Boyle

The Boyle name in Ireland covers two lineages with nothing in common but their English spelling. Ó Baoighill, descendant of Baoigheall ('vain pledge'), was a tenth-century Donegal kindred, the third great northern dynasty beside the O'Donnells and the O'Dohertys. The Boyles of Cork were Anglo-Norman incomers out of Herefordshire in the late sixteenth century, brought to Munster by Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork.

A third strand runs through Lowland Scotland, where Clan Boyle of Ayrshire took its name from Beuville near Caen and appears as David de Boivil, witness to a charter, in 1164. The Gaelic name meanwhile travelled the standard road of anglicisation, on which Ó and Mac were dropped outright or reduced to O', so that Ó Baoighill flattened to O'Boyle and then to Boyle. In the north-west of Ireland it became one of the most common family names of all.

The Ó Baoighill were one of the principal families of the Cenél Conaill, the branch of the Northern Uí Néill descended from Conall Gulban, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Their first recorded standing was as Chiefs of the Three Tuaths in the north-west of Tír Chonaill. The family genealogy runs back through Aneisleis Ó Baoighill, named as a Donegal chieftain, into the same Cenél Conaill stock that produced the Ó Domhnaill kings of Tyrconnell and the O'Dohertys.

When the Three Tuaths passed to the Mac Suibhne, the MacSweeneys, the Ó Baoighill did not vanish; they moved their lordship west to Tír Ainmhireach on the Atlantic coast. That district took their name, Críoch Bhaoigheallach, O'Boyle's country, and it survives on the modern map as the barony of Boylagh, west of the Glenties.

From the eleventh century to the Plantation the Boyles held Boylagh as a sub-lordship under the Ó Domhnaill kingdom, one of the three great kindreds of Tír Chonaill with the Ó Domhnaill and the Ó Gallchobhair, taking positions across political administration, ecclesiastical patronage and native military organisation: not simply a landed family, but part of the working machinery of a Gaelic state.

Western Tyrconnell saw little Anglo-Norman penetration, so the Ó Baoighill barely appear in English or Anglo-Irish administrative sources before the sixteenth century, while the Ó Domhnaill rulers turn visible in Crown records under the Tudors.

The early seventeenth century broke the Gaelic aristocracy of Ulster. In 1607 the senior Gaelic chiefs left Ireland to seek support in Spain, failed, and spent the rest of their lives in Rome. After the Flight of the Earls the Dublin authorities took real control of the whole island for the first time, disarmed the native clans and cleared the way for the Plantation of Ulster; tanistry, election from among a chief's male cousins, gave way to English primogeniture.

The Plantation displaced most Donegal Gaelic surnames from their ground. Boylagh was the exception, and Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich counted the Boyles there among the Gaelic clan structures still in continuous local possession in the modern era. The political thread held too: James Boyle (1863–1936) sat as Member of Parliament for West Donegal from 1900 to 1902 for the Irish Parliamentary Party.

Richard Boyle came ashore in Munster in 1588 with twenty-seven pounds in his pocket. By his death in 1643 he was the wealthiest man in Ireland and Lord Treasurer of it, holding through the Munster Plantation an estate that ran to most of east Cork and west Waterford. The motto the family carries, Honor virtutis praemium, honour is the reward of virtue, reads like the self-account of a man who had landed with nothing and meant the record to show why.

The seat he chose was Lismore, above the Blackwater in County Waterford, on the site of a seventh-century monastery and school where Prince John, Lord of Ireland, raised the first castle in 1185. It had belonged to the FitzGerald Earls of Desmond until their lands were broken up after the killing of the fourteenth Earl in 1583, and then to Sir Walter Raleigh, who sold it during his imprisonment to Boyle. Lismore passed by marriage to the Cavendishes in 1753, was rebuilt in Gothic style for the sixth Duke of Devonshire, and is their Irish home still.

The Cork line ran on through four more titles. Richard Boyle (1612–1698) became first Earl of Burlington and Lord High Treasurer of Ireland; Roger Boyle (1621–1679) first Earl of Orrery, soldier, statesman and dramatist; Francis Boyle (1623–1699) first Viscount Shannon, Privy Councillor and governor of County Cork. Henry Boyle (1669–1725), first Baron Carleton, was Lord Treasurer of Ireland.

The eighteenth century spread the family further. Richard Boyle, second Viscount Shannon (1675–1740), became a field marshal; Henry Boyle, first Earl of Shannon (1682–1764), founded a line that ran through four more earls to 1890; Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), was an architect. John Boyle, fifth Earl of Cork (1707–1762), was a writer and a friend of Jonathan Swift, and Mary Boyle, Countess of Cork and Orrery (1746–1840), kept one of the literary houses of her age. William Boyle, twelfth Earl of Cork (1873–1967), rose to Admiral of the Fleet.

Robert Boyle was born at Lismore Castle on 25 January 1627, the seventh son and fourteenth child of the Great Earl and his second wife Catherine Fenton. He went to Eton at eight in 1635, and left in 1639 with his elder brother Francis on the long European tour under the Genevan tutor Isaac Marcombes. He was at Florence in January 1642 when Galileo died, and read the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by candlelight in Marcombes's house in the months that followed. He came back to England in 1644 to a dead father and a civil war.

He inherited Stalbridge in Dorset and had a chemical laboratory built in the house by 1649. From 1654 he was at Oxford, drawn by the natural philosophers gathered round John Wilkins at Wadham College, the Invisible College that became the nucleus of the Royal Society in 1660. He took on the young Robert Hooke as his curator of experiments, and between 1657 and 1659 the pair rebuilt Otto von Guericke's air pump into the central instrument of seventeenth-century experimental physics.

New Experiments Physico-Mechanical appeared at Oxford in 1660, and its second edition of 1662 carries in an appendix the first quantitative gas law in the history of chemistry: at fixed temperature, the volume of a gas varies inversely with the pressure on it. The Sceptical Chymist of 1661 broke with Aristotle's four elements and Paracelsus's three principles, and put in their place the definition of an element as a substance that cannot be decomposed further by chemical analysis. He was a founding fellow of the Royal Society at its incorporation in July 1662, declined its presidency in 1680 rather than swear the oath required, and died at Pall Mall on 31 December 1691, a week after his sister Katherine, Lady Ranelagh, in whose house he had worked for twenty-three years. His will endowed the Boyle Lectures, which began in 1692 and were revived in 2004.

The Ayrshire Boyles held Kelburn by 1275, when Richard de Boyville is recorded on the lands; Henry de Boyville was keeper of Dumfries, Wigtown and Kirkcudbright castles around 1291, and Richard and Robert de Boyvil both appear on the Ragman Rolls of 1296, submitting to Edward I. Six generations after that first Richard, John Boyle was killed at Sauchieburn in 1488 fighting for James III. The estates were forfeited, and his son, another John, had them restored by James IV.

The family backed Mary, Queen of Scots, and then Charles I, and suffered for the second choice. Their fortunes turned when John Boyle of Kelburn was returned as a Commissioner of Parliament and his eldest son David followed him, becoming Lord Boyle of Kelburn in 1699 and Earl of Glasgow in 1703. David sat as one of the commissioners for the Treaty of Union, and in the Jacobite rising of 1715 raised and armed troops for the Hanoverian government at his own expense.

John Boyle, third Earl of Glasgow, was wounded at Fontenoy in 1745 and again at Lauffeld in 1747, and afterwards served nine consecutive years as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. David Boyle, a grandson of the second Earl, became Solicitor General for Scotland in 1807 and Lord Justice General in 1841, retiring in 1852 after forty-one years of legal service. George Boyle, fourth Earl, was Lord Lieutenant of Renfrewshire from 1810, and his eldest son John was captured by the French off Gibraltar in 1807.

George Frederick Boyle, sixth Earl, came close to ending the line's fortunes. Gripped by Pre-Raphaelite notions of form and beauty, he ran a monumental building programme, renovating Kelburn and funding churches across Scotland, until the estate was bankrupted in 1888 and the assets sold. Kelburn was saved by the purse of his cousin David, who succeeded as seventh Earl in 1890, served as Governor of New Zealand from 1892 to 1897, and was created Baron Fairlie in 1897 to secure a Scottish peer a seat in the Lords.

Kelburn has been in Boyle possession since the twelfth century, its core a thirteenth-century keep remodelled in the sixteenth, and no house in Scotland has been lived in by one family for longer. The grounds opened as a country park in 1977, and when the concrete facing was found in 2007 to need replacing, Lord Glasgow invited four Brazilian graffiti artists to decorate the walls, then sought permission in 2011 to keep the painting on a category A listed building. Stanely, near Paisley, ended the other way: held by the Earls of Glasgow in the eighteenth century, sold by the fourth Earl to the Paisley Water Company, and partly submerged by their reservoir since 1837.