The second son of Edward Southwell Ward, 3rd Viscount Bangor, and his wife Harriet Margaret, Henry Ward succeeded his older brother Edward as 5th Viscount. He was a representative peer for Ireland and also a Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant for county Down. He served in the Kaffir campaign as Captain of the 43rd Light Infantry from 1851-53. On 6 December 1854, he married Mary [killed in an accident in 1869], youngest daughter of Rev. Henry King of Ballylin, King's County. They had three sons and five daughters, of which one son and one daughter died as children. The third son, Maxwell Richard Crosbie, succeeded his father as 6th Viscount. Ward married secondly, in 1874, to Elizabeth [d. 1919], daughter and heiress of Major Hugh Eccles, of Cronroe, Wicklow [Ireland].