Edward Conway, 1st Viscount Conway
Edward Conway, 1st Viscount Conway PC was an English soldier and statesman. Notable among his descendants are Queen Elizabeth II and Barack Obama.
He was the son and heir of Sir John Conway of Arrow, and his wife Ellen or Eleanor, daughter of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamp's Court, Warwickshire.
He commanded a foot regiment at the sack of Cadiz in 1596, where he was knighted. He then served as governor of Brill, an English Cautionary Town near Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where his daughter Brilliana was born. In the first parliament held in the reign of James I, he sat as member for Penryn. When Brill was handed back to the States of Holland in 1616, he was given a pension.
He was appointed to the Privy Council in 1622 and made a Secretary of State in January 1623 for five years. In the parliament which convened on 19 February 1624 he was returned for Evesham. He was created Baron Conway, of Ragley, in 1624 or 1625 and Viscount Conway in 1627, and received the Irish peerage title of Viscount Killultagh. No doubt as a result of his time in the Netherlands, he was a supporter of a 'Protestant' foreign policy; he was sent as ambassador to Prague. In 1628, he was appointed Lord President of the Council, a post he held until his death on 3 January 1631. By his wife Dorothy, daughter of Sir John Tracy of Tedington, Gloucestershire, and widow of Edmund Bray, he had three sons and four daughters. He was succeeded by his son Edward.
