Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dowling, Thady
DOWLING, THADY (1544–1628), ecclesiastic and annalist, was a member of an old native family in the part of Ireland now known as the Queen's County. Of his life little is known beyond the circumstance of his having been about 1590 ecclesiastical treasurer of the see of Leighlin in the county of Carlow. In 1591 Dowling was advanced to the chancellorship of that see. He is mentioned in the record of a regal visitation in 1615 as an ancient Irish minister aged seventy-one, qualified to teach Latin and Irish. Dowling is stated to have died at Leighlin in 1628, in his eighty-fourth year. A grammar of the Irish language and other writings ascribed to him by Ware are not now known to be extant. His ‘Annals of Ireland,’ in Latin, were mainly compiled from printed books, with the addition occasionally of brief notices on local matters. The annals extend from the fabulous period to 1600, and most of the entries are very succinct. No autograph manuscript of Dowling's ‘Annales Hiberniæ’ is at present accessible. They were edited in 1849 for the Irish Archæological Society by the Very Rev. Richard Butler, dean of Clonmacnoise, from a transcript in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. The editor was unable to throw light upon Dowling's career, nor does he appear to have been fully conversant with the sources from which Dowling derived the materials for his compilation. Copies of documents of 1541 in the writing of and attested by Dowling as chancellor of Leighlin are extant among the State Papers, Ireland, in the Public Record Office, London. A transcript of an official document, with an attestation by Dowling in April 1555, is preserved in the same repository.
[Ware, De Scriptoribus Hiberniæ, 1639; MSS., Trinity College, Dublin; State Papers, Ireland, Public Record Office, London; Annals of Ireland, Dublin, 1849.]