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II.
It is possibly to romance rather than religion that we are indebted for another false imprint on a Dublin-printed book, The Vindication of an Injured Lady, Written by the Lady Francesca Maria Lucretia Plunkett, One of the Ladies of the Privy Chamber to the Queen-Mother of England, the imprint of which is given as "London, Printed in the Year, M.DC.LXVII." Copies are to be found at the Bodleian and at Trinity College, Dublin. Ostensibly a defense by Lady Plunkett of her moral character, the work is not quite what it appears to be. According to Walter Harris's account of Dudley Loftus in his edition of Sir James Ware's The Writers of Ireland, the Vindication is from the pen of
The attribution to Loftus is a plausible one. From what is known of his character it is quite the sort of thing he would do. A scholar with a knowledge of a score of languages, including Armenian and Ethiopic, he was notorious also for his "levity" and "want of good sense." If the Lady Plunkett existed at all—and I have not been able to verify her actual existence—Loftus was quite capable, as he has done here, of transforming her into a lady of Italian birth, sprinkling her speech with Italian phrases, and attaching her to the Queen Mother.
The use of a London imprint carries out this elaborate conceit, but the Vindication was undoubtedly printed in Dublin. This conclusion is supported by the use of a decorative initial "T", embodying a boy astride a swan, used by the King's Printing-House and also found in Titus Oates's A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot printed by Benjamin Tooke and John Crook in 1679, and also used elsewhere.
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