Madgett, Nicholas (1703–74), catholic bishop of Kerry, was, according to ‘the local tradition of the family’ recorded in 1841 (Manning), born at Ballinorig near Adfert, Co. Kerry, in 1703. His father James was said to be a protestant and son of a protestant minister, who arrived in Ireland with Cromwell's army and obtained lands near Dingle; but this may be doubtful as a Nicholas Madgett is listed among the ‘papist proprietors’ in the barony of Corcaguiny (1656). His mother (née Leahy) was, it appears, a catholic. Madgett went to Paris to study medicine but studied instead for the catholic priesthood. By 1728 he was a sub-deacon and resident in the Collège des Lombards (the Irish college); by 1732 he was a priest and a teacher at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, of which later he was president. Madgett, like all Irish ecclesiastics in France, was a strong opponent of Jansenism; by defending too explicitly in the second of his three theses at the Sorbonne (18 July 1732) the papal bull Unigenitus (which in 1713 had condemned a devotional manual published by a French Jansenist, Pasquier Quesnel) he incurred the wrath of the parlement de Paris (upholders of the liberties of the Gallican church), the displeasure of a royal court eager to avoid public controversy, and the hostility of the Sorbonne, indignant that its doctrinal freedom should be limited by both parlement and court. After defending his final thesis (4 August 1732) Madgett explained that in Ireland he would be competing for advancement with Spanish- and Italian-trained priests whose theology was strictly ultramontane.
On returning to Ireland (1734) he became parish priest of Tralee and O'Dorney and for many years was vicar general of the diocese of Kerry. On 11 December 1752 he was appointed bishop of Killaloe. As he had no wish to live in his assigned diocese and as the elderly bishop of Kerry, William O'Meara, sought an opportunity to live near relations in Co. Tipperary (partly in Killaloe), it was mutually agreed to make an exchange. Madgett was consecrated to Kerry on 11 February 1753. He set about compiling in Latin (with some words in English or Irish) a sort of treatise of moral theology which he entitled ‘Constitutio ecclesiastica’ and completed in or after 1764. It contains insights into the conditions, customs, and beliefs of catholics of the lower class, as well as showing the author's resolve to suppress those he considered undesirable. Madgett built a house in a lane off Strand Street, Tralee, and lived there until his death, which occurred in August 1774. He was buried at Ardfert. One authority states that he had ‘eight sisters who married locally having issue and a brother who was a naval officer’ (King). Perhaps this brother was the father of Nicholas Madgett (qv) (1738?–1813), best known as a French official after the revolution, or of the Nicholas Madgett (qv) who was a priest in the diocese of Bordeaux; both were said in the 1790s to be nephews of the bishop, but in this case there must have been another brother.