[Sir] William Betham

Life
1779–1853 [Ulster King at Arms]; b. Stradbroke in Suffolk, 22 May 1779ç eldest son of Rev. William Betham, author of the Baronetage of England (... &c.) (1801-05), and his wife Mary (nee Demant); appt. Deputy Ulster King of Arms attached to Dublin Castle, 1807; occupied himself from 1808-26 transcribing the prerogative wills of Ireland - later destroyed by fire at the Four Courts, Dublin, 13 April 1922 - from which he composed genealogical charts; knighted, 1812; appt. Ulster King of Arms, 1820; elected MRIA, 1820; acted as Secretary; distinguished himself as a strong proponent of the Phoenician theory of Irish language-origin associated with Charles Vallencey [q.v.], Charles O'Conor ("Younger"; q.v.], John D'Alton [q.v.] and - tragically - Henry O'Brien [q.v.], and was the author of an influential - if nonsensical - theory of an ancient seafaring civilisation which reached from Yemen to Siam with the Etruscans [Etruria] in the Mediterranean and ancient Ireland as its chief historical bastions; deeply embroiled in controversy between Christian and Oriental (Phoenician) origins of Round Towers in pre-Christian Ireland with George Petrie as his chief opponent;

also elected to the American Antiquarian Society, 1838; read a paper to RIA on Cross of Cong and Breastplate of St. Patrick with readings of the inscriptions which he was enduced to withdraw under criticism by Petrie (25 June 1838); effectively precluded from publication of his papers in Transactions by the newly-formed RIA publications committee, he privately printed issued Gael and Cymbri (1834) and an enlargement of same as Etruria Celtica, 2 vols. (1842); read his paper of the Eugubian Tables at the RIA, 24 April 1837 - coinciding with the first reading of Petrie’s his paper on ‘Antiquities of Tara Hill’; his paper on "The Ancient Tomb recently Riscovered in the Tumulus in the Phoenix Park' (RIA 11 June 1838) was published ‘without abridgement’ in the Proceedings, seemingly in ironic recognition of its Orientalist extremism; Thomas Moore witnessed a contratemp between Betham and Petrie on his visit Dubin in 1838, recording that John O’Donovan had made a "good parody" of its thrust (Journal, 4 Sept.; see note);

d. 26 Oct. 1853, at home, Rockford, Co. Dublin; bur. Carrickbrennan Church, Monkstown; there is a William Betham MSS Collection in the Royal Irish Academy [RIA].

Gold Manillas sketched by Betham

[ NLI Cat - online ]

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Bibliographical details
Etruria Celtica: Etruscan Literature and Antiquities investigated; or, the language of that ancient and illustrious people, compared and identified with the Iberno-Celtic, and both shown to be Phoenician, 2 vols. (Dublin: Philip Dixon Hardy & Sons 1842), ill. [folding maps and part-fold. pls.]; of which Vol. I (396pp.) incls. Perugian inscription and idiomatic English Translation (pp.380ff. & pp.386; Conclusion, p.389ff.; Index [p.393-96; Errata, p.396], and Vol. II (296pp) incls. 39 engravings of Etruscan artifacts. Vol. I also makes section-reference to Edward O’Reilly’s Dictionary and includes the assertion that all early languages were monosyllabic. [Available at Hathi Trust as Vol. 1 [online] and Vol. II [online]; Vol II is also available at Google Books - online]. (Copies held at California ULs and Princeton and Caliornia UL; scanning my Google.

Bibliographical details.
The Book of Dimma: Sir William Betham acquired the Book of Dimma, formerly held at the Abbey of Roscrea, from Henry Monck Mason, LLD, who bought it in turn from a Dr. Harrison. Betham paid Monck L150 for it after some negotiations and subsequently offered it through Evans during a period of financial stress in 1830. It remained unsold at auction and was ultimately bought by TCD for L200. (See P. B. Phair, ‘Betham and the Older Irish Manuscripts’, in The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 92: 1 (1962) - available at JSTOR online.

Analecta 27 (1972) contains a Report to the Taoiseach and the following papers: Sir William Betham’s Manuscripts (P. B. Phair); Inquisitions of 1224 from the Miscellanea of the Exchequer (K. W. Nicholls); Some Unpublished Barry Charters (K. W. Nicholls); A Charter of Willaim De Burgo (K. W. Nicholls); Sir Paul Rycaut’s memoranda and Letters from Ireland, 1686-1687 (Patrick Melvin). Includes indexes of persons and places.

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Commentary
Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination: Patterns in the Historical and Literary Representation of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Cork UP/Field Day 1996) : ‘Laughable, of course. [...] At the end of his long linguistic journey from Etruria [93] to Ireland, the original is gradually lost sight of in a every-thickening fog of semantic entropy, in which anything can mean anything else. What Betham calls translation merely imposes on the Rorschach test of an unintelligible original a machinery of telescoping association; the perspective of his free associations always converges into the same vanishing point [...] In short, the Ulster King of Arms is fantasizing, with a great deal of ingenuity, an very little critical sense. He develops romantic, adventurous scenarios, and Irish antiquity functions as a mere void which he fills with colourful incidents and adventurous jounres, obviously inspired by Homer, the Aeneid, and Ossian. Thus, a nonsensical toponymical list wich Behtam draws up by Gaelicizinf ancient records yields very little information, but, rather, like the free associations triggered by a Rorschach test, does give us a glimpse into Betham’s adventurous imagination. [Here quotes from Etruria Celtica, pp.28-29)] What pretends to be a list of place-names is more like a list of ingredients for an epic adventure story of the Ossian-meets-Odysseus type, set between the “land of lov” and the “gulph of pirates”. What Betham enumerates are mythical narrative ingredients rather than philological observations. Ferguson, in his review of 1845, was scathing on “the endless rigmarole of ‘moon’, ‘stars’, ‘steering’, ‘ocean’, ‘night’, ‘day’, ‘knowledge’, ‘science’, and ‘O Phoenician!’ that succeed one another for a monotonous 200 pages.' (pp.92-93.) [Leerssen goes on to describe the marginalisation of Betham among scholars at the Royal Irish Academy - although ‘the gradual marginalisation of Bethamite speculation and Phoenicianism was a process that took decades of bitter controversy which left their stamp on the Irish historical imagination.’ (p.94.)]

Ridicule: Leerssen further quotes a Journal-entry by Thomas Moore of 1838 recording the information he received from the latter after a near-contretemp between Betham and George Petrie recording that "Sir W. Betham more especially, having drawn down much ridicule on himself by endeavouring to show that a certain Etruscan inscripption, well known to scholars, is every word of it in Irish. To make this out, he has, it appears, disjoinied & connected syllables without scruple, and what is still worse as Petrie intimated, has shown nothing so clearly, either Irish or Etruscan as his utter ignorance of both. A good parody on this paper of Sir William’s has been produced by a Mr. O’Donovan [sic] (the translator of the Four Masters) [....]" (Journal, ed. W. S. Dowden, Vol. 5 [of 6] Delaware 1983-91, p.1997; 4 Sept. 1838; quoted in Leerssen, op. cit., 1996, p.129).

The Memoir of Joseph Holt, General to the Irish Rebels in 1798. From Holt’s Autobiographical MS. in the Possession of Sir. W. Betham was edited by T. C. Croker, and published by Colburn in 1835. (See T. F. D. Croker, Memoir, prefixed to Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland [1825-28] (1859 Edn.).