HOUSE OF TAAFFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 April 1938, Page 2

HOUSE OF TAAFFE

STRANGE FORTUNES OVER LONG PERIOD. THREE HUNDRED YEARS' EXILE. After a period of exile extending nearly 250 years the Irish family of Taaffe is to go back one more to its ancient home.

Count Edward Taaffe, head of the family today, announces that he is to return to Ireland and to’ settle permanently there. It is possible for him to take steps to secure the restoration of the titles of which his father was deprived for lighting against Britain in the war. The father, who died in 1928, was the twelfth holder of the title of Viscount Taaffe in the peerage of Ireland.

There are few families with so romantic a history and one which has brought them to play a leading part in events in so many lands. They originated in Wales. They made their home in Ireland in the 10th century. They settled in Central Europe nearly 250 years ago. A Taaffe held the family castle at Ardree, County Louth, for Queen Elizabeth. A Taaffe was staunch for the Stuarts in the Civil Wars. One gave his life for James II at the Battle of the Boyne. The Taaffe who migrated to Bohemia became a Marshal and Count of the Austrian Empire. The grandfather of the present Count rose to first place

in Austrian politics, becoming Premie; from 1879 to 1893.

Count Edward, who is 39, married at Dunboyne, Meath, in 1931, Miss Grace McLaughlin. She is the granddaughter of the late Chief Justice Meredith, Irish Master of the Rolls. From his father Count Edward learned one of the closest secrets of the Royal Houses of Europe —the circumstances of the deaths in a shoot-ing-box near Vienna in 1889 of Crown Prince Rudolph of Hapsburg and Baroness Mary Vetsera.