THOMAS, Henry (1785-1858), of Castlemahon, co. Cork of 1 St. Alban’s Place, London, Mdx.

A native of Old Derrig, Queen’s County, Thomas was a career officer in the British army. He served with the 27^th Foot (Enniskillens) in the expeditions to Malta, Naples, and Sicily (1805-13) before embarking for the Peninsula, where he took part in the battle of Vittoria, the siege of Pampeluna, and the Pyrenees campaign (1813). He distinguished himself at the battles of Nivelle, Orthes and Toulouse (1813-4), for which he was decorated, his horse having twice been killed under him. He then participated in the Plattsburgh campaign in Canada (1814) before serving with the Army of Occupation in France. He was posted to India in 1827 and subsequently commanded his regiment in Bombay for eight years before returning home in 1835.1H.G. Hart, The New Army List, lxxiii (1857), 92; B. Smyth, History of the XX Regiment: 1688-1888 (1889), 170-1; Hansard, 13 Apr. 1836, vol. 32, c. 1008. While no evidence has been found to support the allegation that he was ‘sent home from Bombay, having got into some contention with the authorities there’, his regiment did remain in India until December 1836: Morning Chronicle, 29 Nov. 1839; Smyth, History of the XX Regiment, 174.

A Protestant, Thomas came forward as the Conservative candidate for Kinsale at the 1835 general election, being connected to the town through his sister’s marriage to a member of the local gentry.2John Thomas Cramer of Rathmore: Freeman’s Journal, 9 Jan. 1835; S.C. Hall, Ireland: Its Scenery, Character, etc., i (1841), 122; Gentleman’s Magazine (Jan.-June 1857), 626; B. Burke, A genealogical and heraldic dictionary of the landed gentry of Great Britain and Ireland, (4th edn., 1862), i. 302. Taking his creed from Peel’s recent address to the electors of Tamworth, he spoke in favour of moderate, steady reform. His return was facilitated by his promise to make a contribution of £1,000 to the construction of a bridge over the River Bandon above Kinsale.3P. Holohan, ‘Kinsale Borough and Cork County Parliamentary Elections 1832: Politics and Broadsheets’, Journal of the Cork Archaeological & Historical Society, vol. 109 (2004), 157-98 [167, 189]. Once in parliament, Thomas was unable to secure a grant in aid for the construction of the bridge, although he did give evidence on the matter to a select committee on public works in Ireland.4Ibid., 189; PP 1835 (573) xx. 169 [225-6]. The bridge would not be completed until 1860. A protectionist, he voted against the repeal of the malt tax and opposed Lord John Russell’s motion on Irish church temporalities in April 1835. He backed Sir William Follett’s motion to protect the voting rights of freemen under the municipal reform bill that June, and supported Peel’s attempt to divide the Irish church bill so as to prevent the alienation of church property.5Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1836), 167; S. Walpole, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, iv (1890), 20-1, 29, 40; Freeman’s Journal, 22 Mar. 1839. He joined the Conservative opposition to Irish municipal corporations in 1836, decrying the ‘duplicity and revolutionary tendency of the Ministry, and their subserviency to the democratic influence on which they seem to depend for existence’.6The Times, 17 Jan. 1837; Examiner, 10 Sept. 1837.

Shortly before the 1837 general election Thomas purchased a large estate ‘out of the fruits of honourable industry’ at Erindall, near Carlow.7Morning Chronicle, 18 Aug. 1837; Belfast News-letter, 5 Apr. 1852. Though in 1841 he lived at Castlemahon, Co. Cork, the residence of Sir William Chatterton: Freeman’s Journal, 2 Jan. 1841. By this time he claimed to have become ‘disengaged from the trammels of party’ and was pledged to act independently to promote ‘local interests and the general concerns of the empire’. The radical MP John Bagshaw, however, claimed that Thomas ‘was always the most violent Tory I ever knew in my life’.8The Times, 17 Jan. 1837; Morning Chronicle, 29 Nov. 1839. He was narrowly defeated at Kinsale by the Liberal, Pierce Mahony, who was subsequently unseated on petition, and Thomas resumed the seat in April 1838. Embittered Liberals sneered that Thomas returned to parliament as one of a quartet of ‘Orange Colonels’ then sitting in the House, and thus completed a ‘hollow square’, or ‘whist party with four dummies’.9Examiner, 6 May 1838.

Thomas spoke in the House only rarely, chiefly confining himself to military affairs. In urging that more money be expended on maintaining military barracks in March 1839, he clashed with Joseph Hume, after alluding to Hume’s dual role as a medical officer and commissary to a regiment in India, whereby he had ‘amassed a large fortune … by supplying rations to the army’.10Hansard, 27 Mar. 1839, vol. 46, c. 1236-7; The Times, 28 Mar. 1837; Freeman’s Journal, 30 Mar. 1839. During the Mahratta war (1802-3) Hume served as chief medical officer, paymaster and commissary-general to an army of 12,000 men, amassing a fortune of about £40,000 ‘probably legally’: R.K. Huch & P.R. Ziegler, Joseph Hume: The People’s M.P. (1985), 4-5; V.E. Chancellor, The Political Life of Joseph Hume (1986), 15-6; Idem., ‘Hume, Joseph (1777-1855)’, Oxford DNB, vol. 28, 770-4. That November he became embroiled in a public controversy with the British army’s commander-in-chief, Lord Rowland Hill, after he was reprimanded for taking part in a meeting of the Ashton-under-Lyne Conservative Association at which John Roby’s denunciation of the court influence exercised by ‘Popish advisers’ was considered ‘insulting and disrespectful towards the Queen’.11The Times, 2, 29 Nov. 1839; Hansard, 31 Jan. 1840, vol. 51, cc. 935-6. Thomas denied that any insult had been offered. His own speech had merely stressed the loyalty of the British army to the sovereign. Also see Freeman’s Journal, 9 Nov., 24 Dec. 1839; The Times, 30 Nov., 3, 9, 14 Dec. 1839, 6 Jan. 1840.

Despite Liberal assertions that Thomas was ‘but a puppet in the hands of the managers of the Carlton Club’ and was ‘notoriously incapacitated, by the state of his health for the discharge of legislative duties’, he came forward again for Kinsale in 1841 only to retire unexpectedly from the contest shortly before the nomination.12Morning Chronicle, 5 Apr. 1838. He soon afterwards resigned the command of his regiment, but resumed his military career in April 1852 when he was appointed general officer commanding the Belfast district. Just weeks later he was accused by William Sharman Crawford of attempting to influence an army pensioner to vote for James Whiteside at the Enniskillen by-election of May 1852.13Belfast News-letter, 5 Apr., 31 May 1852; Smyth, History of the XX Regiment, 359; Freeman’s Journal, 24 May 1852; Hansard, 14 June 1852, vol. 122, cc. 597-602. Thomas attained the rank of lieutenant-general in 1854 and was appointed colonel of the 20^th Foot (East Devonshires). He died in September 1858 at Warrington Lodge, Streatham-common, London.14Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 25 Sept. 1858.