Allen, Thomas (d. 1634), merchant, was second son among three sons and two daughters of Edward Allen of Kilteel, Co. Dublin, and his wife Ales, daughter of Alderman Giles Allen of Dublin; his paternal grandfather, Thomas Alen, from Norfolk, had settled in Ireland in the 1530s and acquired ex-monastic lands. Thomas Allen became a freeman of Dublin, by apprenticeship, in 1596 and was elected sheriff of Dublin (1608–9) and an alderman (1612). A merchant, Allen also drew income from landed estates in the vicinity of Dublin. He married Mary Fitzgerald (or Gerrott) daughter of Alderman Thomas Gerrott of Dublin and his wife Elizabeth (Hodgson), and appears to have had at least three sons and four daughters. He was one of two catholic candidates for Dublin city in the parliamentary elections of 1613, defeated by protestant candidates including the recorder Richard Bolton (qv). The election became part of the schedule of grievances later submitted by catholic MPs, the unsuccessful candidates claiming election on the basis of an earlier (but valid) poll, and of a majority at the final poll, disregarded by the mayor; their case was overruled by the subsequent commission of inquiry appointed by James I. Allen refused to take office as mayor for 1616–17 when faced with the oath of supremacy and as a result lost his place as alderman in 1617 and was briefly disfranchised. He died 6 January 1634.
Sources
GO, MS 48, p. 58; GO, MS 170, pp. 17–18; CSPI, 1611–14, 441–2; Anc. rec. Dublin, ii, 294; iii, 78; H. L. Lyster Denny, ‘An account of the family of Alen, of St. Wolstan's, Co. Kildare’, Kildare Arch. Soc. Jn, iv (1900), 100–2; Colm Lennon, The lords of Dublin in the age of reformation (1989), 67, 200–01, 225