In 1562, Henry Burnell and a number of Irish legal students at the Inns of Court in London organised the signing of a 'book comprehending the miserable estate of the Irish Pale', which accused Thomas Radcliffe, earl of Sussex and lord lieutenant of Ireland, of facilitating real corruption through his levying of the cess taxation. Nonetheless, the crown response was cursory. Their status as members of the most esteemed families of the Pale in Ireland ensured this. The sons and grandsons of men who had provided government service in a long tradition, they found themselves increasingly excluded for reasons of religious and cultural division. For over the next twenty years, Henry Burnell was at the forefront of opposition to innovations in state government. He particularly stood in opposition to those measures justified by prerogative law of the prince. The Irish legal profession construed them as contravening the principles of the magna carta, which they believed applied to the queen's loyal subjects in the English Pale in Ireland just as readily as it applied in England. This belief in the fundamental connection between Old Englishness, the common law, and antiquity endured within the circles, social, cultural and political, surrounding the Burnell family into the 1640s.