Thomas Langlois Lefroy - Political Career

Political Career

Lefroy contested Dublin University in an 1827 by-election, as a Tory, but finished third.

An idea of Lefroy's politics is given by the opening of an editorial in The Times (of London) on Friday 27 February 1829 when he was opposing the Bill to admit Irish Catholics to parliament (if they met a high property qualification).

Serjeant Lefroy and Mr Saurin have been… re-edifying their Orange disciples in Dublin with much curious but rather apocryphal twaddle, touching the coronation oath, the Act of Settlement and so on.
The learned Serjeant expresses his hostility to the proposed law by declaring that he is averse to the removal of ancient landmarks. Now, if the saintly Serjeant means that the letter of a law can constitute a political landmark, we can assure him he is in pitiable error.

Lefroy may have been influenced by Huguenot family memories of persecution by French Catholics; this was the case with other opponents of Catholic emancipation such as William Saurin mentioned above.

Richard Lalor Sheil published a profile of Lefroy stating (amongst many hostile remarks on his combination of piety and moneymaking) that Lefroy was well known for his interest in the conversion of Jews to Protestantism, leading Daniel O'Connell to joke during a lawsuit over a collection of antique coins that Lefroy should be given the Hebrew coins as his fee while O'Connell received those with a Roman inscription. Patrick Geoghegan's life of O'Connell, King Dan, states that O'Connell held Lefroy's legal abilities in contempt and regarded him as a prime example of a lawyer promoted above more meritorious Catholics (notably O'Connell himself) because of his Protestant religion and Tory politics.

He was elected to the House of Commons for the Dublin University seat in 1830, as a Tory (the party later becoming known as Conservative). He became a member of the Privy Council of Ireland on 29 January 1835. In 1838, Thomas Langlois Lefroy received American politician Charles Sumner during Sumner's visit to Ireland. Tom Lefroy continued to represent the University until he was appointed an Irish judge (with the title of a Baron of the Exchequer) in 1841. In 1848 he presided over the sedition trial of the Young Irelander John Mitchel.

He was promoted to Chief Justice of the Court of Queen's Bench in Ireland in 1852. Despite some allegations in Parliament, that he was too old to do the job, Lefroy did not resign as Chief Justice until he was aged 90 and a Conservative government was in office to fill the vacancy. This was in July 1866. One apocryphal story (in the memoirs of the Home Rule MP JG Swift MacNeill) describes Lefroy's son as denying in Parliament that his father was too old to perform his duties, but being himself so visibly old and feeble as to produce the opposite effect on parliamentary opinion. Another version of this story has the son defending his father's capacity although he himself had applied to be excused certain official duties on account of advanced age. The Hansard report of the debate can be found here.

In a satirical pamphlet on the Trinity College Dublin election of 1865 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu suggests that Lefroy was so old that he had "ridden on the mastodon to hunt the megatherium" and mocks the manner in which the Conservative lawyer-politicians Joseph Napier and James Whiteside allegedly insisted whenever the Conservatives were in power (and might appoint them to replace him) that Lefroy is too old to perform his duties, only to insist whenever a Whig government is in power that he is in perfect health.