Maguire, Constantine (1777–1834), landowner, and Brian Butler Maguire (d. 1835), adverturer were the two eldest sons of Hugh Maguire, landowner, of Tempo, Co. Fermanagh, and his wife Phoebe, daughter of George Macnamara of Cong, Co. Mayo. A third son, Stephen, apparently died young; there were also several daughters. By all accounts the two brothers grew up unaccustomed to restraint, among other things practising marksmanship by shooting apples off each other's heads. Constantine (the name is an anglicised form of Cúchonnacht) may have flirted with radical politics in his youth. At any rate, in 1798 he led his brothers in assaulting the Church of Ireland curate of Tempo. It was alleged that he himself had fired a gun at the clergyman. The charges against Brian and Stephen did not go to trial, but Constantine was found guilty as charged and sent to prison for three months. He was lucky to get off so lightly in that hanging year, for someone wrote in the grand-jury book ‘He ought to be hanged’.
The sale of the ancestral home, along with most of the Maguire estate at Tempo, by his father in 1799 deprived Constantine of much of his inheritance, to the remainder of which he succeeded in 1800. His compensation was a commission in the British army, which he joined in 1799 as an ensign in the 27th Regiment of Foot before purchasing a lieutenant's commission in the 88th Regiment (the Connaught Rangers). During the next three years he served in India and Egypt. In August 1803, his health evidently affected by rheumatic pains contracted in the east, he was appointed adjutant in the Irish recruiting department, first in the Belfast district, then from 1807 in the Athlone district. From 1816 until his death in 1834 he was on half-pay. In 1828, in response to a War Office questionnaire, he described himself as ‘one of the oldest staff adjutants in the United Kingdom’. ‘Captain Cohonny’, as his Irish-speaking tenants at Tempo called him, needed to make a good marriage. Instead, in 1807, shortly before the birth of their son (who died in infancy) he married the beautiful Frances Augusta Hawkins. Mrs Hawkins (née Maclean), a woman of good family – her brother was Gen. Sir Fitzroy Maclean – was the recently pensioned-off mistress of James Hamilton (qv), 1st marquess of Abercorn. Any hopes Maguire may have had that the connection would provide him with easy money were soon disappointed, however, for Abercorn's settlement was carefully drawn so as to exclude any fortune-hunting husband.
All the children of this marriage died young, with the sole exception of a daughter. Maguire then took up with a younger woman, Eleanor Gavan, who bore him a large second family, several of whom were born in the debtors’ prison in Dublin where he spent no less than seven years between 1817 and 1824. A chancery suit, brought by his mother when he failed to pay her jointure out of the Tempo estate, went against him. She could not, however, prevent his inheriting her own estate at Toureen, Co. Tipperary, which was entailed, and on her death in 1829 he and his mistress and their family went to live there.
By that time he had made himself detested by the protestant establishment of Fermanagh (of which as landowner and grand juror he too was a member) by espousing catholic emancipation; his merits as a possible liberal parliamentary candidate in that interest were canvassed in 1828. To make matters worse, he was held responsible for the death of an Orangeman named Rutledge, who was hanged in 1829 for firing at him during a dispute with encroaching tenants on his land at Tempo. Maguire refused to join his fellow protestants in a petition to have Rutledge's sentence commuted to transportation. In consequence, Rutledge suffered the fate that Constantine himself had escaped in similar circumstances in 1798.
At Toureen, Maguire soon made himself equally unpopular with his Tipperary tenants, some of whom he evicted for non-payment of rent. After such an episode in 1834, he was murdered on 1 November in brutal fashion by two assailants. Eighteen months later, one man was convicted of the crime and hanged at Clonmel. By the terms of his will, Constantine's estate at Tempo passed to Hugh, the elder of his two sons by Eleanor Gavan; the younger, Philip, got Toureen. Both married and had issue. His legitimate daughter, Florence, who was not mentioned in the will, married an anglican clergyman of Irish origin in England. She too had children.
Brian Maguire, Constantine's brother, was provided in 1799 with a commission in the East India Company's sepoy army at Bombay, in which he had an eventful career lasting eight years. We are largely dependent for information on the Memoirs he published (Dublin, 1811) after his return from the Far East. These cannot be regarded as a reliable source, but such as they are they reveal a fire-eating duellist of pathological touchiness, fearsome temper, and reckless courage. He quarrelled his way out to India in 1799, surviving duels, pirates, and hostile Dutchmen en route. His addiction to affairs of honour eventually led to his being arrested, imprisoned, and cashiered. When released he was put on board a ship for England. On the voyage home, and later in London, he defended his honour, and that of the whole Irish nation, against all insults – real or imagined – in encounters with sword, pistol, and even (on one occasion) billiard cue. Settling, so to speak, in Dublin, he became a notorious ‘character’, in fact a public nuisance.
In 1808 he married Honoria Anne, daughter of James Baker of Ballymoreen, Co. Tipperary, by whom he had two sons and a daughter. The elder boy, George, died in 1830 aged 12; the younger, Charles, joined the crew of a merchant ship after his father's death and was never heard of again. The daughter is said to have died of starvation. A long-drawn-out chancery case over his wife's fortune (she predeceased him) finally failed, leaving him increasingly destitute. Living in a bare room in an old warehouse at Clontarf, his clothes in pawn and no possessions except his weapons and the mummified remains of his dead son, he was reduced to sending the remaining child, ‘ragged and nearly barefoot’, with begging letters to former friends.
The last reported action of this sadly decayed bravo, when briefly chief of his name, was to protest at the inadequate amount of the reward offered for the apprehension of his brother Constantine's murderers. Evicted from Clontarf, he died in even greater obscurity somewhere about Finglas, Co. Dublin, the last legitimate representative in the male line of the Maguires of Tempo.