BUNBURY, Sir Henry, 3rd Bt. (c.1678-1733), of Bunbury and Stanney, nr. Chester.

Buynbury came of an ancient Cheshire family with estates near Chester, for which he sat as a High Church Tory uninterruptedly from William III’s last Parliament to the end of the reign of George I. ‘Gay, good-humoured, and lively’, he was an intimate friend of George Farquhar, who drew from him the character of Sir Harry Wildair.Ormerod, Cheshire, ii. 394. A member of the October Club, he was connected with the Duke of Ormonde, during whose lord lieutenancy of Ireland he was appointed commissioner of the Irish revenue. He was dismissed in 1715, following a report from the Irish lords justices that they had found a letter to a Jacobite agent engaged in distributing a declaration of the Pretender’s, and a great number of seditious pamphlets, ‘superscribed and franked by him’.HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, 59. On learning of Ormonde’s flight he and his Cheshire friends, Charles Cholmondeley and Lord Barrymore, drank to the success of rebellionSee CHOLMONDELEY, Charles. but took no part in it. Early in 1716 he endeavoured to bring relief to the Jacobite prisoners in Chester despite opposition from their guards, giving hospitality to some of their wives.Cheshire Sheaf, 20, 27 May 1942. From 1715 he voted against the Government in every recorded division, making his only recorded speech in support of an opposition motion to reduce the number of half-pay officers in January 1718.

Losing his seat in 1727, he died on 12 Feb. 1733.