more than 800l. a year, out of which he had settled a jointure of about 300l. a year on his daughter-in-law; and he declined altogether to oust his second son, Edward, who ultimately succeeded to the peerage. Costs were given against Loftus, who refused to pay them and appealed to the king. His property was sequestered, and he was imprisoned in the castle from February 1637 until May 1639, and afterwards in his own house until August, the great seal being transferred to commissioners. He accused the lord deputy of partiality at the trial, but apologised and withdrew the charges as being unsupported by evidence and as not proper to be lightly made against a viceroy (Strafford Letters, ii. 260). Even this was not enough for Wentworth, and the chancellor had to make his whole estate over to trustees as security before he was allowed to go to England to prosecute his appeal. Wentworth's friends, Wandesford and Mainwaring, were two of those trustees. In November 1634 the chancellor's appeal was heard before the king in council and dismissed. The great seal was in December 1639 given to Sir Richard Bolton [q. v.] Young Lady Loftus had died in the previous summer, ‘one of the noblest persons,’ Wentworth wrote, ‘I ever had the happiness to be acquainted with. … With her are gone the greatest part of my affections to the country, and all that is left of them shall be thankfully and religiously paid to her excellent memory and lasting goodness’ (ib. ii. 381).
When the Long parliament met Loftus appealed to it, and on 3 May 1642 the House of Lords quashed all the decisions against him. The question was again raised after the Restoration, during the viceroyalty of Arthur Capel, earl of Essex, whose report to the king gives the best general account of the whole affair (Hist. MSS. Comm. 9th Rep. pt. ii. p. 322). The result was that the House of Lords in England, after several days' hearing, reversed the decree made in 1637, thus finally and solemnly declaring that Charles I, Strafford, and their respective councils had been wrong throughout. His arbitrary treatment of Loftus formed part of the eighth article of Strafford's impeachment. Eleanor Loftus herself was Strafford's friend, the sister of his brother's wife, but there is no evidence that she was his mistress, and his words quoted above do not support the accusation, which seems to rest upon some ambiguous expressions in Clarendon's ‘History.’ On the other hand, it may be thought suspicious that Sir Robert Loftus refused to join in his wife's suit against his father.
After his fall Loftus lived at or near his small property at Coverham in Yorkshire. His son Edward, by his marriage with Miss Lyndley, seems to have been then in possession of Middleham Castle, Yorkshire. In 1641 the ex-chancellor was one of several Irish lords and gentlemen living in England who petitioned parliament against disseminators of false news from Ireland. The outbreak of the Irish rebellion rendered his Irish estates worthless. He died at the beginning of 1643, and was buried in Coverham Church.
Loftus married Sarah Bathow, widow of Richard Meredith, bishop of Leighlin, by whom he had four sons and two daughters. Robert died before his father, who was succeeded in the peerage by his second son, Edward. The younger daughter, Alice, married Charles Moore, afterwards Earl of Drogheda. In June 1639 she was seen on her knees before the king at Berwick, ‘very earnestly soliciting for her father's coming over’ (Strafford Letters, ii. 364). On the extinction of the male line, Monasterevan passed through her children to the Moore family. Lord Drogheda possesses a portrait of the chancellor, and many interesting papers connected with him.
[Liber Munerum Publicorum Hiberniæ; Cal. of Irish State Papers, Eliz. 1588–92, and James I; Morrin's Cal. of Patent Rolls, Charles I; Strafford's Letters and Despatches; House of Lords MSS. in 4th and 5th Reports of the Hist. MSS. Commission, and Drogheda MSS. in 9th Rep.; Strafford's Trial in Rushworth and Howell's State Trials; Gardiner's Hist. of England, chap. xc.; Traill's Strafford; Burke's Dormant and Extinct Peerage; Berwick's Rawdon Papers; Lodge's Peerage (Archdall), vol. vii.; Cotton's Fasti Eccl. Hib. vol. ii.; Stubbs's Hist. of Univ. of Dublin; Whittaker's Richmondshire; Atthill's Documents relating to Middleham Church (Camd. Soc.)]
LOFTUS, DUDLEY (1619–1695), jurist and orientalist, was third son of Sir Adam Loftus of Rathfarnham Castle, Dublin, vice-treasurer of Ireland in 1636, by his wife Jane, daughter of Walter Vaughan of Golden Grove, King's County. His grandfather, Sir Dudley Loftus, was eldest son of Adam Loftus [q. v.] the archbishop. Dudley became a fellow-commoner of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1635, and graduated B.A. on 19 Jan. 1637–8. The predilection which he evinced for the study of languages, especially those of the East, induced his father, on Archbishop Ussher's advice, to send him to Oxford, and he was incorporated B.A. there on 9 Nov. 1639, and in the same degree at Cambridge in 1640. He joined University College, Oxford, and proceeded M.A.
