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Title
Date(s)
- [c. 1858-c. 1902] (Creation)
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164 pp.
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Biographical history
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).
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Bound hardback lined notebook buy Guy & Co. Stationers, Limerick, containing transcripts of letters to or concerning Edmund Sexton Pery (1719-1806), MP in the Irish House of Commons from 1751 to 1785 and three-time Speaker of the House (in 1771, 1776 and 1783). The first three pages constitute an index, which however is not fully consistent with the contents and suggests a second, now missing, volume of transcripts. The letters are not in chronological order, although a genera chronological sense in discernible in parts. The letters, written by high-profile statesmen and politicians of the day between 1749 and 1777, relate in the main to parliamentary and current affairs of the day, including political appointments, the state of the Irish revenue, the passing of various bills in the Irish House of Commons and Pery’s campaign to secure a position as Speaker in 1776. The letters also include references to the Seven Years War and, on a more personal note, to a house Pery is building. Other topics covered by the letters include the forthcoming marriage of Pery’s younger brother William to Dorothea Crump, ‘to whom I have been strongly attached for many years & whose fortune is much better than I could expect’ and who ‘is past fifty years old & therefore there is no danger of bringing me any children’ (letter no. 11); the death of Anne Drelincourt, Viscountess Primrose and the bequests to Pery and his wife in her will (no. 62); and the art of growing vines (no. 78). Brief biographical notes of the correspondents have been added to some of the transcripts in pencil in a different hand, presumably by Trifine Turner née de la Poer Monsell.
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Language of material
- English