Bartholomew Purdon

Bartholomew Purdon (c. 1675–1737) was a County Cork landowner and a long-serving member of the Irish House of Commons. He was also a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant of County Cork for many years. He was High Sheriff of County Cork in 1708–9.

He was born at Ballyclogh, County Cork, son of Bartholomew Purdon senior and his wife Alicia Jephson, daughter of General John Jephson of Mallow, County Cork. His paternal grandfather Sir Nicholas Purdon (died 1678) founded the Ballyclogh branch of a prominent County Clare family of English origin: Sir Nicholas's wife was Alice Stephens of County Cork. The lawyer and politician Henry Purdon (died 1737) was Bartholomeww's first cousin.

He was MP for Mallow 1703–13; MP for Doneraile 1713–14; and for Castlemartyr from 1715 to 1727, and again from 1727 until his death in 1737.

He married in 1699 Anne Coote, daughter of Colonel Chidley Coote and his wife Catherine Sandys, and had one daughter Anne, who married firstly in 1730 her cousin, Robert Coote (died 1745), son of the Reverend Chidley Coote, (and brother of General Sir Eyre Coote) by whom she had six children. The best known of their children was their second son, the banker Bartholomew Coote-Purdon (1736–1780), who took his maternal grandfather's surname. Anne married secondly William Cole, sometime after 1745.

The inscription on Bartholomew's tomb described him as a man who in his thirty-nine years of public service "strictly observed justice, faithfully served his King and was a patriot to his country".

Sources

• Alden, John Richard Stephen Sayre: American Revolutionary Adventurer Louisiana State University Press 1983 pp.33-4
• Burke's Peerage 2003 Edition Vol.1 p.893
• Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society 1896 p.180