A New Spreul Record in Ireland Before 1636

The following is a sentence in a lovely piece sent to me today by Mary McCollum, a wonderful researcher of all old documents in Tyrone and elsewhere;

The article that Mary has sent me contains just that one mention of a 'Spreul' man who appears in this story as being in Ireland before 1636. This is one of the very few records that we have of a Sproule in Ireland before 1650. It is an interesting story, but I have to state straight away that we don’t find out who this Spreul man is, however, we do discover where he is living between 1633 and 1636.

The piece is from the fascinating story of a man called Francis Slingsby, and the excerpt that Mary sent is from a book called "Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland". Francis Slingsby was born in Cork in 1611 and he studied in Oxford where he excelled at mathematics.

He was the son of Sir Francis Slingsby whose mother was Lady Mary Percy, the only sister of Thomas and Henry Percy, the seventh and eighth Earls of Northumberland. Thomas Percy had led the “Rising of the North” and was executed for treason, and his brother Henry was executed in 1532. So the Percys were Catholics rebelling against the monarchy of the day.

Sir Francis Slingsby was a Protestant, and he took his family to Ireland, settling in Cork where his son Francis was born. However, son Francis visited Rome 1633, and during this visit he converted to Catholicism. Francis returned to Ireland and was living in Dublin. He was imprisoned there for four months for his beliefs. In prison, Francis Slingsby received help from some very influential people indeed to gain his release;

“It was at the insistence of Queen Maria Henrietta, consort of Charles 1, that young Slingsby recovered his liberty.” Irish Jesuit Archives

Whilst living in Dublin, Francis had converted some folk to Catholicism, among them his mother, his younger brother, his sister and several others. One of those was his friend, the man called Spreul. Some time between 1633 and 1636, Francis converted his friend Spreul to Catholicism. Then in 1639 it appears that both of them, Francis and Spreul, went to Rome. Francis later entered to become a Jesuit priest, and it is from their excellent records in the Jesuit Archives that we have these further details of his life.

But what of our ‘friend Spreul’? The piece says that friend Spreul was, "Converted and and won to the order he himself had chosen". That is, Spreul also became a Jesuit. However, Spreul doesn't appear in the Irish Jesuit Archives, so perhaps he didn't go through with it. We don’t have any early Sproules in Ireland who are Catholic, none at all that we know of so far. So it is fairly certain that this Spreul gentleman either didn’t return to Ireland, or did not have a family in Ireland.

We also don’t know when Francis Slingsby met friend Spreul.  It was definitely before 1636, but it could have been in Dublin or, alternatively, in Oxford where Francis had gone to study. If it were in Oxford, then this Spreul man could have been a Scottish Sproule, or an English Sproule.

If Francis met his friend Spreul in Ireland, then he could have been from any of the Sproule families that were arriving in Ireland at that time. It is possible he is a Cowden Sproule, or Clondermot, or Antrim – from any of the Sproules just arrived from Scotland.

This is one mystery that we definitely won’t solve, we will not locate our friend Spreul – but it is still a very interesting story nonetheless.

 

• Thanks again to Mary McCollum for sending this excerpt.
• The book "Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland" appears in the blog De Processu Martyriali and the author states that, "Myles O'Reilly (1825–80) published his Memorials of those who Suffered for the Catholic Faith in Ireland in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries on both sides of the Atlantic at the end of the 1860s. It was the only accessible catalogue of Irish martyrs until the publication of Our Martyrs in 1896 by Father Denis Murphy, S.J."
• Irish Jesuit Archives