Maguire

The surname is the Gaelic Mac Uidhir, 'son of Odhar', a personal name glossed as sallow, pale-faced, the dun-coloured one. The Odhar behind it was a thirteenth-century lord of the kindred of Lurg, the country north of Lough Erne, so every Maguire is named for a man rather than for a place or a trade. The family belonged to the Airgíalla (Oirghialla, or Oriel), the grouping that held what is now Tyrone, Armagh, Fermanagh and Monaghan.

The modern spelling is a fossil of how Irish was written down in English. Clerks usually turned Mac into Mac or Mc, but it was also rendered Mag, and Mac Uidhir was written as the variant Mag Uidhir, which came out of the plantation-era pen as Maguire. The same name reached paper as McGuire, McGwire and McGwyre, was re-translated back into Gaelic in south-west Donegal as Mac Guibhir, and travelled to America as Meguiar, best known now from Meguiar's wax.

Maguire is among the forty commonest surnames in Ireland, the top twenty-five in Ulster, tenth in County Cavan and thirtieth in Monaghan, and the single commonest surname in County Fermanagh, still the densest Maguire county on the island by a clear margin.

The name is in the Annals as early as 956, but the rise is a thirteenth-century event. From about 1250 the Maguires held the whole of the county that English administrators came to call Maguire's Country, and from about 1264 they supplied its chiefs and princes, having supplanted the Ó Daimhín (Devine) chieftains who ruled there before them. From the thirteenth century to the seventeenth they were kings of Fermanagh.

Donn Carrach Mag Uidhir was the first formally inaugurated, in 1302, and from him the lordship ran for three centuries. The kingdom kept a name older than the family: Fear Manach, 'men of Manach', was on the ground long before any Maguire ruled it, and the chiefs took it rather than imposing their own. Their world was made of water, strung along the upper and lower Lough Erne, where the lake was highway, defence and boundary.

A Maguire became prince of Fermanagh in the open air. The inauguration was made on the summit of Cuilcagh, the mountain near Swanlinbar on the border of Cavan and Fermanagh, and sometimes instead at Sciath Gabhra, or Lisnasciath, the site of the modern town of Lisnaskea. No crown, no cathedral: the new lord stood on the highest ground in his own country, before the kinsmen who had chosen him.

Chosen is the operative word. Succession went by tanistry, under which the next chief was elected from the agnatic cousins descended from a shared patrilineal grandfather or great-grandfather, so the office passed to the ablest adult of the kindred, not automatically to an eldest son. Under Brehon law he was not a proprietor but a custodian, appointed by his kinsmen to protect the clan and its property.

An Irish clan was also wider than its blood. Alongside the chief and his patrilineal relatives it took in unrelated clients, who assumed the leading lineage's surname as a show of allegiance, which is part of why the name lies so thick on the ground in Fermanagh.

Enniskillen Castle was the medieval seat of the Mag Uidhir chieftains, set on the river between the upper and lower lakes. The Maguires policed the lough from it with a private navy reckoned at fifteen hundred boats, and their other strongholds followed the water: the island monastery of Devenish on the Lower Erne, and crannóg forts on the lake islands at MacGann and Cleenish. The village of Maguiresbridge, Droichead Mhig Uidhir, still carries the name on the map.

The kindred grew large enough to throw off branches that became septs in their own right, Maguire in origin under their own surnames: the Mac Manuses, the Mac Caffreys, the Mac Hughs and others. The motto comes down in two versions: Justitia et fortitudo invincibilia sunt, 'justice and fortitude are invincible', and, on the arms, Justi ut sidera fulgent, 'the just shall shine as the stars'.

When the Nine Years' War broke out in 1594 the lordship split in a way that decided its future. Hugh Maguire, Lord of Fermanagh, took the rebels' side. His subordinate kinsman Connor Roe Maguire of Magherastephana went the other way, seeking to displace him and backing Queen Elizabeth's forces so openly that he was called the Queen's Maguire.

Hugh, remembered as Hugh the Hospitable, was killed in 1600 at Coll's Crossroads, and Clan Rising carries the story of it as the Maguire legend. Connor Roe was rewarded for his choice: by letters patent in 1601 he was granted the whole of Maguire's Country. The grant did not survive contact with policy. When the Plantation of Ulster was framed in 1609 the patent was disregarded, and the Queen's Maguire was left with twelve thousand acres of the barony of Magherastephana in place of the county he had been promised.

Cuconnacht Mag Uidhir, Cú Connacht Óg Maguire (1565–1608), was the last chief of the old line. He fought beside Hugh O'Neill and Red Hugh O'Donnell through the Nine Years' War and was present at the disaster of Kinsale, where the northern cause and its Spanish allies came apart. In September 1607 he sailed with the earls from Lough Swilly, in the departure remembered as the Flight of the Earls, when the senior Gaelic chiefs of Ulster left to seek support in Spain and made instead for Rome. He died at Genoa within a year of the sailing. The senior Mag Uidhir line had ruled Fermanagh from 1302 to 1603.

The Plantation of Ulster of 1610 settled Fermanagh principally with English undertakers, in contrast with neighbouring Tyrone and Donegal, which took mostly Lowland Scots, and the Maguires dispersed. The machinery had been assembled over the previous century: English common law extended across the island, the county and the sheriff put in place of the country and the clan chief, and, after the Kingdom of Ireland was created in 1541, surrender and regrant substituted primogeniture for election by tanistry.

The name did not leave the record with the lordship. Connor Roe's son Bryan Maguire was created Baron Maguire of Enniskillen in 1627, bringing the title of the old seat back into Maguire hands in the new English peerage. Both of Bryan's sons, Connor and Rory, threw in with Confederate Ireland in the rebellion of the 1640s, and Rory's son Roger Maguire carried the family's politics on as a Jacobite politician and soldier.

In the nineteenth century the name resurfaces in print and in argument. John Edward Maguire (1815–1872) founded the Cork Examiner, putting a Maguire at the head of one of the enduring newspapers of the Irish south, and Sir Thomas Maguire of Sandymount made his name as an Irish Catholic philosopher. In the United States the McGuire Sisters, the American singing trio of the 1950s, carried the anglicised Fermanagh name into American popular music.

The best-known living Maguire is Tobias Vincent Maguire, born at Santa Monica in California on 27 June 1975, only child of Vincent Maguire, a cook of Irish-Catholic descent from the County Tyrone Maguires. He left high school at sixteen to audition full-time, took his first leading role as Paul Hood in Ang Lee's The Ice Storm (1997), and worked through the following years with the period's leading American directors: Gary Ross on Pleasantville (1998), Lasse Hallström on The Cider House Rules (1999), Curtis Hanson on Wonder Boys (2000) and Ross again on Seabiscuit (2003).

Cast as Peter Parker by Sam Raimi's production team in 2000, he carried Spider-Man (2002) to the highest US-domestic gross of its year, then Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), the trilogy taking more than two and a half billion dollars worldwide. The name that began with a dun-coloured lord north of Lough Erne is still the commonest surname in Fermanagh, and legible now on screens across the world.