Of the author of this Discourse of Ireland, which is preserved among the Stowe Papers at the British Museum,1 and has not hitherto been printed, not much can now be ascertained. But the accuracy of the endorsement on the manuscript, which ascribes it to one Luke Gernon, is borne out by the internal evidence of the narrative. The writer mentions that he was resident in Limerick, the seat of the presidency of Munster, and that he was a member of the council by which the affairs of the province were administered. And it appears that one Luke Gernon was appointed to the office of Second Justice of the province of Munster in 1619.2 Gernon became a member of the King's Inns at Dublin in the same year, and it is perhaps reasonable to identify him with the ‘Lucas Garnons of Beds, gent.,’ who was admitted to Lincoln's Inn on May 5, 1604. That he held that position at least nominally until the Restoration appears from the patent of appointment of his successor, one John Naylor, and the provision of a pension of 100£. a year in Gernon's favour, payable out of the ‘casual profits of the provincial courts in Ireland.’ Of Gernon's career prior to his appointment to the provincial judgeship nothing can be ascertained. His name, which is an old one in the counties of Louth and Meath, suggests an Irish origin. But a letter of Sir William St. Leger, President of Munster from 1626 to 1642, to Dudley Carleton, Lord Dorchester, the well-known Secretary of State to Charles I., speaks of Gernon as having been recommended for preferment by ‘his friends in Hertfordshire,’3 where, as in other English shires, families of the name were long seated.
These friends may however have been his wife's relatives, for it appears that there was some connection between Mrs. Gernon and the second Lady Dorchester,4 and the latter seems to have used her good offices, but unsuccessfully, to procure Gernon's promotion to a judgeship in Dublin. The whole tone of the Discourse suggests, however, that the author was of English birth, and he was quite certainly bred in England.
Gernon remained in Limerick until the outbreak of the rebellion of 1641, when, like most persons in the south of Ireland connected with the English interest, he fell upon evil days. A petition sent by his wife to Cromwell5 in 1653 describes him as having been deprived of all his estate to the value of 3,000£, and as having been constrained with his wife and four small children ‘to travel all naked through woods and bogs in the depth of winter,’ whereby one of his children was ‘starved to death’ and Mrs. Gernon lost the use of her limbs. Cromwell, it appears from this petition, had when in Ireland granted Gernon a pension of 100 marks per annum, probably at the instance of Lord Orrery, with whose father, the great Earl of Cork, Gernon had been well acquainted.6 The pension, however, had not been paid, hence the petition to Cromwell. The earlier petition by Gernon himself on which Cromwell first granted a pension contains a declaration by Gernon of his ‘free submission’ to Cromwell's Government, but his claims to the Protector's favour seem to have been based chiefly on those of the suppliant's wife, ‘a lady of quality whose worth the petitioner doth much tender,’ and who was certified by Archbishop Ussher to be ‘a most fit object of Christian charity.’ That Gernon survived the Restoration, and that his pension of 100 marks was continued to him by the Duke of Ormond's Government appears from a letter of Lord Orrery's, but the exact date of his death is unknown. In 1673, however, administration in respect of the goods of ‘Luke Gernon, lately of Cork, Esquire, deceased,’ was granted to his principal creditor, one Thomas Sheridan. A daughter of Gernon's, marrying a Royalist officer of Bandon, became in 1659 the mother of Nicholas Brady, the joint author with Nahum Tate of the metrical version of the Psalms.7 Another of Gernon's descendants, through the same
Gernon's Discourse is undated, but apart from the fact that it was manifestly written within a short time of his arrival in Munster, the approximate date of its composition appears from the narrative. Gernon states at p. 350, ‘It is now since she (Ireland) was drawn out of the womb of rebellion about sixteen years, by'r-lady nineteen,’ and as Tyrone's submission was made in 1603, this would show his Discourse to have been written between 1619, the year of the writer's appointment, and 1622. A more precise reference at p. 354 reduces this period of three years to one. The fire at Galway mentioned as having ‘happened in May was twelve month’ is known to have occurred in 1619.8 The winter of 1620 is therefore the most probable date of the Discourse.
Gernon's narrative is full of many of the mannerisms of the time, and in certain passages he expresses himself with a freedom not quite appropriate to the social amenities of the twentieth century. Such colloquial licence seems less jarring in the garb of seventeenth-century orthography, and for this reason the spelling of the original manuscript has been retained.