Where the Halling Valley River Lies

Part One

1. The Butler Enigma

My father was born Patrick Clancy Halling on the 28th of August 1924 in Launceston, second city of the Australian island province of Tasmania but largely raised in Sydney. His mother was an Englishwoman probably hailing from the Dulwich area of south London where her family had lately laid down roots, and born Phyllis Mary Pinnock sometime around the turn of the 20th Century. According to the testimony of Phyllis's sister Joan, a more matter-of-fact source of information than the feyly romanesque Phyllis, their maternal grandmother's maiden name had been Butler, name which allegedly links the family to the Butlers of Ormonde, a dynasty of Old English nobles of Norman origin which had dominated the south east of Ireland since the Middle Ages, and thence rendering it a lost or discarded branch of this same dynasty.
The earldom of Ormonde was initially created in the Peerage of Ireland in 1328 for James Butler, son of Sir Edmund Butler and Lady Joan Fitzgerald. Twice becoming extinct, the earldom of Ormonde was restored for a third time in 1538 for the benefit of one Piers Butler.
The fifth earl of this creation, James Butler, born in London on the 19th of October 1610 became the Marquess of Ormonde in 1642, and then the Duke in the Peerage of Ireland (1660), finally becoming Duke of Ormonde in the Peerage of England in 1682. He was the first of the Butlers to assume the Protestant faith, setting him at odds with the remainder of his clan, which typically of the so-called Old English families of English, Welsh, Norman, Breton and Flemish extraction, such as in addition to the Butlers, the Burkes and the Fitzgeralds, had become more Irish than the Irish themselves, or Hiberniores Hibernis ipsis, as distinct from the Protestant "New English" who had replaced them as Ireland's ruling class by ca. 1700.