1667. This same year his naval accounts were subjected to an examination in consequence of his indignant refusal to take part in the attack upon Ormonde;[1] and he was suspended from his office in 1668, no charge, however, against him being substantiated. He took a prominent part in the dispute in 1671 between the two Houses concerning the right of the Lords to amend money bills, and wrote a learned pamphlet on the question entitled The Privileges of the House of Lords and Commons (1702), in which the right of the Lords was asserted. In April 1673 he was appointed lord privy seal, and was disappointed at not obtaining the great seal the same year on the removal of Shaftesbury. In 1679 he was included in Sir W. Temple’s new-modelled council.
In the bitter religious controversies of the time Anglesey showed great moderation and toleration. In 1674 he is mentioned as endeavouring to prevent the justices putting into force the laws against the Roman Catholics and Nonconformists.[2] In the panic of the “Popish Plot” in 1678 he exhibited a saner judgment than most of his contemporaries and a conspicuous courage. On the 6th of December he protested with three other peers against the measure sent up from the Commons enforcing the disarming of all convicted recusants and taking bail from them to keep the peace; he was the only peer to dissent from the motion declaring the existence of an Irish plot; and though believing in the guilt and voting for the death of Lord Stafford, he interceded, according to his own account,[3] with the king for him as well as for Langhorne and Plunket. His independent attitude drew upon him an attack by Dangerfield, and in the Commons by the attorney-general, Sir W. Jones, who accused him of endeavouring to stifle the evidence against the Romanists. In March 1679 he protested against the second reading of the bill for disabling Danby. In 1681 Anglesey wrote A Letter from a Person of Honour in the Country, as a rejoinder to the earl of Castlehaven, who had published memoirs on the Irish rebellion defending the action of the Irish and the Roman Catholics. In so doing Anglesey was held by Ormonde to have censured his conduct and that of Charles I. in concluding the “Cessation,” and the duke brought the matter before the council. In 1682 he wrote The Account of Arthur, Earl of Anglesey . . . of the true state of Your Majesty’s Government and Kingdom, which was addressed to the king in a tone of censure and remonstrance, but appears not to have been printed till 1694.[4] In consequence he was dismissed on the 9th of August 1682 from the office of lord privy seal. In 1683 he appeared at the Old Bailey as a witness in defence of Lord Russell, and in June 1685 he protested alone against the revision of Stafford’s attainder. He died at his home at Blechingdon in Oxfordshire on the 26th of April 1686, closing a career marked by great ability, statesmanship and business capacity, and by conspicuous courage and independence of judgment. He amassed a large fortune in Ireland, in which country he had been allotted lands by Cromwell.
The unfavourable character drawn of him by Burnet is certainly unjust and not supported by any evidence. Pepys, a far more trustworthy judge, speaks of him invariably in terms of respect and approval as a “grave, serious man,” and commends his appointment as treasurer of the navy as that of “a very notable man and understanding and will do things regular and understand them himself.”[5] He was a learned and cultivated man and collected a celebrated library, which was dispersed at his death. Besides the pamphlets already mentioned, he wrote:—A True Account of the Whole Proceedings betwixt . . . the Duke of Ormond and . . . the Earl of Anglesey (1682); A Letter of Remarks upon Jovian (1683); other works ascribed to him being The King’s Right of Indulgence in Matters Spiritual . . . asserted (1688); Truth Unveiled, to which is added a short Treatise on . . . Transubstantiation (1676); The Obligation resulting from the Oath of Supremacy (1688); and England’s Confusion (1659). Memoirs of Lord Anglesey were published by Sir P. Pett in 1693, but contain little biographical information and were repudiated as a mere imposture by Sir John Thompson (Lord Haversham), his son-in-law, in his preface to Lord Anglesey’s State of the Government in 1694. The author however of the preface to The Rights of the Lords asserted (1702), while blaming their publication as “scattered and unfinished papers,” admits their genuineness.
Lord Anglesey married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heiress of Sir James Altham of Oxey, Hertfordshire, by whom, besides other children, he had James, who succeeded him, Altham, created Baron Altham, and Richard, afterwards 3rd Baron Altham. His descendant Richard, the 6th earl (d. 1761), left a son Arthur, whose legitimacy was doubted, and the peerage became extinct. He was summoned to the Irish House of Peers as Viscount Valentia, but was denied his writ to the parliament of Great Britain by a majority of one vote. He was created in 1793 earl of Mountnorris in the peerage of Ireland. All the male descendants of the 1st earl of Anglesey became extinct in the person of George, 2nd earl of Mountnorris, in 1844, when the titles of Viscount Valentia and Baron Mountnorris passed to his cousin Arthur Annesley (1785–1863), who thus became 10th Viscount Valentia, being descended from the 1st Viscount Valentia, the father of the 1st earl of Anglesey in the Annesley family. The 1st viscount was also the ancestor of the Earls Annesley in the Irish peerage.
Authorities.—Dict. of Nat. Biography, with authorities there collected; lives in Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses (Bliss), iv. 181, Biographia Britannica, and H. Walpo1e’s Royal and Noble Authors (1806), iii. 288 (the latter a very inadequate review of Anglesey’s character and career); also Bibliotheca Anglesiana . . . per Thomam Philippum (1686); The Happy Future State of England, by Sir Peter Pett (1688); Great News from Poland (1683), where his religious tolerance is ridiculed; Somers Tracts (Scott, 1812), viii. 344; Notes of the Privy Council (Roxburghe Club, 1896); Cal. of State Papers, Dom.; State Trials, viii. and ix. 619.
(P. C. Y.)
ANGLESEY, HENRY WILLIAM PAGET, 1st Marquess of (1768–1854), British field-marshal, was born on the 17th of May 1768. He was the eldest son of Henry Paget, 1st earl of Uxbridge (d. 1812), and was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, afterwards entering parliament in 1790 as member for Carnarvon, for which he sat for six years. At the outbreak of the French Revolutionary wars Lord Paget (as he was then styled), who had already served in the militia, raised on his father’s estate the regiment of Staffordshire volunteers, in which he was given the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel (1793). The corps soon became part of the regular army as the 80th Foot, and it took part, under Lord Paget’s command, in the Flanders campaign of 1794. In spite of his youth he held a brigade command for a time, and gained also, during the campaign, his first experience of the cavalry arm, with which he was thenceforward associated. His substantive commission as lieutenant-colonel of the 16th Light Dragoons bore the date of the 15th of June 1795, and in 1796 he was made a colonel in the army. In 1795 he married Lady Caroline Elizabeth Villiers, daughter of the earl of Jersey. In April 1797 Lord Paget was transferred to a lieut.-colonelcy in the 7th Light Dragoons, of which regiment he became colonel in 1801. From the first he applied himself strenuously to the improvement of discipline, and to the perfection of a new system of cavalry evolutions. In the short campaign of 1799 in Holland, Paget commanded the cavalry brigade, and in spite of the unsuitable character of the ground, he made, on several occasions, brilliant and successful charges. After the return of the expedition, he devoted himself zealously to his regiment, which under his command became one of the best corps in the service. In 1802 he was promoted major-general, and six years later lieutenant-general. In command of the cavalry of Sir John Moore’s army during the Corunna campaign, Lord Paget won the greatest distinction. At Sahagun, Mayorga and Benavente, the British cavalry behaved so well under his leadership that Moore wrote:—“It is impossible for me to say too much in its praise. . . . Our cavalry is very superior in quality to any the French have, and
