Private letters are amongst the most valuable, but also least well preserved sources for the historian. Dealing with events of the moment rather than of legal consequence, there was little reason to safeguard documents whose very ephemerality was shown by the medium on which they were written (paper) and their language (English). The survival of some notable collections of fifteenth-century letters, Paston, Plumpton, Cely, Stonor, and from the 1530s, the Lisle letters, should not disguise the fact that sixteenth-century letters between individuals (as opposed to letters between central government and its local lieutenants, and vice versa) are found relatively infrequently

Acknowledgements 193

Abbreviations 195

Introduction 197

Darcy Family Tree 226

Network of Galway legal families 227

An Argument, by Patrick Darcy 229

Tables of Statutes & Named Cases 310

Index 317

Written ‘to supply the defect of an ill memory’, Sir Arthur Kaye's manuscript diary is one of the few early eighteenth-century accounts of Parliamentary politics that have survived to the present day. It is also one which scholars in the field have found very useful. As Geoffrey Holmes, the doyen of early eighteenth-century British history, has put it: ‘no contemporary material illustrates more vividly the negative side of the country member's prejudices’. The Parliamentary speeches also preserved amongst Kaye's papers are less well known but in their own way are just as valuable, hence the publication of the two in conjunction.

Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, was one of the Secretaries of State in Queen Anne's Tory administration of 1710–14 which sought to bring an end to the increasingly burdensome War of the Spanish Succession. Employing somewhat dubious means, he and his ministerial colleagues eventually made peace with France by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713; a treaty which paid more attention to the interests of Great Britain than to those of her allies, the Dutch and Austrians. In seeking peace at almost any price Bolingbroke and his colleagues faced a particular problem with the former Spanish territory of the Southern Netherlands (or Flanders). The Dutch were particularly interested in this territory because they hoped to secure possession of strong fortresses there which would provide them with a secure barrier against a sudden attack by the French. The Austrians, for their part, hoped to gain this territory as part of the Emperor's inheritance of former Spanish possessions. Britain herself was concerned to serve her allies in this territory at least. She also had commercial interests in Flanders and had long sought an effective barrier to French efforts to expand into the Low Countries. These concerns were reflected in Bolingbroke's correspondence with Charles, Earl of Orrery, one of his Tory friends, who was appointed in 1711 as the Queen's envoy-extraordinary to the States General in The Hague and to the Council of Flanders in Brussels. Orrery served in this capacity for most of 1711. In late 1712 he returned to these duties and served there for a further year

This political diary forms part of the Holland House papers, which were purchased from the trustees of the fifth Earl of Ilchester in i960 and 1963 and deposited in the British library.1 J.B. Owen, author of the fullest modern account of the politics of the early 1740s, did not have access to these papers, so was unaware of the diary's existence.2 However, two other historians of the period have used it: the sixth Earl of Ilchester, who of course had good reason to be familiar with the contents of the Holland House papers, and Linda Colley.3 Neither appears to have been aware of its significance.