Biographies: Major landowning families

The Colvilles
Successors to the Montgomerys as the main family in Newtownards and Comber

Background in Scotland 
The Colville family traces its origins to Scotland in the 1100s, when Philip de Colville settled there following the Norman Conquest. 

Colvilles in Ballymena
The first Colville to come to Ulster was the famous Dr Alexander Colville. He had been a Professor of Divinity at St Andrews University in Fife before coming to Ulster 
in 1630. He may have been invited to Ulster by Bishop Robert Echlin, whose mother was Grissel Colville. Dr Colville was made rector of Skerry in 1634 and built 
Galgorm Castle near Ballymena. He was a wealthy man, but was accused by his neighbours of ‘selling himself to the devil’. A servant girl was arrested at Irvine in 
Scotland, accused of ‘raising the devil’ - she said she had learned how to do so from Dr Colville, ‘who used to practice it’.

Colvilles in Newtownards and Comber 
Alexander’s son Robert Colville joined the army and by 1651 was a captain. He married four times. He was knighted some time between 1675 and 1679 and bought the Montgomery estates at Newtownards and Comber. Sir Robert Colville rebuilt the ruined Montgomery home ‘Newtown House’ which had been burned down accidentally in 1664 ‘by the carelessness of servants’. He built ‘one doubled roofed house,stables, and coach-houses, and all other necessary or convenient edifices for brewing, baking, washing, hunting, hawking, pleasurerooms or pigeon houses’. (A relative, Alexander Colville, was brought from Scotland to become Minister at the Presbyterian Church in Newtownards on 26 July 1696. He moved to Dromore in 1700, where he died in his pulpit in 1719. His grandson, Maturin Colville, was killed by his own deserting soldiers during the American War of Independence around 1779.) 

Death and Burial
Sir Robert Colville died in December 1697 and was buried in a vault at the Priory in Newtownards. His third wife, ‘Lady Rose’, died in June 1693 and their son Hugh in 1701 aged 25. In 1744 Walter Harris wrote: 
‘A large Tomb of the Colville Family (to a descendant of which the town now belongs), stands in the North Isle, raised five or six feet above the Floor, but naked of any inscription’. Hugh’s daughter Alicia Colville (1700-1762) sold the estates to Alexander Stewart in 1744 for £42,000. 

Associated sites:
Tomb in Newtownards Priory
Mount Pleasant (today Mount Stewart)

The Stewarts of Mount Stewart 
From MacGregor outlaws to eminent Ulster aristocrats

Background in Scotland
The name ‘Stewart’ in Scotland has a special pedigree, regularly associated with royalty and the elite of Scottish society - from politicians and lords to military 
heroes. However the ancestor of the Stewarts of Mount Stewart was actually a MacGregor who had changed his name to Stewart after the name MacGregor had been outlawed in Scotland in the early 17th century.

Life in Ulster
The Ulster link begins in County Donegal, where in 1610 an Alexander McAula from Dunbartonshire was granted 1000 acres in the precinct of Portlough in the east of the county. However it was reported the following year:  ‘Alexander McAula of Durlinge; 1000 acres; appeared not, nothing done’. In 1618 Alexander McAula sold these lands to an Alexander Stewart, believed to have been a son of John Stewart, formerly MacGregor, of Lagry in Dunbartonshire.

In 1629 Alexander’s son John received a new grant of his lands in Donegal which were from then on to be known as the manor of Stewarts-Court. By this time there was a castle, known as Ballylawn, on these lands.

A small portion of this castle survives. It is from this line that the founder of the Stewarts of Mount Stewart descended.

Alexander Stewart (1699-1781)

Alexander Stewart was born at Ballylawn. He became MP for Londonderry and married his cousin Mary Cowan in 1737. They moved to the Ards and, using some of his wife’s family fortune (inherited from her brother who had been Governor of Bombay) they bought the estate of Mount Pleasant on the Ards Peninsula from the Colville family for £42,000 in 1744. They changed the name of the estate to Mount 
Stewart. Their eldest son, Robert Stewart, became an MP in 1769 and a peer in 1783.

He acquired a series of titles throughout his life - Baron Londonderry (1789), Viscount Castlereagh (1795), Earl of Londonderry (1796) and Marquis of Londonderry (1816). He died on 8 April 1821 and was buried at Newtownards Priory in the family tomb.

Associated sites: 
Mount Stewart 
Scrabo Tower 
 

The Blackwood family
An important settler family that rose to become a powerful dynasty

Background in Scotland
The Blackwood name has a long pedigree in Fife, particularly around Dunfermline, which has been a burgh of the Scottish monarchy since around 1125. King Robert the Bruce was buried at the Abbey there in 1329 and in 1588 King James VI made Dunfermline a Royal Burgh. Adam Blackwood (1539-1613) was one of the most important figures in the family. He was a strong supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, who had funded his education in Paris and Toulouse. His brothers Henry and George also settled in France; when firebrand Presbyterian George Buchanan wrote his De Jure Regni Apud Scotos (1579), which advocated limiting the power of the Scottish monarchy, Adam Blackwood published Pro Regibus Apologia (1588) rebutting Buchanan’s arguments. 

Life in Ulster and John Blackwood (1591-1663)
A relative of Adam Blackwood, possibly a cousin, was John Blackwood (1591-1663). He was born in Fife and came to Sir James Hamilton’s flourishing Bangor. Blackwood became a wealthy merchant and also served as Provost of Bangor. His wife was Janet Clarke and their son, also called John Blackwood, was born in 1625. John 
senior was buried at Bangor Abbey in 1663, where his tombstone can still be seen today. John Blackwood (1625-1698) and BallyleidyOn Thomas Raven’s maps of the Hamilton estate of 1625, ‘Ba:Leede’ is shown as vacant land, surrounded to the north and east by marshland, to the west by a dense wood and to the south by land owned by Hamilton’s great rival, ‘Lord Mongumre’. Most of the Raven maps include the names of tenants, suggesting that the Blackwoods did not become tenants at Ballyleidy until after 1625. 

Nearly 50 years later in July 1674 John Blackwood bought Ballyleidy from Sir James Hamilton’s grandson, Henry Hamilton, the 2nd Earl of Clanbrassil (c.1644-1675). 
Blackwood married Anne Wanchope. (On 28 November 1617 a James Wanchop was recorded as a tenant of Sir James Hamilton at Ballygraffan, near Rubane in the Ards 
peninsula). In an Inquisition held at Downpatrick on 9th April 1662, John Blackwood was named as one of a group of ‘good and lawful men of the county’ and that 
‘Ballylidie’ was a townland of 120 acres. Either this John Blackwood or his son, also John (1662-1720), was churchwarden at Bangor in 1693 when the height of the steeple was raised. A memorial at the Abbey commemorates the part played in this by Blackwood and fellow churchwarden John Cleland. John and Anne Blackwood’s daughter Margaret married John Saunders, Provost of Newtownards. The Saunders’ gravestone can still be seen today, a red sandstone memorial built into the wall of the ruined abbey at Movilla.

The expansion of the Blackwood Estate
The Blackwoods quickly rose in influence and status, acquiring major Hamilton lands in both north Down and around Killyleagh. A 1681 rent roll of tenants on the Hamilton estate includes the following information: 
Whitechurch - John Blackwood - yearly rent £8
Ballymccormick & c - John Blackwood - yearly rent £14 10s
Ballyleedy - John Blackwood - yearly rent £28
Bangor Town - James Blackwood - yearly rent £0 s9 d0 
Bangor Town - James Blackwood - yearly rent £3 s19 d4
Bangor Town - John Blackwood - yearly rent £7 s3 d0
Bangor Town - John Blackwood - yearly rent £3 s1 d0 
Island McKee (Mahee) - John Blackwood - yearly rent £4 s0 d0

The Blackwood estate was expanded when the family inherited the townlands of Whitechurch, Ballymacormick, Ballyvernon and 80 acres in Ballymullan. They also 
purchased the townlands of Ganaway, Ballydoonan, Cardy, Ballyboley, Ballygrangee as well as parts of the townlands of Ballymucky, Ballyblack, Ballymaconnell, 
Ballyholme, Drumhirk, Magherascouse, Ballymullan and Ballyferris. 

The Blackwoods were one of the most important families among the early Ulster-Scots and rose to become a powerful dynasty. In later generations their descendants 
included Royal Navy hero Vice-Admiral Sir Henry Blackwood (1770-1832) and the remarkable Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (1826-1902), the 1st Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.

Associated sites:
Blackwood memorials at Bangor Abbey 
Saunders/Blackwood gravestone at Movilla Abbey 
Ballyleidy/Clandeboye Estate