FRENCH, Nicholas. The Vnkinde Desertor of Loyall Men and True Frinds. ONE OF IRELAND’S GREAT RARITIES

[Paris]: Superiorum Permissu, 1676. pp. [25], 22-445, [1]. [i.e. 270]. Bound in full 19th century straight-grained green morocco, title, author and year in gilt direct on spine. Armorial bookplate of Henry Robert Westenra on front pastedown. All edges gilt. A fine copy. Of the utmost rarity.
COPAC with 4 locations only. No copy of the first edition located on COPAC. Wing F2183. Sweeney 2022 refers to this as extremely rare. The 1st and only Wing printing.
Shane Leslie in his Rosenbach lecture attributed the great rarity of this work to it being “a tirade so bitter against Ormonde that the Butler family bought up and destroyed this libel against their head.” Copies of what Ware termed “the calumnies of this foul mouthed author” evoked wild competition amongst 19th-century Irish collectors when it fetched prices higher than those being paid for good copies of the Shakspeare 4th Folio. It had a major literary and historical sequel prompting the earl of Clarendon to write his History of the Rebellion and Civil War in Ireland in which he justifies the various actions taken by the duke.
Nicholas French (1604-1678), bishop of Ferns, was born in Wexford and trained for the priesthood at the Irish College in Louvain. Following his ordination he returned to Wexford as parish priest. During the rebellion he was “a violent enemy of the king’s authority, and a fatal instrument in contriving and fomenting all the divisions which had distracted and rent the kingdom asunder”. He took an active share in the deliberations of the first Supreme Council of the Confederates, and was a bitter opponent of the Marquis of Ormonde.
After the Restoration, a long correspondence ensued between him and Fr. Walsh on behalf of Ormonde, relative to his return to Ireland, which ended in 1665, with the following words: “Seeing that I cannot satisfy my conscience and the Duke together, nor become profitable to my flock at home, nor live quietly and secure, his anger not being appeased, you may know hereby that I am resolved after dog-days to go to Louvain, and there end my days where I began my studies”.
He busied himself in writing a number of political tracts: A Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon’s Settlement and Sale of Ireland (1668); The Bleeding Iphigenia (1674); and an attack on Ormond, The Unkinde Desertor or Loyall Men and True Frinds (1676). All three were published in Louvain or Paris and were reprinted and published by Duffy in 1846 and 1848.
Provenance: From the library of Lord Rossmore. Henry Robert Westenra, 3rd Baron Rossmore (1792-1860), was an Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament and peer, from 1843 to 1852 Lord Lieutenant of Monaghan. The eldest son of Warner Westenra, 2nd Baron Rossmore by his first marriage to Mary Ann Walsh, Henry Robert Westenra was born on at his mother’s family seat, Walsh Park in County Tipperary. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he matriculated on 4 July 1810. His portrait was painted the same year by John Ferneley (1782-1860), showing him with his dogs and carrying a shotgun. Westenra was Member of Parliament for County Monaghan from 1818 to 1830, again from 1831 to 1832 and from May to July 1834, and finally from 1835 to 1842. On 10 August 1842, on the death of his father, he succeeded as the 3rd Baron Rossmore, of Monaghan in the County of Monaghan, in the Peerage of Ireland, and as the 2nd Baron Rossmore, of the County of Monaghan, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, the second title giving him a seat in the House of Lords. From 1843 to 1852 he was Lord Lieutenant of County Monaghan. A member of a family of individualists, Rossmore was a prolific letter-writer, and his surviving letters have been described as “voluminous, frequently vitriolic, and very instructive”.
He was also an accomplished player of the Irish Uilleann pipes, and was considered to be the equal of a good professional piper. In Twenty Years Recollections of an Irish Police Magistrate (1880), Frank Thorpe Porter recalled an evening when Rossmore “ ... played several pieces of exquisitely sweet music, interspersed with the most extraordinary imitations. In one, which was named The hare in the Corn, he produced sounds very much resembling the cry of the harriers, and other tones like the notes of a hunting horn, terminating with two or three simulated squeaks, supposed to indicate the capture of the hare”. In 1820 he married in Edinburgh, Anne Douglas-Hamilton, the daughter of Douglas Hamilton, 8th Duke of Hamilton (1756–1799), and Harriet Pye Bennett. In right of this wife Rossmore inherited an estate on the Scottish Isle of Arran.
In 1846, after the death of his first wife, Rossmore married secondly at Camla Vale, County Monaghan, his cousin Josephine Julia Helen (née Lloyd), with whom he had six children.

[Cat 157]