Maguire, Hugh (c.1710–66), soldier, was third (or third surviving) son of Brian Maguire (d. 1712) of Tempo, Co. Fermanagh, and his wife Bridget, daughter and co-heiress of James Nugent of Coolamber, Co. Longford. As a younger son, Maguire had to make his way in the world. Following a well established tradition in his family, he enlisted as a soldier in the army of the Habsburg emperor, becoming a captain of grenadiers in the Lindesheim (10th Infantry) Regiment and seeing service in Corsica and against the Turks. In 1740 he resigned his commission and returned to Ireland, along with his younger brother, an ensign in the same regiment.
In London, where he settled presently, he caught the eye of Elizabeth, Lady Cathcart (née Malyns), recently widowed relict of her third husband, the 8th Lord Cathcart (d. 1740). Lady Cathcart, a very wealthy woman, purchased a lieutenant-colonel's commission in the British army for her protégé (who converted to protestantism in 1743, in order to take it up). Two years later, when she was 53 and Maguire about 35, she married him. They lived first at Tewin-Water in Hertfordshire, a manor Lady Cathcart (as she continued to be called) had inherited from her first husband. In 1746, however, when she proved reluctant to keep him supplied with as much money as he would have liked or to hand over her jewels to him, Maguire abducted her to Ireland, to live at Carra, Co. Fermanagh, on a property he had prudently purchased a few months earlier. Here they resided for the next seven years, before moving to Castle Nugent, Co. Longford, which he had acquired through his mother (who lived there with them until her death in 1754).
Relations between the colonel and his lady became progressively worse as his demands for money lengthened and his temper shortened. When she refused to reveal the whereabouts of the deeds of Tewin-Water he shut her up in an attic room of the castle, where she remained until he died in 1766. Released at last, Lady Cathcart returned to England, to live to the ripe old age of 97. Her extraordinary story, already well known in the neighbourhood of Castle Nugent, was revealed to polite society at large in a lengthy obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine. This became the basis – acknowledged in a footnote – of one of the central episodes of Maria Edgeworth's (qv) novel Castle Rackrent (1800), with the fictional Sir Kit Rackrent in place of the real Col. Maguire. Personal knowledge of the actual circumstances evidently played an important part in this choice of plot. Though the novelist was not yet born when Maguire died, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (qv), knew all about him and had spoken to some of the people involved in the case, for Castle Nugent was only a few miles from Edgeworthstown. Throughout his wife's scandalous incarceration, Maguire not only entertained his neighbours in appropriate style but played a normal part in public life, as a grand juror for Co. Westmeath (where part of his estate lay) and as candidate in a parliamentary by-election for Co. Longford in 1764. His death in 1766 was apparently caused by lockjaw, following a knife wound when he forced a panel at Tewin in his search for the deeds. His will left instructions for his burial at Devenish on Lough Erne.
Some of the money Maguire extracted from his wife was used to pay off the accumulated debts on his family's estate at Tempo, Co. Fermanagh. After her release and recovery, Lady Cathcart sued his nephew and heir, another Hugh, for her share of these sums, without much success during her own lifetime. In 1799, however, ten years after her death, she achieved a posthumous revenge on the whole family when her trustees obliged Hugh Maguire to sell most of his estate in order to settle the debt.