Loftus, Dudley (1618–95), Oriental scholar and jurist, was born at Rathfarnham castle, Co. Dublin, a son of Sir Adam Loftus, vice-treasurer of Ireland, and his wife Jane, daughter of Walter Vaughan of Golden Grove, Carmarthenshire, Wales. He received his BA degree from TCD in 1638 and proceeded to Oxford, taking his MA from University College 20 October 1640. His return to Ireland coincided with the outbreak of the 1641 rebellion. As a result he was entrusted with the defence of Rathfarnham castle and successfully protected both the castle and the city of Dublin. In recognition of his services he was later made one of the masters in chancery, vicar general of Ireland, and judge of the prerogative court and faculties, but Wood and Ware give no precise years for these appointments. His political career commenced in 1642 when he was elected MP for Naas. This political success was matched, during the interregnum, by a host of legal and administrative appointments. In 1651 he was made deputy judge advocate general and commissioner of the revenue. By 1654 he was appointed judge of the admiralty, and in the following year was made a master in chancery and ingrosser of the great roll of the clerk of the pipe and chief ingrosser for life. Four years later he was elected MP for Kildare and Wicklow in the commonwealth parliament at Westminster. These honours were matched by academic ones, Loftus evidently presiding in TCD as professor of civil law during the 1650s.
Though he had prospered under the interregnum, Loftus was adept enough to survive the political upheavals of the restoration. Borlase suggests that Loftus played a vital role in initiating the convention of 1660, where he represented the borough of Jamestown, Co. Leitrim. This claim remains in dispute, but he certainly chaired a number of committees, among them the committee on religion. This rehabilitation is nowhere more evident than in his depiction in 1661 of the return of episcopacy, The proceedings observed in order to, and in the consecration of the twelve bishops (London, 1661), where Loftus displays himself playing a role in the ensuing pageantry. It was a theme which found echoes in his 1663 tract on the funeral obsequies of John Bramhall (qv), archbishop of Armagh 1660–63: Oratio funebris habita post exuvias nuperi Johannis archiepiscopi Armachani in ecclesia cathedrali Dublini (Dublin, 1663). Loftus continued this political wooing of the restoration élite in a further work of the 1660s: L'oratione del’ eccellentissimo signore Giacobo duca d'Ormondia, signore luogotenente regio d'Irlanda, fatta 27 di settembre, 1662, innanzi la radunanza de'stati (Dublin, 1664), which he translated from The speech of ... James, duke of Ormond, lord lieutenant of Ireland, to ... parliament, on ... the 27 of September, 1662 (Dublin, 1662). This policy was evidently successful: his position as master in chancery was renewed and he was given more legal honours, in 1660 being reappointed vicar general of Ireland and made a judge of the chancery. By the following year he was elected to the Irish house of commons as MP for Bannow, Co. Wexford. This study in political survival may well have owed as much to his own innate conservatism as it did to any repositioning of himself on the restoration political stage. This is clearly evident in the part he played in a review of the University of Dublin to determine the need for a second college. Loftus's decision to produce an edition of an Aristotelian text, and his later conflict with the Dublin Philosophical Society, reflect an identification with ‘ancients’ rather than ‘moderns’, an academic conservatism which no doubt allowed him to fit easily into the new restoration regime.
However, his political career was seriously disrupted by his imprisonment in 1673, following a vociferous denunciation of new regulations concerning governmental control of the corporations, which Loftus, as judge of the prerogative court, considered to be illegal. He remained in the political wilderness till his election as MP for Fethard, Co. Wexford (1692–3). Writing not only under his own name but also that of ‘Philo-Britannicus’, his legal and political career is well reflected in both his manuscript collections and printed works: The case of Ware and Shirley (Dublin, 1669) and Διγαμιας αδικια: or the first marriage of Katherine Fitzgerald (London, 1677).
But his fame is chiefly due to his linguistic ability and oriental studies. By the age of twenty he reputedly knew as many languages, and his interests in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Armenian, Syriac, and Ethiopian are apparent from a 1697 catalogue of 128 of his manuscript works. Several of these were destroyed but the remainder are now in the British Library, the Bodleian, TCD, Marsh's Library, Dublin, and King's Inn's Library, Dublin. His printed works continued these trends, his oriental studies being most evident in works such as his translation of the life of Abu'l Faraj from Arabic into Latin, and his famous translation of the Ethiopian version of the New Testament (1657) for Walton's influential Polyglot Bible of the same year. Following his involvement in this Polyglot Bible he immersed himself in studies of the Syriac and Armenian languages, translating into Latin two Armenian works: Logica seu introductio (Dublin, 1657) and a psalter Liber psalmorum Davidis ex Armenico idiomate in Latinum traductus (Dublin, 1661). With the single exception of his contribution to Edmund Castell's combined Dictionary of Eastern languages (1667), throughout the 1660s few works of an oriental nature reached the press, though he did publish a controversial work in Italian: Lettera esortatoria dimettere opera a sare sincera penitenza mandata. All Signora F. M. L. P. Fugita e scommunicata per Caggione delle enormita de suoi Misfatti, et grandisimi falli (Dublin, 1667). However, in 1672 it became clear that he had been preparing a major work, for he published at Dublin a whole series of translations from Syriac, Armenian, and Persian: The exposition of Dionysius Syrus written above 900 years since on the evangelist St Mark. The disaster of his political career, coupled with an understandable desire to lie low during the events of the turbulent reign of James II, led to a further outpouring of publications in a range of fields: An history of the twofold invention of the cross (Dublin, 1686) and Anaphora. (Dublin, 1693) to name but the most famous. He married first (date unknown) Frances, daughter and heir of Patrick Nangle, son of Thomas, styled baron of Navan, and with her had two sons, Dudley and Adam and five daughters, Mary, Jane, Letitia, Frances and Catherine, all of whom either died young or unmarried with the sole exception of Letitia, who married a Mr Bladen. His second marriage (16 April 1693) to Lady Catherine Mervyn was considered scandalous, given his advanced age, and (in his brother-in-law Ware's view) exemplified his improvident and foolish nature. He died two years later in June 1695 and was buried in St Patrick's cathedral, Dublin.
Loftus's manuscripts are in Marsh's Library, Dublin (MSS Z. 3.1.1; Z.3.2.12; Z.3.2.17 (2); Z.4.2.7; Z. 4.2.11; and Z. 4.5.14, which contains a catalogue of his books, dated 16 July 1689); in TCD (MS 647, ff 1r–2r; MS 844, f. 136r; TCD MUN/P/1/452; and TCD Register Book: MUN/V/5/2/p. 47); in King's Inns Library, Dublin (MS 33); in the BL (Add. MS 4799, ff 38r–44v; Add. MS 4813, f. 175v; Add. MS 19996; Add. MS 21135, ff 35r–36v; Add. MS 38856, ff 99r–102v; Egerton MS 2549, ff 94r–v; Sloane MS 1008, f. 226r; and Stowe MS 203, f. 155r); and in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Tanner 25, ff 67r–68v; Tanner 31, ff 200r–201v, 281r–282v; Tanner 34, ff 14r–17v, 35r–v; Tanner 36, ff 14r–15v, 18r–v, 26r–v, 36r–38v, 49r–50, 63r, 65r–66v, 96r–98v, 110r–v, 141r–142v, 150r–151v, 226r–v; Tanner 37, ff 85r–86v, 161r–180v, 263r–v; and Tanner 104, ff 32r–35v, 70r–v).