PRINTED FOR HIS MAJESTY'S STATIONERY OFFICE And to be purchased, either directly or through any Bookseller, from OLIVER & BOYD, EDINBURGH; or E. PONSONBY, 116, GRAFTON STREET, DUBLIN. 1906. [Cd. 3008.] Price 38. INTRODUCTION. I. MISCELLANEOUS CORRESPONDENCE, 1675-1678. IN the first section of this volume the selections from the general correspondence of the first Duke of Ormond are continued from the point at which those printed in Volume III of the present series of the Ormonde Papers terminated. It will at once be noticed that although the space occupied by this section is little less than that devoted to the corresponding section of Volume III, the period embraced by the correspondence here printed is much shorter than that covered by the earlier volume. This disparity is due to two circumstances. In the first place, to the entrance of the Duke of Ormond, in 1677, on his third and last tenure of the office of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and his consequent resumption of residence in Dublin and of direct concern with public affairs in Ireland; in the second, to the fact that the final period of Ormond's public activity attracted, as was natural, a comparatively slender share of his biographer's attention, with the result that the correspondence preserved at Kilkenny between the years 1677 and 1685 has suffered less than any other portion of the Duke's papers from Carte's liberal interpretation of the licence given him for the purposes of his book.* Of the great mass of the Ormond papers which found their way to Oxford, only those volumes of the Carte collection numbered 38, 39, 40, 45, 47, 50, 52, 53, 54, 216 and 217 relate to this period; and a large portion of their contents are duplicate drafts or contemporary office copies of the documents still at Kilkenny.† The eighth and last book of Carte's Life of Ormond, which embraces the years from 1677 to the Duke's death in 1688, is, accordingly, much the shortest of the whole work; and this for obvious reasons. It deals with a period which, by comparison at least with the two earlier of Ormond's Viceregal terms, was one of civil peace and social calm. Irish affairs, which See the Preface to Carte's Life of Ormond, and see also the Introductions to Vols. II and III of the present series. + See Russell and Prendergast's Report on the Carte Papers at the Bodleian Library. Oxford (Thirty-second Report of the Deputy-Keeper of the Public Record Office, Appendix I). |