Constantine D'Arcy
A name in a burial register with nothing attached to it. He turns out to be Robert D'Arcy's son, christened in Barbados, commissioned into his father's corps at eighteen, and dead at nineteen.
Robert D'Arcy's son Constantine has been half known to this archive for months, and the two halves were never set beside each other. One page held a Barbados christening naming his parents. Two others said his relationship to Robert had never been established. This page puts them together and adds the record that settles it: a Canterbury newspaper that calls him, in May 1805, the son of Col. D'Arcy, chief engineer of Chatham lines.
St Michael, Barbados, 18 February 1786
Robert D'Arcy took his first commission in the Corps of Engineers on 17 JANUARY 1776. Barbados falls inside the years that follow, during which the Corps' own history also puts him at the siege of Fort St Philip's on Minorca in 1781 and carries him in a station list as “Robert D'Arcy, Barbados”. The Corps kept an establishment there throughout the 1780s, and an engineer officer posted to the West Indies took his wife with him. JEAN WARD, whom Robert married at Portsea in 1779, is JANE in an English clerk's hand as often as not.
Into his father's corps
Corps of Royal Engineers · Ordnance-Office, 4 June 1804 — vice Harding, promoted · London Gazette 15707 / 690
The date was known from Connolly. The Gazette citation is new, and so is this: the commission was printed in the KENTISH WEEKLY POST of 12 June 1804 — the Canterbury paper covering Chatham, which carried the boy's first commission and, twenty-three years later, his father's funeral.
Corps of the Royal Engineers · Ordnance-Office, 18 March 1805 — vice Dyson · London Gazette 15789 / 351
THE SAME GAZETTE, THE SAME PAGE, AND THE SAME COLUMN OF THE SAME NEWSPAPERS as his father's promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel. This archive published that page in July, cited it by issue and number, and read the father's line without seeing the son's nine lines below it.
“The son of Col. D'Arcy”
Buried Chatham St Mary the Virgin, 9 May 1805, described in the register as “Lt in the royal engineers”. No age is given. Medway Archives P85/1/79. Connolly gives the death as 6 May. The register scan, Medway CityArk ↗
- It says whose son he was, in a contemporary document. Not a printed roll of 1898 and not a family tree. THE SON OF COL. D'ARCY — and in May 1805 there was exactly one Colonel D'Arcy at Chatham, gazetted Lieutenant-Colonel of the Royal Engineers ten weeks earlier. Three of Robert's children were documented as his on Saturday. This makes four.
- And it gives Robert D'Arcy a job. CHIEF ENGINEER OF CHATHAM LINES. This is entirely new. Every other record of him — the commission, the five promotions, the seventeen death notices, the burial — gives a rank and no posting. The Chatham Lines were the bastioned works built to defend the dockyard and the Medway, the largest engineering undertaking in Kent, and he was running them.
- He was interred with military honours, and so was his father. The Kent Herald used the same phrase of Major-General D'Arcy in May 1827. Twenty-two years apart, in the same parish, the same rite for the son and the father.
The whole of it
Christened February 1786, a gentleman cadet by February 1804, first lieutenant on 1 March 1805, dead by the beginning of May. He was NINETEEN. A boy born in Barbados while his father served there, sent home to the Royal Military Academy, commissioned into his father's corps at eighteen, promoted at nineteen in the same announcement that promoted his father, and buried at Chatham eight weeks later after what the paper calls a few weeks illness.
What this is and is not
| What is newly documented. | The Kentish Gazette notice naming the dead man as the son of Col. D'Arcy of Chatham Lines; Robert D'Arcy's post; the London Gazette citations for both of Constantine's commissions; and four contemporary newspaper printings of them. |
| What was already here. | The Barbados christening of Constantine to Robert and Jane, the christening of his sister Jane in 1788, the two commission dates from Connolly, and the Chatham burial. All of it published before this week, on pages that did not talk to each other. |
| What is still inferred. | That the Barbados child and the Chatham officer are one person. The name is rare, the corps is his father's, the parish is his father's, and the age fits a cadetship in 1804 exactly — but no single document carries both the christening and the commission, and Connolly's Roll, which asserts both, is a printed book of 1898. |
| What is still unknown. | Whether Jane of 1788 lived. When Robert went to Barbados and when he came home. And, as ever, who Robert's own parents were. A man may now be documented as the father of four children and still be nobody's son. |
And there is an earlier Constantine D'Arcy, in the Board of Ordnance
WO 46/10 · Board of Ordnance, out-letters and papers · 1775–1777
The catalogue description of WO 46/10 lists military surveyors by name, appointment date and — unusually — THE PROFESSION OF EACH ONE'S PARENT. The neighbours on the list are a butler to the Earl of Albemarle, a vintner, a publican, a clerk in the Storekeeper's Office at the Tower.
Robert and Jean's family → · The Chatham register → · Robert's career → · His sister at Havre →