A RARE QUEEN ANNE PERIOD DUBLIN CITY MILITIA COMMISSION WARRANT. Appointing Isaac Wills a 2nd Lieutenant in the Dublin City Militia, signed at top centre by Narcissus Armagh and Richard Cox and at...

A RARE QUEEN ANNE PERIOD DUBLIN CITY MILITIA COMMISSION WARRANT. Appointing Isaac Wills a 2nd Lieutenant in the Dublin City Militia, signed at top centre by Narcissus Armagh and Richard Cox and at bottom by Joshua Dawson, dated 28th April 1707. This is the earliest Dublin City Militia Warrant that the cataloguer is aware of. The regiment was raised in 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy, with a view to providing the city of Dublin with a defence against the threat of a Parliamentary resurgence. More commonly known as the City Guards, it had a sister regiment which was raised for service in the county of Dublin. Narcissus Armagh would be better known by his secular name, Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713). Appointed Provost Trinity College, in 1678, Marsh became Primate of Armagh in 1703. Best remember today for the library that he built close by St Patrick's Cathedral, Marsh's Library, the oldest public library in Ireland, and one of the few 18th century buildings in Dublin that still serves its original purpose. Marsh served as one of the Lords Justice, officers who acted as governors in the absence of the Lord Lieutenant, on six occasions between 1799 and 1711. Sir Richard Cox, 1st Baronet (1650-1733) was born at Bandon, Co. Cork, 25th March 1650, the only child of Captain Sir Richard Cox, an officer who had served in the Royalist army during the Confederate wars. An early supporter of the Williamite cause, he fled Ireland in 1687, under threat from Tyrconnel. When William III arrived in England, Cox was quick to press the case for immediate and substantial intervention in Ireland, and accompanied the king to Ireland as one of his secretaries. In 1691 he was appointed Governor of the City and County of Cork, where he presided over a brutal local war, using a greatly expanded militia to campaign along an 80 mile frontier and suppress Jacobite irregulars operating on the borders of his territory. By his own account, his men ''killed and hanged not less than 3,000 of them''. As a reward, Cox was admitted to the Privy Council and knighted on 5th November 1692. Now a leading Tory, he became closely associated with James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormond, a connection that brought him high office. He was sworn in as Lord Chancellor of Ireland on 6th August 1703 and served as a Lord Justice, 1705-7, being created a baronet in 1706. When the Duke of Ormond was replaced as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland on 29th April 1707, Cox fell with him, being removed from the Lord Chancellorship. During his later years Cox was censured by the House of Commons for the role he played in a number of political trials, in particular for the action taken against Dublin Corporation, when it refused to accept a Tory mayor. Though he spent his life battling opponents, Cox was always optimistic that they might eventually see the error of their ways. In 1698 he had produced his ''Essay for the Conversion of the Irish'' in which he argued that the Gaelic Irish were in fact of the same ethnic origin as the people of Great Britain, and praised the virtues that they might display once liberated from popery (current research indicates that Cox was spot on so far as the former observation was concerned, recent DNA profiling of the peoples of Great Britain and Ireland indicating that they have a common ethnic origin, waves of migration from the northern Iberian peninsula during the period circa 10,000 b.c., see Stephen Oppenheimer's ''Origins of the British People'', Constable & Robinson, 2006). Joshua Dawson, civil servant and politician, used his inside knowledge of plans with regard to the future development of the city of Dublin, in what must be the earliest example of planning corruption in Dublin, to amass a fortune. In 1705 he capitalised on his early knowledge of plans to develop the city eastwards from its medieval core, with the timely purchase of a plot of poor land to the east of Grafton St, land that had been described on a map of 1685 as being ''a piece of marshy land without even a bare lane crossing it''. By 1707, the year in which this commission warrant was signed, he had laid out a wide straight road parallel to Grafton Street, which he modestly named Dawson Street. By 1709 he was issuing leases for the construction of houses along the street, and eventually set about building a grand house which he planned to occupy himself. At the time Dawson St was considered the finest street in Dublin. A committee set up in 1714 to organise the building a house for the Lord Mayor of Dublin instead recommended that the house built by Dawson for his own use, but as yet unoccupied, be acquired instead. The house was purchased in 1715 for £3,500, subject to an annual ground rent of 40 shillings and a loaf of double refined sugar each Christmas, and since that date has been the residence of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Dawson signed this commission warrant in his capacity as Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. He became Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1710 and established the State Paper Office in Dublin. This document is particularly interesting, not just for its rarity, or for the signatures that it bears, but more particularly for the signature that is missing from it. Normally commission warrants of this period would be signed at the top centre by the serving Lord Lieutenant. On 28th April 1707 the Lord Lieutenant was James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormond. Ormond had been appointed Lord Lieutenant in February 1703, the first Irish Viceroy since the overthrow of James II, and perhaps the most controversial holder of that office. At heart Ormond was a Jacobite sympathiser, despite having accepted the accession of William III. Ultimately, his high Tory attitudes upset the government of the day and he was manoeuvred out of office in the spring of 1707, his term ending on the day after this document was signed, 29th April 1707. Ormond absented himself, and was not in Dublin to carry out his official duties when this document was presented, on 28th April 1707, Narcissus Armagh and Richard Cox signing the warrant in their capacity as Lords Justices, and deputising for the absent Ormond. By 1713 Ormond was in regular contact with the exiled Jacobite court, and was impeached for high treason in 1715, subsequently fleeing to Paris. On the continent he conspired in succession with the kings of France, Spain, Sweden and Russia, attempting to organise invasions in support of risings in England and Ireland (the Spanish invasion to have been led by former Irish officers of James II's army). He was in France in 1744 to assist Prince Charles Edward in his invasion of Scotland, but fell ill and died at Avignon on 16th November 1745. The officer whose name appears on this warrant, Isaac Wills, was the master carpenter and architect responsible for the design and construction of a number of churches in Dublin during the early part of the 18th century. Josua Dawson was a benefactor in later life, one of the churches that Wills worked on, St Ann's on Dawson Street, being built on a substantial plot of land donated for that purpose by Joshua Dawson. Wills is not listed in the 1738 Dublin Directory, the earliest date available to the cataloguer, and so presumably had left Dublin or died by that year.

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