Henry Burnell (c. 1540–1614) was an Irish judge and politician; he served briefly as Recorder of Dublin and as a justice of the Court of King's Bench. Though he was willing to accept Crown office, he spent much of his career in opposition to the Government. He was one of the leaders of the protest against the policies of the Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir Henry Sidney in the late 1570s, and as a member of the Irish House of Commons in the 1580s he successfully opposed Sidney's successor, Sir John Perrot. In the early 1600s, he was one of the leaders of the protest against strict enforcement of the Penal Laws. His professional reputation was gravely damaged in his later years by a verdict that he was guilty of forgery, when he was convicted and fined for having altered a deed concerning the inheritance of the 11th Earl of Kildare's estate. He was the grandfather of the playwright Henry Burnell.
Early life
He was born in Castleknock, County Dublin, son of John Burnell. The Burnells were a long-established Dublin family, which had settled at Balgriffin; they were descended from Robert Burnell, who was a Baron of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) between about 1388 and 1413. An earlier John Burnell was briefly Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer in the 1490s. The family were staunchly Roman Catholic and their loyalty to the Crown was sometimes questioned as a result. Henry's father had managed to retain the family estates, of which Castleknock was the most important, after his cousin, another John Burnell, had been executed for his part in the rebellion of Silken Thomas in the 1530s. Henry's father was still alive, although described as "very old", in 1577. His sister Alice married Richard Talbot of Templeogue, a prominent Dublin landowner and later a judge of the Court of Common Pleas (Ireland). Henry was at Lincoln's Inn in 1561-2 and was one of a group of Irish students who compiled a book detailing the maladministration of the Pale (those four counties which were under secure Crown control). He returned to Ireland to practice law in about 1564.
In 1573 he was appointed Recorder of Dublin but resigned a little over a year later. His motives are unclear, but since he emerged soon after as legal adviser to the Earl of Kildare, it is likely that he found private practice more lucrative. Even Sir Henry Sidney, a stern critic of Burnell, admitted to his great success at the Bar, which made him a rich man.
Cess controversy
The cess, a tax levied on the landowners of the Pale, supposedly for military purposes, had always been unpopular, and Burnell had denounced it as early as 1562. In 1576 the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Henry Sidney, announced ambitious plans to reform and extend it. The landowners of the Pale protested that the cost would be ruinous. Burnell was one of a deputation of three eminent lawyers chosen to petition Elizabeth directly against the cess, the others being Richard Netterville and Barnaby Skurlock. The mission went badly: Elizabeth took grave offence at the challenge to her royal prerogative, and at Sidney's urging, she imprisoned the three lawyers in the Fleet Prison. Given his family's previous association with Silken Thomas, Burnell was clearly vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty. Sidney, while grudgingly calling him the most honest of the three lawyers (if only he would stay out of politics!), accused him of being a "perverse Papist" with "a great thirst to rid his country of the English." As opposition to Sidney's plans mounted, and he began thinking of asking for his recall to England, the political tension eased, and the three lawyers were freed in return for making an abject apology.
Parliament of 1585
Burnell and Richard Netterville returned to their opposition role in the Irish Parliament of 1585, to which Burnell had been returned as a knight of the shire for County Dublin. The new Lord Deputy Sir John Perrot, like Sidney before him, had an ambitious reform program, but the opposition thwarted him at every opportunity, even insisting on examining his accounts, for which Perrot wished them "foul scorn". He imprisoned some of the opposition members, but was unable to get his legislative program passed.