Without any doubt one of our most famous Irish poets both nationally and internationally has to William Butler Yeats, indeed his poem ‘The Isle of Innisfree’ was voted the nation’s favourite poem just a few years ago.
Yeats was a complex man and was very proud of his of his ancestry. This is most evident in his own surname Butler Yeats and he makes many references to his Butler ancestry in his poetry. On his father’s side, he is descended from one Jervis Yeats, who towards the end of the 17th Century was established in the wholesale linen trade in Dublin, and enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from certain duties of the Irish Parliament. The name ‘Yeats’ was then more common in Yorkshire and it has been presumed that Jervis Yeats was a native of that English county. Jervis died in 1712 and was succeeded in his linen business by his son Benjamin. Benjamin was member of the mercantile community that accepted Dean Swift as their leader and struck the first note of Irish Protestant Nationalism. The family flourished in 18th Century Dublin and moved to William Street, then a street of handsome houses built for rich men of business. Benjamin eldest son also called Benjamin was to marry one Mary Butler, daughter of John Butler of the War Office in Dublin, and, all her brothers dying unmarried, Mary Butler inherited and bought into the family lands in Thomastown in Co. Kildare. Along with these properties Mary inherited an unusual family heirloom, a beautiful silver cup with the Ormonde Crest on it, it was dated 1534 when the initials of some bride and bridegroom were engraved on the lip. Yeats looked back with pride on his links with the Butlers the Earls of Ormonde being next to the Fitzgerald’s the most illustrious of the Anglo-Irish families, in his view.
W.B. Yeats claimed his Butler ancestry came from the ‘MacRichard’ branch of the family. This was one of the younger sons of the 3rd Earl of Ormond known as Edmund MacRichard Butler on account of having Richard II of England as his godfather, an event now commemorated on the marble fireplace in the Picture Gallery of Kilkenny Castle. This branch of the family became known as the Polestown Butlers, after the town of Polestown in Co. Kilkenny, and became the most Gaelic of all the extended Butler family. Edmund Butler served a deputy to the Earls of Ormond and later generations married into the Kavanagh and the O’Carroll families. Yeat’s claimed a connection through the sons of James MacRichard Butler and Sabh Kavanagh, Edmund and Theobald, both deemed illegitimate having been born before their parents’ marriage. Theobald Butler of Ballykeife and Edmund Butler of Hussietown, Co. Tipperary. It was through Edmund that Yeats’ was to claim descent, something that Butler historians have disputed for many years.
Yeats was extremely well informed on Kilkenny’s history and he read Carrigan’s History of the Diocese of Ossory, Holinshed’s History of Ireland and Transactions of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society. In an early poem ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe’ is mention of an evil spirt called Robert, son of Art, which is a reference to Dame Alice Kyteler, the famous 14th Century Kilkenny woman accused of witchcraft by the Franciscan Richard de Ledrede in an inquest held in 1324.
Yeats has a lifelong interest in Irish Folklore Astrology, and the Occult, being a member of The Golden Dawn in England in the late 19th Century. Yeats was to marry late in life in 1917 aged 52 to Georgie Hyde-Lees aged 25 years’ old. Despite this, the marriage was a success and ‘George’ as she was known became interested in her husband’s fascination with spiritualism. They both experimented with ‘Automatic Writing’ trying to contact the afterlife via handwriting. On the 23rd February 1918, a spirt came into contact with George and wrote that her name was Anne Hyde, Duchess of Ormond: she had married he husband James in July 1681 and had come to give the Yeates her ‘dear love’. Two days later George was to dream about Anne, her child lived only three days and she herself died young. Yeats looked her up in Burkes Peerage, and after confusing her with another Anne Hyde, Daughter of the Earl of Claredon and wife of James II, he turned to Carte’s Biography of the First Duke of Ormond. His grandson James, 2nd Duke of Ormonde had married Lady Anne Hyde, daughter of Laurence Hyde, 1st Earl of Rochester.
More communication continued into July between the Yeatses and the spirt of Lady Anne Hyde. It appeared through the automatic writing that she was protecting George during her pregnancy. George was to have a daughter born in February 1919 who was called Anne in recognition of their contact and possible protection by the Lady Anne Hyde.
