Sir Richard Osbaldeston (c.1585 – 1640) was an English barrister who became Attorney General for Ireland. He was the great-grandfather of Richard Osbaldeston, Bishop of London. Background and early career He was born in Lancashire, probably at Sefton. His father, Edward Osbaldeston (died 1639), belonged to an ancient Lancashire family, the Osbaldestons of Osbaldeston Hall. Edward's father, the youngest son of a large family, made an advantageous marriage to Margaret Molyneux, daughter of Sir Richard Molyneux, 1st Baronet and Frances Gerard. Margaret's father was head of the family which later acquired the title Earl of Sefton, and her mother was a daughter of the prominent judge Sir Gilbert Gerard, Master of the Rolls. They were also related to the Earl of Derby, and profited from this connection. By the 1620s Richard was rich enough to buy the Manor of Hunmanby in Yorkshire, where the family remained until they died out in the 1830s. Richard entered Gray's Inn in 1604 and was called to the Bar there. He was Reader of Gray's Inn in 1625, and its Treasurer in 1635. While his practice was undoubtedly lucrative, few details of his career as a barrister survive, but it is likely that he practised in York, where he was living at the time of his first marriage in 1612. Attorney General In 1636 he was knighted and sent to Ireland as the Irish Attorney General: he already had a link with the Irish judiciary through his cousin Geoffrey Osbaldeston, Chief Justice of Connacht (died c.1635) who had a long if undistinguished record of service to the Crown as a judge in Ireland. Richard is said to have been a close associate of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, a fellow Yorkshireman, who may have known him in his younger days. Wentworth frequently consulted him on legal points, but given the Lord Deputy's overwhelming personality and his almost total control of the Irish government, it is unlikely that any legal adviser had much influence over him. There were also family ties between the two men, which were strengthened when Richard's son William married Strafford's cousin Anne Wentworth, the daughter of Sir George Wentworth of Woolley Hall, West Yorkshire. Quo warranto campaign It was Wentworth who in 1638 instructed Osbaldeston to bring proceedings for quo warranto (i.e. a writ arguing that a person or public body is asserting a legal