The Westropps: Attyflin, Askeaton and the Archbishop

In 1657, the same year Vere Hunt settled at Curragh, another of this family's ancestors arrived in the same county: Mountiford Westropp, son of Thomas Westropp of Cornborough in Yorkshire, settled at Limerick, became Comptroller of the port in 1660, and served twice as High Sheriff of Clare. Two Cromwellian arrivals, one county, one year; their descendants married five generations later, neither family knowing they had landed together. In 1690 the government of James II confiscated his horses and arms, which tells you which way he faced; he died in 1698.

His wife carried the deepest connection this side of the family owns. Frances Taylor was the second daughter of John Taylor of Ballinort by Gertrude Berkeley, daughter and heiress of Sir Francis Berkeley of Askeaton: born at Bruton in Somerset about 1555, a son of Sir Maurice Berkeley the royal standard-bearer by Catherine Blount, daughter of that Baron Mountjoy who was Erasmus's patron, and thereby a cadet of the great house of Berkeley Castle. Sir Francis was knighted at Askeaton in 1599 and died in the castle there in 1615. The 1623 Visitation of Somerset, photographed this month, shows him on the page in his father's pedigree: primary-level confirmation of the rung.

And Sir Francis's wife was Catherine Loftus, daughter of Adam Loftus, Archbishop of Dublin, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, first Provost of Trinity College Dublin, builder of Rathfarnham Castle. He had sixteen children and half of Protestant Ireland descends from them; this family does so twice over, for his colleague and successor-in-kind appears in the Piers chapter. A collateral line of his runs to the Duke of Wellington, which the family is under no obligation to mention and never fails to.

Mountiford's son, Mountiford Westropp the second, purchased Attyflin in county Limerick in 1703, the very season the Joneses were settling at Drombeg. His fourth daughter Jane Westropp married in 1726 a Browne of Newgrove in Clare, and here the record does something this site respects: it disagrees with itself. The Hunt-side pedigrees call her husband Edmond; the Westropps' own pedigree says Thomas. Same marriage, same place, same wife, two forenames, and no surviving bond index to break the tie. Both names are recorded, neither silently preferred. Their daughter Anne Browne married Vere Hunt in 1760, and the ladders join.

A small inheritance travelled down the women of this line: the name Gertrude, entering with the Berkeley heiress and cascading through Taylor and Westropp cousins for a century, a forename doing the work of a surname.