Sir Piers Crosby, 1590–1646: Wentworth’s ‘tawney ribbon’

Abstract

Sir Piers Crosby, knight and baronet, lived for fifty-six years, but it is not perhaps too much to say that only a single day in that life has brought him to historical notice. That day was 28 November 1634. On the previous afternoon, Lord Deputy Wentworth had informed a joint meeting of the two houses of the Irish parliament that his government was not prepared to honour the promise which King Charles I had given to landed proprietors in Ireland six years earlier and would not permit the passage of acts relinquishing historic royal claims to Irish land. When the commons met on 28 November, a majority of the members vented their anger and disappointment by defeating an entirely uncontroversial government bill. Prominent among that majority, their ringleader if Wentworth is to be believed, was a renegade privy councillor, Sir Piers Crosby. That Wentworth’s account of what happened was seriously misleading is well established, and I have examined it elsewhere as an illustration of the proposition that one of Wentworth’s major achievements was to impose his version of the events of his deputyship upon generations of historians, approving and disapproving alike. His influence similarly colours historical impressions of the people with whom he dealt, and the purpose of this paper is to suggest the interpretative difficulties to which that may give rise by reconstructing the shape of the career of one individual who suffered the dual misfortune of crossing Wentworth’s path and being remembered only by what Wentworth wrote of him.

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