Providence and posterity: a letter from Lord Mountnorris to his daughter, 1642

Abstract

The political career of Sir Francis Annesley, Lord Mountnorris, is well known to historians. A first-generation settler, he held plantation lands in Ulster and Munster; as vice-treasurer of Ireland he became a rival of the Boyle faction in the Dublin administration in the early 1630s; and after a spectacular fall from grace in 1635 he became one of Lord Deputy Wentworth’s bitterest enemies and spoke against him at his trial in 1641. Yet, unlike his rival, the first earl of Cork, there is little information about Mountnorris’s personal attitudes, his religious views or his family life, other than what can be gleaned from official sources, and from the (mainly hostile) comments of contemporaries. The discovery, therefore, of a cache of family papers in the Public Record Office at Kew provides a unique opportunity to flesh out the bones of his political career. It also allows a comparison between the Annesleys and the Boyles, whose extensive archive has moulded our view of the New English in general. Perhaps the most interesting of these documents is Mountnorris’s letter to his daughter, Beatrice Zouche, dated 5 February 1641[/2], in which he outlines how he expects her to order her day with prayer and meditation and domestic concerns appropriate for a godly matron. This letter reveals a great deal about Mountnorris’s own religious beliefs and his attitudes to his children, and provides some important clues about the mindset of the New English in Ireland.