Family and Early Associations

Abstract

M uch information concerning William Butler Yeats’ family and early life can be agreeably acquired from his own telling and from that of his father. He descended on his father’s side from a certain Jervis Yeats — the old merchant “free of the ten and four” of his poem on ancestors¹ — who towards the close of the seventeenth century was established in the wholesale linen business in Dublin, and enjoyed the privilege of being exempt from certain duties by the Irish Parliament. The name Yeats was then common in Yorkshire and it has been presumed that Jervis Yeats was a settler from that county. He died in 1712, and was succeeded by his son Benjamin, a member of the mercantile community which accepted Dean Swift as its leader and struck the first note of Irish Protestant Nationalism. The family business appears to have flourished ; for, in Grattan’s Dublin, at the close of the eighteenth century, a second Benjamin Yeats, the grandson of Jervis, lived in William Street, at that time a street of handsome houses, the abodes of rich men of business. This Benjamin Yeats married Mary Butler, daughter of John Butler of the War Office in Dublin, and, all her brothers dying unmarried, Mary Butler inherited and brought into the family the lands of Thomastown in Co. Kildare, a small property, which remained in its possession up to the poet’s time, together with a beautiful silver cup with the Ormonde crest upon it, already old at the date 1534, when the initials of some bride and bridegroom were engraved on the lip. The poet looked back with pride to Butlers, Butlers (Earls of Ormonde) being next to Fitzgeralds the most illustrious of the Anglo-Irish medieval families.