John Cornwalsh

Sir John Cornwalsh, or Cornwalysch (died 1472) was an Irish judge who held the office of Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. His tenure was notable for the fact that he succeeded his father as Chief Baron, In the same year he was appointed to act as attorney for Thomas Yong, the Prior of Mullingar, jointly with Stephen Roche, the future Attorney General for Ireland. He is next heard of in 1441 "fighting the King's enemies in Ossory". The fact that Fitzwilliam and Ismay received a royal pardon for the crime gives us a vivid glimpse of the lawless condition of Ireland at the time (although it must be said that the condition of England, under the inept rule of King Henry VI, was not much better).

Career He was appointed Chief Baron soon after his father's death, and certainly before October 1442, when he attended a meeting of the Privy Council of Ireland in that capacity. His appointment was probably on the advice of the powerful Anglo-Irish magnate James Butler, 4th Earl of Ormond, who had been a close associate of the elder Cornwalsh.

This conflict reflected the wider political divisions of the time (his father had engaged in a similar struggle for the office of Chief Baron with Richard Sydgrave in the 1420s), His marriage, according to local gossip, was also a troubled one. During York's final Irish Parliament in 1460, Cornwalsh was one of his few opponents, and an Act of Resumption, declaring his estates liable to forfeiture, was passed. No doubt for this reason he refused to attend Parliament (obligatory for Council members), for which act of defiance he was publicly rebuked. After York's death at the Battle of Wakefield no further action seems to have been taken against Cornwalsh, despite the triumph of York's son King Edward IV, the following year. Edward was generally willing to seek reconciliation with his former opponents: Cornwalsh remained in office until his death in 1472, and he was knighted around 1466. A possible compromise candidate as Chief Baron might have been the long-serving judge John Gough, second Baron of the Exchequer from 1443 to at least 1467, who was praised for his "good service" to the English Crown, but this was apparently never considered. She was the daughter of Christopher Plunkett, first Baron Killeen and Janet Cusack. The marriage was reputed to be a stormy one: Maud was apparently just as strongminded and quarrelsome as her husband, and according to local gossip she often instigated the quarrel. She died in 1482.

Cornwalsh built Dardistown Castle, County Meath, in about 1465, aided by the £10 grant from the English Crown to landowners of the Pale to build fortified houses to aid in the defence of the Pale in the absence of a standing army. He had possession of Malahide Castle and the Galtrim estates (roughly modern Summerhill, County Meath) for his lifetime in the right of his wife. He had no children, and his estates passed to his stepson Thomas Talbot, Maud's son by her first husband.