The Hornby Claim

The first record of Robert D'Arcy in an English parish register

Everything on this page below is about what cannot be shown: no baptism, no parentage in the Corps rolls, no notice of his death. So it is worth putting the one thing that has now been found at the top of it.

It does not touch his parentage, which is what this page is about — a baptism names a child's father, not the father's father. What it does is turn a marriage and a son from things the family believes into things a register says. documented

Above Major George Pitt D'Arcy of the 39th Foot the family tree keeps climbing: to a Major-General of Royal Engineers, to a man said to be born in St James's Palace, to the Earls of Holderness, and finally to Hornby Castle in the North Riding of Yorkshire in the 1560s. Fifteen generations in all.

Six of those fifteen are documented to the day. The archive will defend them. The rest are a different kind of claim, and the honest thing is to say so on its own page rather than bury it in a footnote.

A pedigree that reaches a peerage is the most suspect kind of pedigree there is. Not because such descents never happen — they do — but because they are the descents people most want, and wanting is how a guess becomes a fact in three generations of retelling.

Major-General Robert D'Arcy, and the sentence the tree wrote about him

Robert D'Arcy (1751–1827) is real, and he is impressive. He was Major-General and Commander of the Royal Engineers at Chatham, a Companion of the Bath, known in the family as The General. He married Jean Ward at Portsea in 1779 and had ten children — among them Joseph, who went to Persia, and George Pitt, who went to New South Wales. All of that is solid.

Barbados — inferred, and then found. Three of his children were born in Barbados, and the Roll's war services do not mention the West Indies. There is no conflict: that column lists campaigns, not peacetime postings, so a Royal Engineer sent to garrison Barbados in the later 1780s leaves no trace in it. The archive inferred the posting from that silence. Then the register turned up:

His burial is now confirmed from the register itself. The Kent Burials transcript for St Mary, Chatham records Robert D'Arcy, of Chatham, buried 19 May 1827, aged 76.

What is not solid is where he came from. The family tree carries this note against his name:

A lineal descendant of the great and ancient baronial house of D'Arcy, in which vested the Earldom of Holderness. … this Robert thought to be the illegitim[ate]…

"Thought to be." The tree is not asserting a documented descent here. It is recording a supposition — that Robert was an illegitimate son of a Darcy Earl of Holderness — and the supposition has since been drawn as a solid line on a chart, which is how suppositions get promoted.

The earldom of Holderness ended in 1778, in a daughter

The Darcy Earls of Holderness are among the best-recorded families in England. Conyers Darcy, 1st Earl (1598–1689); Conyers, 2nd Earl (1622–1692); Robert, 3rd Earl (1681–1721); Robert, 4th Earl (1718–1778). At the 4th Earl's death the earldom became extinct, because he left no legitimate son — his heir was his daughter Amelia, who carried the barony of Conyers into another family by marriage.

The 4th Earl married Mary Doublet in 1743 and had three children: George, Lord Darcy and Conyers, who died in 1747 aged two; Thomas, Lord Darcy and Conyers, born and died in 1750; and Lady Amelia, the only one to reach adulthood. Both sons died in infancy.

The extinction is the whole reason an illegitimate son has to be invoked at all. A legitimate male descent from the 4th Earl is not merely unproven; it is excluded by the peerage record. So the claim reduces to: somewhere in the 1750s an earl fathered a boy outside marriage, that boy became a Major-General of Engineers, and nobody wrote it down. Possible. Common enough, even. But it is precisely the kind of claim that leaves no paper — which is what makes it so attractive and so useless.

What this archive is prepared to say

There is no baptism

FindMyPast has been swept for the baptism of a Robert D'Arcy or Darcy born c. 1741–1761, name variants on, across every English record set. The sweep returns burials, marriages, wills and Irish abstracts — and not one English baptism in the window, in Yorkshire or anywhere else.

A null is a result. It does not disprove the Yorkshire descent; it does mean the descent cannot presently be reached from below, and that the argument has to be made, if it can be made at all, from military and estate papers instead of parish registers. That reorders the queue.

Two further negatives from this session, both worth recording:

• The Dictionary of National Biography entry headed "D'Arcy, Robert" is the 4th Earl of Holderness himself — ambassador to Venice, Secretary of State for the Southern Department 1751–57, Governor of the Prince of Wales. It is not our Major-General, who has no DNB entry.
• Connolly's Roll has now been searched — see above. It gives his entire career and his death, and it gives no parentage whatever. That is not a failing of the source; the Roll simply does not record fathers. So the Corps register, which answers everything else about this man, cannot answer the one question this page exists to ask.

One thing the same sweep did turn up: England, Boyd's Marriage Indexes, London, 1779 — "D'Arcy, Robert Hon Amelia Baroness Conyers". That is the 4th Earl's daughter Amelia, Baroness Conyers, marrying in the very year Robert D'Arcy married Jean Ward at Portsea. It is the documentary trace of the legitimate line passing to a daughter — which is precisely why an illegitimate son has to be invoked here at all.

What would actually settle it

1. The Woolwich cadet registers are not the answer. ruled out This archive named them as its best remaining hope, and was wrong. WO 149, the Registers of Cadets of the Royal Military Academy, runs from 1790 and is held at Sandhurst, not Kew — so it cannot contain a cadet of the early 1770s. The printed Records of the Royal Military Academy (1851 and 1892) have also both been searched in full and contain no Robert D'Arcy; they are narrative institutional histories, not registers. Both avenues are closed.
2. Robert D'Arcy's baptism, c. 1750–51. searched, not found A parish register naming a father — or naming a mother and no father, which would be evidence of the illegitimacy the tradition claims. Swept on FindMyPast across all English record sets with no result, so any further search needs to go to unindexed originals: the Bishop's Transcripts for the North Riding, and the garrison and chapel registers of the towns where artillery families lived.
3. His own will — PROB 11/1728/64, and it is digitised. Found at the National Archives on 9 September 2026 while looking for a different will entirely: "Will of Robert D'Arcy, Major General in the Army and Colonel of the Royal Engineers of Chatham, Kent", proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury on 4 July 1827, register Hober. He died at Chatham on 13 May 1827 and was buried there on the 19th; the rank, the Corps and the town all match.
   
   This is the best unread document about him that exists. A will of this period names children, executors, legacies and very often the testator's own origins — and for a man whose parentage appears on no baptism, no commission and no obituary, the people he chose to leave money to are the strongest indirect evidence obtainable. If he was a natural son acknowledged by a family, a legacy or an executor may say so. If he was not, it will show a man with no such connections at all — which is also an answer. located, not yet read How to get it →
4. The 4th Earl of Holderness's will — searched for, and not found. null result, 9 Sep 2026 The National Archives catalogue was queried for a Prerogative Court will of Robert Darcy, 4th Earl of Holdernesse, who died in May 1778, under Darcy, D'Arcy, Holderness and Holdernesse, and across every PROB record dated 1778–1780. Nothing came back. That does not prove he left no will — peers' estates commonly passed by settlement rather than testament, and his heir was his daughter Amelia, Baroness Conyers — but it does mean the acknowledgement this archive was hoping to find is not sitting in the obvious place, and the next person need not look there again.
5. Board of Ordnance minutes — the series is WO 47, and there is a reason nobody has found him in it. located, but not searchable from a catalogue Searched at the National Archives on 10 September 2026. WO 47 is "Ordnance Office: Board of Ordnance: Minutes", 1644–1856 — so it certainly covers January 1776. But the series description carries its own warning: "the minute books or journals of proceedings of the Board of Ordnance prior to 1810 exist in several broken series." They are not catalogued to item level and cannot be pinpointed by name from a desk. This turns a vague hope into a specific reference with a specific obstacle: the piece covering a commission of 17 January 1776 has to be identified in the reading room at Kew, by somebody with the volumes in front of them. WO 45, the reference books to Ordnance correspondence, would be the finding aid — but it starts in 1783, seven years too late.
6. Board of Ordnance records — WO 47 and WO 54. now the best hope Until 1855 the Royal Engineers answered to the Board of Ordnance, not the War Office, and kept records entirely separate from the Army's. Connolly shows he entered the Corps as a second lieutenant on 17 January 1776 with no prior ensigncy. If a cadet warrant or commission entry of that date survives anywhere, it is in the Ordnance minutes or registers — and commission papers of the period frequently name a parent, a guardian or a recommender. A patron of the right surname would be the strongest indirect evidence obtainable.
7. The Royal Engineers Museum's own archive at Chatham. The one institution whose entire subject is this Corps, in the town where he served, died and was buried. An enquiry is drafted.
8. The 4th Earl's will and estate papers. Provision for a natural son is the classic form such an acknowledgement takes.
9. A Y-DNA test against a documented Darcy of Holderness male line — if one survives, which given the extinction of the earldom is itself an open question.

Every one of those needs an archive rather than a search engine, and the letters are written. What can be done from a desk has now been done.

Until then the line stands at 1776 with a General, and that is a perfectly good place for a family line to stand. The research queue →