BROADHEAD, Theodore Henry Lavington (1798-1880), of 40 Berkeley Square, Mdx. and Holly Grove, Windsor, Berks.

Broadhead was the eventual heir to estates in four counties, but in the decade after his father’s death in December 1820 he shared both his addresses with his mother. She was the sole beneficiary of the will of his father, who had sat from 1812-18 for Wareham and in 1820 as a Canningite paying guest for the pocket borough of Yarmouth, where Broadhead came in as his successor. PROB 11/1638/4. A lax and silent attender, when present he almost invariably voted with the Liverpool ministry. Session of Parl. 1825, p. 452. He divided in support of their conduct towards Queen Caroline, 6 Feb. 1821. He voted for Catholic relief, 28 Feb. 1821, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., 10 May 1825, when he was listed as ‘Brinckman’, the surname abandoned by his grandfather. He was in government majorities against a reduction in the grant for the adjutant-general’s office, 11 Apr., parliamentary reform, 9 May, and economy and retrenchment, 27 June 1821. He voted against more extensive tax reductions, 11 Feb., abolition of one of the joint-postmasterships, 13 Mar., and repeal of the salt duties, 28 June 1822. His only known wayward vote was for inquiry into the prosecution of the Dublin Orange theatre rioters, on which the government was defeated, 22 Apr. 1823. No parliamentary activity has been found for 1824 or 1826 and at that year’s dissolution he retired from Yarmouth. There is no evidence that he ever sought to re-enter the Commons.

Broadhead used both surnames in correspondence in 1829, when he informed an antiquarian of his marriage, and formally resumed the exclusive use of the older patronym in 1842. Add. 24866, f. 13. In February 1830 he applied unsuccessfully to the duke of Wellington for the baronetcy apparently offered to his grandfather in 1806 by George IV, then prince of Wales, for which he claimed a warrant had been issued and a title requested. Wellington mss WP1/1096/12; Prince of Wales Corresp. v. 2216, 2275. His wish was gratified in September 1831, when the Grey ministry made him a baronet of Monk Bretton, Yorkshire, the original family estate. He had no obvious claim on a Whig administration and it seems likely that his case was assisted by his father-in-law, Lord Francis Godolphin Osborne, the retiring Whig Member for Cambridgeshire, whom Grey was said to owe ‘long standing promises’. Hatherton diary, 19 Jan. [1832]. In 1829 Broadhead’s mother had sold Holly Grove, which contained ‘50 acres of beautifully timbered pasture land’, to the office of woods and forests, and at her death in 1846 she left him a cash bequest of some £8,000. A. Macnaghten, Windsor and Eton in Georgian Times, 58; PROB 11/2046/86. Four years later he purchased an estate of about 80 acres at St. Leonards, Windsor, formerly known as The Hermitage, and pursued an unsuccessful case in chancery against the vendor, whom he alleged to have concealed the fact that the mansion stood on copyhold land. Macnaghten, 17; The Times, 22 July, 3 Dec. 1850. Nothing is known of his politics after he left the House, but he pestered the Liberal ministries of Lords Melbourne and Palmerston* for a peerage, in pursuance of an offer supposedly made to his father by George Canning*. This emerged in another application to the premier William Gladstone†, 13 Apr. 1871, the failure of which caused him to withdraw his pretensions, adding in a forlorn postscript that he had donated the money earmarked for the patent to the Curates’ Augmentation Fund, 15 Apr. 1873. Shortly afterwards he had second thoughts and sought to advance the claims of his eldest son Theodore Henry Brinckman (1830-1905), Liberal Member for Canterbury, 1868-74, but nothing came of the premier’s promise to note his wishes. Add. 44430, f. 119; 44438, ff. 198, 234, 255.

Brinckman died in February 1880 at his Windsor residence. In his will, dated 8 May 1875, he left numerous bequests and annuities to relatives and servants. The residual legatee was his eldest son, who inherited all his property. In a codicil dated 24 Dec. 1875, Brinckman doubled the settlement of £10,000 in railway stock on his youngest son Arthur, ‘a hardworking minister in the service of God’, as a mark of special favour. A local newspaper obituary eulogized him as ‘kind hearted and a most liberal supporter of the Windsor Royal Infirmary and Dispensary’, a charity he remembered in his will, along with the London Society for the Propagation of the Gospels in Foreign Parts. Windsor and Eton Express, 14 Feb., 29 May 1880.