Robert Day (Irish politician, born 1746)

He was born in County Kerry, the third boy among the seven children of the Reverend John Day of Lohercannon, Tralee, Chancellor of Ardfert Cathedral, and his wife Lucy, one of the many daughters of Maurice FitzGerald, 14th Knight of Kerry (died 1729) and his wife Elizabeth Crosbie. The Day family had come to Ireland from East Anglia in the seventeenth century. Robert's grandfather Edward Day was a prosperous merchant; his paternal grandmother was Margaret Elizabeth Fuller. Among Robert's four brothers was Edward Day, Archdeacon of Ardfert. Robert and Edward were close throughout their lives, and Edward's death in 1808 was a great blow to Robert. A third brother, John Day, was Mayor of Cork in 1807. Their mother's family, a branch of the great FitzGerald dynasty, had held the hereditary title Knight of Kerry since the thirteenth century. Robert was fostered by a local family (a custom which was still common in eighteenth-century Kerry) and spoke only Irish until he was seven. He was a lively young man and not apparently much interested in learning the law, preferring to see the sights of London, attend debates in the British House of Commons and make frequent trips to the Continent. He patronised the well-known Grecian Coffee House in Devereux Court off the Strand, where he is said to have enjoyed the company of Oliver Goldsmith. Despite his love of pleasure, his kindly nature is shown by his organising a charitable subscription for the relief of a poor family who were found starving near the Temple. His obvious enjoyment of life came at a heavy cost, as it caused him to neglect his legal studies. Despite his rise to the top of the legal profession, his ignorance of the law was proverbial. ==Legal practice and political career==

He returned to Ireland after spending about five years in England. He settled into a more sedate way of life, having married Mary (Polly) Pott, daughter of the leading English surgeon Percivall Pott, noted for his work in orthopaedics and on the causes of cancer, and his wife Sarah Cruttenden, in 1774. He retained considerable political influence after he went on the Bench, especially in Tralee, where most of the houses were owned by his son-in-law, Sir Edward Denny. ==Judge==

He was appointed a justice of the Court of King's Bench (Ireland) in 1798, and almost immediately afterwards he was appointed to the Special Commission established to deal with the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. In 1816 he presided at the much publicised quo warranto case, ''Rex v. O'Grady''. In the same year, he presided at the celebrated trial for murder of the Kerry attorney, Rowan Cashel. Cashel, a notoriously quarrelsome young man, had killed his friend Henry Arthur O'Connor in a duel. He was acquitted, as was usual at the time in an affair of honour, after a charge to the jury by Day in Cashel's favour. As a judge, Day was praised for his integrity, but not for his ability. Daniel O'Connell said that one could always win a case in front of Day by insisting on making the closing argument since Day, by his own admission, generally agreed with whoever spoke last (as Geoghegan remarks, many barristers still employ O'Connell's tactics). His colleague on the Irish Bench, William Fletcher, was also given to treating grand juries to political harangues: his address to the grand jury of County Wexford in 1814 caused uproar. His personal friendship with O'Connell even survived O'Connell's fatal duel with John D'Esterre in January 1815. When Dublin was rife with news of the impending duel, Day was sent to arrest O'Connell, with the aim of preventing it. O'Connell insisted that he was not the aggressor in the matter, and Day, seemingly satisfied, merely bound him over to keep the peace, thus making the death of D'Esterre inevitable. "Was there ever such a scene?" O'Connell asked later. Day lived long enough to welcome Catholic Emancipation, and was generous in his praise of O'Connell for his crucial role in achieving it. He retired from the Bench in 1818. He lived at Merrion Square in Dublin city, at Loughlinstown House in south County Dublin, and at Day Place, Tralee. ==Death, marriages and children==

He died at Loughlinstown House in 1841, aged almost ninety-five. By his first wife Mary (Polly) Pott, who died in 1823, he had a daughter Elizabeth, who married Sir Edward Denny, 3rd Baronet, and had six children including Sir Edward Denny, 4th Baronet. He made provision for both sons in his will, and they adopted the surname Day. Mary, who was a Roman Catholic, had lived with the family for many years as a companion and later nurse to Polly. John, their elder son, followed the family tradition of entering the Church. He inherited from the senior branch of the family their property at Beaufort, County Kerry. He married Lucy Thompson, daughter of William Thompson, Archdeacon of Cork and Mary Chetwode. He was the grandfather of Charles Towry-Law, 4th Baron Ellenborough. ==Character==

Ball, writing in the mid-1920s, describes Day as a man who was "estimable in every way". Whether Ball was aware of his unconventional domestic life is unclear (the first published references to Day's relationship with Mary Fitzgerald was in the 1938 memoir of the judge by Ella Day, who had married his descendant, Colonel George Day). Nonetheless, there is ample evidence of his kindly and charitable nature, and of his great gift for friendship. In his later years, he inclined more and more to religion. Kenny adds that the descriptions we have of his pleasure-filled youth in London give an attractive picture of a lively and fun-loving young man. ==Sources==