Christopher Barnewall

Sir Christopher Barnewall (1522–1575) was a leading Anglo-Irish statesman of the Pale in the 1560s and 1570s. He was the effective Leader of the Opposition in the Irish House of Commons in the Parliament of 1568–71. He is remembered for building Turvey House, where he sheltered the future martyr Edmund Campion, for his impressive tomb in Lusk Church, and for the eulogy to him in Holinshed's Chronicles (which was written by his son-in-law Richard Stanyhurst).

He was the son of Patrick Barnewall, Solicitor General for Ireland (died 1552), and Anne Luttrell, daughter of Richard Luttrell. Through both his paternal grandparents he was closely related to the senior branch of the Barnewall family, who held the title Baron Trimleston. His father, a close associate of Thomas Cromwell, was a key figure in the Irish administration between 1535 and 1542: he initially opposed the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but changed his mind in time to profit handsomely from the Dissolution, acquiring Grace Dieu Abbey in Dublin and Knocktopher in Kilkenny. Christopher himself built Turvey House near the ruins of Grace Dieu, reputedly from the Abbey's stones.

Unlike his father and his uncle Thomas Luttrell, who both went on to become senior judges, he did not practice at the Irish Bar: nor was he a Bencher of the King's Inn, which his father had helped found, although he was a party to the renewal of the lease of the Inn from the Crown in 1567. He may however have had some legal training, since Thomas Butler, 10th Earl of Ormonde, of whom he was a close associate, appointed Barnewall in 1556 as steward and receiver of all the Earl's lands within the Pale.

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