Thomas Hervey

Thomas Hervey (20 January 1699 – 1775), of Bond Street, London, was an English pamphleteer and politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1733 to 1747. He became embroiled with the wife of a neighbour who left her husband, and the ensuing dispute brought him to the brink of madness. He was noted for his eccentric open letters. Life Hervey was the second son of John Hervey, 1st Earl of Bristol, MP and his second wife Elizabeth Felton, daughter of Sir Thomas Felton, 4th Baronet of Playford, Suffolk. He was educated at Westminster School from 1712 to 1717 and matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford on 10 May 1717 aged 17. He was taken away from Oxford to study law at Lincoln's Inn where he was admitted on 17 February 1720. He was thus denied what he desired, a post in the army; and gave himself up to drink, with the result that, as his allowance from his father was only £120 per annum, he ‘many, many times wanted a dinner.’ At an early age he was engaged in two duels, and was nearly involved in a third. His ill-health was chronic. For eleven years he was unable to lie in his bed ‘one single night from night to morning;’ he was racked by a ‘constant fever, for which in 17 or 18 years he had been blooded more than 100 times,’ and before he was of age his mind was ‘unhinged.’ Hervey was appointed Equerry to Queen Caroline in 1728. He was returned as Member of Parliament for the family seat at Bury St Edmunds at a by-election on 29 June 1733. He was returned again at the 1734 In 1737, his brother Lord Hervey procured him a present of money from Walpole, and in 1738, a post of £500 p.a. as surveyor of the King's gardens in place of his equerry position. In 1737, the wife of Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet, a considerable heiress, left her husband and put herself under Hervey's protection. In 1739 she made a will bequeathing to Hervey the reversion of her estates in Cambridgeshire, Middlesex, Anglesey and Caernarvonshire, which had been settled ‘after death of me and my husband and failure of issue of my body to the use of such person or persons as I should appoint’. She also asked to Hanmer to leave to Hervey her principal estate of Barton, Suffolk, which he had acquired absolutely under their marriage settlement. Hervey's mother disinherited him for his refusal to separate himself from Colonel Thomas Norton, his colleague in the representation of Bury St. Edmunds.