewal of the war with England they were detained by Napoleon as British subjects. At the restoration of the Bourbons O'Connell received the rank of lieutenant-general in the army of France, and it was supposed that a marshal's bâton awaited him in recognition of his having saved the life of Charles X at the siege of Gibraltar; but after the revolution of 1830 he refused to take the oaths of allegiance to Louis-Philippe, and was consequently struck off the rolls. He died on 9 July 1833, at the age of eighty-eight, at the château of Mâdon, in Blois, where he had long resided. His nephew, Daniel O'Connell ‘the Liberator,’ said of him that ‘in the days of his prosperity he never forgot his country or his God. Never was there a more sincere friend or a more generous man. It was a surprise to those who knew how he could afford to do all the good he did to his kind.’ He was buried in a vault in the village cemetery at Coudé, in which parish Mâdon is situate. Much of his property was left to his nephew, the ‘Liberator.’

Two portraits of O'Connell are known: one in his youth, in the gay uniform of Clare, a scarlet coat, with broad yellow facings, green turnbacks, and silver epaulettes; the other late in life, of the period of the restoration, in a blue uniform and the ribbon of St. Louis. 

O'CONNELL, DANIEL (1775–1847), politician, eldest son of Morgan O'Connell, of Carhen House, Cahirciveen, co. Kerry, the scion of an ancient but historically insignificant house, and Catherine, daughter of John O'Mullane of Whitechurch, co. Cork, was born at Carhen House on 6 Aug. 1775. Through his great-grandmother, Elizabeth Conway, the wife of John O'Connell of Darrynane, he was descended from an Elizabethan undertaker, Jenkin Conway, who obtained for himself and his associates a grant of the castle and lands of Killorglin, formerly in the possession of the Earls of Desmond (see Notes and Queries, 4th ser. vii. 242). He obtained the elements of education from David Mahony, an old hedge-school master; but being at an early age adopted by his uncle, Maurice O'Connell of Darrynane, familiarly known as ‘Old Hunting Cap,’ head of the family, and without children of his own, he was sent by him at the age of thirteen to Father Harrington's school at Cove, now Queenstown. At school O'Connell did not display remarkable ability, but he claimed the unique distinction of being the only boy who never was flogged. Trinity College being practically closed against him as a Roman catholic, he was sent at the age of sixteen to complete his education on the continent; but being too old for admission into the school at Liège, for which he was originally intended, he and his brother Maurice entered the English College of St. Omer in January 1791 (, O'Connell et le Collége Anglais à Saint-Omer). During his residence there he produced a very favourable impression on the principal of the college, Dr. Gregory Stapleton, who predicted a great future for him. On 18 Aug. 1792 he and his brother were transferred to Douay; but the college being shortly afterwards suppressed, they returned to England in January 1793, not without some personal experience of the excesses of the French revolutionists, and of the passionate hatred of the peasantry towards the religious orders, which left a deep impression on O'Connell's mind, and made him, as he declared, with more truth than he was perhaps conscious of, almost a tory at heart. Having for a short time after his return attended a private school in London, kept apparently by a relative of the family, he entered Lincoln's Inn on 30 Jan. 1794, and settled down to the serious study of law (extract from ‘Lincoln's Inn Admission Book’ in Inns of Court, p. 187; O'Connell kept one term in Gray's Inn, a