His father, who was also a barrister, came to Ireland after the Restoration of Charles II as secretary to Sir Edward Smith, the Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas and had a successful career, despite his chronic ill-health.
[2] A handwritten "managerial list" identifying those MPs who supported Ormonde as Lord Lieutenant and those who opposed him, which was prepared by Johnson in 1706, survives.
[4] Such views, which were common among the Irish political class under Queen Anne of England, were not acceptable after the change of dynasty in 1714, especially after his great patron Ormonde, now revealed as a Jacobite, fled to France in 1715.
[1] In 1716, like his former colleagues, he was closely questioned by the House of Commons about the role which the High Court judges had played in the bitter clash between the central government and Dublin Corporation in 1712–3, which had brought the whole administration to a standstill.
[5] In 1721 there was some prospect of a return to the Bench, as his lifelong friend (and future son-in-law) Sir Richard Levinge, 1st Baronet, was now Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas.
[1] Although Levinge was close to seventy and in constant pain from gout, they managed to have one son, also named Richard, born just before his father's death.