Orde (Orde-Powlett), Thomas (1746–1807), 1st Baron Bolton , politician, second son of John Orde (d. 1784) of East Orde and Morpeth, Northumberland, and his second wife, Anne Orde (née Marr; d. 1788), daughter of Ralph Marr of Morpeth, was born on 30 August 1746 and baptised at Morpeth on 2 October. In keeping with his membership of one of Northumberland's premier families, Orde was educated at Eton and at Kings's College, Cambridge, where he was made a fellow in 1768, and graduated BA in 1770 and MA in 1773. He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, London, in 1769, and was called to the bar in 1775. He married, on 7 April 1778, Jean Mary Browne-Powlett, the natural daughter of Charles Powlett (1718–65), 5th duke of Bolton, and Mary Browne Banks; the greater part of the Bolton estates were entailed on Jean Browne-Powlett in the event that she was predeceased by Harry Powlett, sixth duke of Bolton. He died in 1794, and Orde's wife duly inherited, after which Orde took the additional name of Powlett on 7 January 1795.
Consistent with the promise he displayed and the connections he made at Cambridge, Orde did not want for powerful patrons. He owed the succession of offices he held in the duchy of Lancaster from 1772 to the patronage of Lord Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, and his nomination to represent the borough of Aylesbury in 1780 to the earl of Chesterfield. Orde was a loyal and not inactive supporter of Lord North's ministry in its final years, though he lacked the self-confidence necessary to shine in the main chamber of the house of commons. He was more at ease in committee, and he was widely applauded for his outstanding contribution to the report by the secret committee established in May 1781 to investigate the causes of the war in the Carnatic. Orde's reward was his appointment in the short-lived Rockingham ministry as under-secretary to Lord Shelburne (qv) at the home office, where he so impressed Shelburne that he was promoted to the position of secretary to the treasury on the formation of the Shelburne ministry in July 1782. Though this too was to prove short-lived, Shelburne recommended Orde to William Pitt when the latter was charged with forming a new ministry on the dismissal of the Fox–North coalition in December 1783. Orde declined Pitt's invitation to resume his place at the treasury, and it appeared for a time that his future political prospects were slim as he was unwilling to dip deep into his own pockets to secure a seat in parliament. This might well have been the choice had the newly appointed lord lieutenant of Ireland, Charles Manners (qv), 3rd duke of Rutland, not intervened and contrived, with Shelburne's assistance, to persuade Orde to accept the posting of Irish chief secretary.
Although they possessed sharply differing temperaments and work practices, Rutland's determination to put British government in Ireland on a sound political and administrative footing in the wake of the recent concession (1782) of legislative independence, lack of interest in the daily grind of administration, and convivial disposition well complemented Orde's conservative, bureaucratic, and ‘cold’ mindset. Where hard work and application were sufficient, Orde ensured that the business of government was performed expeditiously and efficiently. He had few rivals in his ability to deal with paper, but his judgement of men was palpably less assured, and he proved ill suited to the task of managing staff, which was an essential part of the work of an Irish chief secretary. In addition, he reacted badly to pressure, and the disposition to self-pity, which he indulged when the matter at issue was complex or contested, encouraged him to look wistfully towards the day when he could depart what he perceived as a difficult and disagreeable posting.
These flaws in Orde's personality and working habits were not manifest at the outset of his Irish posting, as his outlook dovetailed with that of such conservative men of business as John FitzGibbon (qv) and John Foster (qv), who had been promoted by Rutland's predecessor, Lord Northington. The priority of the new administration was to deflect the demand for reform of the representative system promoted by a coalition of patriot parliamentarians and middle-class radicals, and once Orde had concluded that any alteration of the representative system must complicate the task of governing Ireland, he threw himself fully into opposing it. He was still more convinced that this was the correct attitude to adopt when public resentment prompted a sharp increase in public disorder during the summer of 1784, though he seriously misjudged both the range of participants and their motives when he concluded that there was a conspiracy afoot involving resentful presbyterians, disaffected catholics, and French agents ‘to weaken the government and to sever the bonds of union between the two countries’ (NLI, Bolton Papers, MS 16355 ff 1–4). Because Orde's failure accurately to read public attitudes was shared across the Irish administration, it did not attract adverse notice. A majority of officials, MPs, and commentators were content to follow him in the firm stand he took in resisting parliamentary reform, and pleased to afford him some credit for the restoration of order to the city streets before the end of the year.
This brought Orde no respite because William Pitt chose this moment to implement his ambitious scheme to mitigate the impact of legislative independence by binding Britain and Ireland in a commercial union. Orde was intimately involved in the preparation of this sophisticated attempt to apply free-trade economics to the Anglo–Irish relationship, and, when the scheme was finally ready, in presenting it to the Irish house of commons in February 1785. This was not a task for which he was well suited, and his inability to secure the unconditional approval of the Irish parliament for the provision for an annual financial payment from the Irish to the British exchequer was the signal for a complex series of discussions that culminated in the fundamental recasting of the propositions encompassing the ‘commercial arrangement’. Orde was caught in the middle between the conflicting visions of the British and Irish parliaments as to what would secure the Anglo–Irish connection, and the pressure took a heavy toll on his well-being, though he was well enough to present the revised settlement to the Irish parliament on 12 August 1785. His faltering performance on that day compounded his failure to manage the strong majority Dublin Castle had previously enjoyed in the commons, and ensured that Pitt's proposed commercial settlement never got onto the statute book. It also caused some influential figures to suggest to Pitt that Orde ought to be replaced by someone with more political skills, but the loyalty of the duke of Rutland ensured that Orde remained in position.
In fact this contretemps worked to Orde's advantage as, once it became apparent in 1786 that the commercial settlement attempted in 1785 would not be revisited, there was an improvement in the political atmosphere and a consequent recovery in his health. It also provided him with the opportunity to develop a number of initiatives he had had in mind for some time. One of these was a police force for Dublin city. Persuaded, by the disorderly events that had taken place in the capital in 1784, of the necessity of following the example of Paris and establishing an efficient police, Orde applied his administrative capacities with great skill and efficiency in making this a reality in 1786. A year later, on 12 April 1787, he presented parliament with a still more ambitious scheme, to reform the existing education system; his plan was for a five-tier educational structure, embracing parish, provincial, diocesan, and collegiate schools and two universities. It met with such intense adverse reaction from the main churches, which were committed to the principle of denominational exclusivity, that it is difficult to see how Orde could have pressed ahead with his scheme in the increasingly conservative atmosphere of the late 1780s. At any event, he was not to have the opportunity. His increasingly frail health meant that he had determined to surrender his Irish posting even before the death of the duke of Rutland in October 1787; this brought the curtain down on a chief secretaryship that had amply demonstrated the potential as well as the challenges of the office, and foreshadowed the role that chief secretaries were to perform in the nineteenth century.
Orde left Ireland with a pension of £1,200, never again to hold major office. He continued to act as MP for Harwich, to which he had been elected in 1784 in the government interest, until 1796. Having by then succeeded to the Bolton estates, he was raised to the peerage in his own right as Baron Bolton of Bolton Castle, Yorkshire, in 1797. He died on 30 July 1807, and was succeeded by William Powlett Orde (1782–1850), 2nd Baron Bolton, the elder of his two sons.