Julie A. Eckerle
When Elizabeth Benson wrote in a 1698 letter to the bishop of Derry, William King (1650–1729), that “I am necessitated to make my complaynt to your Lop [Lordship],” she joined a legion of epistolary petitioners who complained to King in the hope that he could (and would) provide the critical assistance they needed.1 For example, more than ten years earlier, in 1687 (when King was chancellor of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and rector of Saint Werburgh’s), an otherwise unidentified “Eliz” wrote King to request a “small portion” for the bearer of the letter, an old crippled woman who was once a housekeeper (48), and in 1685 Ann Leavens similarly requested charity for Alice Owens, the bearer of her letter. According to Leavens, Owens was a “poor woman,” widowed, “above threescore years of age,” and “very deafe & darke sighted” (30).2 King’s sister Jean Lindsay wrote in 1703 (not long after King became archbishop of Dublin) because she believed her new husband deserved a better post (1010),3 and Elinor Harrison in a 1705 letter asked King to help get the recently vacated dean of Saint Patrick’s position for her husband (1135).4
Although these letters are just a tiny sample of the epistolary requests sent to King during his tenure as bishop of Derry (1691–1703) and archbishop of Dublin (1703–29), they are quite enough to explain why, according to correspondent Mrs. William Stoughton in 1705, King supposedly told a female friend of hers with whom he was visiting that he “thought all the beggers of Ireland found [him] out” (1182).5 Indeed, King’s correspondence from this period, much of which is collected at Trinity College Dublin in the Lyons Collection of the Correspondence of William King, is filled with what can be called “petitionary,” or “suitors’,” letters. Unfortunately, as King’s purported word choice makes clear, there was a “stereotypical expectation that women’s suitors’ letters [would] be pitiful begging letters.”6 Yet, by whatever name, such letters provided a key means of problem solving in a period when individual agency was limited, especially for women. Letter writers of both genders, therefore, do not seem to have hesitated to take advantage of epistolary “begging,” no matter the exasperation they might have engendered in the process.
The massive, multivolume Lyons Collection, which consists primarily of King’s incoming correspondence, provides a case in point, as the collection contains roughly 150 female-authored letters from at least sixty-eight different women from 1683 to 1727, most of which are petitionary in nature.7 In some cases the women responsible for these letters are not familiar to us and were not of high rank or import in their own time either. Thus, restoring these women’s identities is often impossible, as the record leaves us with names (sometimes only partial names) and a random letter or two, nothing more. In other cases the women are the wives and widows of men who had active roles in Ascendancy Ireland, often in the church. And in still others, although not as many, the women are titled. In accordance with this range in the writers’ status, women’s petitionary letters in the Lyons Collection vary widely in degree of formality and skill. Yet in all cases they offer a unique opportunity to consider the rhetorical techniques used by many different women in a variety of circumstances who, in most cases, approached King from a position of vulnerability and great need. In contrast to the chapters in this volume that consider the epistolary techniques of a particular woman or circumstance, then, this chapter surveys and analyzes the strategies used by a range of women who wrote to the same man. It is King himself, in other words, who provides the common denominator. And King was his correspondents’ chosen addressee in large part because he was rooted in the local Irish context that also informed their petitions.
Significantly, King was an Irishman—insofar as one can assign such labels in a period and context when national affiliation and identity were, as explained in the introduction to this volume, far from simple. Born in Antrim to Scottish parents, King converted to Anglicanism from Scots Presbyterianism sometime before 1671.8 He was ordained in 1674 and subsequently devoted the whole of his life to spiritual work in Ireland.9 He served as both chancellor (1679–89) and dean (1689–91) of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin before being promoted to his most distinguished positions as bishop of Derry and then archbishop of Dublin.10 King never married but instead engaged passionately in person and in letters with the theological, intellectual, and political debates of his time. Indeed, in addition to his role as “de facto leader of the church in Ireland,” King served four terms as lord justice and was “a pivotal political, intellectual and clerical personality not just in the Dublin of his day but also in intellectual circles throughout northern Europe.”11
Accordingly, the extant correspondence of this “European man of letters” is extensive and wide ranging in its content, containing intellectual debate, ecclesiastical positions, evidence of “friendships of great strength and warm-heartedness,” and even scientific ideas.12 His correspondents included Charles Willoughby (d. 1694), a Dublin physician and naturalist; Francis Marsh (1627–93), archbishop of Dublin, 1681–93; Sir Robert Southwell (1635–1702), principal secretary of state for Ireland, 1690–1702, and president of the Royal Society, 1690–95; Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the famous dean of Saint Patrick’s, 1713–45; and James Bonnell (1653–99), accountant general of Ireland, whose widow, Jane (1660s–1745), became a voluminous correspondent of King in her own right. Indeed, Jane’s letters are the most numerous of all the female correspondents whose missives appear in the Lyons Collection and thus offer an important case study within this chapter’s larger focus on women’s petitionary letters to King.
Put simply, King was an important man in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland. He was a representative of the Crown at a time when “Irish affairs of state and petitions from the citizens of Ireland could be addressed by the monarch’s representatives in Ireland.”13 Yet King was much more than an English monarch’s representative in Ireland. Rather, he was also an “Irish” man in Ireland, one who understood—through his own travels—how “visitors from Ireland were held in low regard in London” and how, “between 1689 and 1720, an unwholesome cultural dependency [of Ireland on England] had also deepened. This situation forced those from Ireland too often into the posture of entreaty.”14 Perhaps it makes sense, then, that King’s rootedness in Irish politics, culture, and religion made him an obvious recipient of requests from those whose concerns were also rooted in an Irish context.
Therefore, although the letters examined here were not always written from Ireland, are not explicitly political, and often do not mention Ireland at all, the women nonetheless wrote within a distinctly Irish context informed by personal experience (often hardship) associated with life or business in Ireland. Furthermore, they wrote with an implicit trust in their addressee, an Irish-born Anglican who valued at least a degree of Irish autonomy, as evidenced by King’s support for Irish parliamentary rights and his firm belief that the Church of Ireland, while “dependent upon the state . . . nonetheless had the right to preserve its identity.”15 Perhaps even more important, however, was King’s familiarity with Ireland, since it was likely—in addition to his other qualities—to predispose him to answer favorably their various complaints and requests. In the case of spiritual matters, works of charity, and any number of mundane, individualized, and local needs—especially related to his diocese in Derry—King was his parishioners’ go-to authority.
This is evident in a fascinating series of letters in which King is depicted as both villain and savior. The former can be seen in one of only two letters in the Lyons Collection in which both writer and addressee are women.16 In 1704 Mary Colston wrote from England to her niece Mary Lane, in Ireland, to recount her horror upon learning of Lane’s “apostasy” and to convey the family’s certainty that the real villain behind this turn of events was “he who you falsly call archbishop of Dublin.”17 Indeed, Colston writes, “I desire you will aske yr great Muf[t]ie of Dublin from whene he receiued his ordination for if he is only a preist in name he can be noe true or lawful Bishop and doutles ye true church must haue a suceseon of bishops [fr]om ye apostles and I know he can deriue noe such, think of this, and for shame herd noe longer with wolffs in sheeps clothing.” Colston’s bitter sarcasm belies her deep concern for a young family member whose sojourn in Ireland has led her far from the family’s traditional beliefs, a position underscored by the term muftie, which technically refers to a “Muslim cleric or expert in Islamic law empowered to give rulings on religious matters” but in this context pointedly lumps King with what Colston clearly sees as foreign and heathen religions.18 She further claims that she has heard her niece has “become another creature,” one “metamorfosed both in . . . looks and behauior” (2386). The situation is so dire that Lane’s brother has been sent to her at once.
Yet of course Mary Lane, the recipient of this indignant letter, saw the situation quite differently and called on King in two extant letters in the aftermath of her aunt’s missive for both advice (1090) and money (1116).19 In the first case, she “beg[s]” to “be admitted ye honour of a short conferrence in order to arme me against the storme which threatens me. I hourly expect my Brother here, and in what manner I am to treat with him, I humbly beg yr Graces wise direction” (1090). In the latter, she requested money to pay for her lodging until her brother’s arrival, at which point her future would be determined. Unlike Colston, who clearly saw Ireland as a den of heresy, Lane frets about having to “return to England. where I am more barbarously treate[d] by my Relations then is propper to tell” (1116). In this battle between one faith and country and another, King’s authoritative position in and on behalf of Ireland clearly contributed to Lane looking to him for support.
The significance of King’s association with Ireland is most clear at times of transition, as in a 1690 letter from Lady Frances Parker, who wrote to congratulate King on his appointment in Derry:
I have since I was in Ireland lived in hopes of seeing it again and nothing could more have increased that desire then your being so hapyly settled in that kingdom, which gives a vniversull sattisfaction to all that know you of which none must pretend to a greater share then my self. Pardon it Sr if there be a little self intrest in the case for I am apt to flatter my self, Sr Iohn Parker will never want a real Friend, so long as Ireland will be blest in haveing so good as well as so great A Prelate as my Lord Bishop of Londondery. (105)20
Letter writer Hannah Lloyd further reinforces the importance of King’s Irish affiliation when, in a 1704 letter petitioning King for his assistance with her son’s education, she says that “he hath no father either to admonnish or provide for him & my Husbands misfortunes where [were] so many since his comeing to this kingdome yt he had nothing to leave me either to maintain him or support my self in this my helples & mallencholy condition” (1070).21 Since Lloyd wrote her letter from “lisnananah near Cavan,” in the province of Ulster, “this kingdome” is clearly Ireland, and the specific historical context in which she and her potential benefactor operate is turn-of-the century Ireland, precisely early 1704, shortly after King has taken up his post as archbishop of Dublin. King is Lloyd’s “local” authority, even if he is in Dublin and she in Ulster. The same is true when Margaret Lawrence writes in 1707 from England, where her husband is imprisoned, to remind King of a promise he had made to them when they lived in Derry (1253).22
Indeed, King’s transition from his bishopric in Derry to his archbishopric in Dublin inspired a few particularly urgent letters by women who found such a shift in leadership to be anxiety producing. Mary Hill, for instance, “make[s] bold” in her husband’s absence to write a relatively typical petitionary letter requesting King’s assistance assuring that certain lands intended for her husband actually go to him when the current lease expires. Yet since she acknowledges at the beginning of her letter that King is moving “from this Diocess” to Dublin, the specific assistance she requires is for him to put in a word to his successor about the matter (990).23 King correspondent Elizabeth Lloyd shared Hill’s worry about unfinished business falling through with King’s departure from Derry, writing just a few days earlier that she is particularly worried, since “my son Edward understanding yt your Ldshipp is Leaueing derry, and . . . you haue not settled him in his place for his life.”24 Lloyd pulls out all the stops here, noting not only how disastrous it would be for her son and his family if he were turned out of service but also how “it would bring me a poore widdow wth sorrow to my graue.” She also reminds King of how he told her at their last meeting that he would do anything for her son (989). Rhetorically “beg[ing] . . . upon [her] knees” in this dramatic fashion thus reminds us of the importance of the local church administration in everyday life and of the concomitant tenuousness of that life, since one person’s death, promotion, or move to a different locale could destabilize the existence of many others. And destabilization is precisely what leads to so-called begging letters.
Generally speaking, the genre of the petitionary letter ranges widely from state petition letters—formal negotiations with the state apparatus in which, to use Marie-Louise Coolahan’s words, individuals could “narrate their political situations and elicit relief”—to just about any epistolary document in which the writer presents a suit to the addressee.25 Not surprisingly, the more formal variety of the petitionary letter makes more extensive and more sophisticated use of rhetorical and generic conventions and is addressed, if not to an actual monarch, then to high-ranking officials who represent the monarch.26 In contrast, the less formal type may be addressed to anyone in a position to offer the necessary assistance, including a kinsman or kinswoman, and also varies widely in terms of the writer’s rhetorical skill, resources, particular context, and what Susan E. Whyman calls “epistolary literacy.”27
Archives across Britain and Ireland are of course filled with such letters from the early modern period, when physical correspondence provided the primary means of communication and when constant conflict and warfare, especially in Ireland, created greater need for “petition-letters . . . , as networks of support could suddenly disintegrate.”28 Women were particularly vulnerable due to widowhood, loss of property, or simply being left alone to manage the home front while husbands and sons headed to battle, conducted diplomacy, went into exile, or left home and sometimes Ireland itself for any number of other reasons. Indeed, women were most often driven to epistolary petitions when, as Lynne Magnusson notes in her study of Elizabethan women’s letters, they experienced loss of some sort and thus wrote “out of necessity in reactions to deprivations . . . of all kinds imaginable,” such as “in response to their own imprisonment or their husbands’” or “in efforts to recover incomes, titles, properties, or leases.”29 That women in such predicaments would have written to an authority figure like King is thus not at all surprising. Yet his female correspondents and their letters have—with a few exceptions—gone overlooked, thus providing another instance of early modern women’s life writing hiding in plain sight.30
The female-authored petitionary letters in the Lyons Collection tend to meet the expectations of the time for such letters, which meant following classical rhetorical structure (exordium, narratio, propositio, petitio, confutatio, and peroratio); “epistolary conventions in their use of opening and closing modes of address and salutations”; and a number of other requirements. Despite variance according to “the formality of the letter . . . and the social status of the letter writer in relation to the recipient,” the common rhetorical strategies in letters of petition are clear. They include women’s “depiction of themselves and other women as objects of pity, as victims of poverty and suffering,” often through “overtly melancholic rhetoric”; reliance on their status as widows; “the use of negative female gender assumptions”; emphasis on “a range of domestic roles and ideal types of female behaviour, styling themselves as ‘natural’ mothers, and ‘faithful’ and ‘dutiful’ wives”; and personalized storytelling techniques in the narration (or narratio) section of their letters.31 In whole, writers like King’s petitioners relied “on a combination of ethos (the discursive presentation of self—specifically, of one’s moral character—with the aim of obtaining the addressee’s goodwill or favour) and pathos (affective persuasion) to the detriment of logos.”32
Most important, however, as is always the case with rhetorical analysis, is context. For the women writing to King in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Ireland, circumstances were urgent and highly personal. And, for most, King was their superior in power as well as rank. Thus, most of these letters fall into the category Magnusson describes (adapting labels used by Angel Day in The English Secretorie) as “humilitie and entreatie,” undoubtedly the most appropriate category for petitionary letters written from an “inferior” to a “superior.” Accordingly, King’s female petitioners incorporate flattery, gratitude, the requisite narrative and request, emotional manipulation, spiritual manipulation, and—of course—ample use of the humility topos. Given the fact that the suitor’s letter is, put simply, “a social action situated by exigence and audience,”33 the letters witness to women acting in various degrees of desperation to manipulate the epistolary means available to them to convince King, the spiritual and political authority best known to them, to provide assistance.
Therefore, as already noted, most of the women’s letters in the Lyons Collection involve personal requests, and most deal with practical concerns rather than abstract ideas. In one exception Jane Bonnell writes from London in 1712 to ask King’s opinion of John Richardson’s 1711 A Proposal for the Conversion of the Popish Natives of Ireland, to the Establish’d Religion (1422).34 Bonnell, unlike many of her fellow petitioners, was intimately connected to the religious and political topics of her day, both through her late husband and her brother-in-law William Conolly (1662–1729), who was Speaker of the Irish House of Commons from 1715 to 1729. More often, however, the petitionary letters with which King dealt on a daily basis (including Bonnell’s other letters) were more personal, more practically oriented, and less explicit in their acknowledgement of Ireland as the context in which they operate.
Elizabeth Benson’s 1698 letter, briefly mentioned earlier, is a typical example. After “humbly craveing [King’s] assistance,” she goes on to explain—in what is, strictly speaking, the narratio portion of her letter—how her son’s education has been hampered by a broken agreement that has also cost her family a financial investment. Eventually, she builds to her request, or “petition,” which is that King intervene in the legal proceedings on her family’s behalf. Finally, Benson returns to the humble tone of her letter’s opening by “begging your Lops pardon for my presumption in giving yow this trouble.” She concludes with “mak[ing] bold to subscribe my self . . . your Lops most obedient humble Servant” (566). Here we see a clear, modesty-framed petition in which a woman seeks King’s assistance for matters both financial and familial. “Ireland” seems to have no explicit role in the letter. But of course it does inform Benson’s letter and predicament, since she writes from “Linsfortein, Enishowen” in Ireland and since the attorney to whom her son was apprenticed has left Ireland for England.35 This kind of indirect contextualization informs a great many of the letters in the Lyons Collection, whether the petitioners wrote on behalf of others, their loved ones (especially husbands and sons), or themselves.
Like Benson, most of King’s female petitioners wrote on behalf of others. Examples include “Eliz” (48) and Leavens (30), mentioned earlier, as well as Elizabeth Crumy, who wrote in 1711 on behalf of a whole parish, Finvoy (County Antrim), to convey the parishioners’ concern that the church-building project there was far exceeding the anticipated costs (1412).36 More often the women wrote on behalf of family members, frequently asking that King help a son achieve an education or a husband secure a position. This subset of petitioners includes Lindsay (1010) and Harrison (1135), mentioned earlier, as well as Rebecca Berkeley, whose concern required two letters in 1691.37 The first was a simple plea for King’s patience, since—she informs him—her husband, the reverend James Berkeley, had accompanied King William III into Flanders and therefore would not be present when Bishop King visited Derry: “I therfore hope yr Losp will excuse his absence since he is in the Kings servis, as for his parishes your Lsps comands will carefully be obayed & nothing will be omitted that is for the go[o]d of the people” (118). Yet by December, eight months after the first letter, Berkeley wrote in a more urgent tone seemingly designed to keep the King from taking action against her husband: “I hope Mr Berkley has begd your pardon for his staying longer then he intended and given you an account that he desines to leave London about Christmus for though the King has dun him the honour to receive him as one of his Chaplens in ornery yet I doe n[ot] find that he intends to make use of the previlledge he has to attend at coort but resolves to cum home” (193).38 Berkeley is perhaps disingenuous in implying that she does not know of her husband’s communications with King but clearly not willing to leave the matter to chance.
Although Berkeley clearly has both her own and her husband’s self-interest invested in her letters, plenty of other women wrote explicitly on their own behalf. Here again the petitioners’ requests are both relatively routine and urgent, especially if the writers are widowed or otherwise estranged from male support. Such instances reveal the most about women’s options for agency and negotiation in a context not predisposed to support their needs. Perhaps most poignant in this regard is the already mentioned letter from Mrs. William Stoughton, the widowed mother of ten children who in 1705 found herself feeling personally attacked by King’s claim about beggars. After all, it was the gentlewoman she sent to call on King, apparently to remind him of a promise he had made to Stoughton, who was by that time in England and unable to visit herself, that led him to make this remark. Recognizing that she is likely the “beggar” that spurred King’s comment, Stoughton faced a complex rhetorical situation, one she handles first by thanking him for a past favor and second by explaining why she sent her friend to call on him. Here she addresses his accusation head-on:
my Lord I cannot but take notice of the reflections you made to the gentlewoman in saying you thought all the beggers of Ireland found you out I am sorry I should be stiled one of that number I thank God I have not had such occasion nor did I beg of any in all my Life nor was it ever in my thoughts to desire any thing of your grace in that nature all I desired of my friend when she went to you was what I have mentiond I [o]nst writ to your grace and desired ye favour of you to lend me two guineas to repair some loss I had with no other designe but to return the[m] againe with thanks as I shall this you were pleased to send me.
However, having restated the facts of the case, she must also defend her reputation. No, she has not ever been a beggar. Yes, she and her sons did experience great losses in Ireland. But, no, her Irish losses did not lead to her request (which, she claims, was based on her apparently misguided understanding that old widows in London could get a yearly allowance in certain circumstances), nor was her life in Ireland disrespectful in any way. On the contrary, she insists, “I was the mother of ten children and nursed nine of them so that I could not have much time for Idleness if I were that way inclined which I never was nor am I ashamed of the charecter I have Left behind me in Dublin” (1182). King may be frustrated by being constantly approached by so-called beggars—specifically, as he apparently said, beggars of Ireland. But Stoughton is also frustrated, and this frustration seeps into a letter that is her only means of managing from afar her reputation and at least some of her financial needs. Even sending an on-the-ground representative seems not to have yielded the results she had hoped for and, on the contrary, created more problems for her to deal with, once again by letter.
Stoughton’s letter brings into sharp focus the bind in which female petitioners often found themselves, since speaking out on behalf of their own needs and desires often had in turn to be defended and justified. Self-defense became only more complicated once the petitioner had left Ireland, as Stoughton’s insistence on her good character, “Left behind me in Dublin,” suggests. In such matters it was no doubt helpful to have an Irish contact, someone like King whose reputation for piety and honesty was indubitable. Yet, in a somewhat circular fashion, one would have to maintain a respectful reputation in King’s eyes to maintain his support.
This essential requirement for a successful petition likely explains a December 1699 letter to the then bishop of Derry in which Jane Bonnell found it necessary to defend herself against rumor:
I must farther beg that yu will not upon heresay readilly believe an ill or undecent thing of me, for there are some bussy people that has nothing to doe but to sencure [censure] others, wch trully I shoud not much mind if I did not fear that some whose good opinion I vallue may be . . . influenced by hering ill storys how falce soever, among other & worse things they say of me that I am gon quit out of mourning & am now in collerd clothes, wch was as far from once entering my thoughts as the murthering my Brother was. (651)
Written within a year of her husband James’s death on April 28, Bonnell recognizes the rumor as an affront to the very exemplary widowhood that she has already made the core of her identity.39 Indeed, the construction of this identity is deeply entwined with her request that King publish James’s life and letters—which in turn forms the primary topic of her letters to King over several years. Therefore, when Bonnell in a letter a few months later thanks King for saying “yt if [he] hard any ill of [her] [he] woud communicat it” but insists that “my humer is not to lay such things much to heart wn I am parfectly jnnocent of what is said of me” (657), the gap between the concern of one letter and the dismissal of the next is quite telling. Bonnell needed King not to take the rumor seriously, just as she needs King to help with her project.
Nearly everything Bonnell writes to King in the first few years after her husband’s death must be understood within this context, even her frequent return to a spiritual matter that has become a source of debate in her correspondence with King:
One part of yr letter has taken up some of my thoughts, & trully the same thing has don soe for severall months past, wch is how far I may be falty in more earnestly desiring to get to heaven for the love of a frend that is gon there, then for the desire of enjoying God himself, who gave me that frend & all the other blessings I enjoy, but how falty soever I may be in this it is wt I cannot get the mastry of, but I please my self with the hopes that it is such a desire as God will pas by as a frailty of human nature, but other times I think it is hardly to be called a falt to desire to . . . enjoy a frend in heaven who I loved here for his such qualitys as God himself loved him for. (657)
Although not a petition per se, Bonnell incorporates this concern in letters that are in every other respect petitionary. And the often-hyperbolic manner in which she describes her love for her late husband, the very “friend” she is so eager to meet in Heaven, implicitly marks her own devotion to James Bonnell as greater than King’s. Such a characterization is one of many techniques she uses in her attempts to convince King to act.
Significantly, Bonnell’s connection to King had originated in his own long-term friendship with James, accountant general of Ireland and a deeply devout man in his own right. It must have made great sense to Bonnell that, when she sought to publish her husband’s life and letters, King would be the perfect man to ask. Yet he refused, and even though she was able to get William Hamilton (d. 1729), archdeacon of Armagh, to take on the project instead, the 1703 publication of The Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell seems not to have assuaged the bitterness and hurt she felt.40 Thus, in the course of her long correspondence to King (which includes twenty-three letters in the Lyons Collection), Bonnell’s bold tongue, quick wit, and remarkable capacity for rhetorical manipulation appear with stunning clarity and consistency.
Yet even with her bold tone, Bonnell’s letters encapsulate many aspects of women’s life writing in the seventeenth century, including the familiar turn to life writing as a means of coping with emotional distress and the even more commonplace decision to use life writing to construct or otherwise manage a husband’s posthumous reputation, often by shepherding his textual remains into print.41 For Bonnell, this work on behalf of her deceased husband seems to have become her main reason for living. In her first extant letter to King as a widow, written in late September 1699, she describes with great earnestness her desire to get James’s papers “into order for the press” (625).42 A couple of months later, she claims that gathering and compiling documents for this project is “the only thing in this world that I am much concerned for.” Indeed, she adds, “I must confess I can take noe pleasure in any thing but in thinking, speaking or hearing others speak of him, & the more I think of him the more I love & honour his memory & bless God anew for making me the happy wife of such a saint” (640). Thus it becomes clear that writing and receiving letters about her husband provide not only a means to an end (the texts she hopes to have published) but also a means of keeping James’s memory alive.
Even so, Bonnell goes far beyond both personal indulgence and the therapeutic benefits of life writing when she reaches out to numerous individuals over many years and with extraordinary persistence to make sure that James’s memory lives on in others as well. Her reasoning—much like that behind all published lives of this period—is to make James’s exemplary character and piety known to the world; she is further confident that, as his widow, “it lies upon me to make him known to after generations” (820). Thus she urges King to select those letters from James’s correspondence that will be most “of use to the world” (631). Furthermore, given her belief that James was a very “patron” of goodness (645), she argues that the project is better done sooner than later: “for if one desires such a thing shoud doe good, it will have most effect upon people that loved him & remembers him; after generations may believe or not believe what may be said of one they did not know. but now every good & valluable thing thats said of him will be intirely credited, & I believe if yr Ldsp wd goe one [on] with that work nothing that has bin published of many years woud be more exceptable to the publick” (761). By this point in early 1701, King has made his resistance to the project quite clear in his letters, but Bonnell only escalates her rhetoric in the face of this resistance, asking in an April epistle if there are not, among James’s letters, “many . . . wch have soe much of the composers spirit and piety, as might help to a waken and Reforme a Degenerate world” (783). Like so many of her fellow correspondents, Bonnell here attempts to play on King’s spiritual devotion, having failed in earlier efforts to manipulate his loyalty to James as a friend.
In her efforts to persuade King to accept her petition, Bonnell tries nearly everything. She is conciliatory, offering to bring someone else on board to “ease [King] of the drudging part of” the project (625). She is aggressive (writing letters nearly every two weeks), repetitive, manipulative, and verbose.43 On one occasion, when she still thinks King is leaning toward the project, she says, “I use no arguments to porswade yu to it because I please my self with the beleiff that yu . . . are forward to doe all that lies in yr power to preserve the memory of such a man who I may say deserved it from yu if the sincerest frendship may merrit any thing” (673). Of course, she is making an argument here, and she is also relying on numerous forms of manipulation to do it. Therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, when King ultimately fails to respond in the way Bonnell hopes, he is subjected to extraordinarily bold, angry, and self-righteous letters in a relentless epistolary campaign.
This is where Bonnell shows herself truly unique among the Lyons Collection’s female writers. About one and a half years after Bonnell first mentions the publication project, she finally seems to understand that King does not want to do it, has, in fact, “persist[ed] in . . . den[c]ying”—to use Bonnell’s words—“to doe Iustice to the memory of yr frend.” Her response to this disappointment is remarkably cutting:
I must acknowledge to be in a temper to writ such a Life woud need such recollection & sedeatness of temper as is not easilly to be attained in the midst of such incombrance as yu are engaged in, but the way to be in such a temper, woud be to set about such a work, the dwelling much upon his life, & conversing with his heavenly remains, must put one in such a temper if they be not utterly lost to all sence of piety. My earnest desire was that yu shoud set about it when the sence of the loss yu had, was fresh in yr memory, & had made some impression on yu, then yu woud have neither wanted temper nor words to have represented him in a true Light, but alas we are all apt to let such things wear too soon of [off], . . . may I never forget [my loss] I humbly beg. (752)
In swift fashion, Bonnell calls into question King’s loyalty, temperament, commitment to God’s “desine,” and even his piety. And despite asking King in this letter to return her husband’s papers so that she can get a second opinion from Archdeacon Hamilton, she maintains her epistolary pressure through a barrage of her own arguments in defense of the project, others’ opinions of the project’s worthiness, and additional insults: “yr Ldsp may call this eagerness, but Love & gratitude . . . is its proper name; and it is an Eagerness wch I hope will live till I go to my gr[a]ve. But I am more concernd in the other part of yr letter concerning the life of yr frend, for so I will call him till I am forced to alter that name, and even let wt will happen he must still be called yr frend since he really was soe whether yu be his or no” (783).44 Even as she further acknowledges that “these expostulations will be imputed to the womans Eagerness,” Bonnell asks King to reconsider his decision.
Clearly, Bonnell and King’s relationship was complicated, and King was not beyond snarky retorts of his own. For example, in a May 10, 1715, letter to Bonnell, he notes, “There is an art of complaining forth in wch I find you have made some proficiency, pray do you much frequent court for if you have I am afraid, wt is observd there, may have influenced you, to lay that to my charge of wch you only guilty.”45 Furthermore, as already noted, Bonnell felt it necessary from her earliest extant letters to King to defend herself against his concern that she was demonstrating excessive grief.46 And then, of course, there is King’s comment about beggars, a comment that he supposedly made to a woman about another woman. There is no doubt that gendered assumptions about appropriate female behavior are at work here, thus explaining why Bonnell might be on guard against gendered claims about “womans Eagerness.” But there is also no doubt that Bonnell—while quite willing to fall back on tropes of femininity when necessary—also felt no need to subject herself to such restrictive codes of behavior.47 She was a woman of very strong opinions and often quite hard to please.48
In the end, Bonnell’s determined efforts were productive. Hamilton’s Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell went through multiple editions and seemed to follow the guidelines and ideas she had initially proposed to King.49 It further contributed to the construction of Bonnell as an exemplary widow, an endeavor Hamilton seemed more than willing to support with his comment that James “left behind him a truly afflicted widow, who, I am persuaded, will persevere to shew the world, how justly she prized his excellent qualities and tender love; and who has spared no pains to get his life and character published, that so some justice may be done to his memory.”50 Bonnell’s efforts, then, not only memorialized James but also herself, as the devoted and pious widow. And her ultimately successful campaign underscores that, when it comes to petition letters, persistence is essential.51 Despite the fact that circumstances took her frequently to England (where she often went to Bath for both her own and her daughter’s health), her life’s work—in the form of her publication projects—continued to send her back across the Irish Sea, whether in person or by letter.52 First and foremost, this was because James’s work was itself rooted in the Irish context. As Hamilton writes in The Exemplary Life of the response to his death, “so well was the character of his excellences confirmed among us; so generally was he known, esteemed, and loved in Ireland; . . . that I believe no private man was ever more lamented. . . . It was looked upon as a general loss.”53 But Bonnell’s continual return to Ireland was also a result of her need for King, the premier Irish authority capable of helping her achieve her desires. If it is the local that matters most in an individual’s life, and if it is most often the local authority to whom individuals turn for help, then King was Bonnell’s guy. Although he disappointed her in the end, he was her go-to authority and would continue to receive her missives for years after their falling-out over the publication of James’s life and papers.54 Therefore, even if Bonnell’s less-than-humble tone and the quantity of her epistolary output were not the norm, her persistent reliance on King—and on what he meant to Irish life and letters—was.
In other words, King’s Irish context simply cannot be overstated, even though many of his female petitioners do not mention Ireland at all. The bottom line is that he is there, in Ireland, firmly embedded in theological and political networks, attentive to both abstract and concrete concerns that matter deeply to his constituents, and knowledgeable about the institutions and individuals with whom his petitioners need to interact. Thus, King’s petitioners used goodwill gestures, offered prayer, flattered excessively, expressed gratitude for past favors (also excessively), played on King’s emotions, presented requests both directly and indirectly, invoked Christian charity, played what a twenty-first-century cynic might call “the poor widow card,” and did whatever else they thought might work to open King’s eyes, ears, and hearts to their petitions—sometimes all in the same letter. Even when King does provide the requested assistance, his petitioners often come back for more. Elizabeth Lovelace, for example, who wrote in 1704 to ask King for help renewing her family’s lease (1122), wrote about the same lease yet again in 1707, this time noting that the rent is far more than they used to pay. Even though she points out that, “as my Gratious God put it in yr hart to spek for me, I hope he will put me in a way to pay ye rent tho tis great,” she has made her point. Thus, when she goes on to ask King to keep out an eye for employment opportunities for her son in Dublin (what began as her son’s willingness to wait on King when he is in town in the body of the letter becomes a more straightforward request in the postscript) (1267), one can imagine that King was not at all surprised to find his work in this particular case not yet done.55
Yet he continues to write, to assist, and to maintain and cement relationships as necessary. After all, few men were in the position actually to grant individuals’ petitions, especially those from women of lesser rank trying to make their way in turn-of-the-century Ireland, often without the husbands who would typically negotiate on their behalf and—if necessary—travel to Dublin or beyond to England to settle matters in person. Just as writing letters was likely their only means of securing King’s assistance, so was reading and answering their so-called beggars’ petitions simply his job to do. He was, after all, William King: bishop, archbishop, lord justice, intellectual, church leader, converted Anglican, writer, correspondent, friend, and brother. Most significant, for “all the beggers of Ireland,” he was “a promoter & lover of Iustice” (1000).56
I conducted research for this chapter during three trips to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) (June 2012, June 2014, and October 2016) and one to the National Library of Ireland (NLI), Dublin (June 2016). I am immensely grateful to the research assistance of the archivists at both libraries and to the University of Minnesota Imagine Funds and Faculty Research Enhancement Funds, which made the research possible.
1. The writer’s name appears at the end of the letter (Elizabeth Benson to William King, March 25, 1698, MSS 1995–2008/566, Lyons Collection, TCD) as “Eliza: Benson,” in a seemingly different hand than the rest of the letter. It is likely that, as was often the case, someone else wrote the letter, and she simply signed it. Benson wrote from Linsfort, Inishowen, in County Donegal. Although this is the only letter from Benson in the collection, there are also letters from three male Bensons. All subsequent letters from the Lyons Collection referenced in the chapter are indicated by letter number in the body of the text.
2. This is the only letter from Leavens in the Lyons Collection.
3. The husband referenced was Lindsay’s second, a Scottish clergyman whom she had married shortly before writing the letter (in which she also informs King of said marriage). This is the only letter in the Lyons Collection from her.
4. This is the only letter in the Lyons Collection from Harrison, whose signature appears on the letter as “Elli: Harrison,” but there are three from her husband, Theophilus (d. 1720), who was then prebendary of Clonmethan in Saint Patrick’s, Dublin, and dean of Clonmacnois; see Samuel Carlyle Hughes, The Church of S. John the Evangelist, Dublin (Dublin, 1889), 58. In the end, the position vacated by the death of Jerome Ryves (d. 1704) went to John Stearne (1660–1745), a kinsman of Ryves, who then served to 1713.
5. This is the only letter in the Lyons Collection from Stoughton, a widow, although there are two 1706 letters from a William Stoughton, perhaps a son.
6. Lynne Magnusson, “A Rhetoric of Requests: Genre and Linguistic Scripts in Elizabethan Women’s Suitors, Letters,” in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 57 (emphasis added).
7. I have not included in this count letters by individuals whose gender cannot be clearly determined. Furthermore, although my count includes all letters regardless of date, my analysis focuses only on those written up to 1714, which—while somewhat arbitrary—nonetheless marks the end of an historical period, the Stuart dynasty. A complete list of the female-authored letters in the Lyons Collection is provided at the end of this chapter. Many of King’s outgoing letters are also housed at TCD: 182 in the Lyons Collection and far more in other collections, especially MS 750 (outgoing correspondence when King was archbishop); MS 1,489 (a letter book from King’s time as bishop of Derry); and MS 2,009 (correspondence from King and others to the Second Duke of Ormonde).
8. Sandra Hynes, “Mapping Friendship and Dissent: The Letters from Joseph Boyse to Ralph Thoresby, 1680–1710,” in Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context, ed. Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 206n5; Joseph Richardson, “William King: European Man of Letters,” in Archbishop William King and the Anglican Irish Context, 1688–1729, ed. Christopher J. Fauske (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 110.
9. Frank Leslie Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, “King, William (1650–1729), Abp. of *Dublin,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Frank Leslie Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, 3rd ed., rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 934.
10. For a more detailed account of King’s ecclesiastical career, see Fauske, Archbishop William King, esp. Richardson, “William King,” 106.
11. Christopher J. Fauske, “‘The angel of St. Patrick’s is now the guardian of the kingdom,’” in Fauske, Archbishop William King, 18, 24. King’s complex religious and political identity is described by Fauske as typical “of the Irish-born Anglicans who thought about their position. Native to Ireland by birth, they were, with few exceptions, not Irish by ancestry. They occupied lands seized from others, often within living memory, and . . . had to come to terms with a political reality in Westminster that did not correspond to their assumptions of the constitutional position they should have enjoyed” (13). King’s support for William, Prince of Orange, led him to be imprisoned in Dublin Castle in 1689 and 1690. He has also been described as “a convinced patriot, resisting all attempts to introduce Englishmen into high office” (Cross and Livingstone, “King, William,” in Cross and Livingstone, Oxford Dictionary, 934). In less polite terms, Philip O’Regan refers to this aspect of King’s character as “anglophobia,” in “William King as Bishop and Parliamentarian, 1691–7,” in Fauske, Archbishop William King, 77. Even King’s habits as a consumer had something of the “patriot” in them, according to Toby Barnard’s brief treatment of King in Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). Especially during his tenure as archbishop, Barnard argues, “King became an increasingly strident champion of all things Irish, and . . . extended this attitude to goods” (122).
12. Richardson, “William King,” in Fauske, Archbishop William King, 106; Fauske, “‘angel of St. Patrick’s,’” 27.
13. Fauske, “‘angel of St. Patrick’s,’” 13.
14. Barnard, Making the Grand Figure, 336, 337.
15. O’Regan, “William King,” 100; Fauske, “‘angel of St. Patrick’s,’” 14.
16. The other is 2301, from Elizabeth Dean to Mrs. King. The latter is likely King’s sister-in-law, Marion King, wife of his brother Robert.
17. This is the only letter by Mary Colston in the Lyons Collection.
18. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Mufti, n.,” def. 1., accessed April 5, 2018, www.oed.com. I am grateful to Estelle Gittins, of TCD Manuscripts and Archives Research Library, for her assistance with this term.
19. These are the only two letters from Lane in the Lyons Collection.
20. Parker was the second wife of Sir John Parker (d. 1696), son of King’s “first clerical patron,” John Parker, archbishop of Tuam (Fauske, “‘angel of St. Patrick’s,’” 12). King remained a friend of the archbishop’s family throughout his life, as evidenced by the fact that he stayed with Frances and John Parker at their home in Fermoyle, County Roscommon, and by the extant correspondence, which includes letters like this one (the only one from Lady Frances Parker in the Lyons Collection) and five from Archbishop Parker’s granddaughter Mary Dillon. Sir John Parker and his family were among the Protestants who left England in 1688. Charles Simeon King, ed., A Great Archbishop of Dublin, William King, D. D., 1650–1729: His Autobiography, Family, and a Selection from His Correspondence (London: 1908, 16n2).
21. There is one other letter from Lloyd in the Lyons Collection, from 1702.
22. This is the only letter from Lawrence in the Lyons Collection.
23. There are two letters from Mary Hill in the Lyons Collection, one from 1702/3 and one from 1703, and two from her husband, Samuel Hill. The successor mentioned in this letter was Charles Hickman (1648–1713), who remained in the position until his death. Another frequent King correspondent, Hickman did not enjoy his predecessor’s favor; King apparently regarded him as “an habitual absentee who on one of his visits had uprooted for private gain a wood which King had planted for the future benefit of the diocese.” Alan Acheson, A History of the Church of Ireland, 1691–1996 (Dublin: Columbia, 1997, 47).
24. This is the only letter from Elizabeth Lloyd in the Lyons Collection, although there are several from her son. In fact, just two days before she wrote this letter to King, Edward wrote his own letter expressing his hope that King would keep the new bishop from dispossessing him (988).
25. Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. Useful guides to the burgeoning scholarship on epistolary networks, conventions, and strategies—which has been led to a significant degree by James Daybell—are his articles “Recent Studies in Sixteenth-Century Letters,” English Literary Renaissance 35, no. 2 (2005): 331–62; “Recent Studies in Seventeenth-Century Letters,” English Literary Renaissance 36, no. 1 (2006): 135–70; and his co-edited collection, with Andrew Gordon, Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–1690 (London: Routledge, 2016). For eighteenth-century epistolary culture among “lower- and middling-sort writers” (17), see Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). And for work on early modern women’s petitionary letters in particular, see Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Ideal Communities and Planter Women’s Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland,” Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29, no. 2 (2012): 69–91; Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 102–39; James Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice: Women’s Epistolary Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century Letters of Petition,” Women’s Writing 13, no. 1 (2006): 3–22; Magnusson, “A Rhetoric of Requests,” in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 51–66; and Alison Thorne, “Women’s Petitionary Letters and Early Seventeenth-Century Treason Trials,” Women’s Writing 13, no. 1 (2006): 23–43.
26. Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 10.
27. As Whyman explains the concept, “The possession of epistolary literacy meant far more than signing one’s name. Those who enjoyed it could write coherent prose and engage in accepted epistolary conventions. With practice, they were able to conduct business and construct personal relationships. Epistolary literacy was thus a valuable skill” (Pen and the People, 76), one that incorporates both the material and intellectual aspects of letter writing. Petitionary elements, furthermore, “are found in almost every kind of Renaissance letter, which works to erode distinctions between ‘domestic’ or ‘familiar’ letters and letters of petition or ‘practical’ letters. The petitionary mode was commonly used in letters from daughters (and sons) to parents, from nieces to uncles and aunts, sometimes in letters from wives to husbands, as well as in other letters where the addressee was socially superior to the writer” (Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice,” 10).
28. Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Irish Women’s Letters, 1641–1653,” in Daybell and Gordon, Women and Epistolary Agency, 167.
29. Magnusson, “Rhetoric of Requests,” 56. See also Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice,” 3–4.
30. One obstacle to studying women’s letters, Magnusson points out, “is access to texts: not that they are few, but that they are so many” (“Rhetoric of Requests,” 52).
31. Daybell, “Scripting a Female Voice,” 8, 12, 14, 15–16, 17.
32. Thorne, “Women’s Petitionary Letters,” 27. Of course, as Magnusson usefully reminds us, women’s letters “do not exist in a separate economy from men’s” (“Rhetoric of Requests,” 52). Both male and female petitioners use similar techniques—including professions of modesty, conventionally associated with femininity—and sometimes work in tandem to make their requests: wives write when their husbands cannot; husbands pass along wives’ comments; some letters are signed by both husband and wife, and so on.
33. Magnusson, “Rhetoric of Requests,” 57, 54.
34. King did support using the Irish language for preaching and otherwise converting the native Irish, a highly controversial topic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
35. Likely the place Benson names is Inishowen, in County Donegal.
36. There is only one letter from Crumy in the Lyons Collection; however, a letter from King to a woman with a slightly differently spelled last name, “Crump” (William King to Elizabeth Crump, September 14, 1704, MS 750/3/1/30, William King Outgoing Correspondence, TCD), may well indicate the same individual.
37. These are the only two letters from Berkeley in the Lyons Collection.
38. The phrase “chaplain in ordinary” designates a position held in an official capacity. James Berkeley was appointed chaplain in ordinary November 25, 1691.
39. Barnard considers the power gained and demonstrated by Bonnell and her two sisters, Katherine Conolly and Mary Jones, in their respective widowhoods. See chapter 9, “A Tale of Three Sisters: Katherine Conolly of Castletown,” of his Irish Protestant Ascents and Descents, 1641–1770 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004).
40. Intriguingly, D. W. Hayton’s entry for James Bonnell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (“Bonnell, James [1653–1699],” Oxford University Press, May 19, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2849) mistakenly claims that “William King, . . . in a somewhat proprietorial manner, proposed writing [James’s] life, but the formidable Mrs Bonnell arranged for this honour to pass instead to Archdeacon William Hamilton of Armagh.” Hamilton was a frequent correspondent of both King and Bonnell, who often refers to him as “cousin”; see, for example, her November 28, 1699, letter to King (645).
41. Of course, many early modern women actually wrote their husbands’ lives themselves, as Lucy Hutchinson famously did with The Life of John Hutchinson of Owthorpe, in the County of Nottingham, Esquire (though her text was not published until 1806). In addition to the Lyons Collection, a great deal of Bonnell’s correspondence is archived at the NLI; most important for the current purpose is MS 41,580 (letters to Bonnell within the Smythe of Barbavilla Papers), much of which correspondence regards subsequent editions of her husband’s Exemplary Life and Character.
42. There were certainly earlier letters, however, which we know because Bonnell references them in the extant material.
43. Well aware of what might be deemed her epistolary excess, Bonnell self-effacingly notes in one letter that “I will for once endeavor not to cram the peaper as full as it can hold” (673).
44. This letter is dated April 8, 1701.
45. William King to Jane Bonnell, May 10, 1715, MS 41,580/14, Smythe of Barbavilla Papers, NLI.
46. See especially 625.
47. See, for example, 675, written March 23, 1700: “I am very sensable that I trespass too much upon yu, wch is generally the falt of my sex where wee meet with incoragem[e]nt we are apt to tire out our corraspondants.”
48. In just one letter to King (631), for instance, she expresses her dissatisfaction with Rev. John Strype’s account of her husband’s last visit, which contains “a great many useless things”; the Bishop of Cork’s funeral sermon, “for wch I know he expects my thanks but I am not to good a dissembler as to give it him”; and the print for the copper plate, which “was don from a picter yt I did not think very like.”
49. For example, Bonnell wanted the volume to include James’s meditations and prayers, the sermon preached at his funeral, and evidence from letters that James’s piety in part descended from his parents.
50. William Hamilton, The Exemplary Life and Character of James Bonnell, 8th ed. (London, 1829), 68.
51. As Magnusson writes, the petitionary letter “is remarkable for its apparently limitless reiteration of the same request and for the length and extreme elaboration of the rhetoric of each request” (“Rhetoric of Requests,” 54).
52. The Bonnells had three children: sons Albert and Samuel, both of whom died before their father, and daughter Rebekah, who died at age six.
53. Hamilton, Exemplary Life, 203.
54. The latest letter in the Lyons Collection from Bonnell to King is dated March 20, 1712 (1422). However, King wrote to her as late as June 15, 1727, in which letter he acknowledged having received hers of May 27 (William King to Jane Bonnell, MS 750/8/206, William King Outgoing Correspondence, TCD).
55. In all, there are seven letters from Lovelace in the Lyons Collection, dating from sometime before 1689 (see 2300) to 1709. Letters from two male Lovelaces, Arthur and Paul, are also included in the collection; one of these men is likely the son that Lovelace occasionally refers to in her missives.
56. This is how Ka. Heylan (or Heyland), writer of two letters in the Lyons Collection, describes King in 1703.
57. The letters are listed by letter number, then date and letter writer. I have included only those letters obviously written by women; therefore, it is possible that other letters by women are included in the collection. I have also updated the dates to new style where necessary and indicated (where possible) when letters were written from somewhere other than Ireland. Women’s documents in the Lyons Collection that do not qualify as letters include 30a, the will of Mary Crooke, widow of John Crooke, printer general; 297a, the answer of Anne Boardman to a bill of complaint; 1310a, a receipt from Mary Synge, daughter of Primate Michael Boyle (d. 1702) and wife of Samuel Synge (1655–1708), dean of Kildare, for two legal documents; and 2313, a draft deed by Dorris Gay. Items listed only in this appendix (and not discussed in the text) are not included individually in the bibliography.
58. Although the date is unclear, the letter was written to King as bishop of Derry, the position he left in 1703.
59. The calendar identifies the date as March 9, but November 9 is provided in the letter itself.
60. Only these first four letters of the writer’s name are visible in the signature.
61. The calendar identifies the date as October 11.
62. In a series of five letters from Lady Mary Dillon, only one is fully dated. But, given the content of the letters, I believe this one to have been the first; the order of the others is more difficult to determine. This letter was endorsed November, 1695.
63. The year is not clear, but the calendar proposes 1699 (with a question mark), and this makes sense. Bonnell writes in the letter that her husband is gravely ill, and he died on April 28 of that year.
64. The date for this letter, which is in such poor condition that it is protected in a clear sleeve (unlike the rest of the letters in the collection) is unclear. The calendar proposes 1700 (with a question mark). It is written sometime after Bonnell’s husband died (thus after April 28, 1699) and while King was still bishop of Derry (thus before 1703).
65. This letter has been printed in King, Great Archbishop of Dublin, 93–94.
66. There are also several earlier letters in the collection written to King from Rev. Andrew Hamilton on this correspondent’s behalf, when she was still the widow Mildred Wallis and had not yet remarried.
67. All textual evidence—not least of which is the author’s seeming reference to [her]self as a “woman” when ending the letter—points to female authorship, but it is not certain because the condition of the paper allows for only the letters “oman” to be legible. The calendar also has a question mark before “Mrs.”
68. The letter was endorsed on this date.
69. The date is not clear, and the calendar provides only “[before 11 March 1703].” But we can be a little more specific, since Bonnell in the letter references one that King wrote to Andrew Hamilton, archdeacon of Raphoe, about his brother William Hamilton’s plans to write a life of James Bonnell. A letter that fits this description (Lyons Collection 937) is dated September 2, 1702.
70. The calendar identifies the date as March 23.
71. The letter was endorsed on this date.
72. Both the letter and the calendar (which usually includes both old and new style dating) date this letter as 1714. However, given its placement in the chronologically organized collection, it is probably, according to the new style, 1715.
73. The calendar attributes this letter to Lucy, rather than Susanna, Nugent. But the hand, subject matter, and signature (“S Nugent”) match Susanna’s other letters in the collection.
74. The letter was endorsed with this year.
75. Due to a tear on the bottom right-hand portion of the paper, “MAll” is all that is visible of the writer’s signature; however, she is identified as “Allen” in the calendar.
76. There is a discrepancy between the calendar, which identifies the letter writer as “Dorothy Leper,” the wife of Rev. William Leper, and the signature, which is “Dorothy fforster.” In the letter itself the writer refers to “ye last will & testament of ye said Iohn Forster.” It is also important to note that the signature does not appear to be in the same hand as the body of the letter.
77. This letter is endorsed “Mrs Butler.”
78. Based on both the calendar and the text of the letter, the addressee, whose full name is not available, is Dawson’s father.
79. This was John Trench, dean of Raphoe.
80. This and the following two letters are to Robert King, William King’s brother.
81. Although the letter is addressed to Annesley, Hamilton asks him to pass a message to King.
82. The calendar puts a question mark after the year. But 1704 makes sense, as the letter concerns Mary Lane, who encloses the letter and describes the same concerns in her own June 19, 1704, letter to King.