Richard Osbaldeston

Sir Richard Osbaldeston (c.1585 – 1640) was an English barrister who became Attorney General for Ireland. He was the great-grandfather of Richard Osbaldeston, Bishop of London.

Background and early career

He was born in Lancashire, probably at Sefton. His father, Edward Osbaldeston (died 1639), belonged to an ancient Lancashire family, the Osbaldestons of Osbaldeston Hall. Edward's father, the youngest son of a large family, made an advantageous marriage to Margaret Molyneux, daughter of Sir Richard Molyneux, 1st Baronet and Frances Gerard. Margaret's father was head of the family which later acquired the title Earl of Sefton, and her mother was a daughter of the prominent judge Sir Gilbert Gerard, Master of the Rolls. They were also related to the Earl of Derby, and profited from this connection. By the 1620s Richard was rich enough to buy the Manor of Hunmanby in Yorkshire, where the family remained until they died out in the 1830s.

Richard entered Gray's Inn in 1604 and was called to the Bar there. He was Reader of Gray's Inn in 1625, and its Treasurer in 1635. While his practice was undoubtedly lucrative, few details of his career as a barrister survive, but it is likely that he practised in York, where he was living at the time of his first marriage in 1612. he already had a link with the Irish judiciary through his cousin Geoffrey Osbaldeston, Chief Justice of Connacht (died c.1635) who had a long if undistinguished record of service to the Crown as a judge in Ireland. Richard is said to have been a close associate of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, a fellow Yorkshireman, who may have known him in his younger days. Wentworth frequently consulted him on legal points, but given the Lord Deputy's overwhelming personality and his total control of the Irish government, it is unlikely that any legal adviser had much influence over him. There were also family ties between the two men, which were strengthened when Richard's son William married Strafford's cousin Anne Wentworth, the daughter of Sir George Wentworth of Woolley Hall, West Yorkshire.

In 1639, the quo warranto campaign was extended into an attack on all local landowners who claimed the right to hold local Admiralty courts. The campaign was not entirely successful: the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) ruled that Richard Talbot of Malahide Castle (ancestor of Baron Talbot de Malahide) had the right to hold an admiralty court for the port of Malahide in north Dublin, which had been guaranteed to the Talbot family by the Crown. The campaign seems to have petered out after Osbaldeston's death. After his death it was regranted to his son William. It was later acquired by Sir Richard Reynell, 1st Baronet.

He died in Dublin in June 1640 and was buried in the Church of St. John the Evangelist, Dublin. Dr Cooke, the Admiralty judge, wrote to London with the terse message that "the old Attorney (General) is dead" and asked for a replacement to be sent quickly, to continue the quo warranto campaign.