Here the Bernevals flourished in great prosperity until the reign of King John, when the Irish rose against them, and destroyed every member of the family but one, who happened to be in London learning the law.
He was thirty years old when his father died in 1622, and he represented County Dublin in the Irish House of Commons in the Parliaments of 1634 and 1639.
However, according to John Lodge's Peerage of Ireland: "...dreading the designs of the Irish, he fled into Wales with his wife, several priests, and others, and stayed there till after the cessation of arms was concluded, returning to Captain Bartlett's ship 17 March 1643."
A conversation on board this ship with his cousin Susanna Stockdale, reported by Lodge, points to the fact that his sympathies were rather with the Roman Catholics in Ireland than the Protestants, Roman Catholic sympathies being traditional in his family, and it is there said that he was very intimately acquainted with some that were near Queen Henrietta Maria of France.
His daughter Mabel married firstly Christopher Plunkett, 2nd Earl of Fingall and secondly her cousin Colonel James Barnewall.