Sir Thomas Phillips of Limavady Servito

Sir Thomas Phillips is not to be found among the worthies of the Dictionary of National Biography, nor is he mentioned in Webb's Compendium of Irish Biography or Crone's Concise Dictionary. He was one of those known in early-seventeenth Ireland as ‘ servitors ’—military men who had fought for the crown during Tyrone's rebellion and established claims on the royal generosity which they expected to have satisfied after the peace. In the Ulster plantation, servitors constituted a separate group among the planters, and some of them thus became the founders of great landed families. In his successful pursuit of forfeited land in Ulster, Phillips is a fair example of the servitor class. Very likely he would have left no more mark on Irish history than many another fellow-adventurer, had he not staked his claim in a part of Ulster that presently became a sphere of interest of the city of London. Within a few years of the Londoner's advent, Phillips engaged them in a controversy which he maintained with almost incredible pertinacity for a quarter of a century, and which, on the eve of his death, ended in a crushing defeat for his opponents.