Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 46.djvu/266

 when James had suppressed the old corporation and granted a new charter. He sat as a peer in the Irish parliament held on 7 May 1689, after the abdication, the chief business being to attaint most of the protestant landowners. Tyrone's regiment was one of seven which formed the garrison of Cork when Marlborough attacked it in September 1690. He and Colonel Rycaut negotiated the capitulation, which averted an assault. The garrison of about four thousand men became prisoners on 28 Sept. Having evidently levied war against William and Mary, he was charged with treason, and lodged in the Tower by order of the privy council dated 9 Oct. There he died on the 14th, and on 3 Nov. he was buried in the ancient parish church of Farnborough, Hampshire, the resting-place of his father-in-law Anglesey. Both vault and register are still to be seen, the words ‘in woollen’ being omitted in the entry of Tyrone's burial. He underwent outlawry in Ireland, but this was reversed in his son's time. There is a picture of a man in armour at Curraghmore which is supposed to be a portrait of this earl.

Tyrone married in 1654 Dorothy Annesley, eldest daughter of Arthur, first earl of Anglesey [q. v.] He was succeeded by his eldest surviving son, John, lord Decies, who died a bachelor in 1693 at the age of twenty-eight, after having gone through the form of marriage when he was seven. John is the hero of the Beresford ghost story on which Scott founded his fine ballad of the ‘Eve of St. John’ (Ulster Journal of Archæology, vii. 149). He was succeeded by his brother James, who left one daughter, Lady Catherine. She became the wife of Sir Marcus Beresford, and from this marriage the Marquis of Waterford is descended.

[Lodge's Irish Peerage, ed. Archdall; Jacobite Narrative known to Macaulay as Light to the Blind, ed. Gilbert; Carte's Life of Ormonde; Archbishop King's State of the Protestants under James II; Smith's Cork; Arthur Earl of Essex's Letters, 1770; Macaulay's Hist. of England, chap. xvi.; D'Alton's Irish Army List of James II, vol. ii.; Kennett's Hist. of England, vol. iii.; Irish Commons' Journal, 1660; authorities cited in text. See also the article on Archbishop OLIVER PLUNKET. Count De la Poer of Gurteen-le-Poer, co. Waterford, who claims the barony of Le Poer, created in 27 Hen. VIII, has kindly given access to his manuscript collections concerning the Power or De la Poer family.] 

POWER, TYRONE (1797–1841), Irish comedian, whose full name was William Grattan Tyrone Power, was born near Kilmacthomas, co. Waterford, on 2 Nov. 1797. His father was a member of a well-to-do Waterford family, and died in America before Tyrone was a year old. His mother Marie, daughter of a Colonel Maxwell, who fell in the American war of independence, settled, on her husband's death, in Cardiff, where she had a distant relative named Bird, a printer and bookseller. On the voyage from Dublin she and her son were wrecked off the Welsh coast, and narrowly escaped drowning. Power may have served an apprenticeship to Bird's printing business in Cardiff. Bird was printer to the local theatre, and seems to have introduced Power to the company of strolling players which, to the great grief of his mother, he joined in his fourteenth year. He was handsome and well made, and creditably filled the rôle of ‘a walking gentleman.’ In 1815 he visited Newport, Isle of Wight, and became engaged to Miss Gilbert, whom he married in 1817, at the age of nineteen, his wife being a year younger. After appearing in various minor characters he undertook, in 1818, at Margate, the part of a comic Irishman, Looney Mactwoler, in the ‘Review.’ His first attempt in the part, in which he was destined to make a great reputation, was a complete failure. Want of success as an actor led him at the end of the year, when his wife succeeded to a small fortune, to quit the stage. He spent twelve months ineffectively in South Africa, but returned to England and the stage in 1821. He obtained small engagements in the London theatres, and in 1824 made a second and somewhat successful attempt in Irish farce as Larry Hoolagan, a drunken scheming servant, in the ‘Irish Valet.’ In 1826, while filling small rôles at Covent Garden, his opportunity came. Charles Connor [q. v.], the leading Irish comedian on the London stage, died suddenly of apoplexy in St. James's Park on 7 Oct. 1826. At the time he was fulfilling an engagement at Covent Garden. Power was alloted Connor's parts as Serjeant Milligan in ‘Returned Killed,’ and O'Shaughnessy in the ‘One Hundred Pound Note.’ His success was immediate. Henceforth he confined himself to the delineation of Irish character, in which he is said by contemporary critics to have been superior to Connor, and at least the equal of John Henry Johnstone [q. v.] He appeared at the Haymarket, Adelphi, and Covent Garden theatres in London, fulfilling long engagements at 100l. and 120l. a week, and he paid annual visits to the Theatre Royal, Dublin, where he was always received with boundless enthusiasm. Between 1833 and 1835 he made a tour in America, appearing in the principal towns