Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Bradstreet, Samuel
BRADSTREET, Sir SAMUEL (1735?–1791), Irish judge, the representative of a family who had settled in Ireland in the time of Cromwell, was born about 1735, being the younger son of Sir Simon Bradstreet, a barrister, who was created a baronet of Ireland on 14 July 1759. Samuel Bradstreet was called to the Irish bar in Hilary term, 1758. He was appointed in 1766 to the recordership of Dublin. In June 1776 Bradstreet who, at the death of Sir Simon, his elder brother, in 1774, had succeeded to the title as third baronet was elected representative of the city of Dublin in the Irish House of Commons. He was re-elected in October 1783, and was distinguished as a member of the 'patriotic party,' from which, however, according to Sir Jonah Barrington, he was one of the 'partial desertions.' 'Mr. Yelverton, the great champion of liberty, had been made chief baron, and silenced; Mr. Bradstreet [i.e. Sir Samuel Bradstreet] became a judge [in January 1784], and mute; Mr. Denis Daly had accepted the office of paymaster, and had renegaded' (Historic Anecdotes, ii. 166). Bradstreet presided in 1788 at Maryborough, Queen's County, where he summed up for the conviction of Captain (afterwards General) Gillespie, for the murder of William Barrington, younger brother of Sir Jonah Barrington, whom he held to have been unfairly slain by Captain Gillespie in a duel. In 1788 Bradstreet was appointed a commissioner of the great seal, in association with the Archbishop of Dublin and Sir Hugh Carleton, chief justice of the court of common pleas. Bradstreet died at his seat at Booterstown, near Dublin, on 2 May 1791, and was succeeded in the baronetcy by Simon, the eldest of his four sons by his wife Eliza, whom he married in 1771, and who died in 1802, only daughter and heiress of James Tully, M.D., of Dublin.
[Dublin Gazette, 23-25 Oct. 1783, and 13-15 Jan. 1784; London Gazette, 10-13 Jan. 1784; Wilson's Dublin Directory, 1766-1776; St. James's Chronicle, 7-10 May 1791; Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 1884; Smyth's Chronicle of the Law Officers of Ireland, 1839; B. H. Blacker's Parishes of Booterstown and Donny brook, 1860-74; Members of Parliament: Parliament of Ireland, 1559-1800, 1878; Barrington's Historic Memoirs of Ireland, 1833; Barrington's Rise and Fall of the Irish Nation; Barrington's Personal Sketches of his own Time, 1869.]