Luke Gernon

Luke Gernon (c.1580 – c.1672) was an English-born judge who held high office in seventeenth-century Ireland. He is best remembered today for his manuscript A Discourse of Ireland, which was written in 1620, and first published in 1904. He was the ancestor of several notable descendants, including the poet Nicholas Brady, and Maziere Brady, a long-serving Lord Chancellor of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

In view of his later eminence, it is surprising how little is known of his family background or his early life. He was certainly English by birth and was probably a native of Hertfordshire. He was most likely the Lucas Gernon who entered Lincoln's Inn in 1604; afterwards he is said to have served for a time as a soldier. He arrived in Ireland some time before 1619, in which year he was admitted to the King's Inn. In the same year he became second justice of the Provincial Court of the Lord President of Munster, of which Court he gives some interesting details in his Discourse. He lobbied, unsuccessfully, to be appointed a judge of one of the courts of common law, which would have enabled him to move to Dublin, always the centre of Irish political and social life (although the Irish capital did not impress him: "it resembles Bristol but falls short", he wrote).

He lived for many years in Limerick, a city which, like many travellers of the time, he praised for its beauty, and he remained there until the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Gernon and his family suffered greatly during the Rebellion, as we know from his petition in 1653 to Oliver Cromwell, in which he acknowledges Cromwell's lawful authority and asks for a pension, which it seems had already been promised but not paid. Gernon states that he had lost an estate worth £3000, and that he and his wife and four small children had been forced to "travel in depth of winter through the woods and bogs", whereby one child starved to death and Mrs. Gernon lost the use of her limbs. On this occasion the pension was paid, no doubt because the petition was supported by Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery and by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, who seems to have been a close friend of Mrs. Gernon.

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