Robert Reynolds (Attorney General)

Sir Robert Reynolds was an English lawyer and Member of Parliament (MP) who served as Solicitor General and Attorney General during the Commonwealth period.

Reynolds, who was the brother of Sir John Reynolds, was MP for Hindon in the Long Parliament, taking the parliamentary side on the outbreak of the Civil War.

Served with Robert Goodwin as one of Parliament's commissioners to the Protestant administration of Dublin in September of 1642. Their mandate was to join the Irish Council of War, and advise the privy councillors in how to resist the ongoing Irish Rebellion. They tended to promote more severe punishments for the rebels and a more aggressive prosecution of the war. This alienated the more moderate established administration, slowly coming to be dominated by the Marquess of Ormond. They ended up returning to England in February 1643.

He refused to be a commissioner in the trial of King Charles I. Nevertheless, in 1650 he was appointed Solicitor General. After 1653 he retired from public life until the death of Oliver Cromwell, but was elected MP for Whitchurch in Richard Cromwell's Parliament before resuming his seat for Hindon in the restored Rump, and in 1660 was appointed Attorney General.

He supported the return of Charles II, and though supplanted as Attorney-General at the Restoration was knighted by the new king as a sign of favour.

References

*D Brunton & D H Pennington, "Members of the Long Parliament" (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954)
*"Cobbett's Parliamentary history of England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803" (London: Thomas Hansard, 1808) [http://www2.odl.ox.ac.uk/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?e=p-000-00---0modhis06--00-0-0-0prompt-10---4------0-1l--1-en-50---20-about---00001-001-1-1isoZz-8859Zz-1-0&a=d&cl=CL1]
* Concise Dictionary of National Biography (1930)
* Armstrong, Robert. "Protestant War: The "British" of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms." (New York: Manchester University Press, 2005)