Patrick Burnell (died 1491) was an Irish judge and Crown official of the fifteenth century. He was a member of the prominent

Burnell family The Burnell family were a Dublin family who were prominent in Irish public life and in the arts from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. They acquired substantial estates in County Dublin, and married into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. They ...

, who were Lords of the Manor of Balgriffin in

County Dublin "Action to match our speech" , image_map = Island_of_Ireland_location_map_Dublin.svg , map_alt = map showing County Dublin as a small area of darker green on the east coast within the lighter green background of ...

for several generations, and produced several distinguished judges; in Patrick's own generation, his cousin

John Burnell John Burnell (died c.1492) was an Irish judge who held office as Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. The Burnell family had been Lords of the Manor of Balgriffin, County Dublin since the fourteenth century: they acquired the manor of Castleknock t ...

was briefly

Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer The Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer was the Baron (judge) who presided over the Court of Exchequer (Ireland). The Irish Court of Exchequer was a mirror of the equivalent court in England and was one of the four courts which sat in the buildin ...

. He is first heard of in 1467, when he was serving as a clerk in the

Exchequer of Ireland The Exchequer of Ireland was a body in the Kingdom of Ireland tasked with collecting The Crown, royal revenue. Modelled on the Exchequer, English Exchequer, it was created in 1210 after King John of England applied English law and legal structure ...

; in 1477 he was giving evidence to the English Court of Chancery. In 1478 he was appointed third Baron of the

Court of Exchequer (Ireland) The Court of Exchequer (Ireland) or the Irish Exchequer of Pleas, was one of the senior courts of common law in Ireland. It was the mirror image of the equivalent court in England. The Court of Exchequer was one of the four royal courts of justic ...

, following the death of Nicholas Sutton, whose widow, Anne Cusacke, Burnell later married. He was made Chief Chamberlain as well as a Baron of the Exchequer in 1484, and owned several properties in Dublin, including houses in

Fishamble Street Fishamble Street (; ) is a street in Dublin, Ireland within the old city walls. Location The street joins Wood Quay at the Fish Slip near Fyan's Castle. It originally ran from Castle Street to Essex Quay until the creation of Lord Edward Stre ...

. In common with almost all of the Irish judges of the time he was a client of Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, who was for many years the dominant force in Irish political life. Like his judicial colleagues, he meekly agreed, at Kildare's insistence, to support the claim of the pretender Lambert Simnel to be the rightful

King of England The monarchy of the United Kingdom, commonly referred to as the British monarchy, is the constitutional form of government by which a hereditary sovereign reigns as the head of state of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies (the Bailiw ...

in 1487: Kildare had Simnel crowned in

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

and he invaded England with an Irish army. When Simnel's cause was crushed at the

Battle of Stoke Field The Battle of Stoke Field on 16 June 1487 may be considered the last battle of the Wars of the Roses, since it was the last major engagement between contenders for the throne whose claims derived from descent from the houses of Lancaster and Yo ...

, the victorious King Henry VII showed remarkable clemency to the rebels (including Simnel himself, who became a servant in the Royal household), and Burnell benefitted from the general

royal pardon In the English and British tradition, the royal prerogative of mercy is one of the historic royal prerogatives of the British monarch, by which they can grant pardons (informally known as a royal pardon) to convicted persons. The royal preroga ...

issued in 1488. He died in 1491.

References

* F. Elrington Ball, ''The Judges in Ireland 1221-1921'', London John Murray 1926
page 185
1491 deaths People from Castleknock Year of birth unknown Barons of the Irish Exchequer {{Ireland-law-bio-stub