Following Conolly’s death in 1729, Archbishop Boulter wrote to the duke of Newcastle, ‘After his death being expected for several days, Mr Conolly died this morning about one o’clock. He has left behind him a very great fortune, some talk of 17,000 per ann’. Historians have long accepted this estimate as a close approximation of Conolly’s income, but it has never been scrutinised, despite the exceptional nature of Conolly’s fortune. His rise through the ranks of Irish society, from humble origins to his death as squire of Castletown is of abiding interest, representing as it does the most remarkable case of social mobility in eighteenth-century Ireland. Land provided the greatest proportion of Conolly’s wealth, but earnings from the law and office were also important. The latter, however, even at the height of his political power, formed a mere fraction of his wealth. After a short discussion of Conolly’s non-landed income, this chapter examines in greater detail the accumulation of his estates and the revenues they provided.

Conolly’s income can be divided into three parts: law, land, and office. He had begun his career as an attorney attached to the Irish court of common pleas in the 1680s, and enjoyed a modest annual income of approximately £121 by 1688. Following the Williamite war, he became legal agent to Derry corporation in 1691, while he would later serve as the Irish legal agent to the London-based Irish Society (1697–1700), a position which brought an annual salary of £20. His involvement in their long-running legal dispute with the bishop of Derry in the late 1690s, together with his activities on behalf of the duke of Ormonde, from whom he received a salary of £100 a year, added to his income from the law. His legal business, while an important source of revenue in this early period of his career, gradually declined in importance, as his political star rose in the early 1700s. Conolly’s status as an attorney meant that he was never able to build up a legal practice like the barrister MPs Robert Rochfort and Alan Brodrick, who each earned in excess of £1,000 p.a. in the prime of their careers.