Sir Henry George Ward GCMG (27 February 1797 – 2 August 1860) was an English diplomat, politician, and colonial administrator.

Educated at Harrow School, and sent abroad to learn languages, he became in 1816 attaché to the British legation at Stockholm, under Sir Edward Thornton.

He was appointed joint commissioner to Mexico in October 1823, and returned to England in 1824 and he married Emily Elizabeth Swinburne in London on 8 April.

During this time, Emily Ward kept a notebook with sketches of their journey in Mexico, publishing them as illustrations in her husband's future book and also travel writings under her own name.

[6] In December 1832 Ward entered the House of Commons, elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for St Albans, and sitting for that seat until 1837; and then for Sheffield from 1837 to 1849.

[7] His reputation was as an advanced liberal, and he regarded classical economics as authoritative, as witnessed by his opposition to the Ten Hours Bill.

[11] On the same day Lord Ripon, Edward Stanley, Sir James Graham, and the Duke of Richmond resigned office because they could not support the appointment of an Irish church commission.

The outcome was only resolved late in the evening when Stanley and Graham were already gone, and the Marquess of Lansdowne threatened to resign himself unless Viscount Althorp did as he was told by Grey, moving an adjournment of the motion in the Commons, while proposing an enquiry into the Irish church.

[3] He spoke in Parliament in defence of William Symonds, attacked in 1848 by the Radical MPs John MacGregor and Joseph Hume on grounds of profligate expenditure, putting the case that dockyard spending had seen retrenchment.

[22] The initiative then floundered in the face of opposition from Lord John Russell and Robert Vernon Smith in the Commons, and from Tories, with widespread indifference.

Ward and Hutt supported William Smith O'Brien on colonisation in Wakefield's style in June 1840, but the House was not convinced of the practicality of further schemes and disliked the expense.

He spoke in Parliament about the detrimental effect of the seekers of stag profit who invested, often fraudulently, in public offerings of railway shares; he put a figure of only 40% on the allocation to "genuine" investors.

The rest of his time was more peaceful, but Ward used his prerogative powers to freely banish newspaper editors of papers and members of the assembly.

[3] He succeeded Sir Charles Trevelyan as Governor of Madras in June 1860 but served in that capacity only for a few weeks until his death from cholera on 2 August, aged 63.