Speaker and Irish ambassador view curious shared history

Sir Lindsay Hoyle unveiled a fake gravestone ahead of his meeting with His Excellency Martin Fraser about more weighty diplomatic matters.

As the pair discussed the 25^th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and the situation in Ukraine, the conversation also turned to the intriguing story behind the inscribed piece of stonework.

According to the UK Parliamentary Archives, the gravestone had been used by someone claiming to be the heir of Viscount Tracy of Rathcoole in the County of Dublin – a title created by Charles I for Sir John Tracy, previously a Member of Parliament for Gloucestershire.

The seat was passed down through the male heirs until 1797 – on the death of the eighth Viscount – when the peerage became extinct.

However, the title came with land and a seat in the House of Lords, and during the 19^th century, four claimants came forward saying they were the rightful heirs.

One man, Joseph Tracy, said he was the eldest grandson of a William Tracy who died in 1735 – and that on the death of the eighth Viscount in 1797, he should have been entitled to the peerage.

Joseph claimed that his grandfather William had been cut out of the will of his own father – an English judge – because he had married an Irish tradesman’s daughter named Mary O’Brien.

But Joseph took so long rounding up witnesses to present his case, that he died before it could be heard by the House of Lords.

Not to be deterred, Joseph’s son, James Tracy, took up the matter – and in 1843 the claim was presented to their Lordships, with the main pieces of evidence including a family prayer book, and the lost tombstone of William Tracy.

However, the Law Lords were suspicious, and they postponed their formal decision – only for a man called Patrick Holton to turn up a year later, claiming he had helped make the gravestone three years earlier.

He had not only engraved it but had broken it into four blocks and held them over a fire to make them look old.

Unsurprisingly, the case was thrown out, but the so-called evidence was kept as a record of Parliament’s proceedings.

The gravestone and its story are an important example of a collaboration between leading archives in Ireland and the UK called ‘Beyond 2022’.

The project aims to create a virtual reconstruction of the Record Treasury of the Public Record Office of Ireland, which was destroyed during the opening engagement of the Irish Civil War in June 1922.