Henry Duquerry (c.1750-1804) was a leading Irish barrister, Law Officer and politician of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
[2] The elder Duquerry apparently held an official position, as he was granted a Crown pension of £200 a year, "to be charged on the French funds", in 1762.
[3]The Hibernian Magazine of that year has a detailed description of an alarming incident where Duquerry was robbed at gunpoint by a footpad who threatened his infant son's life.
[2] Although his speech in 1795 on the possibility of a peace treaty with France caused something of a stir, and was later published as a pamphlet,[1] one listener called it "the stupidest thing I ever heard".
He was a friend of most of the leading politicians of the day, including Henry Grattan and John Philpot Curran, the latter being his fellow MP for Rathcormack.
He had recently visited the Holy Land, and intended to publish an account of his travels there: but on the return journey he suffered what his contemporaries called "sunstroke".
[1] Whatever the precise medical nature of his illness, it is said to have ultimately deprived him of his intellect; Oliver Burke, some generations later, wrote that in his last years he "groped in utter idiocy", a statement confirmed by the biographer William Fitzpatrick in the 1860s.
The illness was obviously grave, as he was forced to resign his office as Serjeant-at-law: but Hart suggests that he must have recovered his reason, at least for a time, since he continued to practice at the Bar and attend the House of Commons.