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Life
1767-1843; noted orator, called ‘The Incorruptible’; ed. TCD; bar. 1790; MP for Callan, 1797; presumed author of Cease Your Funning (1799), opposing Act of Union; appt. Sarjeant-at-Law; Solicitor General, 1805-22; Chief Justice 1822-1841; he arbitrated the Bottle Riot at the Royal Theatre, and distinguished between noisy and riotous audience; his numerous parliamentary speeches were issued as pamphlets; Bushe is the model for the lord chief justice in Edgeworth’s novel Patronage (1814); there is a life by OE Somerville and Martin Ross, being his great-grand-daughters and cousins of one another. ODNB DIH CAB
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Works
[Charles Kendall Bushe], Cease Your Funning, or, The Rebel Detected [3rd edn.] (Dublin 1798) [epigraph, ‘Oh that mine enemy would write a book’].
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Criticism
OE. Somerville & Martin Ross, An Incorruptible Irishman (1906) [copy in Belfast Central Public Library].
Legal beagles: Bushe is the subject of chapter-length memoir-studies by both Richard Lalor Sheil (Sketches, Legal and Political, ed. Marmion Savage, London 1855), and W. H. Curran, Sketches of the Irish Bar and Essays, Literary and Political (1855) - see notices of both in The North British Review, Vol. 24 (Nov.-Feb. 1855-56) - “Books from Ireland” pp.117-40:
‘Of Mr. Sheil’s “Sketches” of Irish barristers, the best is an account of Bushe, Chief-Justice of Ireland. A more interesting account of Bushe is, however, given in the last and best book upon our list - Curran’s “Sketches of the Irish Bar”. These, like Sheil’s, were originally printed in the New Monthly Magazine, and are not reprinted with some additional matter not hitherto published, of which that likely to give most pleasure in ireland, is a very beautifully written memoir of the late Chief baron Woulfe [whom Curran visited in Kilkenny in 1836]’ (p.137.)
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Commentary
Claire Connolly, ‘Writing the Union’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union, ed. Dáire Keogh & Kevin Whelan (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001), calls Cease Your Funning (Dublin 1798) a riposte to Edward Cooke’s Arguments For and Against a Union; gives further details: Bushe compares Cooke’s pamphlet to Swift’s Modest Proposal, remarking, ‘The stile [sic] consists altogether in the art of supporting in a train of grave irony the opposite of the opinion which you mean to establish.’ (Bushe, op. cit., pp.3-4); Bushe describes the tone of Arguments as ‘either a member of the Oppostion or an absolute United Irishman’ (p.4); calls the assertion of independence from Britain ‘the mere cant and fabrication of the United Irishmen’, and ajudges the author to be ‘a concealed United Irishman [who has] jesuitically assumed the style and character of a loyal Englishman’ (p.11), and calls for his prosecution (p.7, 44-45; cited in Connolly, op. cit., p.172). Note: Connolly remarks that Bushe is the model for the lord chief justice in Edgeworth’s novel Patronage (1814) and later notes that his copy of Mary Tighe's Psyche is held in the Houghton Library of Harvard University.
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