John Hely

Sir John Hely (died 7 April 1701) was an English-born judge in Ireland, who was also the founder of the prominent landowning Hely family of County Kilkenny.

He was born in London, eldest son of James Hely. He entered Lincoln's Inn in 1670 and was called to the Bar in 1679.

In 1685 he made an advantageous marriage to Meliora Gorges, daughter of the prominent merchant Ferdinando Gorges of Eye Manor, Hertfordshire, and his wife Meliora Hilliard. Gorges had made a fortune in Barbados, although he ultimately lost much of it. Hely and Meliora had at least five children, including their son, George, who was the founder of the prominent Hely family of Foulkestown, County Kilkenny.^[1]

Meliora's elder sister Barbara had married in 1675 Thomas Coningsby, 1st Earl Coningsby, and (although Barbara's marriage to Coningsby was notoriously unhappy, and ended in divorce), Hely's rise to high office was almost certainly due to the Coningsby connection:^[2] Coningsby's biographer suggests that Hely was sent to Ireland to strengthen Coningsby's power base in Dublin.^[3]

He was appointed Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer in 1690 on the recommendation of Coningsby, who was one of the Lord Justices (Ireland). He arrived in Ireland the following year, joined the King's Inns^[4] and was knighted in 1692. He held the office of Commissioner of Revenue Appeals at the same time.

He lived at Stephen Street in Dublin and had a country house at Ballygall near Finglas. He was a member of the Dublin Philosophical Society.

In 1695 Hely became Chief Justice of the Irish Common Pleas. He acted as Speaker of the Irish House of Lords in 1696-7. Soon afterwards despite his relative youth his health failed; in 1701 although he felt well enough to travel on the spring assizes he fell ill at Ennis and died "after two days sickness" at the house of Mr David England, who was later paid £3 for his trouble. Burke suggests that Hely, like many judges of the time, found the strain of going on assize (in particular enduring the ordeal of the notoriously bad Irish roads) too much for his constitution to bear.^[5]

About 1698 the Irish born writer and publisher John Dunton, on a visit to Dublin, gave a sketch of the Irish judiciary and praised most of them, including Hely, as "men of such reputation that no one complains of them". On the other hand Ball notes that the general reaction to the news of his sudden death was not so much grief as a widespread interest in who would be appointed to fill his place.^[6]

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