Sunday 10 June 2012

Origins of Lichfield Kennedys



The Kennedys of Lichfield have in every generation since at least the mid 1800s believed that they were descended from the Kennedys who ruled Ayrshire since at least the 1200s.  Lord Justice Sir William Rann Kennedy (1846-1915) believed he had proved descent from Kennedy of Girvanmains and had Arms drawn up accordingly.  Over the years a number of legends have grown up within the family.  These are of interest as they cast light on the family’s collective preoccupations.

There is a legend of a Kennedy lady who arrived in Lichfield in 1715 with three sons as a result of the Jacobite upheavals throughout Britain on the ascent of George I of the House of Hanover to the Throne.  There is apparently no evidence for this in the parish registers of the period but in itself the story is curious for its indication of belief in the Scottish link.

Some Kennedys believe that members of the family were involved in the 1745-6 uprising of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.  There is an item of clothing with blood on it associated with this legend.  Most who are interested seem to believe that the family were Jacobites.

Most Kennedys over the years who have expressed a view believed that they are directly related to the ruling family in Ayrshire,  the Cassilis family.  A number of family chairs - a few of which still exist - were embroidered with Cassilis heraldic dolphins during the latter 1800s or possibly in Edwardian times.  There is an amount of silver cutlery and other items displaying heraldic dolphins. 

Some of the Kennedys have however shown loyalty to another family  – that of Maddox, to which one of the Kennedys became allied by marriage.  This was taken to the extent of using the Maddox coat of arms. 

There was a William Kanady who was pardoned for taking part in the Protestant Uprising led by the Duke of Monmouth against the Catholic King James II in 1685.  There is no way currently of proving that he was a Lichfield Kanady though it could have been a son born in the 1640s to the William and Margory mentioned in the Parish Registers for St Michael in the 1650s.

The Kennedys were resident in Lichfield in Staffordshire at least as far back as the Commonwealth.  One William Kanady’s wife Margory is recorded as being buried in 1655 in the Parish Registers of St Michael’s Church,  on Green Hill,  the focus of the Bower Day celebration for which that ancient city is reknowned.  What was a Scottish Kennedy doing in Lichfield?  There were few Scottish names of note in the Midlands in the first half of the 17th Century.  One that does crop up in Stebbing Shaw is that of Balmerinoch – Lord Elphinstone.  This Scottish Lord was granted the lands of Shenstone Park by Charles I.  This seems an odd act on the part of the monarch – Balmerinoch’s father had been executed by Charles’ father James when he was still only King of Scotland for forging a letter from the King to the Pope – thereby smearing him as a papist.  The Balmerinoch who was awarded Shenstone Park was still a staunch Presbyterian.  Perhaps it was some attempt to buy off the tough religious zealot.  The lands did not remain in Balmerinoch’s hands for long,  but perhaps a Kennedy cohort settled in the district after having travelled to Shenstone on his employer’s business. 

More promisingly for our story, one Sir John Kennedy held lands in Kenilworth in Warwickshire, in the early part of the English reign of King James VI of Scotland and I of England.  He was a courtier who married to Elizabeth the daughter of Giles, Lord Chandos much against his Lordship’s wishes.  Chandos complained much about his son-in-law,  but James personally asked him to bear with Kennedy,  as he loved him very much.  Sir John was an unstable character whose debts seem to have been many.  They eventually became the business of King James who had to set some of them aside.

Kennedy appeared in a masque by Ben Jonson,  the costumes by Inigo Jones in 1608.  He was one of the signs of the zodiac and along with him were The Duke of Lennox, the Earls of Arundel, Montgomery, and Pembroke, the Lords D'Aubigny, De Walden, Hay, and Sanquhar, the Master of Mar, Sir Robert Rich, and a Mr. Erskine.

The Kennedy marital troubles ended up being discussed in the House of Lords after his wife was turned out of their home in her nightclothes. 

Sir John died in 1623 with his debt problem still left for his executors to sort out.

The name of William Kanady is not mentioned in the accounts of The Civil War as being among the defending forces involved in the last of the sieges of The Close – as the fortifications around the Cathedral were known,  and indeed as the area formerly defended by those walls is still described today.  However this earliest known Lichfield Kanady showed his loyalties by being elected as a churchwarden at St Michaels in 1664.  This indicates that he was almost certainly a loyalist to the King and the Established Church.  The Vicar of St Michaels of the period had been incumbent since 1638 and was – in common with the other vicars in Lichfield – a staunch Established Churchman.  At no time in the darkest hour of Cromwellian Dissenter Rule did a nonconformist preacher take over in St Michaels.  Feeling was so strong in the City generally that, for example, the Parish Register at St Marys of the period is inscribed (in Latin) ‘The Era Of Oliver The Tyrant’ – and this at a time when Commonwealth spies were everywhere.  After his defeat at the Battle of Naseby King Charles I was welcomed sorrowfully and reverentially to Lichfield by the two bailiffs and sheriff of Lichfield who presented the City’s maces to him (the items subsequently disappeared upon his capture).

Therefore we might deduce that Mr Kennedy, and perhaps his wife (though he might have met her afterwards) straggled into Lichfield sometime in the 1650s,  possibly fleeing from the failed revolt of Charles II which ended with defeat and massacre of Scottish and other Royalist troops at Worcester.  Perhaps he was a Scottish recruit to that ill-fated attempt to restore the Stuart heir to the throne of England.  He was of an age where he could have been a combatant at that period in the Civil War.

Little else can be deduced concerning the William whose wife died in 1655.  He was too old to be father of the William who was married in 1698,  therefore he must be his grandfather.  The son of William and Margory (d. 1655), father of the William who was married in 1698 would have been born in the 1650s though no record of this birth has been seen.

This period was the lowest point in Lichfield’s history.  The Cathedral and its Close had been ruined by the occupation of the Royalist Army. The Cathedral spire had been blown off by Sir William Brereton’s Parliamentarian cannons and the mediaeval frescoes and carvings blasted away by Puritan fanatics.  The Cathedral library had been destroyed by the new custodians of the Public Good. The Close was a midden-strewn ruin,  with squatters occupying the former grand residences.  Prominent Lichfield citizens had to forfeit their residences and lands as a penalty for their loyalty to the King,  No longer were the purses of the senior clergy of the Cathedral opened in the town as these dignitaries were banished by the new dissenting order.  This meant no work for the members of the Trades Guilds who had relied on the wealthy inhabitants of the Close for their custom.  Many of the old timber houses had been destroyed during the sieges.  Over a quarter of the population of the City died of the plague in the mid 1640s – a proportion far bigger than that which perished in London in 1665. 

Despite these conditions the Kennedy family settled there, and continued to be buried at St Michaels, with a few exceptions, for the next 100 years. 

William is covered in more detail here

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