Daniel Augustus Beaufort (1739-1821)

Life

son of Daniel Cornelis de Beaufort (1700-1788), provost-archdeacon of Tuam, and a French refugee; ed. TCD, MA, 1764; hon. LLD 1789; vicar of Navan, Co. Louth, 1764; rector of Collon, 1790; built or refurbished seventeen houses and churches in Ireland including one in his own parish at Collon; issued his famous map, Memoir of a Map of Ireland (1792), marking all the Protestant and none of the Catholic churches; strongly promoted by the viceroy Marquess of Buckingham, it sold 2,000 copies in eighteen months; joint-fndr. of RIA;he was concerned in the Sunday School movement; his dg. Fanny became fourth wife of Richard Lovell Edgeworth; father of Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, the navy hydrographer. [See also L. C. Beaufort - as infra.]

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Works
Memoir of a Map of Ireland: illustrating the Topography of that Kingdom, and containing a short Account of its Present State, Civil and Ecclesiastical; with a Complete Index to the Map (Dublin: Allen 1792) [incls. folding map on linen]]. Do. [2nd edn.] (Sold by W. Faden [etc.] 1797) [1 map : hand col.; 160 X 84 cm.]

Note: The map, entitled in various fonts “A New Map of Ireland Civil and Ecclesiastical by the Rev. D. A. Beaufort L.L.D Member of the Royal Irish Academy’, features an engraved title-ill. (engraved) with a ship flying a British Navy flag, tree, church and infants - amid goods agricultural and industrial (and poss. artistic) and an engraving of Henry Grattan[?] inset exhibited by a child with wings. The text is inserted in the vacant space between that illustration reading "A memoir, illustrative of this Map, with a complete Inded to it, and an account of the present state of Ireland, civil and ecclesiastical, to be had of the publishers, price 10/6. [See infra - with access to a scaleable image in the US Library of Congress.]

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Criticism
C. C. Ellison, The Hopeful Traveller: The Life and Times of Daniel Beaufort LL.D (Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1987) [see Irish Review, Autumn 1988].

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Commentary
R. E. Ward & C. Ward, eds., Letters of Charles O’Conor (1988), in which Beaufort is dismissively called a ‘schoolmaster in Athy’: ‘Little moved by anything I have written against these gentlemen, the latter published his ‘Topography of Ireland’ in the eleventh number [of Collectanea], the most flagrant imposition that I believe ever appeared in our own or in any age. This impelled me to resume the subject of our antiquities and add the topography of Ireland as divided into districts and tribes in the second century [...]; Beaufort, a stranger to your language, distorted such [materials] as he had to a degree which has no parallel except perhaps in the dreams of a sick man in a frenzy’ (Letter to Thomas O’Gorman; 31 May 1783; p.424.)

John O’Donovan, letter of (15 August, 1936; Navan): ‘Let me have Beauford’s words (11th number of Vallancey’s Collectanea) describing the situation of 1. Ros na Righ, 2. Brugh na Boinne, Cleitach and Gabhra. I have discovered them and I shall lash him with a whip of scorpions, with a pen dipped in poison and gall. I shall have no mercy on a bare-faced liar, a presumptuous historical charlatan, a flagrant imposter. I have met his work here with honest innocent men who shallow every word he has written for historical truth.’ (See M. Flanagan, ed., Letters containing Information Relative to the Antiquities of the Country of Roscommon [ … &c.], 2 vols., Bray 1927; cited in Cathy Swift, ‘John O’Donovan and the Framing of early Medieval Ireland in the Nineteenth Century’, in Bullán, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1994, p.97.)

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References
Ulster libraries: University of Ulster Library (Morris Collecton) holds Memoir of a Map of Ireland (London 1792). Library of Herbert Bell (Belfast) holds Daniel Augustus Beaufort, Memoir of [a] Map of Ireland (Dublin 1792).

Cathach Books (1996-97) lists Memoir of a Map of Ireland: illustrating the Topography of that Kingdom, and containing a short Account of its Present State, Civil and Ecclesiastical; with a Complete Index to the Map, with orig. folding map on linen (Dublin: Allen 1792) [Ł975]; Beaufort’s Ireland [3rd ed.] (Dublin 1813), and Memoir of A Map of Ireland: The Topography of that Kingdom [1st ed.] (Dublin 1792).

Daniel Beaufort, Memoir of a Map of Ireland (2nd edn. 1792)
Viewable as a large jpeg [1332x1651] at Library of Congress - online.

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Notes
L. C. Beaufort, An Essay upon the State of Architecture and Antiquites, Previous to the Landing of the Anglo-Normans in Ireland, in The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, Vol. 15 (Dublin 1828), pp. 101-241() - available online.