657 



WHARTON, DUKE OF. 



WHARTON, DUKE OF. 



58 



Wharton, who did not succeed to his father's title till 1696, is stated 

 to have entered parliament in the reign of Charles II.; and from the 

 commencement of hia political life he adhered steadily to the Whig 

 party. On the landing of the Prince of Orange at Torbay, in Novem- 

 ber 1688, he and his father were among the first who joined him ; and 

 after the settlement of the new government he was made comptroller 

 of the household, and sworn of the privy council. In April 1697, 

 being now a peer, he was appointed lord-lieutenant of Oxfordshire, 

 and also one of the two chief justices in eyre, then an office of some 

 importance. On the accession of Anne he was removed from his 

 places by the Tory ministry, which then came into power; but after 

 Whig principles re-acquiied the ascendancy, his eminent abilities came 

 again into request, and, after having given his assistance as one of the 

 commissioners in arranging the treaty of union with Scotland, he was, 

 in December 1706, created Viscount Wiuchendon and Earl of Wharton. 

 In 1708, he was appointed lord-lieutenant of Ireland, and he held 

 that post till after the overthrow of the Whig administration of Lord 

 Godolphin in the autumn of 1710. For the remainder of the reiga 

 of Anne he was one of the most active leaders of the opposition. In 

 September 1714, immediately after the arrival of George I., he was 

 made lord privy seal, and on the 1st of January 1715, he was created 

 Marquis of Wharton and Malmsbury in the peerage of England, and 

 Baron Trim, Earl of Rathfarnham, and Marquis of Catherlogh in that 

 of Ireland ; but he died at his house in Dover Street, London, on the 

 12th of April in the same year. 



The Marquis was twice married : first to Anne, daughter of Sir 

 Henry Lee of Ditchley, in Oxfordshire, by whom he had no issue ; 

 secondly, to Lucy Loftus, daughter of Viscount Lisburne, by whom 

 he had the son who succeeded to his honours. Both these ladies were 

 cultivators of literature. Some account of the first, who died in 1685, 

 and also some poetical pieces written by her, may be read in Nichols's 

 'Collection,' i. 51-53, and ii. 329. She is highly complimented in 

 various passages by Waller, especially in his ' Two Cantos of Divine 

 Poesy, occasioned upon sight of the 53rd chapter of Isaiah turned 

 into verse by Mrs. Wharton.' Some love-verses by the second (entitled 

 'To Cupid') are in Nichols, v. 10. The famous ballad of ' Lillibur- 

 lero,' made on the Earl of Tyrconnel, who had in 1686 been appointed 

 lord-lieutenant of Ireland by James II., going over to his government 

 for the second time in 1688, is said to have been written by Lord 

 Wharton (see Percy's ' Reliques,' iii. 373-376). 



The Marquis of Wharton, probably on account of his eminent 

 abilities and services to his party, appears to have been an object of 

 special dislike to the Tories of his own day. There are two characters 

 of him by Swift, one in his ' Four Last Years of Queen Anne,' which 

 is severe enough; the other dated London, August 30th, 1710, a con- 

 centration of bitterness and venom. In the latter he says, among 

 other things, " He bears the gallantries of his lady with the indif- 

 ference of a Stoic, and thinks them well recompensed by a return of 

 children to support his family," &c. This would seem to imply that 

 the Marquis's second wife bore him several children. In the notes 

 upon Burnet's ' History of his Own Time,' by Lord Dartmouth, among 

 other caustic things, it is said that the marquis, " in respect to his 

 great sincerity and veracity, went amongst his own party by the name 

 of honest Tom Wharton." 



WHARTON, PHILIP WHARTON, DUKE OF, was the son (we 

 believe the only son) of Thomas, Marquis of Wharton, and was born 

 in December 1698. Having early shown great quickness of parts, he 

 was carefully educated at home under the superintendence of his 

 father, whoso ambition was to make him both a great orator and a 

 great patriot ; the latter term meaning in his lordship's notion not 

 only a pure Whig in politics, but further, it would seem, a Presby- 

 terian in religion. Either the training he received, however, or pos- 

 sibly the nature with which he had come into the world, proved more 

 favourable to the intellectual than to the moral progress of the boy. 

 His first folly was an early one, his getting himself married clan- 

 destinely at the Fleet, when he was scarcely sixteen, to the daughter 

 of Major-General Holmes, a shock which his father took so much to 

 heart, that it is said to have killed him iu six weeks. The old marquis 

 died April 12th, 1715 ; and the marchioness, also, it is affirmed, killed 

 in effect by the same stroke, followed her husband to the grave in the 

 course of the next year. Yet it is admitted by Wharton's biographers 

 that, although the match he had made was " no ways suitable to his 

 birth, fortune, or character, and far less to the great views which his 

 father had of disposing of him in such a marriage as would have 

 been a considerable addition to the fortune and grandeur of his 

 illustrious family," the lady was unobjectionable, except upon the 

 score of the inequality of her condition, and "deserved infinitely 

 more happiness than she met with in this unfortunate alliance." They 

 appear to have parted soon after the marriage ; in the beginning of 

 1716 the marquis, probably in obedience to directions left by his 

 father, went abroad with a French Huguenot governor to be educated 

 or confirmed in strict Presbyterian principles at Geneva. In passing 

 through Germany, his vanity was gratified by receiving an order of 

 knighthood from some petty court ; he also immediately began to run 

 in debt; his Huguenot governor only disgusted him by his "dry 

 moral precepts and the restraints he endeavoured to lay upon him ; " 

 the Geneva discipline proved intolerable, and, after a brief space, 

 cutting all entanglements, he left the Huguenot behind, and, " as if 



EIOQ. Div. VOL. vi. 



he had been flying from the plague," set out post for Lyon, where be 

 arrived on the 13th of October 1716. His next proceeding was to 

 write a letter to the Pretender, then residing at Avignon, which he 

 forwarded with the present of a fine stallion ; the Chevalier in return 

 sent for him to his court, where he spent a day, and, it is said, accepted 

 from the soi-disant king the title of Duke of Northumberland. After 

 this he presented himself in Paris, where he visited the widow of 

 James II. at St. Germain, and borrowed 20001. from her; without 

 however declining the attentions of the English ambassador, Lord 

 Stair, at whose table he repeatedly dined. To get the money from the 

 queen-dowager, who was obliged to pawn her jewels to raise it, he is 

 asserted to have engaged to employ it in promoting the interest of 

 her family in England : at the same time he told a friend who remon- 

 strated with him, that till he could repay what he had thus borrowed, 

 he must remain a Jacobite, but when that obligation was discharged he 

 would return to the Whigs. 



Having signalised his stay in Paris by sundry extravagances, he 

 returned to England in December, but soon after set out for Ireland, 

 where he was immediately allowed to take his seat in the House of Peers, 

 although as yet only in his eighteenth or nineteenth year. Whether 

 he had purchased this indulgence by any engagement to support the 

 government does not appear ; but he forthwith took that side with all 

 apparent sincerity and zeal, and speedily raised himself to such dis- 

 tinction by the figure he made in debate, that, under age as he still 

 was, it was thought proper to raise him to the highest rank in the 

 English peerage, and on the 20th of January 1718, he was created 

 Duke of Wharton. If we put aside those bestowed on members, 

 legitimate and illegitimate, of the royal family, this was certainly the 

 most extraordinary creation of an English dukedom on record ; and 

 it may also be regarded as the most remarkable passage even in Whar- 

 ton's singular career. Notwithstanding the practice which then pre- 

 vailed, of conferring that dignity with much less reserve than at 

 present, the attainment of it in such circumstances must be held to 

 bear strong testimony to the impression which the talents of the young 

 nobleman made at his first appearance on the political stage. 



It was probably not till after he had attained his majority, early in. 

 1720, that he took his seat in the English House of Peers. His name 

 first appears in the records of the debates on the 5th of April in that 

 year. Up to this time he is said to have continued to support the 

 ministry ; but he now warmly joined the opposition to the great 

 government measure of the South Sea Bill, in the debate on the 

 motion for its committal, which took place on the above-mentioned 

 day. He also spoke several times on the same subject at the explosion 

 of that wild scheme ; and it was in replying to a bitter invective of his, 

 on the 4th of February, 1721, that Earl Stanhope, then secretary of 

 state, burst a blood-vessel, which occasioned his death the next day. 

 His next prominent appearance was as an opponent of the bill of 

 pains and penalties against Atterbury, in the great debate about which, 

 on the 15th of May, 1723, on the motion that the bill should pass, he 

 delivered a long and able speech, a full report of which was soon 

 after published. This is the last speech of the Duke of Wharton's 

 that is noticed in the ' Parliamentary History.' His estate, worth, 

 it is said, 16,0002. a year when he came to it, had by this time 

 become so involved, that his property was placed in the hands of 

 trustees, for the benefit of his creditors, and he was allowed only 

 1200?. per annum. He now, perhaps in the hope of making money by 

 the speculation, set up a twice-a-week political paper, under the title of 

 ' The True Briton :' the first number appeared on Monday, June 3rd 

 1723; the second, on the following Friday; the 74th and last, on 

 Monday, February 17th 1724. At the same time he exerted all his 

 influence in every other way against the ministry and the court ; even 

 getting himself made a member of the Wax-Chandlers' company in the 

 city of London, that he might speak and vote at common-halls and 

 other civic meetings. But he soon got tired of that unprofitable work, 

 and giving out that his intention was to retrench for a few years, he 

 went off to the continent, apparently in the early part of the year 

 1724. Proceeding first to Vienna, ho made a distinguished figure at 

 that court for a short time ; then he set oxit for Madrid, " where," 

 says his original biographer, " his arrival alarmed the English minister 

 so much, that two expresses were sent from Madrid to London, upon 

 an apprehension that the duke was received there in the character of a 

 minister himself; upon which his grace was served with an order 

 under the privy seal to summon him home." This order he entirely 

 disregarded : " His grace," says one account (Salmon, in ' Chronolo- 

 gical Historian,' under date of June 1726), " being in a coach when it 

 was delivered to him, contemptuously threw it into the street without 

 opening it; and soon after, it is said, declared himself a Roman 

 Catholic." He " endeavoured," continued the writer of his Life, " to 

 stir up the Spanish court not only against the person that delivered 

 the warrant, but against the court of Great Britain itself, for exercising 

 an act of power, as he was pleased to call it, within the jurisdiction of 

 his Catholic Majesty's kingdom. After this he acted openly in the 

 service of the Pretender, and appeared at his court, where he was 

 received with great marks of favour." 



The subsequent conduct 1 of this spoiled child of fortune can only be 

 attributed to a species of madness. His duchess, whom he had 

 entirely neglected from an early period of their marriage, having died, 

 April 14th 1726, he immediately offered his hand to Miss O'Byrue, *,he 



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