daughter of Christopher Plunket, third lord Killeen, by whom he had a son Christopher, who succeeded him as seventeenth Baron Howth, and was father of Sir Christopher, twentieth baron Howth [q. v.], and four daughters, Alison, Elizabeth, Ellenor, and Anne. He married, secondly, Anne, daughter of Thomas Birford of Kilrow, co. Meath, by whom he had two sons, Amorey and Robert, and one daughter, Katherine. His third wife was Alison, daughter of Robert Fitzsimons, by whom he had a son and a daughter, William and Marian.
[Letters and Papers of Henry VII (Rolls Ser.), i. 379, ii. 307, 370; G. E. C.'s Peerage, iv. 272; Lodge's Irish Peerage, ed. Archdall, iii. 189; Harleian MS. 1425, f. 104; O'Flanagan's Lord Chancellors of Ireland.]
ST. LAWRENCE, ROBERT, fifteenth, or more properly third, Baron Howth (d. 1483), son of Christopher, fourteenth baron, whose father Christopher, thirteenth lord of Howth, created a peer by writ shortly before 1430, was head of the ancient family of St. Lawrence. Their ancestor, Almaric de Tristram, landed in Ireland with De Courci in 1176, and having distinguished himself by his conduct in the first engagement with the Irish at the hill of Howth, received as a reward the grant of the district. He assumed the name of St. Lawrence after defeating the Danes near Clontarf on St. Lawrence's day, and fell in battle in 1189. Robert's mother was Elizabeth Bermingham of Athenry. He succeeded to the barony on the death of his father about 1463, and was created chancellor of the green wax of the exchequer by patent on 22 Feb. 1467 (Harl. MS. 433). In 1474 he formed one of the ‘thirteen most noble and worthy persons within the four shires,’ known as the brotherhood of St. George, who were entrusted by an act of parliament of that year with the duty of defending the Pale against Irish invasions and of preserving order within its bounds (Cal. of Irish State Papers, Carew MS. Misc. 403). On 20 May 1483 he was appointed lord chancellor of Ireland by Richard III, but he died a few months later. He married Joan, second daughter of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and great-uncle of Henry VII, who afterwards married Sir Richard Fry. By her he had four sons—Nicholas [q. v.], Thomas, Walter, and Christopher—and two daughters, Genet and Anne.
[Lodge's Irish Peerage, ed. Archdall, iii. 187; G. E. C.'s Peerage, iv. 272; Rymer's Fœdera, xii. 181; D'Alton's History of Dublin, p. 160; Harleian MS. 1425, f. 104; O'Flanagan's Lord Chancellors of Ireland.]
ST. LEGER, Sir ANTHONY (1496?–1559), lord-deputy of Ireland, eldest son of Ralph St. Leger, esq., of Ulcombe, Kent, and Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Haut of Shelvingbourne in the same county, was born about 1496. ‘When twelve years of age,’ says Lloyd (State Worthies, i. 99), ‘he was sent for his grammar learning with his tutor into France, for his carriage into Italy, for his philosophy to Cambridge, for his law to Grays-Inne; and for that which completed all, the government of himself, to court; where his debonnairness and freedome took with the king, as his solidity and wisdome with the cardinal.’ He was present at the marriage of the Princess Mary at Paris in October 1514, and is mentioned in the following year as forming one of Lord Abergavenny's suite (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, i. 898, ii. 134). After Wolsey's downfall, in which, if we may trust the uncorroborated evidence of Lloyd, he seems to have taken a prominent part, he attached himself to Cromwell, whose active agent he was in the demolition of the suppressed abbeys. On 2 Aug. 1535, he was appointed, along with Sir William Fitzwilliam and George Poulett, to inquire into the state of Calais, and to take measures for strengthening the English Pale in France (ib. ix. 79). The following year he was one of the grand jury of Kent that found a true bill against Anne Boleyn (cf. Froude, ii. 507), and his name appears in the list of such noblemen and gentlemen as were appointed in October that year to attend upon the king's own person in the northern rebellion (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, xi. 233). On 31 July 1537 he was placed at the head of a commission ‘for the ordre and establishment to be taken and made touching the hole state of our lande of Ireland, and all and every our affaires within the same, bothe for the reduccion of the said lande to a due civilitie and obedyens, and the advanncement of the publique weale of the same’ (State Papers, Henry VIII, printed, ii. 452–63). He and his fellow-commissioners arrived at Dublin on 8 Sept., and, having with the assistance of the lord-deputy, Lord Leonard Grey [q. v.], dissolved the army, they set out on the 26th on a tour of inspection through the parts adjacent to the English Pale. Beginning at Kilkenny, where a jury of the inhabitants gave evidence as to the nature of the disorders prevailing among them and of the grievances they suffered at the hands of the neighbouring native Irish and of the degenerate Anglo-Norman gentry, the commissioners proceeded systematically in like manner through Tipperary, Waterford, Wex-
