Stafford, Sir Thomas (1576?–1655), author, was the illegitimate son of George Carew (qv) and an Irishwoman from the Carlow region. In 1625 his mother told Richard Boyle (qv), 1st earl of Cork, how Thomas had been conceived when she had lived in Leighlin, Co. Carlow, while her husband, a Capt. Stafford, was away, and that Carew was then the commander of the local royal garrison. The captain's absence was sufficiently long for there to be no doubt as to the child's paternity. The identity of the cuckolded husband is uncertain as ‘Stafford’ was a common name in that part of Ireland, but he may have been Francis Stafford, an officer in the royal army in Ulster during this period. Thomas was born in Leighlin in the month of December at some point during 1576–80.
In late 1600 he was serving in the royal army in Munster, under the command of his father, who had been appointed lord president of the province earlier in the year. Virtually nothing is known of his life previous to this, but he may have been the Thomas Stafford, aged 15, of Buckinghamshire, who in October 1592 matriculated for Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and who lived in the college (1594–7), but did not graduate. Carew had taken a wife in 1580, but this marriage failed to produce any surviving children and at some point he took in his illegitimate but only child. In spring 1591 Carew left Ireland for England, and he may have brought Thomas with him at this time. However, he never openly acknowledged him as his son and presumably did not permit him to live with his family; instead possibly arranging livings for him in Buckinghamshire and then at Oxford.
During 1600–03 Carew was engaged in suppressing rebellion in Munster, and Stafford seems to have been at his side for much of this period. He was present at the siege and battle of Kinsale (October 1601–January 1602) and fought at the siege of Dunboy (June 1602), by which time he was a lieutenant in the royal army. As such he was under the command of Gawen Harvey, who commanded a royal ship based at Baltimore in west Cork. He took part in the brutal and wearying winter campaign of 1602–3 in west Munster, whereby the remnants of the rebel forces were defeated.
From 1603 Carew resided in England, where Stafford assisted him in his capacity as a leading member of the households of Queen Anne (1603–19) and Queen Henrietta Maria (1626–9) and as master of the ordnance (1608–29). When Carew visited Ireland in 1611 on government business, Stafford accompanied him and was knighted by the lord deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester (qv), on 6 October. In January 1625 Carew used influence to have the command of a company of horse in Ireland bestowed on his son, although Stafford complained that his company was the smallest in the Irish army and tried to have it augmented; he did not go to Ireland to exercise this command.
On his father's death (March 1629) he inherited most of his estates, including his main residence at the Savoy in London. During his father's final years, he had deputised for him as master of the ordnance and was initially retained in this role by Carew's successor. However, in July he was removed from this position and deprived of his command in Ireland. His efforts to receive a royal pension in recompense failed. Nonetheless he continued as a member of the queen's court, acting as her gentleman usher. Carew bequeathed to Stafford his extensive manuscript collection comprising rare annals and historic accounts relating to medieval Ireland, and official correspondence relating to sixteenth-century Ireland. Shortly before his death, Carew had pledged to hand this collection, which comprised sixty-two volumes, over to TCD, but Stafford refused to do so and declared that instead they would be stored in a library erected in honour of his father's memory.
Although nothing came of this, he did use this material as the basis for his history of the war in Munster during 1600–03. Pacata Hibernia (1633) was designed above all else to glorify and magnify his father's part in winning the war. He claimed to be merely the editor of the work, which he said had been substantially written by his father shortly after the events it describes. It is widely recognised that Stafford wrote it himself. The manner in which the author occasionally slips into the first person plural suggests that the book was partly based on the recollections of someone who had fought in the royal army and had been at Carew's side for much, but not all, of the war. In the preface he stresses that Irish as well as English can enjoy this account of the crown's military victory because most of the Irish remained loyal to their true sovereign. This may be an oblique reference to his own Irish roots. Much of the information in Pacata Hibernia can be found in other sources but it does contain anecdotal evidence that is of historic interest, and includes a number of detailed maps; new editions were reprinted in 1810 and in 1896.
Around 1633 he married Mary, Lady Killigrew, widow of Sir Robert Killigrew and daughter of Sir Henry Wodehouse of Kimberley, Norfolk. The marriage produced no surviving children. Probably at the prompting of his stepson Sir William Killigrew, he invested in a scheme to drain the fens of Lincolnshire in 1635. After the outbreak of the English civil war in 1642, he continued to attend on the queen when she was in England during 1643–4. As a result his property in London and elsewhere, including the Carew manuscripts, was sequestered by the parliamentarian authorities. He accompanied the queen to Exeter (April 1644), where he remained until it surrendered to parliament. In September 1646 parliament fined him £1,000 for his support for the royalist cause. Despite this composition he experienced difficulties in getting repossession of all his former property and struggled to pay his fine; in 1648 he stated that he had other debts of £2,000 to service also. In March of that year the authorities handed back the Carew papers, but appear to have been anxious that this material should not remain permanently in private hands.
He died during the first half of 1655 and was buried with his father at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. A Latin epitaph on his tomb outlined his career and service to Carew, but did not include his date of death. Presumably his family could not afford to pay for an engraver to complete it. In June 1655 his widow sold forty to fifty volumes of the Carew papers to a private bookseller in London. Most of these papers had by 1677 found their way into the Lambeth Library, where they remain. At some point during 1629–41 he must have given seven volumes of the Carew papers to William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, as these are to be found among the Laud manuscripts in the Bodleian Library.