He was the son of a Yorkshire gentleman and was educated at the University of Cambridge. He accompanied the Earl of Sussex to Ireland as his chaplain in 1560, and three years later was consecrated archbishop of Armagh by Hugh Curwen, Archbishop of Dublin. In 1565 Queen Elizabeth I of England, to supplement the meagre income derivable from the archbishopric in a politically unstable country, appointed Loftus temporarily to the deanery of St Patrick's; and in the same year he became president of the new commission for ecclesiastical causes.
In 1567 he was made Archbishop of Dublin, where the queen expected him to carry out reforms in the Church. On several occasions he temporarily carried out the functions of lord keeper, and in August 1581 he was appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Loftus was constantly occupied in attempts to improve his financial position by obtaining additional preferment. He had been obliged to resign the deanery of St Patrick's in 1567, and twenty years later he quarrelled violently with Sir John Perrot, the lord deputy, over the proposal to appropriate the revenues of the cathedral to the foundation of a university. Loftus favoured the project of founding a university in Dublin, but on lines different from Perrot's proposal, and it was largely through his influence that the corporation of Dublin granted the lands of the priory of All Hallows as a beginning of the endowment of Trinity College, Dublin, of which he was named first provost in the charter creating the foundation in 1591. Loftus, who took an important part in the administration of Ireland under successive lords deputy, and whose zeal and efficiency were commended by James I on his accession, died in Dublin. By his wife, Jane Purdon, he had twenty children.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.