dence against him could not be true. Charles retorted that Essex might have saved him by saying this at the trial, but that he himself dared not pardon any one. Plunket was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on 1 July. On the scaffold he read a dignified speech, denying what had been sworn against him, and pointing out the flaws in the evidence. A postscript was affixed, in which he declared that he had made no mental reservation or evasion, but employed words ‘in their usual sense and meaning, as protestants do when they discourse with all candour and sincerity.’ His dying speech was at once printed and circulated.
‘Lord Essex told me,’ says Burnet, ‘that this Plunket was a wise and sober man … in due submission to the government, without engaging into intrigues of state … the foreman of the grand jury, who was a zealous protestant, told me, they contradicted one another evidently … he was condemned, and suffered very decently, expressing himself in many particulars as became a bishop.’ Charles Fox, in his historical fragment, declared that of his ‘innocence no doubt could be entertained.’ In Dalrymple's ‘Memoirs’ Plunket is called ‘the most innocent of men.’
Extraordinary honour has been paid to Archbishop Plunket's remains. The head was sent to Cardinal Howard at Rome, and by him presented to Archbishop Hugh MacMahon, who brought it to Ireland about 1722. It is still preserved in the Dominican convent at Drogheda, which was founded in that year by the archbishop's grand-niece, Catherine Plunket. Father Corker, the chief of the English Benedictines, who was in Newgate with Plunket, had the body buried first in the churchyard of St. Giles-in-the-fields; two years later it was exhumed and carried to Germany to the Benedictine Abbey of St. Adrian and St. Denis at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim, and there it remained until the Prussian government expelled the English monks in 1803. It was then placed in the churchyard, but brought to England in 1883, when it was placed in St. Gregory's monastery, Downside, near Bath. Father Corker employed a surgeon named Ridley to cut off the arms below the elbows. One of these severed limbs was long preserved at Sarnsfield Court, Herefordshire, and is now at the Franciscan convent, Taunton. When the body was removed from Lamspringe some bones were extracted and left there as relics.
There is a portrait of Plunket in the Drogheda nunnery, said to have been painted in prison, ‘in the dress peculiar to archbishops of that time, with long flowing hair and beard.’ A portrait painted by G. Murphy is in the National Portrait Gallery, London, and has been engraved by Vander Vaart; other engravings by Luttrell, Collins, Dunbar, and Lowndes are mentioned by Bromley. Another portrait is in the Bodleian Library.
[Cardinal Moran has collected most of the facts and many of the documents in his Memoir of Archbishop Plunket, and in his Spicilegium Ossoriense. The latter contains originals of which the former gives translations or extracts. Other letters are in De Burgo's Hibernia Dominicana, 1762, and in the 7th and 10th Reports of the Hist. MSS. Comm.; Carte's Ormonde; Stuart's Armagh; D'Alton's Hist. of Drogheda; Archbishop Hugh MacMahon's Jus Primatiale Armachanum, 1728; Peter Walsh's Hist. of the Remonstrance; State Trials, vols. ii. and iii., ed. 1742; Anthony Wood's Life and Times, ed. Clark, vol. ii.; Arthur, Earl of Essex's Letters, 1770; Brady's Episcopal Succession; Macrae's Annals of the Bodleian Library; Tablet newspaper, 10 Feb. 1883; information kindly supplied by the Rev. Robert Murphy, P.P., St. Peter's, Drogheda.]
PLUNKET, PATRICK (d. 1668), ninth Baron of Dunsany, co. Meath, was only son of Christopher, eighth lord Dunsany, by his wife Mary or Maud, daughter of Henry Babington of Dethick, Derbyshire. Both father and mother were Roman catholics. An ancestor, Sir Christopher Plunket (d. 1445), was active in the Irish wars during the early part of the fifteenth century, and is said to have been deputy to Sir Thomas Stanley, lord lieutenant of Ireland. His son, Sir Christopher (d. 1461), is generally reckoned first Baron Dunsany. Another Christopher Plunket was taken prisoner by the Irish in 1466, and died in 1467 (Lodge, vi. 166–74; Book of Howth, pp. 156, 172, 359; Annals of Four Masters, iv. 1043, 1049). Patrick Plunket, seventh lord Dunsany (fl. 1530), was reputed to be the author of some literary works, which have not come to light.
Patrick, the ninth lord, succeeded to the title and estates on the death of his father in 1603. He sat in the House of Lords at Dublin, and married Jane, daughter of Sir Thomas Heneage of Lincolnshire. At the commencement of the movements of 1641 in Ireland, Lord Dunsany, with other Roman catholic peers, addressed letters to the lords justices at Dublin in relation to rumoured designs against themselves and their co-religionists. In March 1641–2 Dunsany, in a letter to the Earl of Ormonde, still extant, avowed himself a loyal subject, a ‘lover of the prosperity of England,’ and added, ‘I am an Englishman born, my mother an Englishwoman, and my wife an English-
