beneficed clergymen contributing to the subsidy should ipso facto be deprived of their benefices, and be incapable of holding any preferment within the province; and that the laity who contributed should be ipso facto excommunicated, and their children to the third generation disqualified for any benefice within the same limits. In pursuance of these decrees the archbishop and his suffragans openly excommunicated several offenders in the leading street of Clonmel. For this offence an information was exhibited against him to the king's damage of 1,000l., in answer to which he pleaded that by Magna Charta the church was to remain free, and that all were to be excommunicated who should infringe the liberties granted thereby. He was, however, convicted, and had a day given him ten several times to move in arrest of judgment. What further came of it does not appear. The other bishops were convicted upon the like information.
In 1353 he had a vehement dispute with Roger Cradock, bishop of Waterford. Two Irishmen found guilty of heresy, or, according to another account, of contumely offered to the Virgin Mary, before the bishop, had been burned by his order, without any license from the archbishop. Ware adds that ‘on Thursday after St. Francis's Day, a little before midnight, the archbishop entered privately into the churchyard of the Blessed Trinity at Waterford by the little door of St. Catherine, guarded by a numerous troop of armed men, and made an assault on the bishop in his lodgings, and grievously wounded him and many others who were in his company, and robbed him of his goods.’
Kelly died at Cashel on 20 Nov. 1361 (Annals of Nenagh), and was buried in his cathedral in that city. He was a man of learning, and wrote a ‘Book of the Canon Law,’ and one, or (as some say) seven ‘Books of Familiar Letters,’ and other works, none of which are extant.
[Sir James Ware's Works, ed. Harris, i. 478, 533, ii. (Writers of Ireland) 85; Cotton's Fasti Ecclesiæ Hibernicæ, i. 8; King's Church Hist. of Ireland, i. 651; D'Alton's Hist. of Drogheda, ii. 51.]
KELSEY, THOMAS (d. 1680?), soldier, was originally, according to Wood, ‘a mean trader in Birchin Lane in London, a godly button-maker’ (Wood, Fasti, ed. Bliss, iii. 111). He appears in the first list of the new model army as major in the foot regiment of Colonel Edward Montague, and in that capacity signed the articles for the surrender of Langford House to Cromwell on 17 Oct. 1645 (Lords' Journals, vii. 279; Hist. MSS. Comm. 6th Rep. p. 81). Before the close of 1646 Kelsey was transferred to Colonel Ingoldsby's regiment as lieutenant-colonel, and on the surrender of Oxford to Fairfax became deputy-governor of that city (Peacock, Army Lists, p. 105, ed. 1874). He took a prominent part in supporting the authority of the puritan visitors of the university (Wood, Annales, pp. 556, 560, 597, 604, 640). In 1648 he detected and frustrated a royalist plot for the surprise of the city (ib. p. 602; Lords' Journals, x. 407). On 14 April 1648 he was created M.A. (Wood, Fasti, ed. Bliss, ii. 111). On 15 May 1651 parliament empowered the council of state to commission Kelsey to be lieutenant of Dover Castle (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1651, pp. 201, 209). Under the protectorate Kelsey was appointed, on 8 Nov. 1655, one of the commissioners for the management of the navy, and made major-general of the militia for the counties of Kent and Surrey, October 1655 (ib. 1655 p. 275, 1655–6 p. 10). The salary of the first of these offices was 500l. a year; of the second 666l. 13s. 4d. (Harleian Miscellany, iii. 456, ed. Park). Kelsey represented Sandwich in the parliament of 1654, and Dover in that of 1656 and in Richard Cromwell's parliament. He was extremely zealous in returning supporters of the Protector to the parliament, and pressed him to require a recognition of his authority from all members elected. He promised to stand by Cromwell with his life and fortune, and urged him to remember that ‘the interest of God's people’ was ‘to be preferred to 1,000 parliaments.’ ‘If parliaments will not do it,’ he concluded, ‘take to your assistance such as will stand by you in the work,’ 26 Aug. 1656 (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1656–7, p. 87; Thurloe, v. 384). The proposal to make Cromwell king seems to have cooled his zeal, and he told the parliament of 1659 ‘the Petition and Advice is a thing I never was for; I never gave my vote for it’ (Burton, Diary, iii. 407). He spoke in 1657 in favour of the bill for the permanent establishment of the major-generals, defended in the parliament of 1659 the oppressive acts of Major-general Butler, and moved the rejection of the petitions of the cavaliers who had been transported to Barbadoes. It had been impossible, he asserted, ‘to have preserved us from blood and confusion if in all proceedings his late highness and his council had been guided according to the strict rules of law’ (ib. i. 242, iv. 266, 405). In the debates on foreign policy he showed great hostility to the Dutch, and pressed for the ‘sending of a fleet to support the King of Sweden’ (ib. iii. 440, 457).
