Bandon Born, Sir Richard Cox, (1650-1733), Lord Chancellor of Ireland, ‘A Description of the Kingdom of Cork’, West Cork Baronies.
From one of Robert Days very numeros articles in the JOurnal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society. now one line search by Day
PDF No 6 of Robert Day’s articles,
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FRom:
https://www.libraryireland.com/biography/SirRichardCox.php
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Life
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[of Dunmanway, Co. Cork;] b. Bandonbridge, Co. Cork, son of Captain Richard Cox and his wife Katherine, the daughter of Walter Bird of Clonakilty, the Coxes having come from Wiltshire in around 1600 and dispossessed in Rebellion of 1641; Cox was orphaned at the age of 3 and raised by a maternal grandmother in Co. Cork, he qualified in law at Grays Inn, London, 1673 and was apprenticed in the manorial courts of the Boyle family, Co. Cork; appt. Recorder of Kinsale with an estate at Clonakilty, 1687; he lost his post during the Tyrconnell administration following the accession of James II;
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he moved to Bristol and practised there as a lawyer; became acquainted with Sir Robert Southwell who introduced him to Duke of Ormond, thereafter his patron; he returned to with William III and fought at the Battle of the Boyne, 1690; thereafter he served on the Irish bench; he was knighted 5 Nov. 1692; served as Justice of the Common Pleas, 1690, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, 1699; appt. Lord Chancellor of Ireland, 1703, and Chief Justice on the Queen’s Bench, 1711-14 [var. 1712];
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he escaped impeachment when Ormond defected to Jacobite cause, 1715; pub. pamphlet on the restriction of the woollen trade (1698); issued An Essay for the Conversion of the Irish, showing that ’tis their duty to become Protestants, in a Letter to Themselves [1698]; instrumental in passage of “An Act to prevent the further growth of Popery” (1703), within days of taking office as Lord Chancellor; he was nevertheless on friendly terms which Hugh Magauran, [q.v.], whose Pléaráca na Ruarcachwas translated by Swift; he was the object of a praise-poem by one Cormac Ó Luinín – otherwise unknown – which was preserved in a manuscript by Charles O’Conor of Belanagare [q.v.] and is held at Clonalis House;
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Cox published a history of Ireland as Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland [2 pts.] (1689-90), written from New English standpoint – and called ‘trite’ by the ODNB; it purports to be first chronological history of Ireland, and incidentally attacks the ridiculous stories which they have publish of the Firbolgs and Tuah-de-danans’; his historical work was pointedly ignored by William Molyneux (in Case of Ireland’s Protestants being bound … [ &c.]) as emphasising the complete dependence of the Irish state on the English government; answered by Hugh MacCurtin [Aodh Buidhe Mac Cuirtin] in A brief discourse in vindication of the antiquity of Ireland (1717), for which Cox imprisoned him;
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he was an early advocate of parliamentary union with Great Britain; lived in retirement at Dunmanway, Co. Cork, for 20 years before his death; according to himself he made ‘paradise cheese’ there and kept ‘the best Welsh ale in Europe’, as well as ‘the best claret in the world’; he died of apoplexy at home and is buried in Dunmanway; his letters are in Trinity College; there is an oil port. in Great Hall of Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. RR ODNB FDA
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Works
- Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland from the Conquest Thereof by the English to this Present Time. With An Introductory Discourse touching the Ancient State of that Kingdom; and a new and Exact Map of the same, 2 vols. (London: H. Clark and Joseph Watts (1689-90) [2 pts. in 1; folding map in pt. 1; identical fp. in both]; also unrev. rep. 1692 [see details];
- Proceedings of the House of Commons of Ireland in rejecting the altered Money-Bill on Dec. 17, 1753, vindicated by the authorities taken from the Law and Usage of Parliament [3rd edn.] (Dublin: Wilson 1745) [see Cathach Books Cat. 1996-97].
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Bibliographical details
HIBERNIA ANGLICANA, / or, the / HISTORY / OF / IRELAND / From the Conqueft thereof by the / ENGLISH, /To this Prefent Time. / WITH / An Introductory Difcourfe touching the Ancient / State of that Kingdom; and a New and Exact Map of the fame. / PART I. / By RICHARD COX, Efq; / Recorder of Kingfale. / Ardua res eft vesustis novitatem dare, obfoletis nitorem, obfcuris lucem, dubiis fidem. Plin. / Attamen audemdum eft, & veritas inveftiganda, quam fi non omnino Affesqueremur, tamen prpius ad eam quam nunc fumus, tandem peveniemus. Printed by H. Clark, for Joseph Watts at the Angel in St. Paul’s Churchyard, MCDLXXXIX. [Copy in Linen Hall Lib., Belfast.]
There is a praise-poem to Sir Richard Cox composed by the otherwise unknown poet Cormac Ó Luinín and transcribed in the hand of Charles O’Conor (1710-1790) in a manuscript held in the library of of Clonalis House, seat of the O’Conors, in Castlereagh, Co. Roscommon. A digital copy is held on the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies website at ISO [Irish Script on Screen Project] – online ; see also copy attached.
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Criticism
- Walter Harris, Life of Cox, added to edn. of James Ware’s ‘History of the Writers of Ireland’, in Harris, ed., The Whole Works of Sir James Ware concerning Ireland, revised and improved (2nd edn.] Dublin 1764), Vol. 1 pp.207-52;
- Richard Caulfield, ed., The Autobiography of Sir Richard Cox (London 1860);
- Ian Montgomery, ‘An Entire Coherent History of Ireland, Richard Cox’s Hibernia Anglicana’, in Linenhall Review, 12, 1 (Spring 1995), pp.9-11;
- Ian Montgomery, The Career of Sir Richard Cox (MA Univ. of Ulster, 1993) [on which the former is based].
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See also Commentary, infra. |
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Commentary
[Darrell Figgis?], Ireland’s Brehon Laws [CTS n.d.], 32pp. pamphlet gathered in Irish History and Archaeology [bound collection]: ‘Sir Richard Cox, the author of Hibernia Anglicana, would not admit the Irish possessed written laws at all. A Co. Leitrim man, Thaddeus Roddy, has put it on record that ‘his honoured friend Sir Richard Cox, would not believe in the existence of written laws until, in the summer of 1699, he showed him some of his thirty books of Ancient Irish Laws’. Notwithstanding the enlightenment he got from Roddy, Sir Richard Cox afterwards illegally imprisoned Hugh MacCurtin, in Newgate, for refuting his own inaccurate and misleading statements about the laws of Ireland in a pamphlet published in 1717.’ (Copy in Library of Herbert Bell, Belfast.)
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Russell K. Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP 1959), remarking that Hibernia Anglicana (1689), incidentally attacks ‘the ridiculous stories which they have publish of the Firbolgs and Tuah-de-danans’, with particular reference to Peter Walsh’s Prospect (1982); see Cox, Introduction, pp.1-2, and and Apparatus, p.4; cited in Alspach, p.74.)
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W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (IAP 1976; 1984), Sir Richard Cox, ‘very few of the Irish aim at any more than a little Latin, which every cowboy pretends to’ (Researches in the South of Ireland, c. 1689, cited in DH Madden, trans. Stanihurst Description of Ireland, 1906; cf. Brookiana, i. 33. [Stanford, 27]
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Joseph Th. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fior-Ghael (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1986), Sir Richard Cox, Some thoughts on the bill for prohibiting the exportation of woollen manufactures (Dublin 1698); Some thoughts on the bill depending (Dublin 1698) [do.]; Hibernia Anglicana, 2 vols. (London 1698-90). Leerssen distinguishes the younger and the elder Cox [see index]. The elder Sir Richard Cox fled Ireland in the Civil War; later, as Lord Chancellor, he was one of the prime movers behind the penal laws; An essay for the conversion of the Irish, showing that ‘tis their duty to become Protestants (1698); also Hibernia Anglicana, or, the history of Ireland from the conquest thereof by the English to this present time (1698-90), is wholly anti-Catholic and castigates Keating, Walsh, O’Flaherty, O’Sull[i]van Beare. Unlike him, Borlase is even unaware of the existence of those writers. Cox is praised in Walter Harris, Works of Sir James Ware, vol. 3., 207-252. ALSO, This was the first Gaelic history to be published in Ireland, and for it Sir Richard Cox, as Chief Justice, had MacCurtain clapped in jail, where he produced an Irish grammar, dedicated to John Devenish, major-general of the Austrian army in the Netherlands. [Joseph Leerssen, Mere Irish & Fíor Ghael (1986). p. 367]. SEE also Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, p.32, Sir Richard Cox, Bart.
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West Cork History 