Sir John Parnell, 2nd Baronet

Painting of Sir John Parnell, around 1770, by Pompeo Batoni. Sir John Parnell, 2nd Baronet (25 December 1744 – December 1801) was an Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament.

Biography A Church of Ireland landowner, his family had originally migrated to Ireland from Congleton in Cheshire. The only son of Sir John Parnell, 1st Baronet and Anne Ward, daughter of Michael Ward, justice of the Court of King's Bench. Parnell was a supporter of Catholic emancipation and was the great-grandfather of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule campaign.

From a line of politically astute ancestors who had moved to Ireland in the 17th century, Parnell rose to the highest positions in Irish politics as Commissioner of the Revenue (1780), Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland (1787), and Lord of the Treasury (1793).

Parnell first served in the Parliament of Ireland as an MP for Bangor, from 1767 to 1768. He later sat for Queen's County from 1783 until the Union with Great Britain created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. Parnell and his son Henry and had been instrumental in winning the right for Catholics to vote. and together they had four children. Their eldest son John Augustus was a deaf-mute who was housed in a large walled garden for most of his life, while their second son Henry Brooke Parnell would go on to inherit the baronetcy and follow his own political career, becoming an Irish peer and also a member of parliament for Queen's County in the House of Commons at Westminster.