Bagenal, Philip Henry Dudley (1850–1927), public official and political writer, was born 18 June 1850, the youngest of the four sons of Philip Bagenal (1796–1856), a landowner, of Benekerry, Co. Carlow, and his wife, Georgiana Thomasina, daughter of James Boyd of Rosslare, Co. Wexford. He was educated at St Columba's College, Rathfarnham, and at Lincoln College, Oxford. Having been called to the Irish and English bars (1874 and 1881), he entered government service in England and from 1896 until 1918 was inspector-general of the Local Government Board. He was the author of The life of Ralph Bernal Osborne, M.P. (1884), Vicissitudes of an Anglo-Irish family, 1530–1800 (1925), and (as B. Phillips, for private circulation) The annals of the County Carlow Cricket Club (date unknown). In Ireland, however, he was best known for his authorship of a number of polemical works directed against Charles Stewart Parnell (qv) and his followers: Parnellism unveiled; or The land-and-labour agitation (1880), The Irish agitator in parliament and on the platform (1880), The American Irish and their influence on Irish politics (1882), and Foreign land tenures and the Irish tenant (1882). After Parnell's fall and death he wrote The priest in politics (1893), against the role of the catholic clergy. P. H. D. Bagenal died 7 August 1927 in London.
He married in 1884 a cousin, Harriot Jocelyn Hore of Kilmeany, Co. Carlow; they had three sons and two daughters. A brother, Beauchamp Frederick Bagenal (1846–1939), who inherited Benekerry from their father, served as a volunteer under Garibaldi. Bagenal's grandson Sir Nicholas Henderson (b. 1919) served as the British ambassador in Madrid, Warsaw, Bonn, Paris and Washington.