Lord Tyrawly in Lisbon

As the late Sir Richard Lodge observed in a perceptive essay on the vicissitudes of the English Factory at Lisbon, Lord Tyrawly’s dispatches from the Portuguese capital make exceptionally good reading. He had none of the caution of a normal diplomatist, and he wielded a singularly pungent and racy pen. Apart from this, he was an interesting personality in his own right.

A typical member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ‘establishment’, he was bitterly anti-Roman Catholic, despite his Celtic patronymic and remote origins. Moreover, he had an active military and a diplomatic career which between them spanned the War of the Spanish Succession and the Seven Years War, and brought him to the courts of Portugal and Russia when they were both at the height of their somewhat garish and exotic glory.