Robin Hill, 8th Marquess of Downshire

[1] He successfully re-established his Ulster-based landowning family in North Yorkshire following the Irish Land Acts and the creation of Bracknell New Town, which had largely deprived him of his original estates.

At Eton College he captained the school shooting VIII and led it to win the Asburton Shield at Bisley.

The family's Irish domains and their Berkshire estate with its 1870s retro-Jacobean Burne-Jones and Morris windowed mansion at Easthampstead had both become alienated and sold.

The archive – featuring letters by Stuart kings, Philip II of Spain, Marie de' Medici, Bacon, Donne, Dryden, Fenton, Alexander Pope and Georg Rudolf Weckherlin – had been on loan to Berkshire Record Office.

Breakup was avoided as on the eve of the November sale the auction was cancelled and the British Library took the papers.

His maiden speech, made in October 1994, was part of a debate taking note of "recent developments in Northern Ireland".

There are a multiplicity of reasons for that phenomenon, although some try to award part of the blame to the equivocal manner in which Ireland has been treated successively by England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom.

I would not subscribe entirely to that view, although I believe that, in establishing a link between England and Ireland, fundamental mistakes were made at the start which are taking many centuries to resolve ... [T]here is no doubt that the joint declaration marks a sea change in contemporary Irish politics.

Surely, there then arises a more potent conflict of interest-the invocation of public power in order to provide private profit.'