Lord Monteagle of Brandon
(1790-1866)
26 June 1861

Volume 4, page 132, sitting number 4599.

Thomas Spring-Rice was born on 8 February 1790, the son of Stephen Edward Rice of Mount Trenchard, County Limerick, and Catherine Spring, heiress of Thomas Spring. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and later studied law but was not called to the bar. He was elected to Parliament for Limerick (Whig) in 1820, and then sat for Cambridge from 1832 to 1829.

He was Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department under George Canning and Lord Goderich in 1827 and then served as joint Secretary to the Treasury from 1830 to 1834 under Lord Grey. In June 1834 Grey appointed Spring-Rice Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, with a seat in the cabinet, a post he retained when Lord Melbourne became Prime Minister in July. The Whig government fell in November 1834, but Spring-Rice returned to office under Melbourne in April the following year, when he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. He held this post until 1839, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Monteagle of Brandon in the County of Kerry. Lord Monteagle of Brandon was also Comptroller of the Exchequer from 1835 to 1865.

He married firstly Theodosia, daughter of Edmund Pery, 1st Earl of Limerick, in 1811. They had five sons and three daughters. After his first wife’s death in 1839 he married secondly Marianne, daughter of John Marshall, in 1841.

Lord Monteagle of Brandon died at Mount Trenchard near Limerick on 7 February 1866, at the age of 75. He was succeeded in the barony by his grandson Thomas Spring-Rice, the son of his eldest son the Honourable Stephen Edmund Spring-Rice (1841-1865).