Item 8 - Letter from Thomas Monsell to ‘Sam’

The Monsells, of French extraction, were a plantation family from Dorsetshire, England, who had settled in Tervoe, county Limerick by the 1660s. Many of the early members of the family were prosperous merchants and landowners, most notably Samuel Monsell (d. 1735), a shipping merchant whose business extended from Ireland to England, France, Holland and Spain. Of his several sons, the eldest, William (1705-1772) became a lawyer. His second marriage in 1751 to Dymphna Pery (d. 1774), sister of Edmond Sexton Pery, MP and three-time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, gave the Monsells not only a distinguished pedigree but considerable political influence. Their son, Colonel William Thomas Monsell (1754-1836), married Hannah Strettell of Dublin, whose father Amos Strettell was director of the Bank of Ireland. Their younger son, Thomas, became Archdeacon of Derry and was father to the noted hymnologist John Samuel Bewley Monsell and to the celebrated botanical artist Diana Conyngham Ellis née Monsell. Colonel Monsell’s elder son, William, was grandfather to and namesake of the distinguished politician William Monsell (1812-1894). His first wife, Anna Maria Wyndham Quin (1814-1855), whom he married in 1836, was daughter of the second Earl of Dunraven of Adare Manor, county Limerick, then one of the wealthiest men in Ireland. William Monsell was created 1st Baron Emly of Tervoe in 1874. The title became extinct on the death of his only surviving son, Thomas William Gaston Monsell (1858-1932), from his second marriage to Berthe de Montigny Boulainvilliers (d. 1890).