Stewart (Stuart), Sir William (d. 1647), 1st baronet, army officer, was a Scot, and may have been the son of Andrew and Katherine Stewart of Garlies, Wigtownshire. He appears to have been a veteran of Swedish and/or Danish service, and arrived in Ulster in 1608 as one of two officers in command of 200 Scottish soldiers sent to help quash the insurrection of Sir Cahir O'Doherty (qv). He remained in Ulster, with command of a foot company, and in 1609 James I recommended him for one of the land grants allocated to servitors (military or civil officers) under the Ulster plantation scheme. He secured a patent for lands in the barony of Kilmacrenan, Co. Donegal, on 30 November 1610, and over the course of the next two decades expanded his holdings considerably through purchases in Co. Donegal and Co. Tyrone. Making his principal residence at Newtownstewart, he earned a reputation as an energetic planter, constructing forts, bawns, and houses ‘in the English fashion’ and settling tenants from Scotland. Knighted in 1619, he was created a baronet in 1623, acted as custos rotulorum for Co. Donegal 1624–5 and as a JP there and in Co. Tyrone, and was named to the Irish council in January 1628. He sat in the Irish parliament as MP for Co. Donegal in 1613–15 and 1634–5, and was returned at a by-election in 1641, apparently as an MP for the University of Dublin. He married (date unknown) Frances, daughter of Sir Robert Newcomen and his wife Catherine (née Molyneux); they had five sons and two daughters, though Stewart is also believed to have had at least one illegitimate daughter, who married a minister, Abraham Pont, known for his support of the covenanting movement in Scotland; by the end of 1638 she was facing prosecution in the court of high commission, and rumours of covenanting sympathies had attached themselves to her father. He fared badly in a long-running dispute with John Leslie (qv), bishop of Raphoe, and was rebuked by the lord deputy, Thomas Wentworth (qv), for words ‘scandalous to the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts’. Consideration was given to proceeding against him for ‘whoredom and bastardy’, if ‘the crime be not of too old a date’, but the matter seems to have dropped once Wentworth assured himself that Stewart was ‘conformable’, securing his assent to the anti-covenanting ‘black oath’ in 1639 (Knowler, ii, 245, 337).
Stewart was drilling his company at Newtownstewart when news reached him of the outbreak of the 1641 insurrection. He secured the evacuation of his wife and the younger members of his family to Scotland, while local forces and displaced protestants and British gathered under his leadership. Leaders of the rising, notably Sir Phelim O'Neill (qv), appealed to him, representing their actions as intending ‘nothing against your nation’, the Scots. In November he was granted a commission by Charles I to raise a regiment of foot and a troop of horse. He would later claim loss by destruction of houses, ‘markett townes, and certaine villages’ totalling £2,200, of possession of lands ‘worth neare £2,000’ a year, and of livestock and other goods as a result of the rising (Gilbert, Contemporary history, i, 552–3). In September 1642 the Dublin administration moved to give him overall command of pro-government forces in the north-west, but the opposition of Sir Robert Stewart (qv), sometimes mistakenly described as his brother, ensured that command was resumed by a commission of senior local officers. By the winter of 1642–3 hopes were expressed in some quarters that he might ‘prove an active instrument for furthering the work of reformation’, that is, promoting presbyterian reform against ‘the service book men’ of the established church of Ireland (Speciall good news from Ireland . . . (1643), 3, 6).
Stewart accepted the September 1643 cessation between the king and the confederate catholics, but by November he and Sir Robert Stewart had signed a letter to the Scottish regime seeking supplies to renew the war. The royal administration in Dublin chose to interpret the action in a favourable light, claiming both men acted ‘to gain time and to stop the current’ running towards renewed war, and arguing that their ‘ends are good’ and their ‘affection and fidelity to his majesty’ should not be doubted (Ormonde MSS, new ser., ii, 340). On the recommendation of the Dublin council, Stewart was one of the Irish privy counsellors called to court at Oxford in the spring of 1644 in response to the opening of peace negotiations between the confederates and the king. He and his fellow counsellors submitted a lengthy, and almost wholly negative, response to the catholic propositions; one royalist observer reckoned they had ‘played ye fooles notably’ (Carte MS 11, f. 172), worried at offending the pro-war English parliament. Perhaps disillusioned by this experience, by July 1644 he had made his way to London, making contact with the parliamentarian committees mandated to direct supplies to Ireland for the continuance of the war. In his absence his regiment entered into the Solemn League and Covenant. He returned to Ulster in 1645, remaining active in command of his regiment and troop. One of the pillars of the plantation order in Ulster for decades, and one of its defenders in the turbulent 1640s, on 25 June 1647 his son and heir, Sir Alexander Stewart, reported the death of that ‘honourable old man’, his father (HMC, Egmont MSS, i, 419).