Court of Castle Chamber

In the seventeenth century, Castle Chamber, like its English counterpart, was seen by the Stuart dynasty as a suitable instrument for enforcing government policy and it became highly unpopular as a result.

Due to the ineffectiveness of the regular Irish courts in dealing with serious crime, the establishment of a separate Star Chamber jurisdiction in Ireland was a reform which had been proposed by successive Lord Deputies, notably Sir Henry Sidney, who in the months before his recall to England at the end of his first term as Lord Deputy in 1567, helped to draw up the plans for the new court.

In the Queen's own words: to the intent that such pernicious evils and griefs shall not escape without just and due correction, we have thought it meet to appoint that a particular court for the hearing and determination of those detestable enormities faults and offences shall be holden within the castle of Dublin.

[3]The remit of the new court was very wide: it had the power to deal with cases of riot, kidnapping, perjury, forgery, recusancy, judicial corruption, the correction of recalcitrant sheriffs and juries, libel and malicious attacks on the reputation of public figures.

Meade, one of the few openly Roman Catholic judges on the Irish Bench, was charged with a number of grave offences, including refusing to acknowledge King James I as the rightful monarch, inciting the citizens of Cork to demolish the fort at Haulbowline, killing or inciting the killing of three Englishmen, and shutting the city gates in the face of troops sent by Sir George Carew, the Lord President of Munster.

As a court of equity it was open to women, and quite a large number of cases brought before it involved women as plaintiffs, defendants or both: Jenet Sarsfield sued Margaret Howth for abduction and other offences, and in the long-running case of Digby v Kildare Lettice Digby sued her grandmother, the Dowager Countess of Kildare, for forgery.

[10] Our knowledge of the procedures followed in Castle Chamber is hampered by the court's notoriously poor record-keeping: during the last twenty years of its operation, no proper entry book of the cases it heard was kept.

The court soon became notorious for slow procedures, heavy fees, and ineffective remedies, although these weaknesses did not deter litigants from bringing lawsuits.

Robert Travers, Vicar General of the Diocese of Meath, was so notorious for corruption that in 1621 he was prosecuted in Castle Chamber for extortion and taking bribes.

As the William Meade case shows, other humiliating penalties might also be imposed, such as being forced to wear a placard proclaiming one's crime in public.

[3] No doubt there were many reasons for this, including the unfamiliarity of lawyers and litigants with the new Court, the speedy recall to England of successive Lord Deputies, the wish of many English-born judges to return home as quickly as possible, and the disruption caused by the Desmond Rebellions in the early 1580s.

Under the second Deputyship of Sir William FitzWilliam (1588–94), the Court continued to operate smoothly enough, but in the disturbed political climate during the later stages of the Nine Years War, it almost ceased to function.

[16] Chichester's actions went well beyond what was thought desirable by the Irish Privy Council, and met strong opposition from the Anglo-Irish gentry of the Pale, many of whom, like the highly influential Sir Patrick Barnewall, remained openly loyal to the Roman Catholic faith.

On the other hand, Chichester had the strong support of the energetic reforming Attorney General, Sir John Davies, who believed that Castle Chamber would be "the best school there was to teach the people obedience."

Falkland offered a program of religious toleration and increased participation by Catholics in public life, popularly known as the Graces, which operated between 1625 and 1634.

[25] The Earl of Strafford (Lord Deputy 1632–41) was determined to impose a strong authoritarian rule in Ireland, and he believed that Castle Chamber was a suitable vehicle for this purpose.

[26] However, he was somewhat informal in his approach to judicial business, and some cases where he was alleged by his enemies to have acted in a tyrannical manner were heard by the full Privy Council.

The powerful Earl of Cork was prosecuted for misappropriating the funds of Youghal College, and he was needlessly humiliated by being ordered to take down his family monument in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

It has been argued that however unpopular Castle Chamber was with the ruling class, ordinary litigants under the regime of Strafford saw it as a court where they might receive impartial justice against the rich and powerful: Wedgwood points in particular to the case of John Fitzgerald, who successfully petitioned Castle Chamber to release him from custody and to hear his claim for judicial misconduct against Lord Chancellor Loftus.

[14] Although it was principally the military disasters in Scotland which caused the downfall of Strafford, his conduct of Irish affairs and, in particular, his administration of justice and his extensive use of Castle Chamber, formed the basis for many of the articles of impeachment brought against him in 1641.

In 1641, the year of Strafford's execution and the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, Castle Chamber simply ceased to operate, and although it still existed after the Restoration, no serious effort was made to revive it as a working court.