Richard Bettesworth

He was a quarrelsome individual, and his list of enemies included Jonathan Swift, the publisher George Faulkner and Josiah Hort, Bishop of Kilmore and future Archbishop of Tuam.

[2] He may have been a son or grandson of Thomas Bettesworth, who was appointed one of the original burgesses of the town of Midleton in 1672, shortly after it received its royal charter from King Charles II of England.

From the early 1730s Bettesworth, who was a Nonconformist in religion, was strongly associated with the anti-clerical party in the Irish House of Commons, who supported moves which were likely to weaken the Church of Ireland, and in particular, pressed for the reduction of agricultural tithes.

[9] His antipathy to Bettesworth and another old enemy, Richard Tighe, MP for Newtownards and member of the Privy Council of Ireland ("that puppy pair of Dicks" as Swift called them), did not lessen with the years.

[11] In 1741 Bettesworth was sitting as an extra judge of assize (a task regularly performed by the Irish serjeants-at-law at the time) on the Munster Circuit, when he caught the infectious fever which was particularly rampant in that famine year, and died of it.