woman.’ Later in the same month he applied to the lords justices for assistance to enable him to defend his castle and lands. His request was not acceded to, and he was soon after committed to prison on a charge of treason. After an incarceration of eighteen months he was liberated, but bound to appear for trial in the court of king's bench. Under the government of the parliament of England Dunsany and his wife were ejected from their castle and possessions, which had been decreed to ‘adventurers’ who had advanced money in London for estates in Ireland. In the acts of settlement and explanation of 1662 a clause was inserted for restoring to Dunsany his castle, with portions of the estates which he possessed in 1641. He died in 1668.
[Carte's Life of Ormonde, 1736; Carte Papers, Bodleian Library; Peerage of Ireland, 1789; Wood's Athenæ Oxon. 1813; Prendergast's Cromwellian Settlement, 1875; Gilbert's Contemporary Hist. of Affairs in Ireland, 1879, and Hist. of Confederation and War in Ireland, 1882.]
PLUNKET, THOMAS, Baron Plunket of the Holy Roman Empire (1716–1779), general in the service of Austria, a kinsman of Lord Dunsany, was born in Ireland in 1716. Entering the Austrian army, he fought in Turkey and in the war of the Spanish succession. In 1746, as a colonel and adjutant-general of the army in Italy, he much distinguished himself, and in the following year he was sent to Genoa as bearer of the imperial pardon to that republic. He went through the seven years' war. In 1757, under Daun, by capturing the obstinately defended village of Krzeszow, he greatly contributed to the victory of Kollin. The cross of the order of Maria Theresa, which conferred the title of baron, was consequently awarded him on 4 Dec. 1758. In the following year he was in command of eight Austrian regiments in Saxony (Carlyle, Frederick the Great, viii. 177). In 1763 he was nominated general. On St. Patrick's day 1766 he attended the dinner given at Vienna to men of Irish extraction by Count Demetrius O'Mahony, the Spanish ambassador [see under O'Mahony, Daniel]. In 1770 he was appointed governor of Antwerp, which post he held till his death, 20 Jan. 1779.
By his marriage with Mary D'Alton, probably a sister of Richard and Edward D'Alton, Austrian generals, he had a son, an Austrian officer, killed at the siege of Belgrade in 1789. A daughter, Mary Bridget Charlotte Josephine, born at Louvain in 1759, was educated at the English Austin nunnery, Paris, and married in 1787 the Marquis de Chastellux, who died on 26 Oct. 1788; she was subsequently lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Orleans, and died at Paris on 18 Dec. 1815. Her son Alfred (born posthumously in February 1789) became an equerry to Princess Adelaide, the sister of Louis-Philippe, was a deputy, 1832–42, and was created a peer of France in 1845.
[Hirtenfeld's Militär Maria Theresen Orden, Vienna, 1857; Annual Register, 1766, p. 60; Diary of Gouverneur Morris; Alger's Englishmen in French Revolution.]
PLUNKET, WILLIAM CONYNGHAM, first Baron Plunket (1764–1854), lord chancellor of Ireland, born at Enniskillen, co. Monaghan, on 1 July 1764, was the fourth and youngest son of Thomas Plunket, a presbyterian minister of Enniskillen, whose father also was a zealous minister of the same denomination. His mother, Mary, was daughter of Redmond Conyngham of the same town. The father, educated at Glasgow, was transferred from Enniskillen to Dublin, where he was, in 1768, appointed the colleague of the Rev. Dr. Moody in the ministry of the Strand Street Chapel. He proved an active liberal politician at Dublin, possessed of great political knowledge and conversational powers; he was a constant attendant in the gallery of the House of Commons, and a frequent adviser of the patriot members. In 1778 he died, leaving his widow ill provided for; and it was only by the support of the Strand Street congregation that she was able to bring up her children.
William Plunket attended the school of the Rev. Lewis Kerr, and became familiar with Barry Yelverton (afterwards Lord Avonmore) through a schoolboy intimacy with his son. In 1779 he matriculated in the university of Dublin, twice took the class prize, obtained a scholarship in his third year, and joined the college historical society, where, with his friends young Yelverton and Thomas Addis Emmet [q. v.], he was a frequent speaker. Fired by the example of its members, Bushe, Magee, Parsons, and Wolfe Tone—inspired, too, by the enthusiasm of the patriotic successes of 1782—he became a leading debater, was vice-president in 1783, took the medals for oratory, history, and for composition in turn, and produced an essay in defence of the Age, which the society decided to print and rewarded with a special prize. In 1784 he graduated B.A., and having kept his terms at the king's inns while at the university, he entered Lincoln's Inn, London, and began, in lodgings at Lambeth, the diligent study of law, depending on
