Beschreibung:

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 o