Fontenoy. 1745. Louis XIV decorates Michael Rothe of Kilkenny on the field. In the school in which I was educated, it was regarded as a victory. But there are other stories.
Philidor. Otherwise François André Danican, 1726-95, was the greatest player of the eighteenth century and his book was to have a lasting impact. The origin of the name is obscure. According to a story told by Phildor himself, his grandfather had replaced an Italian oboist called Filidori in the court orchestra at Versailles and on hearing him play Louis XIII remarked 'I have found a new Filidori', whereupon the Danicans accepted the compliment and adopted the name. The problem with this account is that despite a century of research no scholar has discovered a musician called Filidori. The other suggestion is that the name is derived from Filedóir, 'poet', bard', 'court entertainer' because his grandfather had moved from Scotland to Normandy, where the name Duncan (Ir. Donnchadh) was changed into Danican and his profession into a surname. Both etymologies are suspicious and the latter is reminiscent of the bogus derivation of Robespierre's family name from a Kilkenny man who landed in France and gave his name as 'Rothe, Pierre'. Professor Ruairí Ó hUiginn suggested to me that the origin of the name may be 'fidilóir', a fiddler, violinist, which would make a lot of sense in terms of the family's role as a musical dynasty.
The first Irish chess club is associated with George Stone (1708-64), the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh, and it was established in Dublin about 1749. All that is known of it is a single sentence by J.C. Walker, written in 1787 in which he states that:
A chess club, consisting of some of the principal gentry and nobility, and of which the late Primate Stone was president, was instituted in Dublin about forty years since, but like all private associations, its existence was of short duration.
Fontenoy. 1745. Cuimhnígí ar Luimneach agus ar fheall na Sasanach ('Remember Limerick and the perfidy of Albion') was reputedly the cry of the charge. Napoleon said that the victory perpetuated the ancien régime by thirty years. Of course it was not Louis XIV or Michael Rothe. Both were dead at the time but the schoolboy story remembered in Kilkenny had the gist of truth in it. Louis XV and Charles Edward (Michael's son), Comte de Rooth.
Philidor. It was as a boy chorister attached to the Chapel Royal that he learned chess by watching the older musicians play. In 1745 he travelled to Rotterdam to help stage a series of subscription concerts. The lead singer died and as a Frenchman, with no money, in the Low Countries after Fontenoy, Philidor found himself at his wit's end. He supported himself by playing blindfold games. His skill brought him to the attention of English officers and encouraged by their introductions he visited London in 1747. His play created a sensation. He was encouraged to put his ideas into print. He returned to Holland to write it, met Prince William Augustus (one thinks of the square in Birr), duke of Cumberland, known to history as 'the butcher of Culloden', but described by Marshal Saxe, the victor of Fontenoy, as 'the greatest general of the age'. Cumberland, clearly charmed by Philidor, subscribed to 50 copies of the publication (enough to ensure it would be printed) and encouraged his officers to do likewise. The list of 126 subscribers reads like a military's who's who. Many may have been recruited at or around the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle on 18 October 1748, which brought the War of Austrian Succession to a close.
Among the subscribers was George Stone, archbishop of Armagh, who bought eight copies of the foundational work of modern chess, L'analyse des échecs (London, 1749). Philidor, if not in person but as a mind, arrived in Dublin.
For a period in the late 1740s and early 1750s George Stone was effectively the governor of Ireland. It was a time when the lords lieutenant rarely lived in Ireland and deputed their duties to others. The son of a London goldsmith, educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, Stone came to Ireland in 1731 as chaplain to the lord lieutenant, Lionel Sackville, first duke of Dorset. He quickly found preferment in the Church of Ireland becoming dean of Ferns (1733), bishop of Ferns (1740), bishop of Kildare (1743), bishop of Derry (1745) and archbishop of Armagh (1747). In a state-controlled church all of these appointments were political and were rewards for Stone's staunch support of the government line. In this he was helped by the fact that his brother Andrew was an intimate of George II and a secretary to George III.
Other Irish subscribers, presumably members of George Stone's club, included Henry Seymour Conway (1719-95), George Macartney (1672-1757) and Charles Moore, lord Tullamore (1712-64). It seems likely that Samuel Pullein (1713-84), author of Scaccia Ludus, a poem on the game of chess (Dublin, 1750), and subsequently rector of Skreen, County Meath, was also a member.
How many others were part of the club is unknown but given Stone's high political profile, there was probably a political dimension to its existence. Sociability and regular dinners were part of all eighteenth-century clubs and this would have made independent meeting rooms desirable. However, in the case of Primate Stone it seems more likely that members met in the palatial splendour of his house in Henrietta St, known as 'Primate's Hill', which, at the time, was a byword for sumptuous living.
Stone never married but according to his political opponents this did not prevent him from having a string of mistresses. The excess of his dinners, it was said, turned him into an alcoholic and that at his parties 'the rake took the place of the archbishop'. Such entertainments were a means of manipulating the Irish political class and the chess club, by providing a convivial, non-party setting, was part of this. A contemporary commented on Stone:
The Primate of Ireland ... had every vice but hypocrisy [and] took every shape but that of a man of virtue and religion: polite, insinuating, generous, the pimp of pleasure and the spy of state, a slave to one vice, but the other vices, especially the most natural one, he made to serve his purposes. Had he been galant [sic], he could have obliged one lady at a time, but from his own seraglio he obtained many. He governed private families by providing the ladies with lovers of his own educating. They were taught by his lordship to spell the love letters they wrote. This prelate was much such a successor to St Patrick as Pope Sixtus [d.1484] to St Peter'.
What is that famous end-line from Some Like it Hot? 'Nobody's perfect'. The Dublin club of 1749 (say, at a guess, 1747-64) gave birth to Philidor's Irish opponent but that is another story.