Courtesy of Malahide Historical Society

The current movie blockbuster on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte reminds us of Malahide’s (slight) Napoleonic connections.

On Church Road, Manor Books is housed in Manor House, which dates from the late 1700s and was the one-time office in the village for handling the affairs of the Lord of the Manor, Lord Talbot de Malahide, who owned the ground rent and much of the properties. Lord Talbot’s agent or bailiff would manage village affairs such as collection of rents and meetings with tenants. Up to the early 1800s it was the site of the Manor Court which dates from a time when the local landowner held a degree of legal jurisdiction over his properties and tenants and was the lowest level in the courts system. In here, minor legal and petty crime cases would be heard and when the building was being refurbished in the 1990s the remains of a holding cell were found.

For a time in the early 1800s Manor House was home to an adventurer and United Irishman grandly named Herve Morres de Montmorency who fled to France after the failed 1798 rebellion and achieved a commission in the French Army under Napoleon Bonaparte who is said to have been an admirer of Napper Tandy and Montmorency and interviewed him personally. Up to his death in France in 1839 he remained wanted by the British forces.

At The Diamond, the house, which up to recently was the Ulster Bank, was in the 1780s the home of John Fortescue who was married to the sister of Arthur Wellesley, an officer in the British Army who later became the Duke of Wellington and defeated Napoleon at Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Wellesley is believed to have been a regular visitor to his sister in Malahide.

On the Coast Road, Hick’s Tower, with its ‘witches’ hat’ roof added in 1911, was a Martello Tower, one of around 50 such watchtowers around the Irish coast built by the British to watch out for French invasion forces during the Napoleonic wars.