The Maturin and Johnston Families in Ireland

The name Maturin will be familiar to many, but perhaps as a memory of Patrick O'Brian and his Napoleonic Navy stories rather than one of the few descended from the Huguenot Pastor from Guyenne, Gabriel Maturin. It is one of history's oddities that the name should be so memorable when only 160 babes baptised as Maturin in the UK and Ireland can be traced in the last 300 years, and only eleven of those are still alive in mainland UK, and just one in Ireland. It may disappoint O'Brian fans that none were named Stephen and only two were in the Victorian, rather than the Napoleonic war,  Navy so not even the most imaginative can give Aubrey's sidekick a reality.

O'Brian was proud of his Irish literary roots. When he was searching for a good Irish / French name he will have known the history of one of the great Irish writers, Charles Robert Maturin, championed by Scott and Byron and now best known for his Melmoth the Wanderer gothic horror adventure. The name Maturin was also used by Somerset Maugham in The Razor's Edge, perhaps picked as Charles Robert's entry in the Dictionary of National Biography is very close to his own. The most recently publicised Maturin was the actor Eric who appeared with Paul Robeson in Sanders of the River in 1935 and in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp in 1943.

Now back to the start. Most of the stories agree that Gabriel was born in the Montauriol - Monflanquin area of Guyenne, east of Bordaux, married Rachel Garrigue and had a family before they fled to Dordrecht in Holland after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In 1689 he joined a clandestine mission back to France to give comfort to the faithful who had remained, but was arrested within five months and condemned to perpetual solitary confinement on the île Sainte Marguerite with the five other Protestant ministers on the mission. There he remained for 25 years and was only released after representations at the highest levels at the negotiations at the Treaty of Utrecht. His son, Peter, was chaplain to the regiment commanded by the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim; Marlborough had a direct line to Queen Anne. The Bishop for all overseas clergy was the Bishop of London; John Robinson was that Bishop and also one of the plenipotentiaries negotiating the Treaty. Gabriel was the only one of the Protestant clergy to be released and he emerged as a cripple but able to make his way to London. Peter had been based in Utrecht where both his sons were born in 1700 and 1705. By 1718 they had reached Ireland when Gabriel James, the elder son, entered Trinity College Dublin and Peter had gained the preferment which led eventually to his appointment as the Dean of Killala, way out on the northern coast of Connemara west of Sligo. Gabriel James used his natural talent to make his way in the church; when Jonathan Swift died in 1745 he was elected as Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin but lived for only one year after and died at the age of 46.

The Johnston family became entwined with the Maturins in 1802. Until then the Maturin men had been Protestant clerics or soldiers named Gabriel, Peter, Jacques (or James), Charles with an occasional William or Henry. The Johnstons had been Benjamin or John (and Edmund coming in from the Welds), dissenting lawyers and doctors, though their prosperity was boosted by John Johnston who was an "Ironmonger" at the height of the Georgian development of Dublin. After the marriage of Henry Maturin to Elizabeth Johnston in 1802 and the subsequent marriage of Benjamin Johnston to Emma Maturin in 1843 the Maturins started to breed lawyers and doctors and Johnstons to raise clergymen.

Click here to go the Maturin Index.