Peter Walsh

Irish Franciscan, born at Mooretown, County Kildare, about 1608; died in London, 15 March, 1688. Educated and ordained in the celebrated Irish College of St. Anthony at Louvain, he was later appointed to the convent of his order at Kilkenny, where he warmly supported the Ormondist party in the confederation then assembled in that city. He was made guardian by the triumphant Ormondists in 1648; took a leading part in the agitation against the validity of the censures fulminated by the nuncio, Rinuccini; acted as chaplain to the Munster army till its final defeat by the Parliamentary forces; led a precarious existence in England and on the Continent till 1660 when the Restoration saw him back in London and high in the favour of the evil genius of the Confederates, the all-powerful Ormonde. He was appointed their accredited London agent by the few surviving Irish bishops in 1661. He introduced and tried to have accepted by the Irish clergy and people the famous "Remonstrance" which distracted the country for the next half-dozen years; took a prominent part in a meeting of the bishops and clergy which, with Ormonde's consent, he had assembled in Dublin in June, 1666, to discuss the Remonstrance; but despite all his efforts he was unable to induce or force the meeting to sign a document which the great majority regarded as disrespectful to the Holy See, if not actually in conflict with Catholic teaching on the supremacy of the pope. Breaking definitively with the ecclesiastical authorities, he put himself at the head of a party consisting of a few of the clergy and several laymen, who were known as the Valesians and Valesian heretics, and who were a source of considerable anxiety to the bishops for some time; but the fall of Ormonde in 1669 deprived them of their mainstay, and they declined so rapidly that Oliver Plunket, writing to Propaganda in 1671, was able to report that hardly a