chancellor chief justice judge lawyer author
Cox was born in Bandon, Ireland. He was the great-great-grandson of Richard Cox, the Chancellor of Oxford in 1547. His father was Captain Richard Cox II (1610–c1651) and mother was Katherine (Bird) Batten.
She was born in Clonakilty, County Cork, Ireland and died c.1651/52 probably in Bandon.
He qualified at Gray"s Inn, London, in 1673. Was apprenticed in the manorial courts of the Boyle family, of County Cork.
He served as Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1703 to 1707 and as Lord Chief Justice of the Queen"s Bench for Ireland from 1711 to 1714. His family had arrived from Wiltshire in c. 1600, and was dispossessed in the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
He was appointed Recorder of Kinsale, and acquired an estate at Clonakilty, 1687.
But lost recordership after accession of James World War II He moved to Bristol, where he practiced as a lawyer and became acquainted with Sir Robert Southwell, who introduced him to the Duke of Ormonde, thereafter his patron. He returned to Ireland, and fought at the Boyne, in 1690.
He was knighted on 5 November 1692 by William III of England and then became a baronet on 21 November 1706. He became Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1703 and then Lord Chief Justice of the Queen"s Bench from 1711-1714, after being dismissed in 1707 for his opposition to the possible repeal of the sacramental test for religious dissenters in that year.
He escaped impeachment when Ormonde defected to the Jacobite cause in 1715.
He was the author of an early history of Ireland as regarded from the standpoint of the New English. Hibernia Anglicana, or, The History of Ireland (1689-1690), (called ‘trite’ by Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Purporting to be the first chronological history of Ireland, and incidentally attacking "the ridiculous stories which they have publish of the Firbolgs and Tuah-de-danans".
He lived 20 years in retirement before his death, from apoplexy, in the Great Hall of the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham.
