MEMOIR OF THE LE FANU FAMILY FROM THE GRANT OF HENRI IV BY T. P. LE FANU LARGELY FROl\tl MATERIALS COLLECTED BY W. J. H. LE FANU PRIVATELY PRINTED Contents PAGE CHAPTER I. Our Forefathers in France - - • I CHAPTER II. The Refugees - - - - - 24 CHAPTER III. The Sheridan Connection .. 44 APPENDIX I. Grant of Henry IV, 1595 • - 69 .A.PPENDIX II. Baptismal Certificates of Philippe and Guill~ume Le Fanu 7 2 APPENDIX III. Commission of Charl1es de Cresserons in Queen Anne's Army - - - - - 74 APPENDIX IV. List of Works by Members of the Le Fanu family • 7 5 PEDIGREE. Table I - - - AT END PEDIGREE. Tabl,e II. .. " List of Illustrations 1. HENRIETTE RABOTEAU (1709-1789), wife of William Le Fanu - FTontispiece 2. LE FANU ARMS, from the gTant of Henri IV, 1595 (d'azur au cygne d' aTgent; au chef d' OT, cha-rge de t-rois Toses de gueules, fieuronnees d' or, CHAMILLART, Recherche de la Noblesse de Caen en 1666- Caen, 1887) - - - Title page To face page 3. PHILIPPE LE FANU (1681-1743) - - - - 6 4. MARIE BACON (1674-1746), wife of Philippe Le Fanu - 8 5. W ILLIAl\1 LE F ANU ( I 708-1797) - - - I 2 6. THOMAS SHERIDAN, ~f .A. (1719-1788) - - 14 CFrom a p 01t1ait by John Lewis.) 7. FRANCES CHAMBERLAINE (1724-1766), wife of Thomas She1idan - 18 8. RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN (1751-1816), /1om a po1trait by Gains- borough in the possession of lVlajor Pym, of BTansted - - 20 9. JOSEPH LE FANU (1743-1825) - - 24 10. ALICIA SHERIDAN (1753-1817), wife of Joseph Le Fanu - - 26 11. CAPTAIN HENRY LE FANU, 56th Regiment (1748-1821) - - 30 12. ELIZABETH SHERIDAN (1758-1837), wife of Captain Hen-ry Le Fanu 32 13. THE REVEREND PETER LE FANU (174g-1825) - - 36 14. CATHERINE COOTE, wife of the Reverend William Dobbin, F.T.C.D. 38 15. THE VERY REVEREND THOMAS PHILIP LE FANU, Dean of Emly (1784-1845) (from a miniatu1e by Charles Robertson) - - 42 16. EMMA LUCRETIA DOBBIN, wife of Dean Le Fanu, died 1861 (/Tom a miniature by Charles Robertson) - - - 44 17. JOSEPH SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814-1873) (from a photog1aph taken about 1855) - - 48 18. SUSAN BENNETT, wife of Joseph She1idan Le Fanu, died 1858 - - 50 19. WILLIAM RICHARD LE FANU (1816-1894), Commissioner of Public W 01/is in Ireland, 1863 to 1891 (from a photograph taken about 1855) - - - - 54 20. HENRIETTA VICTORINE BARRINGTON, wife of William Richard Le Fanu, died 1899 - - 56 21. WILLIAM JOSEPH HENRY LE FANU (1843-1923), Indian Civil Service 60 22. THOMAS PHILIP LE FANU, C.B. Commissioner of Public Works in lTeland from 1913 - • 62 The Le Fanu Family c·HAPTER I. OuR FoREFATHERs IN FRANCE • .. THE name of Le Fanu appears to be now extinct in France and is, confined in England and Ireland to the descendants of Thomas Philip Le Fanu, sometime Dean of Emly, who died in 1845, and of his first cousin, William Joseph Henry Le Fanu, who was at the time of his death in 1879, and had been since 1834, Rector of St. Paul's, Dublin. The origin of the name is doubtful; Fanu as a French word is defined by Littre as: " Terme rural qui a beaucoup de fane. Se dit du ble qui pousse trop de feuilles," while fane is defined as "feuille secke tombe de l' arbre." It is hard to see how the epithet could be applied to a man, but there is another Norman name occurring much more frequently and differing only by one letter which denotes a personal peculiarity. This is Le Canu, in medireval Latin Canutus, meaning the white-haired Man, and used in legal documents to represent the English name Hoare. This suggests a possible connection with fenutio, defined by Du Cange as equivalent to ruber color. The meaning of the name would then be " redhead " or " redcoat." It has also been suggested that it may be a Scandinavian place name, though the termination of the Latin form Fanutus does not favour this deriva­ tion. There is an island Fano to the south-west of Jutland, and there B 2 THE LE FANU FAMILY is also a Fano in Norway. It has again been connected with the Norse and Danish word Fane, sifnifying a standard or banner, but these are mere guesses. - The derivation from the Roman Fannius is equally conjectural and against it may be urged the physical evidence of form and feature pointing to a Northern ancestry, as the caution which in not a few members of the family takes the place of good principles is unquestionably a legacy from our Norman forefathers. After these attempts to peer into the remote past, there is more than a touch of bathos in the con£ ession that save for a single reference nothing whatever is known of the family before the middle of the sixteenth century. That reference is, however, of some importance as it connects the name with Vire, a town some twenty-five miles south­ east of Caen. An ecclesiastical record of the year 1415, discovered at Chichamp by M. Butet Hamel, Conservateur de la Bibliotheque et de la Musee de Vire, and communicated by him to W. J. H. Le Fann (160)1 refers to one, Abbe Le Fanut, se disant Sieur de ,Bombenard. Possibly the worthy cleric had a cold in his head when he instructed his 1nan of law; anyhow Bombenard may well be a mistake for Montbes­ nard, the name of a hill close to Vire, from which the family would appear to have derived the style and title of Sieur de Montbesnard which they used at least down to 1738. The Le Fanu pedigree, so far as it can now be traced, begins with Michel I.:e Fanu (1) who took his degree in arts at the University of Caen in 1536. He is described in the university records as belonging to the diocese of Coutances, which agrees with the theory that he came from the neigbourhood of Vire. At Caen he studied law under Gilles de Caumont, whom he describes thirty years later in his poem, " De 1. The numbers in brackets refer to the pedigree appended to this memoir. OUR FOREFATHERS !IV FRANCE 3 Antiquissima Juris Origine '' (Caen, r 568), as a hale and happy old man devoted to teaching and to the good of his country. De Caumont was also the subject of a brief memoir by Jacques de Cahaignes, Rector of the University, who in_ his "Elogiorum Civium Cadomensium Centuria" (Caen, 1609), has left a series of portraits of his fellow citizens so candid th~t the book became extremely rare almost imme­ diately after its publication. De Caumont appears in that memoir as a venerable sage, learned in· Roman law and skilled in practice at the bar, simple and direct in thought and speech and utterly disdaining all niceties of language and those literary diversions _·which filled up the leisure of many of his fellow professors at the University. De . Cahaignes' book, which is now available in an excellent translation, published a~ Caen in 1880, enables us to realise the sort of life which Michel Le Fanu lived. All the leading members. of the learned professions ·at Caen appear to have been connected with the University. 'fhe spirit of the renaissance and the new learning had in many _cases attracted them to the reformed religion, which in France, more than either in England or Germany, was especially indebted to the Univer­ sities for its advancement. There is reason to believe that in the middle of the sixteenth century the majority of the professors of the University were Huguenots,1 and the inquisitor, Laurentin, found it necessa1y in I 539 to investigate the cases of several persons in Caen ,vho were_ suspect~d of heresy. 2 Many of these professors, who were also busy men of the world taking their full part in the affairs of their city, amused themselves in their lighter hours by the composition of v·erses, sometimes in French but more often in Latin, the universal 1. Bulletin de la Societe de 1'histoire du Protestantisme Fran~ais, 1905, p. 417 2. Galland : L 'Histoire du Protestantisme a Caen, p. xx. 4 THE LE FANU FAMILY language of the learned. Of Michel Le Fanu and his son Etienne, Jacques de Cahaignes writes as follows :- " Michel Le Fanu etait entraine par une vocation naturelle vers l'etude de la poesie; mais comme il voyait qu'elle n'etait d'aucune ressource pour le soutien de sa famille, et que la moisson du poete . etait nulle, les vers ne servant qu'a vous charmer et non a vous nourrir-il s'appliqua a l'etude du Droit Civil, bien que ce ne fut pas son penchant, et se destina ou barreau. T ~ut le temps que lui laissaient ses occupations judiciaires (car il se desinteressait entiere­ ment de la direction de sa maison), il le consacrait aux Muses, ses amies de predilection. A vrai dire, il improvisait ses vers latins et fran<;ais plutot qu'il ne les comE_osait. Chez lui facilite egalait !'inspiration; tout sujet, quelque aride et quelque futile qu'il fut, . etait pour lui une occasion de montrer les ressources inepuisables de son imagination. Les gens instruits font beaucoup de cas de ses poesies latines; ses vers fran<;ais n'ont pas cette tournure elegante qui est auj ourd'hui en usage; car notre langue a subi des changements; on y a introduit de nouvelles tournures de phrases; elle est bien diff erente de celle du siecle dernier.