Anne Sarsfield, Viscountess Sarsfield was an Irish aristocrat of the 16th and 17th centuries. She was born Anne Bagenal, and should not be confused with her niece Anne Bagenal the daughter of her brother Henry.
She was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Bagenal, an English-born adventurer who had fled to Ireland following accusations of murder in his native Staffordshire. He received the patronage of the Gaelic lord Conn O'Neill, 1st Earl of Tyrone and established himself in Newry. Her mother was a Welsh woman Eleanor Griffith. [1] Amongst her siblings were Sir Henry Bagenal, the Marshal of Ireland, and Mabel Bagenal, the wife of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone whose forces killed Sir Henry at the 1598 Battle of the Yellow Ford during Tyrone's Rebellion.
Sir Nicholas Bagenal or Bagenall or Bagnall was an English-born soldier and politician who became Marshal of the Army in Ireland during the Tudor era.
Staffordshire is a landlocked county in the West Midlands of England. It borders with Cheshire to the northwest, Derbyshire and Leicestershire to the east, Warwickshire to the southeast, West Midlands and Worcestershire to the south, and Shropshire to the west.
The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group native to northwestern Europe. They are associated with the Gaelic languages: a branch of the Celtic languages comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. Historically, the ethnonyms Irish and Scots referred to the Gaels in general, but the scope of those nationalities is today more complex.
Anne's first marriage was to Sir Dudley Loftus, the eldest son of Adam Loftus, the Archbishop of Dublin a leading figure in the Church of Ireland who also held political office in the Irish Government. Such dynastic alliances were typical of the newly established Protestant landed families of Ireland. She had five children with him including Sir Adam Loftus and Nicholas Loftus.
Sir Dudley Loftus (1561-1616) was an Irish landowner and politician of the 16th and early seventeenth century.
Adam Loftus was Archbishop of Armagh, and later Dublin, and Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1581. He was also the first Provost of Trinity College, Dublin.
The Archbishop of Dublin is a senior bishop in the Church of Ireland, second only to the Archbishop of Armagh. The archbishop is the diocesan bishop of the United Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough and the metropolitan bishop of the Province of Dublin, which covers the southern half of Ireland, and he is styled Primate of Ireland.
After his death in 1616 she remarried to Dominick Sarsfield, 1st Viscount Sarsfield a leading member of the Irish judiciary, who became Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas. Sarsfield was descended from an Old English family with strong Catholic links. He was a man of great strength of character, but as a judge became so notorious for corruption that he was finally removed from office in 1633. Although Dominick had conformed to Protestantism, his son and successor William Sarsfield, 2nd Viscount Sarsfield ( the son of his first wife Joan Terry), was to become a Catholic.
Dominick Sarsfield, 1st Viscount Sarsfield of Kilmallock was an Irish peer and judge who became Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas, but was removed from office for corruption and died in disgrace.
