Byron’s grandfather, Edmund Byron, was a London attorney, who in 1721 was a clerk to George Walter of Worcester Park, Surrey, a trustee of the Leicester estate in Soho and an owner of property there. Walter, who was knighted in 1727, died in 1742, and in his will of 19 Nov. 1741 named Byron as one of his trustees and executors.
In 1768 Richard Byron married Ann, the daughter of Richard Iles of Hertford (d. 1777), whose sister Ann was the second wife of Thomas Dimsdale (1712-1800), the Quaker inoculist, sometime London banker and Member for Hertford, 1780-90. His father settled on them stocks, funds and securities in excess of £8,000 and gave them entitlement to a trust fund of £4,000 on the death of Richard’s mother, which occurred not long afterwards. By Edmund Byron’s will, Richard received a freehold house in Gerrard Street and three copyhold houses at Highgate, Middlesex. His wife, who died in 1781, bore him three sons, Richard Iles, Thomas and Edmund; and four daughters, Lucy, Ann, Elizabeth and Charlotte. Their grandfather devised a house each in Leicester Square to Lucy and Ann and left £2,500 in trust to be invested and divided equally between their five siblings when they came of age.
Nothing is known of Thomas Byron’s life before his marriage in 1803 to the daughter of Nathaniel Brassey (1752-98), another Hertford Quaker and London banker, whose aunt Elizabeth, the wife of John Iles, had been Byron’s great-grandmother. At that time he was living at Bengeo, on the northern fringe of Hertford. He subsequently resided at nearby Ware, and then at Bayford, three miles south of Hertford.
Byron was returned unopposed for Hertford in 1823 on the interest and in the room of Lord Cranborne, a member of the board of control, who had just succeeded his father as 2nd marquess of Salisbury. He was evidently not the most assiduous of attenders, and is not known to have spoken in debate. He divided with the Liverpool ministry in defence of the prosecution of the Methodist missionary John Smith in Demerara, 11 June 1824. He voted against Catholic relief, 21 Apr., 10 May, and the Irish franchise bill, 26 Apr., and for the duke of Cumberland’s annuity, 10 June 1825. He voted against reform of Edinburgh’s representative system, 13 Apr. 1826. He stood again for Hertford at the 1826 general election, when he was nominated as an opponent of Catholic claims and a supporter of the abolition of slavery. A Dissenting minister attacked him for his vote on the Smith case and pressed him to say if he would support repeal of the Test Acts; but he refused to give any pledges or to apologize for his vote on Smith, and claimed that he
had never given a vote ... but upon the conviction that the measure he supported was best calculated to uphold the welfare of the people, the honour of the crown, and the constitutional independence of the empire.
He was persistently shouted down throughout a rowdy four-day contest, inspired by hostility to the Hatfield House interest. It ended in his return with a Whig, but he did not have the expected majority. Salisbury was told that he ‘has gone through it well and put up with insults, turncoats and unfounded attacks in the spirited manner which does him the highest credit’.
Byron voted against Catholic relief, 6 Mar. 1827, 12 May 1828, and repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb. 1828. He presented a Hertford petition for the abolition of slavery, 12 June 1828. In February 1829 Planta, the Wellington ministry’s patronage secretary, surmised that he would divide ‘with government’ for Catholic emancipation. Although his name does not appear in the published majority lists, and he may have been the ‘Thomas Bryan’ who was named in the minority of 17 opposed to the Irish franchise bill, 19 Mar., a local newspaper reported from ‘authority’ that he had been ‘present at the whole of the debate on the Catholic question’, 5, 6 Mar., and had voted ‘with ministers’ at the end of it.
Byron ... is not the sort of man we want. He is a very good fellow. I like him as a jovial kind of person. He is a John Bull sort of fellow ... but not cut out for Parliament.
Ibid. 2M, Nicholson to same, 7 July, 7 Aug., 12 Oct. 1829.
He divided with government against Lord Blandford’s reform scheme, 18 Feb., and the enfranchisement of Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester, 23 Feb.; but he was in the minority of 23 for a reduction in the grant for volunteers, 22 Feb. 1830. He voted against the sale of beer bill, 4 May 1830. He retired from Parliament at the dissolution that summer, when Salisbury replaced him with a kinsman of his own.
Byron died in Nottingham Place in April 1845. By his will, dated 22 Feb. 1845, he confirmed the settlement of the Surrey estates on his eldest son Thomas, his residuary legatee, whom he had provided with £2,000 on his marriage. He exercised his powers under his uncle’s will to charge the Coulsdon property with his daughters’ portions of £1,000, and to devise the London house to them on the death of his aunt. To his second son Richard Willoughby he left ‘a small copyhold property’ at Hendon, Middlesex, bought from his uncle, and a legacy of £100; and to his youngest son Cecil, who died on his way back from Australia in 1849, an annuity of £50. He charged his residual personal estate with payment of a sum of £4,000 for which he had covenanted to the trustees of his own marriage settlement.