LOFTUS, Dr Dudley (1619-95), of Wood Quay, Dublin.

Dudley Loftus’s father, Sir Adam Loftus, was a wealthy New English landowner, vice-treasurer of Ireland, and grandson of the Elizabethan archbishop of Dublin and chancellor of Ireland, Adam Loftus. This intimate connection with the settler community and the administration and the established church was to influence Dudley Loftus’s entire career. Loftus was born in 1619, and entered the university of Dublin in 1635, as a fellow commoner. His early education was influenced by Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh, who, noting his proficiency in eastern languages, ‘advised his father … to hasten him to the university of Oxford’.23Bodl. Tanner 25, f. 67r-v. Loftus held Ussher in high regard, praising him in 1639 as the ‘splendour of all Europe, greatest glory of all the world’.24Ussher Corresp. ed. Boran, ii. 804-5. After Oxford, Loftus returned to Ireland, ‘with a resolution to take leave of his friends and to improve his study by travels into foreign parts’, but he was prevented from leaving Ireland by the outbreak of rebellion in October 1641.25Bodl. Tanner 25, f. 67v. In the early years of the Irish wars, Loftus was given charge of the family home at Rathfarnham Castle, to the south of Dublin.26Bodl. Tanner 25, f. 67v. He was elected to the Irish Parliament for the co. Kildare seat of Naas in a by-election in 1642.27Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 228. He remained in Dublin after the cessation of arms with the Confederates in 1643, despite the defection of his father and his elder brother (Sir Arthur Loftus) to Parliament in the same year, and thereafter proved a loyal supporter of the king’s lord lieutenant, James Butler, marquess of Ormond. In April 1647 Loftus was sent to London by Ormond, to gain permission for the lord lieutenant to transport Irish troops into foreign service, as part of his deal to surrender Dublin to Parliament.28Bodl. Carte 20, ff. 600, 602-3. In May, Loftus attended the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs*, and with his father’s help ‘engaged several men of great power to give their assent unto the same’.29Bodl. Carte 21, f. 70. The factional changes at Westminster hampered Loftus’s task, however, and on 6 July he complained to Ormond that the Derby House Committee had lost most of its Presbyterian MPs, ‘who were of greatest power and of most sincere affection to your excellency’.30Bodl. Carte 11, f. 368. Although Loftus seems to have been rewarded with the office of judge of the prerogative court in Leinster (a position he held by July) he made no more progress.31Ussher Corresp. ed. Boran, iii. 907. On 31 July the Independent grandees on the committee told Ormond that the matter had in fact been held up in Parliament (‘the business of the houses having been ever since very great and weighty’), and there can be little doubt that the root cause was factional, rather than procedural.32Bodl. Carte 21, ff. 294, 366. By this time Ormond’s surrender of Dublin had removed his main bargaining tool in his negotiations with Parliament.

Loftus had returned to Dublin by October 1647, when he told his father of the success of the new governor, Colonel Michael Jones, in his campaigns against the Confederates.33HMC Egmont, i. 478. He was probably the Dudley Loftus who served as captain in the regiment of his brother, Sir Arthur Loftus, in the army in Munster of Murrough O’Brien, 6th Baron Inchiquin, but with Inchiquin’s defection to the King in April 1648 he became a refugee in England.34CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 12, 16, 21. Loftus was back in Ireland in 1651, apparently to a mixed reception. He served as deputy judge-advocate in Leinster from June of that year, but on 5 September the parliamentary commissioners refused to let him continue as judge of the prerogative court for Leinster, ‘not having authority from the Parliament of the commonwealth of England’.35NLI, MS 758, f. 116; Eg. 1762, ff. 4v-5. In November he was evidently back in favour, as he was appointed justice of the peace for the same province.36TCD, MS 844, f. 110. Thereafter, Loftus was in constant demand for his legal skills. In November 1652 he was among those instructed to collect information about the massacres of Protestants at the beginning of the rebellion, and in December he was named as commissioner for the high court of justice in Dublin.37Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 296; TCD, MS 844, f. 136. In 1653 he was made justice of the peace for Dublin and from October 1654 he served as assessment commissioner for the city and county.38TCD, MS 844, f. 139v; An Assessment for Ire. In 1654 he was appointed judge of the court of admiralty, with a salary of £100; and in 1655 he became master of chancery.39Add. 19833, f. 3v; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 288. In the latter year Loftus was in post as professor of civil law at the university, in which capacity he welcomed the new chancellor, Henry Cromwell*, and presented a number of senior officers to honorary degrees.40Clarke Pprs. iii. 50.

In the later 1650s, Loftus became a close ally of Henry Cromwell, now lord deputy of Ireland, advising him on religious, educational and legal affairs. In June 1658 Loftus was acting as commissioner for the establishment of ministers; in December he adjudicated the case of Talbot v. Vaughan; and in the same month was named to the committee to set up a new college in Dublin.41CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 667; TSP vii. 576; Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland, 209. It was about this time that Loftus was appointed surveyor-general – a post he held until the early months of the Restoration.42Eg. 2549, ff. 94-5. Loftus’s many official positions, the support of the government and his family’s local influence presumably influenced his election as MP for cos. Kildare and Wicklow in the third protectorate Parliament which met in January 1659. He crossed to England in early February, with a letter from Henry Cromwell recommending him to Secretary John Thurloe* as ‘a person very well affected to the government’.43TSP vii. 606. Loftus soon fulfilled such expectations. In the Commons he was an outspoken opponent of moves to force the withdrawal of Irish and Scottish MPs from the House, preparatory to a vote on their right to sit. On 11 March he was ‘taken down’ for objecting to ‘reflections upon these nations’, and when he was allowed to speak he denounced those who suggested that the Irish and Scots would vote ‘ad nutum protectoris’ [at the nod of the protector], which he said was ‘a high reflection’.44Burton’s Diary, iv. 130-1. On 17 March Loftus defended the right of his fellow MPs to sit, saying that it was ‘founded on the Petition and Advice’, and now they were sitting ‘the right of possession is before the law of nations, and it is a rule that we shall continue till our right be determined’. Loftus reminded the House of the danger of withdrawal, for ‘it will dissatisfy the well-affected of that nation, [and] it will encourage your enemies to insurrection’, and asserted that the Irish MPs owed a duty ‘to him that called us and his father that redeemed us’.45Burton’s Diary, iv. 169; Schilling thesis, 231.

Once the right of the Irish MPs was established at the end of March 1659, the business of Ireland could be addressed. Loftus was named to the committee of Irish affairs on 1 April.46CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 522; CJ vii. 623a. On 19 April he sent Henry Cromwell an account of business in Parliament, which he reiterated his strong support for the protectorate. Loftus thought Richard Cromwell’s* attack on the senior officers at Wallingford House was ‘very satisfactory to the House, and well pleasing to most people’: such decisive moves would, he hoped, ‘prove a stable foundation of a lasting settlement’, and reported that he had already begun drafting legislation, including ‘an act for settlement of the ministry of Ireland upon legal titles … an act of union, an act of probate of wills which I have so drawn up as to put the disposal of all offices relating thereunto in your excellency’.47Henry Cromwell Corresp. 502-3. Loftus’s optimism was misplaced, for within a few days the Parliament was dissolved under pressure from the army, and the protectorate came to an end soon afterwards. When the Irish officers seized Dublin and declared their support for the Rump Parliament in December 1659, Loftus’s legal expertise was once again called upon, and he may have been instrumental in setting up the General Convention which met in March 1660. Loftus was the returning officer for the elections, and was himself returned for Jamestown, co. Leitrim, probably on the interest of Sir Charles Coote*.48Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 123, 167, 227-8. Yet, as the Restoration drew nearer, he was prompted to break ranks, writing privately to Ormond to argue for ‘the preservation of the sacred order of bishops and the use of the liturgy’, instead of the Presbyterian forms supported by some leading Old Protestants.49Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 310; Bodl. Carte 30, ff. 685, 689.

In the years after 1660, Loftus retained his position as master of chancery and judge of the prerogative court, and was elected MP for Bannow in co. Wexford in 1661-6.50Stowe 152, f. 98v; CJI i. 595. He remained on good terms with Ormond, who returned to Ireland as lord lieutenant in 1662, but his relations with his successor, Arthur Capel, 1st earl of Essex, were less comfortable. In September 1673 Loftus was arrested for inciting the Dublin corporation to defy the lord lieutenant and to refuse the new rules imposed on them, which he denounced as ‘illegal’. Essex saw Loftus as the ‘principal incendiary’, commenting that ‘though of great learning, he is so very indiscreet and unfit for employment’. In late October the king took Essex’s advice, and sacked Loftus as master of chancery.51CSP Dom. 1673, pp. 527-8, 592, 601. After the 1673 episode, Loftus retired to his study in Dublin. In earlier years he had managed to continue his work on eastern languages, and had contributed to the Polyglot Bible of 1657, as well as publishing numerous works taken from Arabic, Syriac and Armenian texts.52Ath. Ox. iv. 429-30. In the 1670s and 1680s he worked with Narcissus Marsh (later archbishop of Dublin) and Archbishop William Sancroft on a number of projects, mainly translating theological works.53Tanner Lttrs. 425-85. He also brought expert (if somewhat antiquarian) legal advice to a number of celebrated causes, including the alleged bigamy of Lady Katherine Fitzgerald, which he tackled in a pamphlet of 1677.54D. Loftus, Digamias Adikia, or the first marriage of Katherine Fitzgerald (1677). Characteristically, Loftus welcomed the appointment of Henry Hyde†, 2nd earl of Clarendon, as lord lieutenant in 1685 because of his academic studies as a young man, ‘especially in the search of ancient records and other antiquities, and the transcription of collections out of them’; although he added that the Protestant interest in Ireland was relieved that the act of settlement remain unaltered, and that the clergy would be protected from the king’s Catholic friends.55Bodl. Tanner 31, ff. 281-2v. Loftus also advised Clarendon’s replacement, Robert Talbot, 1st earl of Tyrconnell, against raising an Irish army against the English in December 1688, as this would only lead to a catastrophic defeat for the Irish Catholics.56CCSP v. 685. Events of the next few months would prove him right. Immediately after William III’s victory at the Boyne, Loftus was one of a group of Protestants who took control of Dublin, and raised a militia to defend it against the retreating Catholic army.57HMC Ormonde, n.s. viii. 388. He was again elected to the Irish Parliament, for Fethard in Wexford, in 1692, serving until his death in June 1695.58CJI ii. 568. Loftus was married twice, and had two sons and five daughters from his first marriage, but only one daughter, Letitia Bladen, is known to have married.59Ath. Ox. iv. 430; Oxford DNB.