William Gerard

Despite the fact that he was not a clergyman, he was appointed Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin in 1573, although he admitted to having an "uneasy conscience" about his fitness for any clerical position.

[7] Even Elrington Ball,[4] who has a rather poor opinion of Gerard overall, admits that he came to Ireland with good intentions and at first showed himself to be an energetic and capable Lord Chancellor.

He announced his intention of extending the assize system across the Kingdom of Ireland, to restore public order and deal with the serious crime problem, and quickly established regular sessions throughout the east and south-east.

[5] He argued for the need to introduce large numbers of English settlers to Ireland (in Ball's opinion, this is an example of Gerard's habit of constantly interfering in matters which were none of his business).

In the second aim at least he had considerable success in the early years, when Castle Chamber heard a large number of cases dealing with riot, affray and other offences against public order.

Castle Chamber accepted the evidence that he had beaten his wife so severely that she was in fear of her life, while Jane had died soon after a similar beating, and probably as a direct result of it.

Given Howth's social standing, the penalties were severe enough: he was briefly imprisoned, subjected to heavy fines and ordered to pay maintenance to his wife, who was allowed to live apart from him and was given custody of their children.

[10] The Sidney administration was weakened by the Anglo-Irish gentry's intense opposition to Sidney's proposals on tax reform, and in particular to the levying of cess, a bitterly unpopular tax for the upkeep of military garrisons of the Pale (the counties surrounding Dublin which were under secure Crown control), which the gentry complained imposed a crippling financial burden on them.

The cess controversy reached its height in 1577 when Sidney persuaded the Queen to imprison three eminent Irish barristers who had gone to London to petition for his proposals to be withdrawn.

Gerard, who had often been in ill health during his years in Wales, complained about the effect on his constitution of the damp Irish climate, and he was now over sixty, a considerable age for the time.

He wrote a loyal letter to Elizabeth I, saying that he hoped to see her one more time even if he had to crawl all the way to London, but by then he was too ill to leave Chester, where he died in early May 1581.

They had two sons and four daughters[5] including: Historians agree that Gerard began his career in Ireland with an energetic attempt to reform the legal system.

He calls him an energetic and capable reformer who in his early years in Ireland did much to re-establish the authority of the courts and, as the case of Lord Howth shows, was willing to administer impartial justice even against members of the nobility.