John Pocklington

John Pocklington (1658–1731) was an English lawyer and Whig politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons between 1695 and 1713. He was appointed a Welsh circuit judge in 1707 and a judge of the Court of Exchequer (Ireland) in 1714, as a result of which he settled in Ireland. He suffered from chronic ill health, and was imprisoned on the orders of the Irish House of Lords in 1719, during a major Constitutional crisis. His descendants, who adopted the surname Domvile, were wealthy landowners in Templeogue, south County Dublin. Early life Pocklington was born in Nottingham, the eldest son of Rev. Oliver Pocklington, a clergyman who came originally from Brington, Cambridgeshire, and his wife, Katherine Towers, of Castle Ashby, Northamptonshire. His grandfather, John Pocklington, was also a clergyman and a noted polemicist during the controversies leading up to the English Civil War, who argued strongly in support of the ecclesiastical policies of Archbishop William Laud. He was deprived of his living by the Long Parliament shortly before his death in 1642. The younger John went to school in Peterborough, and was admitted at St John's College, Cambridge on 27 October 1674. He entered Middle Temple on 24 May 1677 and was called to the Bar in 1684.