The Pedigree of D. Felipe/Philip V of Spain (1700-46) in the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies: A Jacobite Statement

Medieval and early modern genealogies are rarely simple records of biological descent, but rather are ideological statements used to establish political and cultural connections, create hierarchy, and order society. Ireland possessed one of the most developed aristocratic genealogical traditions in medieval Europe, which reached its culmination in the middle of the seventeenth century in manuscripts like the Ó Cléirigh Book of Genealogies (Royal Irish Academy MS 23 D 17). To that manuscript a later scribe added a patrilinear genealogy of Felipe/Philip V, first Bourbon king of Spain (1700-24 and 1724-46), a unique addition to a vast corpus that does not otherwise concern itself with foreign rulers. That 124 generation genealogy presents Felipe as a son of the Habsburg monarch Felipe IV (1605-65), who was actually his great-grandfather through the female line (Felipe IV’s daughter, Maria Teresa, was the wife of Louis XIV of France). This article argues that this was a deliberate anomaly, with the intention of promoting his claim to the Spanish throne during the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-14), by placing him in direct succession to the most recent Spanish monarch from whom he was descended. The compilation of this unique genealogy in an Irish manuscript, doubtless using a Continental printed exemplar, was motivated by sympathies for the exiled Jacobite claimant to the three crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, James III (the “Old Pretender”), as Bourbon France and later Bourbon Spain became the Jacobites’ chief supporters in their attempts to reclaim the three kingdoms. As such, the genealogy of Felipe V is also a unique product of an Irish Jacobite literary tradition that is otherwise dominated by poetry and song.