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Life
?1560-1625; son of Waterford merchant, related to Luke Wadding; ed. Westminster School under Camden; Oxon.; Louvain, Arts, 1575; ord. 1594; Provost of Cambrian Cathedral, 1594; sent to Rome, where he acted as agent for his university, and also leading adviser on Irish afffairs to the Vatican, and a chief supporter of Hugh O’Neill, contrary to the anti-rebellion policy of other members of the Old English in Rome; had O’Neill appt. captain-gen. of Catholic army in Ireland; saw to appt. of Mateo de Oviedo as archbishop of Dublin; issued De regno Hibernicae commentarius written in 1600 in defence of a Catholic war in order to secure support of Pope Clement VIII for O’Neill, portraying it as a war in defence of Catholic faith; published posthumously, 1632;
appointed titular Archb. of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, 1601-25 [succeeding Edmund MacGaura], received pall, 14 Dec. 1601; retained preferments in Belgium; Lombard personally noticed by James I as disturber of government, 1614 (Anthologia Hibernica, i. 33); De Regno suppressed by Charles I through Wentworth, 1633 (Nov. 28 1633, Sec. Windebank asking Wentworth to suppress the book and call the author, then dead, to account); bequeathed his ‘laborious writings and all his literary travails to Faggin [presum. Fagan], bishop of Ossory; he is a character in Brian Friel’s Making History (1988); Lombardo chaied the first trial-commission on Galileo. FOST RR ODNB OCIL
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Works
Casus circa decretum Clementis Papae VIII de sacramenti confessione in absentia &c (Antwerp 1624), 12o; De Regno Hiberniae Sanctorum insula, Commentarius, in quo preter ejusdem Insulae Silvum[?] nominis originem ... Pii Canatius et Res e Principle O-Neillo ad fidem Catholicam propagandam feliciter gestae continentur (Lovanii [Louvain] apud viduam Steph. Martini 1632), 4o [Walsh 284]; Matthew J. Byrne, ed., Extracts from the De Hibernia Insula Commentarius of Peter Lombard Archbishop of Armagh (Cork UP; London: Longmans 1930).
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Commentary
Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fior-Ghael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, Its Development and Literary Expression Prior To The Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Pub. Co. 1986), Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh, resided in Rome, De regno Hiberniae sanctorum insulae commentarius (printed 1632), in which he corrects the English image of the Irish by allowing them to be uncultivated and lazy and musical, but insisting that they are ‘tenacissimi orthodoxae fidei’. (Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael, 1986).
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References
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica, Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, Dr. Peter Lombard, p.380.
Dictionary of National Biography, Irish Roman Catholic prelate; ed. Westminster and Louvain Univ., DD, 1594; provost of Cambrai Cathedral; Archb. of Armagh and primate of all Ireland, 1601; d. at Rome; author of De Regno Hiberniae, Sanctorum Insula Commentarius (publ. 1632); Bibl. cites Ware, Irish Writers (ed. Harris, p.103); Brenan’s Ecclesiastical History; Moran’s Spicegelium Ossoriensis.
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland (London 1988): David Rothe was acknowledged as virtual leader of Catholic Church in absence of Lombard (p.46.)
Theo. Moody et al., eds., New History of Ireland, Vol. VIII, ‘Chronology of Irish History to 1979’, cites Lombard under Dec. 1600: completed De Regno Hib. Sanctorum insula; also under June 29-July 9, Papal Provision of Peter to Armagh See.
Muriel McCarthy & Caroline Sherwood-Smith, eds., Hibernia Resurgens: Catalogue of Marsh’s Library (1994); b. c.1555 [sic]; biog. and bibl. as supra.
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Notes
William Camden, 1551-1623; assisted Gabriel Goodman (d.1601) collecting archaeological material; usher at Westminster school, 1575-93; headmaster, 1593; Britannia, 1600; greatly enlarged sixth ed., 1607; printing official reports of Gunpowder trial, 1607 ... &c .
George A Little, Dublin Before the Vikings (Dublin: M. H. Gill 1957): Peter Lombard, Archb. of Armagh (1560-1625), speaks of the Irish keeping up continuous pressure on occupied Britain ‘that they might restrain the Romans, and keep them from passing over into Ireland’. (De regno Hiberniae, sanctorum insulae commentarius, etc. (Louvain 1632), 4o, Cap. II, p.22); that defensively inspired policy on the part of the Irish is proved by the attacks stopping as soon as the Romans left Britain, according to Bede (Ecclesiastical History, lib. 1, cap.14.).
Sean O’Faolain: Lombard figures as a Counter-Reformation fanatic in Sean O’Faolain’s The Great O’Neill (Longmans 1942; rep. Cork: Mercier 1972), p.119ff.; see also Brian Friel, Making History (1988), in which he is a leading character and an explainer of the diminished role of personal truth in national history.
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