Thomas Cusacke

Thomas Cusacke (died c.1496) was an Irish barrister and judge, who held the offices of Attorney General for Ireland and Lord Chief Justice of Ireland. He should not be confused with his much younger cousin Thomas Cusack, Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who was a child of about six when the elder Thomas died.

Elrington Ball states that he belonged to a junior branch of the well-known landowning Cusack family of County Meath. He was thus a cousin of John Cusack of Cussington: John was the father of the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Cusack, and ancestor, through his granddaughter Catherine Colley, of the Duke of Wellington.

Thomas is first heard of in London in 1472 as a law student: he went to London, in his own words: "so as to thoroughly ground himself in the King's law", and he was given a licence to import grain into Ireland. He was made Attorney General for Ireland in 1480.

Like nearly all the senior judges and lawyers in Ireland in that era he was a client of Gerald FitzGerald, 8th Earl of Kildare, who was almost all-powerful in Ireland for 30 years. Kildare and his faction made the mistake of supporting Lambert Simnel, pretender to the English Crown, who was decisively defeated at the Battle of Stoke Field in 1487. The victorious King Henry VII was merciful to the Irish rebels (as indeed he was to Simnel himself, who became an official of the Royal household). He issued a royal pardon for the great majority of them, including Cusacke, who became Lord Chief Justice in 1490.

Henry's clemency had limits, and his strong suspicion that the Anglo-Irish nobility were aiding another pretender, Perkin Warbeck, led to Kildare's temporary downfall in 1494. The new Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Edward Poynings, undertook a general purge of the Irish judges, including Cusacke who was replaced by the eminent English lawyer Thomas Bowring.

From 1496 onwards Kildare regained much of his influence, and some of his former allies on the bench returned to power, but no more is heard of Cusacke, which suggests that he had died sometime between 1494 and 1496.

References

• Ball, F. Elrington The Judges in Ireland 1221-1921 John Murray London 1926
• Longford, Elizabeth Wellington- the Years of the Sword Weidenfeld and Nicholson London 1969