Sir Richard Cox, 1st Baronet

Early life

Cox was born in Bandon, Ireland. He was the great-great-grandson of Richard Cox, the Chancellor of Oxford in 1547. His family had arrived from Wiltshire in c. 1600, and was dispossessed in the Irish Rebellion of 1641. His father was Captain Richard Cox II (1610–c.1651) and his mother was Katherine Bird, daughter of Walter Bird, and widow of Captain Thomas Batten. She was born in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland and died c.1651/52, probably in Bandon. Her death was generally said to be caused by grief for her husband, who was murdered by one Captain Norton in unexplained circumstances. Richard was thus orphaned by the age of three and raised by his maternal grandparents and his uncle John Bird in County Cork. He went to school in Clonakilty, and then by his own account spent "three years idling". Having inherited a small property from his grandfather, he went to England to study law.

Career

He qualified at Gray's Inn, London, in 1673; and was apprenticed in the manorial courts of the Boyle family, of County Cork. In 1674 he made an imprudent marriage to Mary Bourne, a girl of fifteen, whose family he claimed had grossly deceived him as to the size of her dowry. He quarreled bitterly with his mother-in-law, retired to the country for a time, then resolved to make his fortune at the Irish Bar. He built up a lucrative legal practice, was appointed Recorder of Kinsale, and acquired an estate at Clonakilty by 1687; but lost his recordership after the accession of James II. He moved to Bristol, where he practiced as a barrister and became acquainted with Sir Robert Southwell, who introduced him to the Duke of Ormonde, thereafter his patron.

Politician and judge

He returned to Ireland, and fought at the Boyne, in 1690. Following William's victory at the Boyne, Cox drafted the Declaration of Finglas offering full. protection (in effect a pardon) to all Jacobites who laid down arms by 1st August 1690, (later extended to 25 August), other than those described as "the desperate leaders of the Rebellion". The King praised Cox's drafting of the Declaration, saying that he himself had not needed to change a word of it. He was knighted on 5 November 1692 by King William, who had a great respect for him, and then became a baronet on 21 November 1706. He was made Recorder of Waterford and second justice of the Court of Common Pleas (Ireland) in 1690. He subsequently military governor of Cork in 1691 and a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1692.

He approved of the Treaty of Limerick, which offered reasonably generous terms to the defeated Jacobites. When it became clear that the Government would not honour the terms of the Treaty, Cox denounced this as a breach of trust, and was in political disgrace for a time as a result, being dismissed from the Privy Council in 1695. This was only a temporary career setback: he became Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas in 1701, and was reappointed to the Privy Council the same year. Although he maintained that as a matter of simple justice they should receive what they were promised under the Treaty, Cox on general was no friend to Roman Catholics. He fully supported the strict enforcement, and indeed the extension, of the Penal Laws, and as Lord Chancellor he oversaw the passage of the Popery Act of 1703, often regarded as an effort to eliminate the Catholic landowning class entirely.

He became Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1703 and then Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench from 1711–14, after being dismissed in 1707 for his opposition to the possible repeal of the sacramental test for religious dissenters in that year. He escaped impeachment when Ormonde defected to the Jacobite cause in 1715.

Publications

He was the author of an early history of Ireland as regarded from the standpoint of the New English; Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland (1689–90), (called ‘trite’ by Oxford Dictionary of National Biography); purporting to be the first chronological history of Ireland, and incidentally attacking "the ridiculous stories which they have publish of the Firbolgs and Tuah-de-danans'. When Aodh Buí Mac Cruitín, hereditary poet to the O’Briens of Thomond a representative of the Gaelic literati, in the preface of 'A Brief Discourse in Vindication of the Antiquity of Ireland', published in 1717, refuted some of the statements made in 'Hibernia Anglicana', Cox had him imprisoned in New Gate prison for one year.

Later years

He lived 20 years in retirement before his death, from apoplexy, in the Great Hall of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.

He devoted much effort in his later years to improving the town of Dunmanway: he obtained a royal charter to hold fairs amd market days in the town, and did much to encourage the local flax industry. Thanks largely to his efforts, by the time of his death Dunmanway was a flourishing little town of some 600 citizens.

Personal life

He was married to Mary Bourne, daughter of John Bourne, on 26 February 1674. She was born in 1658 in County Cork, Ireland, and died on 1 June 1715. Cox praised her as a very good wife, while admitting frankly that he might not have married her if he had known how small her fortune was (this was the cause of a bitter family quarrel). They had numerous children, (Cox mentions twenty-one, though only fifteen can be identified with certainty), of whom the eldest son, also Richard, predeceased his father. A younger son, Michael, was Archbishop of Cashel from 1754 to 1779. The eldest daughter Amy married Sir William Mansel, the seventh of the Mansel baronets in 1700, and had five children, including Sir Richard Mansel, 8th Baronet. Her sister Mary married Arthur Riggs in 1701; after his death she remarried Rev. Nicholas Skolfield, Vicar of Drinagh.

Cox's letters give vivid evidence of a lively and charming personality:he welcomes additions to his numerous offspring, describes the pleasures of good food and drink, and his love of music and fine clothes. In character he was strictly honest and upright, and in general considered to be a good judge, though his prejudice against Catholics meant that he was not always strictly impartial.

Cox died of apoplexy on 3 May 1733. His grandson Sir Richard Cox, 2nd Baronet (1702-1766) succeeded to the title and estates.