Amanda E. Herbert
In the 1650s a woman named Eliza Blennerhassett (pre-1639–76) wrote a series of lonely letters from Ireland to England. Penned over the course of about five years, the letters were addressed to a family that Blennerhassett called “the only suports of my spirits.”1 In her correspondence Blennerhassett worked to maintain social ties with these people living in England and attempted to preserve her friendship with them. The letters were seeded with pieces of gossip, gift objects, political intelligence, medical and culinary recipes, and expressions of the love and affection that she claimed she felt for this distant family. She showered them with compliments and assured them of her continuing commitment to their bond. And in her letters Blennerhassett cultivated and crafted a very specific kind of English-Irish identity by inserting strategic complaints about Ireland and the people she encountered while living in that country. Through close examination of Blennerhassett’s correspondence, we are able to see how one early modern woman constructed a cross-channel, archipelagic identity by using seventeenth-century Ireland, as both a location and an idea, to influence her sense of self, memory, and place.
Despite her close association with England and her clear disdain for Ireland, Eliza Blennerhassett could have chosen to define herself as an “Irish” person. Members of her family had lived in Ireland for decades, having settled in both the north of Ireland in County Tyrone and along the western coast in County Kerry from the fifteenth century onward. Blennerhassett participated in the mid-seventeenth-century Cromwellian settlement, traveling to Ireland in 1656 in the company of her brother. In 1660 she got married in Ireland, to one of her English-Irish cousins. She bore children in Ireland, and she lived in that country until her death. It is likely that she was buried there. Her connections to Ireland were durable and enduring.
People like Eliza Blennerhassett traditionally have been overlooked by scholars, because concepts of primogeniture privileged, and have often continued to privilege, the study of early modern families. Blennerhassett was born into two well-known, and frequently studied, aristocratic English-Irish families—the Mervyns and the Blennerhassetts—but was tied to only minor branches of each of those groups. She was the daughter of Deborah Mervyn and Leonard Blennerhassett. Her mother was related to the Barons Audley, but through two maternal lines, which limited her access to the wealth, property, and privilege possessed by that family. And although her father, Leonard Blennerhassett, was descended from Richard de Blennerhassett of Carlisle (ca. 1450) and was knighted in 1635/36 at Dublin by Lord Thomas Wentworth, then lord deputy of Ireland, he was also a very minor scion of that family: the third son of a second son of a third son. The Mervyns and Blennerhassetts owned property in many different Irish counties, with their most significant holdings in Counties Dublin, Fermanagh, Kerry, and Tyrone. But while Eliza Blennerhassett might have visited some of those locations, she consistently wrote only from two rather small homes: from Trillick Castle, a “defended” or fortified house in County Tyrone, and from a residence in the city of Dublin.2
Eliza Blennerhassett also left a very faint archival footprint. She is difficult to trace because, like many members of her family, she signed her letters in different ways: Eliza and Elizabeth and then Blennerhassett, Haysett, and (after she married) Mervyn. Although it is likely that she wrote hundreds of letters over the course of her lifetime, I have been able to find only seven that have survived.3 These seven letters, the first dating from October 29, 1656, and the last from February 11, 1660/61, are held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, as part of the remarkable Hastings Family Papers, a collection of approximately fifty thousand manuscripts, including accounts, correspondence, court records, catalogs of books, deeds, estate and manorial papers, and household books, dating from circa 1100–1892. The letters were written to five members of the Hastings family: to Lucy Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon (1613–79), and to four of Lucy’s children, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, and Theophilus.
The Hastings family represented one of Blennerhassett’s most important social and familial connections: Eliza Blennerhassett was first cousin once removed to Lucy Hastings and second cousin to Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, and Theophilus Hastings, as Blennerhassett’s grandmother (Christian Touchet Mervyn) and Lucy Hastings’s mother (Eleanor Touchet Davies) were sisters. Like the Blennerhassetts, the Hastings family had a long history in Ireland. Lucy Davies Hastings was born in Dublin, the daughter of Eleanor and her husband, Sir John Davies.4 And, like the Blennerhassetts, the Hastings family owned land and buildings in Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone. Echoes of their mutual ties in Ireland can be found throughout the Hastings Family Papers. An anonymous Hastings letter, dating from circa 1650 and written to a man named John Blennerhassett (relationship to Eliza Blennerhassett unknown), explains that the author was “ready to goe to a Tryall about some off my interest in the Countie of Kiery” and asked for John Blennerhassett’s help in “getting me a good Jury in that Countie that will bee sensible . . . in order to recover that which is myne owne.”5 Another revealing letter, from William Davys (a cousin of Lucy Davies Hastings and one of the Hastings family’s agents in Ireland) to Lucy Hastings in 1657, explains that Davys had been working to put “Mr. Henry Bleverhayssett [probably Eliza Blennerhassett’s brother] and Mr. Ferdinando Davys into the Commission of Assesment for the Countyes of Fermanaugh and Tyrone (which will be some advantage to your honors interest in both Countyes).”6 Although we cannot confirm the identities of all the people writing or mentioned in these letters, the two missives—joined together with the Hastings Family Papers’ many pieces of correspondence to solicitors, stewards, and tenants in Ireland—speak to the Hastings’ and Blennerhassetts’ mutual engagement with Irish law, property, and politics.7
Despite the hundreds of letters that the Hastings family sent back and forth across the Irish Sea, important divisions separated Lucy Hastings and her children from Ireland itself. Lucy Hastings left Ireland for England at the age of five and completed her education and training in England. She married in England and spent most of her time in that country. During the 1650s, when Eliza Blennerhassett’s surviving letters were written, Lucy Hastings and her children were living full-time at their Donington Park estate in Leicestershire, and this is where Blennerhassett sent her correspondence. The 1650s were a tumultuous time for Lucy Hastings and her children, as that decade saw the deaths of Lucy’s oldest son, Henry Hastings (d. 1649), as well as her husband, Ferdinando Hastings, Sixth Earl of Huntingdon (1609–56), and the Hastings’ involvement in many lawsuits, as their properties had been sequestered during the English civil wars. Through all this turmoil, and despite the difficulties the royalist Hastings family faced with the Interregnum and Commonwealth governments, Lucy Hastings remained resolutely in England. By the 1670s she had even sold off all of the Hastings family’s Irish properties.8
We thus know a lot about Lucy Hastings and her children, but we know almost nothing about Eliza Blennerhassett and her family, who lacked the power and privilege of their Hastings cousins. We don’t know exactly when, or even where, Eliza Blennerhassett was born, nor do we know where she was raised, although it is clear that she spent at least part of her early years in England, as she references her “coming over into [Ireland]” several times in her letters to the Hastings family. We don’t know when or where or under what circumstances she became acquainted with Lucy, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, and Theophilus Hastings. There is one sparse reference to Eliza Blennerhassett in Burke’s Irish Family Records, which explains that she was born sometime before 1639, the date that her mother, Deborah Mervyn, died. Burke’s states that she married one of her English-Irish cousins, Henry Mervyn, who was elected, first, to a position as member of Parliament for Trillick Castle and then, later, to act as high sheriff of County Tyrone. Burke’s also mentions that Eliza Blennerhassett died in 1676, “leaving issue,” but we don’t know the names or genders of her children, when or where they were born, or even how many she had.9 Eliza Blennerhassett has very nearly disappeared.
For all the gaps in our knowledge of Eliza Blennerhassett’s life and experiences, her seven letters are remarkably revealing. Blennerhassett’s letters begin shortly after her emigration from England to Ireland and chronicle the next five years of her life. They record her earliest impressions of Ireland, of the plantation movement, and of her role as an English-Irish woman. They provide a rare firsthand account of a person who was, while certainly not poor, also not “noble”: Blennerhassett inherited no estates, held no title, and possessed little to no official influence over early modern politics, religion, law, or the state. The letters are rich in detail about Blennerhassett’s feelings, inviting scholarly analysis of the ways that she described and deployed her emotions.10 And they offer a telling glimpse into the ways that the women and men who participated in the Cromwellian settlement wrote and thought about themselves: how they related to family and friends living in England; how they described their national identity; how they worked (or did not) to fit into Irish society; and how they felt about their homes, old and new. Before exploring the content of Blennerhassett’s few, but richly detailed, letters to the Hastings family, it is worth pausing to discuss the idioms and languages that she used in her communications.
When Blennerhassett wrote to the members of the Hastings family, she wrote to five very different people: Lucy Hastings was in her late thirties when she received Blennerhassett’s letters, a recent widow responsible for running the Hastings estates as well as overseeing the education and care of her children. Her daughters, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Mary, would have been in their twenties when they received their letters from Eliza Blennerhassett; at the time of this correspondence they were all unmarried and living with their mother at Donington Park. Blennerhassett’s youngest Hastings correspondent was Theophilus, Lucy Hastings’s son and the Seventh Earl of Huntingdon. Theophilus was very young—from six to ten years of age—during the period covered by Eliza Blennerhassett’s surviving letters.11 Despite the significant differences in the ages, life stages, and genders of her Hastings correspondents, however, Eliza Blennerhassett approached the members of the family in very similar ways, as she employed consistent sets of phrases, tropes, and positions in all the letters.
We cannot know precisely how Blennerhassett felt about any of the members of the Hastings family, but she chose to present herself as a loving ally.12 Passion, affection, humility, fidelity, sincerity, and constancy were traits expected of early modern women, and by using them Blennerhassett positioned herself as an ideal feminized subject while simultaneously attempting to convey to the Hastings family how important their alliance was to her.13 In 1658 Blennerhassett offered her “unfained and most faithfull affection” to Elizabeth Hastings and expressed her delight that Elizabeth Hastings was willing “to concerne your selfe with so much afection in me” in return.14 Her mother, Lucy Hastings, received similar treatment, being told by Blennerhassett that “there is not a persone in the world that hath a more affectionat passion, and zeale, to your service then I.”15 Although she wrote frequently of her love and loyalty, Blennerhassett nonetheless had less money, fewer connections, and much weaker political and social influence—in Ireland or in England—than did members of the Hastings family. Perhaps for this reason she simultaneously employed language that emphasized her subservience and obedience to them. In 1656, when she was late responding to a letter, she cringed to Elizabeth Hastings that if she “weare any way guilty of [this offence] I should hate my selfe.”16 She cast herself in various letters as “the ungratfullst person in the world,” completely “want[ing] of meirit,”17 and “farre unworthy of that honourable kindnessess that I have receved from you.”18 Although this kind of language might seem groveling, it was done with deliberation and purpose. By positioning herself as an affectionate supplicant, Blennerhassett worked to flatter and honor the Hastings family and to maintain her alliance with them.
Blennerhassett stayed in contact with the Hastings family over many years and continued to speak of her affection for them even as it became increasingly clear that her emigration to Ireland had become permanent. In October 1656 she asked Mary Hastings to convey her good wishes to “my deare Lady Lucy [Hastings] and Lady Christiana [Hastings]” and to ask that they excuse her for “not writing to them at this time for I have out write my selfe.”19 Two years later she sent greetings to “my Lord and Lady [Hastings]” via Elizabeth Hastings and asked additionally to “lett me be mentioned to my Lady Elenor my Lady Lucy and the rest of my dear Ladyes . . . [and] my pritty Deare Lord Theophilus.”20 And in 1660/61, after she had been married and had given birth to her first child, Eliza Blennerhassett asked Theophilus Hastings to give her “affectionate service to my deare Lady Elizabeth and the rest of my honoured Ladys.”21 Even five years after her departure from England, Eliza Blennerhassett thus worked to maintain her emotional bonds with multiple members of the Hastings family, describing what she believed was her continuing connection to them.
The alliance that Eliza Blennerhassett cultivated so carefully with the Hastings family was certainly maintained through these languages of subservience and love, but it was also nurtured in the interplay of objects, items chosen for their ability to speak to the supposedly identical qualities, tastes, and talents of both donor and recipient. In October 1656 Blennerhassett thanked Eleanor Hastings for the gift of a book, expressing her gratitude for “my Lady Newcastells booke that you pleased of your favor to send me.”22 This was likely a reference to a work by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, and could have been any one of her early books: Poems and Fancies (1653), The World’s Olio (1655), or Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655). By sending Blennerhassett a copy of a book written by Cavendish, Eleanor Hastings helped to celebrate—and promote—elite women’s contributions to studies of literature, language, philosophy, and science and suggested that she and Blennerhassett also shared a taste for those subjects.23 The gifts exchanged between Blennerhassett and the Hastings women showcased their talents in medicine and cuisine as well as in literature and philosophy; in 1658 Blennerhassett thanked Elizabeth Hastings for “the recepts you honoured me with,” expressing her gratitude by “returne[ing] my most humble thankes for them.”24 Gifts of “receipts,” or recipes, should not be dismissed as quaint or banal, for in the early modern period they were powerful tools, used by women and men of many different backgrounds to share critical information about medical care, science, nutrition, and the natural environment.25 The Blennerhassett-Hastings gift exchange referenced their mutual appreciation of and skills in creative and decorative art; in 1656 Blennerhassett asked Eleanor Hastings to send “some littell fancy drawne by your owne hand by the next [letter].”26 Two years later Blennerhassett included “a locke of [my] haire” in her missive to Elizabeth Hastings. Hair locks or cuttings, often considered decorative objects, were popular gifts in the early modern period; freighted with meaning, they were intended to convey the lasting emotional ties that bound together friends, lovers, or family members even when they were physically separated.27 Blennerhassett’s gift exchanges with the Hastings family emphasized their mutual bonds, tastes, and qualities, celebrating their commonalities and attempting to mitigate any perceived cultural or geographic differences.
As if to provide further reassurance that her own interests and national identity lay firmly in England, Blennerhassett fed the Hastings family with a steady stream of information about military movements, reports on the successes (or failures) of settlement, and evidence of alliances forged between English and Irish families. Blennerhassett offered such a report to Eleanor Hastings in the fall of 1656, writing that a Lady Frances Butler had been “transplanted into Connaght” and was occupied in “farme[ing] her owne estate.” Blennerhassett was disappointed that she had “not seen my Lady Frances Butler since I came into this country” but assured Hastings that she was in touch with her by letter, for “[I] have the content to heare from her somtimes.”28 Military men also received mention in Blennerhassett’s letters; she wrote that a “Major Moor is gone Col[one]l into Hispaniola,” probably a reference to William Moore, who was active in Cromwell’s Western Design, a scheme that saw British troops stage a series of attacks on Spanish colonies in the Caribbean.29 Blennerhassett sent news of aristocratic marriages, as when “the Earle of Killdars eldest daughter” had been “latly maried to one Captain Shane,” and she provided the Hastings family with detailed information about the success of her own family’s Irish investments.30 In 1658 Blennerhassett explained that there were not enough profits coming in from their recently seized estate, as it would be “a yeare or tow till my brothers estate weare a littell better settelled.” And in June of that year Blennerhassett dutifully offered Lucy Hastings a detailed report on her own Irish income and annuities: “I am to receve the anuiety of 50 lb a year and at the end of three years 700 lb and in default of payment then the anuiety of 80 lb a year is to be continued till the 700 lb be payed.”31 By conveying information about settlement, military movements, marriage alliances, and investment patterns to the Hastings family, Blennerhassett attempted to prove both her loyalty and her indispensability as a source of on-the-ground intelligence.
To further convince the Hastings family that she allied herself with them and with England, Blennerhassett seeded her letters with strategic complaints about her new life in Ireland. She wrote to Elizabeth Hastings in 1658, “Madam, I must confesse I have a dislike to live in this Country.”32 Part of her discomfort stemmed from what she perceived were religious differences between the two countries; although Blennerhassett provided very few clues about the character of her own Protestant beliefs, she did complain frequently of the religious difficulties that she apparently faced in Ireland. She wrote in 1658 that “the want of hearing the word of god dispenced . . . makes [living here] uncomfortable to me” and explained that she was unable to listen to Protestant preaching because “there is not a minister under 10 or 12 miles round about us.” Although Blennerhassett was able to find ministers who occasionally would “giv[e] us now and then a sermon,” the lack of regular Protestant contact and support was troubling to her. She told the Hastings family that she had complained about this to her uncle Audley Mervyn, her mother’s brother and a Speaker of Irish Parliament from 1661 to 1666, but she was still largely unsatisfied by his efforts: “my uncle says he will endeavor to gett [a minister] now that he goes up to Dubline but ther has wanted since I came into the country.”33
Blennerhassett also complained about how isolated she felt. In 1658 she explained to Elizabeth Hastings that although the estates allotted to her family were fertile, she believed that they were underserved and depopulated, describing that “the harvest is great but labourers are very few.”34 She was also disappointed at the enormous length of time that it took to communicate with and travel to visit friends and family. It took a long “5 weekes” for her to “recev[e] the satisfaction and great happyness of a letter from [Eleanor Hastings].”35 When she attempted to write letters to England, the “conveniencys” she “relyed on” had “failed me.”36 She complained that it was necessary to pray for “god to send a faire wind” before she could confidently send correspondence to England.37 And her new life as an English person in Ireland was peripatetic; she suffered from “want of opertunitys”38 to write to her friends, and she “had so littell time afforded”39 to her, as her family members required her to travel repeatedly between their different, and distant, Irish properties, making her feel as if she was “so unsettelled not being constant in any place.”40 She wanted only “shuld it please god [to be] at the end of my jorney.”41 Eliza Blennerhassett emphasized the hardships that she believed she was experiencing in Ireland in an attempt to tie herself to the Hastings family and perhaps even to situate her life in Ireland in opposition to her previous life in England.
Blennerhassett played on her history and memories of the Hastings family—and the idea that her old life in England had afforded more opportunities for sociability with the Hastings family, opportunities that she now sorely missed—in a further attempt to maintain her old friendship with Lucy, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, and Theophilus. She wrote to Elizabeth Hastings in 1658 that her “gratfull memory of you, [will] ever continue.”42 In 1659 she employed flowery, courtly language when hoping that ten-year-old Theophilus Hastings would “continue the memory of me, as of one that is extreamly in love with you.”43 And in 1660/61 she wrote again to Theophilus, hoping “that I have yett the happiness of some place in your memory.”44 Memories of the members of the Hastings family helped, she claimed, to mitigate the hardship of her separation from them. The letters that she received from Lucy Hastings and her children were “the only suports of my spirits,” now that she was living in Ireland, and she begged them “not to debare me of them when occations are offered.” In Blennerhassett’s letters, life in Ireland was life in exile, and her continuing alliance to the Hastings—forged through the correspondence, the exchange of gifts, and the sharing of news and intelligence—was her saving grace. As she wrote to Eleanor Hastings soon after her arrival in 1656, “I am now in the worst part of Ierland, [and] I have the best company it can afford, werfor I have offten those thoughts that entertaine me with your La[dyshi]p.”45
Blennerhassett’s seven letters, which capture her thoughts, feelings, and self-stylings at a critical moment in history—both Ireland’s and her own—help us to better understand one woman’s Irish experiences. Blennerhassett traveled from England to Ireland and participated in Cromwell’s settlement scheme, but, as she did so, she worked hard to maintain her connections to one prominent family she had left behind: the earls and countesses of Huntingdon. Blennerhassett saw herself as sharing a common past and a common identity with Lucy, Eleanor, Elizabeth, Mary, and Theophilus Hastings. Yet the Hastings family was in the process of shedding their ties to Ireland at the very same moment that Blennerhassett was tightening her own bonds to that country. Blennerhassett resisted this shift by writing to the Hastings of all their similarities and by attempting to demonstrate her usefulness to them as an on-the-ground observer of Ireland and its people. In the process she revealed the complexities of English-Irish women’s senses of self and national identity. Despite our lack of biographical information about Eliza Blennerhassett and despite the fact that she left so few surviving letters, her writings reveal the introspective habits of someone trying to construct and manage a new English-Irish identity. By adding Blennerhassett’s voice to the scholarly repertoire of life writing in early modern Ireland, we can begin to explore the ways that transmarine and archipelagic relationships and alliances affected these women’s senses of self, place, and nation.
1. Eliza Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, Hastings Correspondence Box 20, Folder 840, Huntington Library (HL), San Marino CA.
2. Bernard Burke and Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1976), 134–35; William Shaw, The Knights of England, vol. 2 (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906), 204; Mary Agnes Hickson, Selections from Old Kerry Records (London: Watson and Hazell, 1872). Spelling of the family’s name varies widely in historical records. For consistency’s sake, I have chosen to use “Blennerhassett” throughout this piece.
3. The seven letters in the Hastings Family Papers are Eliza Blennerhassett to Mary Hastings, October 29, 1656, HAC 20(839), HL; Eliza Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL; Eliza Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL; Eliza Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL; Eliza Blennerhassett to Lucy Hastings (Countess Huntingdon), June 27, 1658, HAC 20(842), HL; Eliza [Blenner] Hayssett to Theophilus Hastings (Seventh Earl Huntingdon), October 30, 1659, HAC 21(6,244), HL; and Elizabeth Mervyn, née Blennerhassett, to Theophilus Hastings (Seventh Earl Huntingdon), February 11, 1660/61, HAC 22(9,245), HL.
4. Members of the family spelled their name Davis, Davies, and Davys.
5. Letter to John Blennerhassett, ca. 1650, HAC 19(4,629), HL.
6. William Davys to Lucy Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, 1657, HAC 20(2,079), HL. The timing and topic of this letter suggest that the Henry Blennerhassett mentioned in the missive was Eliza Blennerhassett’s brother Henry, high sheriff of County Fermanagh in 1658 and 1661 and member of Parliament for the same county in 1662. Henry Blennerhassett died in 1677, one year after his sister Eliza. See Burke and Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records, 134–35.
7. Tania Claire Jeffries, “Hastings [née Davies], Lucy, Countess of Huntingdon (1613–1679) Noblewoman,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 23, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-65147.
8. Jeffries, “Hastings [née Davies], Lucy.”
9. Burke and Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records, 134–35.
10. The history of emotions is a relatively new and rapidly expanding field. For the most recent, representative work on this topic, especially in early modern British contexts, see Susan Broomhall, ed., Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (London: Routledge, 2015); Broomhall, ed., Authority, Gender, and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
11. Finding reliable genealogical information on all ten of Lucy Hastings’s children, many of whom did not survive infancy, childhood, or young adulthood, can be difficult. Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Mary were close in age, and Elizabeth was born in 1635. Theophilus Hastings was born in 1660 and died in 1701. See H. A. Doubleday, Duncan Warrand, and Howard de Walden, eds. The Complete Peerage, vol. 6 (London: St. Catherine Press, 1926), 661; Bernard Burke and Ashworth Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1931), 1296–97; and Jeffries, “Hastings [née Davies], Lucy.”
12. On the ways that early modern women deployed gendered expressions of affection and love in their correspondence to construct and maintain alliances, see Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); on early modern women’s correspondence more generally, see James Daybell, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
13. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Herbert, Female Alliances.
14. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
15. Blennerhassett to Lucy Hastings, June 27, 1658, HAC 20(842), HL.
16. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
17. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
18. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
19. Blennerhassett to Mary Hastings, October 29, 1656, HAC 20(839), HL.
20. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
21. Mervyn to Theophilus Hastings, February 11, 1660/61, HAC 22(9,245), HL.
22. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
23. It is possible, but less likely, that the book was Cavendish’s autobiographical True Relation or her work Nature’s Pictures, as both texts appeared in 1656, the same year that this letter from Blennerhassett was sent. Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Emma Rees, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, and Exile (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003).
24. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
25. Michelle DiMeo and Sara Pennell, eds., Reading and Writing Recipe Books, 1550–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin, eds., Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, 1500–1800 (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2011); Betty Travitsky and Anne Lake Prescott, eds., Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of Elizabeth Talbot Grey and Aletheia Talbot Howard (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2008).
26. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
27. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL. On the significance of gifts of hair in the long eighteenth century, see Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” in “Hair,” ed. Angela Rosenthal, special issue, Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 1–16.
28. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
29. Many thanks to Carla Pestana for her help with this reference. See Charles Firth, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 2:726. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
30. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
31. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20 (843), HL; Blennerhassett to Lucy Hastings, June 27, 1658, HAC 20(842), HL.
32. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
33. Burke and Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke’s Irish Family Records, 134–35; Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
34. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
35. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.
36. Blennerhassett to Mary Hastings, October 29, 1656, HAC 20(839), HL.
37. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
38. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, ca. 1658, HAC 20(843), HL.
39. Blennerhassett to Mary Hastings, October 29, 1656, HAC 20(839), HL.
40. Blennerhassett to Lucy Hastings, June 27, 1658, HAC 20(842), HL.
41. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
42. Blennerhassett to Elizabeth Hastings, 1658, HAC 20(841), HL.
43. Hayssett to Theophilus Hastings, October 30, 1659, HAC 21(6,244), HL.
44. Mervyn to Theophilus Hastings, February 11, 1660/61, HAC 22(9,245), HL.
45. Blennerhassett to Eleanor Hastings, October 30, 1656, HAC 20(840), HL.