Henry Whitfield (lawyer)


Henry Whitfield was an English lawyer who moved to Ireland, where he was elected a Member of the Irish House of Commons, and apparently had financial interests in Barbados.

Life

Baptised on 17 June 1619 at the church of St Giles Cripplegate in London and recorded as age 16 in the 1634 Visitation of London, he was the second son of Sir Ralph Whitfield, a landowner, MP and prominent lawyer in London, and his wife Dorothy, daughter of the antiquary Sir Henry Spelman. His elder brother was the lawyer and landowner Sir Herbert Whitfield.
In 1632 he was admitted at Gray's Inn, his father's inn of court, to study law and in 1635 he was admitted to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge for a university education. In 1646 at the church of St Bartholomew-the-Less in London he married Hester, daughter of William Temple.
At some point he moved to Ireland, and by 1685 was MP for Trim. Having made his will on 26 September 1688, which was later registered in Barbados where he presumably had financial interests, he died in Dublin on 26 October 1688. His wife outlived him, dying in 1696.

Family

Together, he and Hester had six known children: