Part of the Irish Brigade, Dillon’s Regiment was brought from Ireland to France in 1690 by Count Arthur Dillon (1670-1733) during the Williamite War. However, the Dillons originally came from France: Henri de Léon of Brittany arrived in Ireland some 500 years earlier with the Normans and Prince John. Dillon gentry spread throughout Ireland, from Drumraney to Clonbrock. Over the centuries in France, the Irish-French Dillons were famed for their military successes, but some also suffered spectacular downfalls during the French Revolution. We will describe some of these famous Dillons in France, and also in Languedoc where they had both a religious (Narbonne) and a military (Carcassonne) presence for some time.
Count Arthur Dillon
Arthur Dillon (1670-1733) was the son of Theobald Dillon (died 1691), a great-grandson of the 1st Viscount Dillon, and Mary Talbot, daughter of Sir Henry Talbot. Both his parents died during the Williamite War in 1691: his father fell at the Battle of Aughrim, and his mother was accidentally killed by a bomb just a few weeks later during the Siege of Limerick.
He brought Dillon’s Regiment to France via Brest in 1690 as its colonel when he was just 20 years old, as part of the 5,400-strong Irish Brigade during the Williamite War. Dillon and his regiment fought in Roussillon and Catalonia during the Nine Years’ War, and they had a key role in the capture of Barcelona. He later fought in – amongst other places – Italy, Germany, and back in Spain again. Louis XIV made him Count Dillon in 1711. Arthur led Dillon’s Regiment until his retirement in 1730, and died in Saint-Germain in 1733.
From 1730 to 1747, there were multiple changes in “colonel proprietor”, all sons of Count Arthur Dillon: Charles (who died in 1741), Henry (who resigned as colonel proprietor in 1743), James (who died in 1745), and Edward (who died in 1747). From 1747 onwards, the regiment remained without a Dillon as colonel proprietor for some 20 years.
Arthur’s son Henry could not leave his English estates without endangering them, so Louis XIV kept the regiment in the Dillon name, and appointed various interim colonels (with Henry as absentee colonel proprietor) until Henry’s son (Count Arthur’s grandson) Arthur could take over in 1767.
Archbishop Arthur Richard Dillon
An Irish-French Dillon was quite [in]famous in the Languedoc region. The fifth of Count Arthur Dillon’s sons, Arthur Richard Dillon had been Bishop of Evreux, Archbishop of Toulouse, and since 1763, he was Archbishop of Narbonne (as primate of the ecclesiastical region of Gallia Narbonensis and ex officio president of the states of Languedoc). This would have included Carcassonne during the time that Dillon’s Regiment visited in 1763 and 1764.
Described as visionary and enterprising, he was more devoted to infrastructural rather than spiritual development: promoting buildings (including the cathedral he was eventually buried in), bridges, canals (in particular, the Junction Canal connecting the Canal du Midi to the Canal de la Robine), roads, harbours, creating science professorships in Montpellier and Toulouse, and trying to reduce poverty in Narbonne and the region. Both cours Dillon (a road in Toulouse) and quai Dillon (in Narbonne) are named in his honour.
However, also said to be more of an “Irish squire of the ‘Castle Rackrent’ days rather than a dignified ecclesiastic”, he lived with his niece (the daughter of his own sister Laura) and reputed lover Madame de Rothe in a scandalous arrangement for that or any time. “He was devoted to hunting, and swore consumedly, though he set his face against such practices in the inferior clergy”, according to WF Prideaux in Notes and Queries.
After the civil constitution of the clergy was adopted in 1790, there was an unsuccessful proposal to move the episcopal seat for the Aude department from Narbonne to Carcassonne, but in any case Dillon refused to accept this new constitution. He was exiled, and later died and was buried in London in 1806, with his body being eventually returned to Narbonne Cathedral over 200 years later in 2007, and his dentures remaining in England!
General Theobald Dillon
Dublin-born Theobald Hyacinthe Dillon (1745–1792), son of banker Thomas Dillon Hussey (Château de Chevaux in La Ferté-Saint-Aubin) and Marie Hussey from Meath, entered Dillon’s Regiment as a cadet in 1760 or 1762, and progressed in rank over the next 30 years to become colonel commandant in Dillon’s Regiment in 1788 (although he had taken over the regiment in 1780 from distant cousin Arthur Dillon), and a general in 1791.
Theobald’s family were descendants of Catherine Dillon, a sister of the 1st Viscount Dillon, and were also related further back through half-siblings Thomas and Edmund Dillon, making him a distant cousin of General Arthur Dillon. He has been misidentified in various places as a brother or first cousin of General Arthur Dillon, whose own brother Theobald died in infancy, and Arthur did not have an uncle named Thomas.
Theobald Hyacinthe Dillon had an elder brother called Edward Patrick Joseph Dillon Hussey, who is possibly the Edward Dillon mentioned in records visiting a masonic lodge in Carcassonne during 1763, before a visit of his younger brother (“cadet”) Theobald Dillon.
Theobald was attacked by his own troops, incorrectly believing themselves to be betrayed by him, and he died in 1792 (an event that was the subject of various paintings and engravings and also captured in this report).
“Le Beau” Edward Dillon
[Charles] Edward Dillon (1750-1839), who was born in Bordeaux and known as “le beau Dillon”, became a second colonel in Dillon’s Regiment.
His father was Robert Dillon, Lord of Terrefort, also known for the Château Dillon winery, and whose brother was Thomas Dillon Hussey. His mother was Mary Dicconson of Wrightington. He was known to be a favourite of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Edward was an uncle of the writer Adèle d’Osmond, Comtesse de Boigne, whose mother was Edward’s sister Eléonore. Another brother was Robert William who fought in the American War of Independence.
Some biographies have conflated Edward with his first cousin Theobald (1745–1792). This is also addressed in Notes and Queries by WF Prideaux. In fact, Edward did have an older brother called Theobald (1747-1819), which adds to the confusion. (There are just so many Arthurs, Theobalds and Edwards!)
General Arthur Dillon
It was the first Arthur’s grandson, also named Arthur Dillon (1750–1794) and a nephew of the Archbishop of Narbonne, who took over the regiment in 1767 after joining as a cadet at the age of 15.
He later went on to lead the brigade in the American Revolutionary War (from 1777 to 1783, during which time Dillon Rhum also came about), and then again during the French Revolutionary Wars. After his tenure, Dillon’s Regiment was nationalised in 1791, and became the 87th Regiment of Infantry.
He is reputed to have saved Paris (and therefore France) from the Austrians in 1792 at the Battle of Valmy. Unfortunately, Arthur Dillon himself was guillotined as a royalist during the Reign of Terror in 1794, shouting “vive le roi” before he died.
Marquise de La Tour du Pin
General Arthur’s daughter Henrietta-Lucy Dillon (called Lucie, later Marquise de La Tour du Pin), by his first wife and first cousin once removed Thérèse-Lucy de Rothe (lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, daughter of the aforementioned Madame de Rothe, and granddaughter of Arthur’s aunt Laura), was a writer who became famous for her memoirs titled Recollections of the Revolution and the Empire.
Lucie, who was also a grandniece (via Arthur) and a great-grandniece (via Madame de Rothe) of the aforementioned Archbishop Arthur Richard Dillon, had some ‘interesting’ comments to make about his household in her memoirs, when she lived with her grandmother and mother: “I saw things which might have been expected to warp my mind”.
Her half-sister Fanny, by Arthur’s second wife, [Anne] Laure de Girardin de Montgérald (a cousin of Empress Joséphine), was an aristocrat who later married to Napoleon’s aide-de-camp Henri Gatien Bertrand, and was present at Napoleon’s death in 1821.
More Dillons
Mistakenly described as a grandson of Arthur, the similarly named Arthur Marie Dillon (1834-1922), son of Pierre Dillon (whose own father was Jacques, not Arthur) and Marie Adele Poidevin, was a friend of and fellow exilee with General Ernest Boulanger, later dying on Berder Island in Morbihan, Brittany which he himself had bought.
The Dillon military legacy continued into the 20th century, with Weygand speaking of another English general called Dillon, then on the staff of World War I Commander-in-Chief Ferdinand Foch, in an encounter with [Dillon’s] 87th Regiment in 1918. This is likely the 19th Viscount Dillon, Brigadier Eric Dillon, Irish peer and British army officer.
An article on The Noble Line of the Dillons, Irish Swordsmen of France was written in 1989 by Renagh Holohan of the Irish Times, and is worth a read.
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