Castlehaven, neglected for more than a century, has received more justice at the hands of later historians. He is frequently referred to by Lingard, and his work will be found an admirable commentary on Carte’s _Life of Ormond_. There is a notice of him in Horace Walpole’s _Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors_ (vol. iii.)
“If this lord,” says Walpole, “who led a very martial life, had not taken the pains to record his own actions (which, however, he has done with great frankness and ingenuity), we should know little of his story, our historians scarce mentioning him, and even our writers of anecdotes, as Burnet, or of tales and circumstances, as Roger North, not giving any account of a court quarrel occasioned by his lordship’s _Memoirs_. Anthony Wood alone has preserved this event, but has not made it intelligible. … The earl had been much censured for his share in the Irish Rebellion, and wrote the _Memoirs_ to explain his conduct rather than to excuse it; for he freely confesses his faults, and imputes them to provocations from the government of that kingdom, to whose rashness and cruelty, conjointly with the votes and resolutions of the English Parliament, he ascribes the massacre. There are no dates nor method, and less style, in these _Memoirs_--defects atoned for in some measure by a martial honesty. Soon after their publication the Earl of Anglesey wrote to ask a copy. Lord Castlehaven sent him one, but denying the work as his. Anglesey, who had been a commissioner in Ireland for the Parliament, published Castlehaven’s letter, with observations and reflections very abusive of the Duke of Ormond, which occasioned first a printed controversy, and this a trial before the Privy Council; the event of which was that Anglesey’s first letter was voted a scandalous libel, and himself removed from the custody of the Privy Seal; and that the Earl of Castlehaven’s _Memoirs_, on which he was several times examined, and which he owned, was declared a scandalous libel on the government--a censure that seems very little founded; there is not a word that can authorize that sentence from the Council of Charles II. but the imputation on the lords-justices of Charles I.; for I suppose the Privy Council did not pique themselves on vindicating the honor of the republican Parliament! Bishop Morley wrote _A True Account of the Whole Proceeding between James, Duke of Ormond, and Arthur, Earl of Anglesey_.”