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 Annesley ; he felt it necessary, as he confessed two years later, to remove Mountnorris from office, and this was the most effective means he could take. Hume attempts to extenuate Strafford's conduct, but Hallam condemns the vindictive bitterness he here exhibited in strong terms; and although Mr. S. R. Gardiner has shown that law was technically on Wentworth's side, and his intention was merely to terrify Mountnorris, Hallam's verdict seems substantially just. In the result Mountnorris, after three days' imprisonment, was promised his freedom if he would admit the justice of the sentence, but this he refused to do. On the report of the privy council's committee of inquiry he was stripped of all his offices, but on 13 Feb. 1635-6 a petition to Strafford from Lady Mountnorris, which was never answered, proves that he was still in prison. Later in the year Lady Mountnorris petitioned the king to permit her husband to return to England, and the request was granted.

The rest of Mountnorris's life was passed in attempts to regain his lost offices. On 11 May 1641 he wrote to Strafford enumerating the wrongs he had done him, and desiring, in behalf of wife and children, a reconciliation with himself, and his aid in regaining the king's favour. But other agencies had already been set at work in his behalf. A committee of the Long parliament had begun at the close of 1640 to examine his relations with Strafford, and on 9 Sept. 1641 a vote of the commons declared his sentence, imprisonment, and deprivations unjust and illegal. The declaration was sent up to the lords, who made several orders between October and December 1641 for the attendance before them of witnesses to enable them to judge the questions at issue; but their final decision is not recorded in their journals. In 1642 Mountnorris succeeded to the viscounty of Valentia on Sir Henry Power's death. In 1643 the House of Commons granted him permission, after much delay, to go to Duncannon in Ireland. In 1646 he was for some time in London, but he lived, when not in Ireland, on an estate near his birth-place, at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, which had been sold to him by Charles I in 1627. In 1648 parliament restored him to the office of clerk of the signet in Ireland, and made him a grant of 500l. Later he appears to have lived on friendly terms with Henry Cromwell, the lord deputy of Ireland during the protectorate, and to have secured the office of secretary of state at Dublin. In November 1656 he proposed to the English government that he should resign these posts to his son Arthur (Rawl. MSS., A. 44, f. 120; A. 57, f. 263). Henry Cromwell, writing to General Fleetwood (4 Feb. 1657-8), urges him to aid in carrying out this arrangement, and speaks in high terms of father and son ('s State Papers, vi. 777). Lord Mountnorris died in 1660.

Lord Mountnorris married Dorothy, daughter of Sir John Phillipps, Bart., of Picton Castle, Pembrokeshire, who died 3 May 1624. By her he had three sons, of whom Arthur, the eldest, became later Lord Annesley and Earl of Anglesey [see Annesley, Arthur (DNB00)].

 ANNESLEY, JAMES (1715–1760), claimant, was born in 1715, and was the son of Lord Altham, according to one account, by his wife Mary Sheffield, natural daughter of the Duke of Buckingham, or, according to another, by a woman called Juggy Landy. Lord Altham, grandson of Arthur, the first Earl of Anglesey, was a dissolute spendthrift. He was married in 1706, quarrelled with his wife, was reconciled to her in 1713, and lived with her for some time at his house at Dunmaine, co. Wexford. During their cohabitation the child was born. In 1716 they were again separated; the child remained with the father, and was said to have been treated for a time like a legitimate heir. About 1722 Lord Altham fell under the influence of a mistress, named Gregory. Lady Altham returned to England in 1723, having for some time suffered from paralysis, and lingered in London till her death in October 1729. Meanwhile the mistress (it is suggested) alienated the father's affections by persuading him that the boy was not his own son. The lad was left to himself, rambled to different places during two years previously to his father's death (16 Nov. 1727), and was at one time protected by a butcher named Purcell. Lord Altham was succeeded by his brother Richard, afterwards Earl of Anglesey, in spite of the reports as to the existence of a legitimate son. In order to make things pleasant, the uncle attempted to kidnap the nephew, and succeeded, about four months after the father's death, in having him sent to America and sold for a common slave. The boy remained there till the term of his slavery was out; at the end of 1740