Arthur Forbes, 1st Earl of Granard
By B. R. Forbes, Clan Historian & Storyteller
Arthur Forbes, 1st Earl of Granard, lived through a period in which governments changed, monarchs were overthrown, and political allegiance could determine the survival of a family and its estates. His career carried him from the battlefields of Scotland to the Irish Parliament, the Privy Council, and command of the army in Ireland. He served Charles I and Charles II, negotiated with the Commonwealth government, and held high office under James VII and II. Yet when James’s policies threatened the Protestant landholding community in Ireland, Granard opposed the measures and withdrew from public life rather than endorse them.
His experience reveals the difficulty of distinguishing loyalty to a monarch from duty to a country. For Granard, allegiance involved not only the Crown but also the security of Ireland’s Protestant community, the preservation of his family’s inheritance, and the political order he believed necessary to protect both. His life illustrates how duty to country could demand cooperation with authority at one moment and resistance to it at another.
Arthur Forbes was born in 1623, the son of Sir Arthur Forbes, a younger son of the Forbes family of Corse in Aberdeenshire. His father had established himself in Ireland through plantation lands acquired under commissions for County Longford in 1619 and County Leitrim in 1620. The Longford property was subsequently erected into the Manor of Castle Forbes, establishing the family’s principal Irish seat.
The elder Arthur’s career reflected the military connections that linked Scotland, Ireland, and continental Europe. Between April 1626 and February 1627, he served as a lieutenant colonel in the regiment of Sir Donald Mackay of Strathnaver, later 1st Lord Reay, in the service of Denmark-Norway. Created a baronet of Nova Scotia in September 1628, he later contracted with Alexander, Master of Forbes, to raise and transport 500 men from Ireland for Swedish service. His military career ended violently in April 1632, when Sir Frederick Hamilton, his colonel, killed him in a duel near Hamburg. He was buried at Buxtehude.
Arthur was eight years old when his father died. His inheritance would soon become more than a matter of property: it would be a test of his family’s survival amid the upheavals of seventeenth-century Ireland.
When the Irish rebellion began in 1641, his mother, Jane Lauder Forbes, gathered approximately 220 displaced and distressed British settlers into Castle Forbes. She defended the castle against repeated assaults from about November 1, 1641, until August 2, 1642, when exhausted supplies compelled her to accept terms allowing the defenders to march to Trim. Her subsequent deposition, given in September 1642, records the ordeal endured by those who sought refuge within the castle walls.
Arthur, then eighteen, raised men and attempted to relieve his mother and the besieged defenders. The attempt failed, but the episode established an enduring connection between military service and family duty. The defense of Castle Forbes was simultaneously a struggle to protect lives, preserve an estate, and maintain the position of a Protestant family in a country engulfed by violence.
Following the failed relief attempt, Forbes went to Scotland and entered the royalist cause. He “devoted himself to arms, and signalized his loyalty to the Kings Charles the First and Second.” His commitment placed him among those who sought to preserve the Stuart monarchy against its opponents, but it also exposed him to imprisonment and political uncertainty.
Forbes served under James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, in support of Charles I during the Scottish campaigns of 1644–1645. Following Montrose’s defeat in 1645, Forbes was taken prisoner and confined in Edinburgh Castle for two years.
His royalism brought him into conflict with the political authorities who controlled Scotland, yet his determination to serve the Stuart cause persisted. When Charles II came to Scotland in 1650, the Covenanter government led by Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll, excluded from the King’s presence those who had fought for Charles I. Lord Lorne, Argyll’s son and captain of the King’s guard, nevertheless, brought Forbes privately before Charles II. The encounter demonstrated that personal and political relationships could create opportunities even within a divided royalist and Covenanter landscape.
In 1653, Forbes joined the royalist campaign in the Scottish Highlands against the English occupation under General George Monck. Among those involved were William Cunningham, 9th Earl of Glencairn, and Lord Lorne. At their request, Charles II sent John Middleton to command the royalist forces. The campaign failed when Colonel Thomas Morgan broke the resistance in 1654.
The defeat forced the royalists to negotiate. Lord Lorne made terms with Monck, and the resulting articles covered Forbes. They provided for his entitlement to his Irish estate if it had not already been disposed of. The authorities in Ireland found no evidence that he had “acted, assisted, or countenanced the rebellion in Ireland,” concluding that his military activity had taken place in Scotland or England. On August 17, 1655, the government determined that he should enjoy his estates in Leitrim and Longford.
Forbes returned to Ireland that year. His experience revealed a distinction central to his subsequent career: military opposition to the Commonwealth did not necessarily mean the loss of his Irish inheritance. By negotiating the terms of his submission through the royalist leadership, he secured the property that supported his family’s position. Loyalty to the Stuarts had brought him into conflict with the government, but political negotiation helped preserve the material foundation of his future service.
The restoration of Charles II offered Forbes an opportunity to reconcile his royalist commitments with public service in Ireland. Lord Broghill and Sir Charles Coote, influential figures in the Irish political establishment, planned the restoration of the monarchy. In the spring of 1660, they sent Forbes to Brussels to meet Charles II and assure him that, if he came to Ireland, the kingdom would declare for him. The King received the proposal favorably and dismissed Forbes with the letters and commissions he had requested.
Following the Restoration, Forbes received a commission for a troop of horse dated February 9, 1661. He was appointed to the Court of Claims, which adjudicated the Irish land settlement, on March 19, 1661, and again on May 22, 1662. In 1661, the King also granted him houses, castles, and lands in Mullingar, County Westmeath, and Forbes took his place in the Irish Parliament.
These appointments placed him at the intersection of royal authority, military administration, and the contentious question of landownership. The settlement of property following the wars and the Restoration affected the security of many families. For Forbes, the preservation of the estates acquired by his father remained closely connected to his ability to serve the Crown.
His advancement continued in 1663, when he helped uncover a conspiracy to seize Dublin Castle, Drogheda, and Derry and capture the Lord Lieutenant, James Butler, Duke of Ormond. While in the north, Forbes discovered the plotters’ designs against Derry, Culmore, and Raphoe. On May 24, he arrested Alexander Staples, member of Parliament for Strabane and the principal conspirator in the north, and imprisoned him at Culmore. The northern plotters subsequently fled to Scotland.
The episode reinforced Forbes’s standing as a dependable figure in the restored government. His loyalty was expressed not merely through declarations of allegiance but through the practical work of defending the political order against those who sought to overthrow it.
In 1670, Forbes was sworn into the Irish Privy Council and appointed Marshal and Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Ireland on August 9. He served as one of the Lords Justices, exercising the functions of government in the Lord Lieutenant’s absence, on three occasions: June 12, 1671; July 5, 1675; and March 20, 1685.
His advancement culminated in a succession of titles and military responsibilities. In 1675, he was created Baron Clanehugh and Viscount Granard. On April 1, 1684, he raised the Eighteenth Regiment of Foot, later known as the Royal Irish Regiment, and on September 10 became lieutenant-general of the army. Charles II created him Earl of Granard on December 30, 1684.
These honors reflected decades of service to the monarchy, but Granard’s responsibilities extended beyond military command. He also used his access to the King to assist Irish Presbyterians, whose religious position remained uncertain under the restored Stuart monarchy.
In 1672, Granard obtained what became known as the first regium donum, a royal grant to support Presbyterian ministers in Ireland. The Presbyterian minister James Kirkpatrick later reported that Charles II offered £1,200 annually, although only £600 proved available and the grant was made at the lower amount.
The intervention is significant because it shows Granard using royal influence to support a community whose religious interests did not always align with those of the Crown. His position did not require him to abandon his royalist commitments; rather, it enabled him to seek accommodation between the monarchy and a Protestant religious community. Duty to country, as he understood it, could include using the authority of the state to protect people whose interests might otherwise be neglected.
Charles II died in 1685, and his brother succeeded him as James VII of Scotland and James II of England and Ireland. Granard retained his military commands under the new monarch. Henry Hyde, 2nd Earl of Clarendon, who became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, spoke favorably of him in February 1686, describing him as “exactly honest in all his dealings, and generous to all that are under him.” Clarendon also praised Granard’s “eminent loyalty to the Crown, in the worst of times”.
Yet Granard’s position was becoming increasingly precarious. On March 1, 1686, he resigned his regiment to his son. On May 20, James appointed him President of the Council in Ireland, an office without precedent in the kingdom. The appointment, however, brought little practical authority. Clarendon observed that there was no need for such an office and that no president of the council had previously served in Ireland.
The appointment coincided with the arrival of Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, a Catholic confidant of the King. On June 5, 1686, Tyrconnell landed in Dublin as lieutenant-general, empowered to appoint and remove army officers without the Lord Lieutenant’s control. The effective military command Granard had exercised since 1670 passed to a figure charged with reshaping the army.
Granard did not openly challenge the King. Clarendon reported that he had “never yet willingly offended the Crown in his life and would not now do it at the end of his days.” Nevertheless, Granard withdrew to England at the end of July. His departure marked a quiet but consequential boundary: he would not rebel against the monarch he had served, but neither would he lend his authority to a political arrangement that had rendered his own office ineffective.
His conduct reveals the limits of loyalty defined solely by obedience. Granard remained committed to the Crown, yet the transfer of military authority and the erosion of his position forced him to consider whether continued service could accomplish anything useful. Withdrawal offered a way to avoid direct confrontation without pretending that the new arrangement preserved the responsibilities he had once exercised.
The crisis deepened in 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to challenge James’s rule. James fled to France in December, and in February 1689 the English Parliament offered the crown to William and his wife, Mary, James’s elder daughter. Ireland remained largely under Tyrconnell’s administration and continued to support James.
James landed at Kinsale in March 1689 and summoned an Irish Parliament, which met from May 7 until July 20. Its proceedings confronted Protestant landowners with a direct threat to their property and political standing.
Two measures were particularly consequential. An Act of Repeal sought to undo the Acts of Settlement and Explanation, on which much Protestant landownership rested. An Act of Attainder condemned as traitors Protestants who were absent from Ireland or living under William’s authority, exposing their estates to forfeiture.
Granard appealed to James in person, arguing against the proposed legislation. The King replied that he could not do evil that good might come of it. At a second audience, Granard warned that the measures would alienate many subjects who had otherwise remained loyal. His arguments failed to change the King’s position.
Granard then entered the House of Lords and formally declared his dissent from both bills. He mounted his horse and rode to Castle Forbes.
This was a decisive moment in the negotiation of his loyalties. Granard had served the Stuart monarchy for decades, endured imprisonment for the royalist cause, and helped restore Charles II. Yet he now opposed measures enacted by James, whom he regarded as threatening the security of Ireland’s Protestant landowners. His resistance was not a rejection of monarchy in principle. It was a refusal to equate duty to the Crown with acceptance of every royal policy.
The consequences were immediate. In 1690, Irish forces besieged Castle Forbes and burned the village of Newtown Forbes, but they failed to capture the castle. Once again, the family seat became the physical focus of a conflict between political allegiance and the preservation of an inheritance. The estate that Granard’s father had established, and that he had worked throughout his life to retain, was now threatened by the very political crisis in which he had refused to endorse the King’s legislation.
Granard’s eldest son, Arthur, Lord Forbes, followed a different course. While in England, he adhered to James’s cause and was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the government of William and Mary. His friends attempted to use his royalist loyalty to protect his Mullingar estate from the Act of Repeal. The Irish Parliament under James offered only a promise of land elsewhere, which one member of the Commons dismissed as “a mouthful of moonshine.”
Father and son thus found themselves on different sides of a conflict in which loyalty, religious identity, political legitimacy, and inheritance could not easily be reconciled. Their contrasting positions also demonstrate that family duty did not necessarily dictate a single political response.
On July 1, 1690, William defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne. James departed Ireland for France, while William took Dublin and advanced toward Limerick.
Granard’s recorded role in the subsequent campaign was limited. He was not reported to have taken part in the battle itself. While William’s army lay between Carrick and Clonmel, however, Granard came to wait upon the King. In November 1690, William and Mary appointed him to the Irish Privy Council, recognizing his standing and his willingness to serve the government now established in Ireland.
His appointment illustrates the distinction between loyalty to a particular monarch and service to the country’s governing institutions. Granard had resisted James’s land legislation and withdrawn from his administration, but he could still serve under William and Mary. His career was not a simple passage from one allegiance to another. It reflected an effort to preserve a measure of political stability and public service amid a conflict that had divided Ireland and threatened the security of its inhabitants.
In August 1691, Granard received command of approximately 5,000 men, mostly militia, accompanied by three field pieces, to reduce Sligo, which remained in Jacobite hands under Sir Teague O’Regan. During the march over the Curlew Mountains, the draught horses failed, forcing soldiers to pull the artillery themselves for several miles. The defenders, observing the number of carriages accompanying the force, believed Granard had brought heavy guns and mortars. They agreed to negotiate and surrendered Sligo on September 15, 1691, on terms permitting them to march to Limerick with their arms and baggage.
The campaign proved to be Granard’s last military operation. His career had spanned the royalist wars, the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Williamite War in Ireland. He had fought for the Stuarts, negotiated the preservation of his estates under the Commonwealth, helped restore Charles II, served under James II, and ultimately accepted office under William and Mary.
Granard made his will on March 12, 1693, and died at Castle Forbes in 1696. He was buried in the vault of the church at Newtown Forbes, which he had built. His eldest son, Arthur, succeeded him as the second Earl of Granard.
Arthur Forbes’s life resists a simple judgment about loyalty. His devotion to the Stuart monarchy was genuine, but it was not unconditional obedience. He served the Crown in war and government, protected his family’s inheritance through negotiation, sought support for Irish Presbyterians, and opposed legislation that threatened the Protestant landholding community. At different moments, duty required military resistance, political accommodation, public service, or withdrawal.
Granard’s legacy lies in that difficult distinction: loyalty is most severely tested when obedience to authority and responsibility to the wider community no longer point in the same direction.
Excerpted from Forbes: A Story of Duty by B. R. Forbes, copyright 2026.
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