Wogan, Sir Charles (1698?–1757?), ‘the Chevalier Wogan’, soldier, Jacobite, and man of letters, was born in Rathcoffey, Co. Kildare, second son of William Wogan and Anne Wogan (née Gaydon). He passed most of his boyhood in Kildare but also spent some time in Windsor, England, where he made the acquaintance of the poet and Jacobite sympathiser Alexander Pope. At the age of 17 he was actively involved in the 1715 attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy. Serving as a captain in the Jacobite army – other Irish officers included his brother Nicholas, Col. Henry Oxburgh (qv) and James Talbot – Wogan commanded the fifth troop of the English Jacobite army in Northumberland and acted as ADC to Gen. Foster. He was imprisoned in Newgate after the surrender of the Jacobite army, and was transferred to Westminster Hall (April 1716) to be tried for high treason. He and seven others managed to escape and conceal themselves in London, and Wogan made good his escape to the Continent with a price of £500 on his head.
In 1718 he joined the regiment of his cousin Arthur Dillon (qv) in the French service, but left after a year for the papal state of Avignon, where he became a secret agent of the Stuart king. In 1718 he accompanied James Butler (qv), duke of Ormond, to Russia to help to forge an alliance between Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden to assist a proposed Jacobite assault on their common enemy George I, elector of Hanover. He also tried to negotiate a marriage between James Stuart and a daughter or niece of the tsar. In his attempts to find a suitable bride for his exiled master, Wogan travelled incognito throughout Germany. His searches finally took him to Ohlau, residence of James Sobieski (exiled king of Poland and son of the warrior-king Jan Sobieski who had saved Vienna from the Turks in 1683) and a match was arranged with his daughter Maria Clementina. George I could not countenance a union between his rival and a princess of such an illustrious family. The wedding party was arrested on Charles VI's orders and placed under house arrest in Innsbruck, deep within imperial territory. Wogan persuaded James III and James Sobieski to allow him to attempt the princess's rescue. Along with his mother's brother Richard Gaydon, Capt. Lucius O'Toole, and Capt. John Misset, officers in the regiment of his cousin Gen. Dillon, he defied contemporary logistics and atrocious weather conditions and confounded Europe by snatching the princess from under the noses of the imperial authorities. On their arrival in Rome, Pope Clement XI wished to make the man who had rescued his god-daughter a senator of Rome, the highest civil honour the city could bestow. Wogan accepted on condition that the same honour was given to his companions. He was also made a knight-baronet and commissioned as a colonel by King James, and on 29 August 1719 served as a witness at James's wedding.
Wogan and Misset subsequently went to Genoa, where the English envoy unsuccessfully sought their arrest. In 1723 they proceeded to Spain, where Philip V gave them the rank of colonel. Wogan spent the rest of his military career fighting the Moors in the Maghreb. In 1723 he distinguished himself at Oran and was also sent to the relief of Santa Cruz. Philip V rewarded him with the governorship of La Mancha. Wogan deemed this an appropriate tribute to the most famous knight in Europe but an honour that in no way eclipsed his affection for Ireland, where he stressed that he ‘should have a better estate at home than ever his [Don Quixote's] fathers enjoyed, and a tomb too where no man of honour may be ashamed to lie’ (RA, MS 260, f. 118).
In spite of his illustrious career in the Spanish service Wogan never wavered in his loyalty to the house of Stuart. He continued to correspond with his exiled king and court and retained his insatiable appetite for Jacobite intrigue, operating under a range of aliases that included Ainsley, Germain, and Warner. Along with his brother Nicholas Wogan he corresponded with a Dublin lawyer Francis Glascock in 1719 during the so-called ‘Layer plot’ (Glascock was committed to Newgate for possessing three letters from Charles Wogan). In 1722 Wogan represented James III's cause at the Spanish court, and in 1724 joined a flotilla of three Spanish ships cruising off the Italian coast, amid rumours of a Jacobite invasion of Ireland. Throughout the 1720s and 1730s he wrote to his master James III urging him to give Ireland serious consideration as a suitable target for a Jacobite invasion, basing his letters and memoirs on information received from a number of Irish émigrés newly returned from Ireland. In 1745 he spearheaded attempts to induce the Spanish court to provide the necessary funds and arms to supply the beleaguered Charles Edward, the Young Pretender. As part of this campaign he published his Mémoirs sur l'enterprise d'Innsbruck (1745) which he dedicated to the queen of France, herself a Polish princess and a relative of Clementina. He later joined Henry, duke of York, James's younger son, at Madrid in the hope of joining Charles Edward in Scotland.
Wogan is probably best remembered for his correspondence with Jonathan Swift (qv). After reading Swift's A modest proposal (1729) he anonymously sent samples of his prose and verse to the dean, asking him about the feasibility of having them published in Dublin, and sent the dean casks of Spanish wine which were reciprocated with editions of English authors, including Pope, Gray, and Young. In these missives to a mentor he railed at English injustices against the Irish, and French ingratitude for Irish military service to their country. Swift managed to find out the identity of his correspondent and urged him to seek a publisher in London; he also sent him two editions of his own works, one of which Wogan dispatched to the Stuart claimant in Rome.
Wogan's correspondence with Swift also sheds light on this patriotic Irishman's émigré mentalité and his views on Irish history and historiography. He expressed an indignation like that of Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating (qv)) at the manner in which Irish history had been written by Englishmen, particularly Clarendon and those ‘mongrel’ historians from Richard Stanihurst (qv) to William King (qv) who ‘cannot afford the Irish a good word in order to curry favour with England’ (Flood, 128). He also upbraided Pope for running down Ireland as the seat of dullness, as he himself was much indebted to its genius, in particular mentioning the earl of Roscommon (qv) and Peter Walsh (qv), Swift, Sir Samuel Garth, William Congreve (qv), and Thomas Parnell (qv). He also expressed a pro-Tyrconnell view of the Jacobite war, vented his spleen against France for her maltreatment of the Irish exiles, and praised the heroics of his fellow Irishmen in Europe.
Wogan spent the rest of his life as governor of La Mancha. A letter from his son James to the exiled Stuart king suggests that he died sometime before December 1757. His portrait by an unknown artist is held by the NGI, and many samples of his correspondence are in the Stuart papers in Windsor castle.
Wogan's younger brother Nicholas (1700?–1770), found guilty of high treason for his part in the 1715 rising, was pardoned because he was only 15; heavily involved in the ‘Layer plot’, he later became a naturalised French subject, joined Berwick's regiment, lost an arm at the battle of Fontenoy, accompanied Charles Edward to Scotland, and married a daughter of Sir Neil O'Neill; he left no issue. A chevalier of St Louis, he was pensioned in 1764 and died in 1770. His uncle John Gaydon (d. 1721), whose brother Richard assisted in the rescue of the princess, was a lieutenant of Sarsfield's Horse, served on the Rhine and Italy, fought at Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, and became a maréchal de camp.