Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/416

  volumes of collections relating to the history of the Wharton family bequeathed by Edward Ross Wharton [q. v.], fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, to the Bodleian Library in 1896. The Carte manuscripts in the Bodleian contain nine volumes of Wharton papers, borrowed by Thomas Carte, whose contents are described in the report on the Carte Papers by C. W. Russell and J. P. Prendergast, forming Appendix i. to the Thirty-second Report of the Deputy-Keeper of Public Records.]  WHARTON, PHILIP, (1698–1731), only son and heir, by his second wife, of Thomas Wharton, marquis of Wharton [q. v.], was born in the third week of December 1698, either at Ditchley or Adderbury in Oxfordshire. He was christened on 5 Jan. 1698–9, when William III, Shrewsbury, and the Princess Anne were his sponsors (, iv. 469). From 1706 to 1715 he adopted the style of Viscount Winchendon. Showing great quickness of parts, he was educated at home under the superintendence of his father, whose ambition was to make him a great orator and a great ‘patriot,’ by which the marquis meant a pure whig. But ‘honest Tom’ found it less easy to transmit his political principles than his mendacity and his contempt for the bonds of marriage. When but sixteen Philip shattered his father's hopes of further aggrandisement through the medium of a prudent alliance by marrying, on 2 March 1714–15, Martha, daughter of Major-general Richard Holmes, the ceremony being performed by one of the Fleet parsons. The young wife, described as ‘a person of extraordinary education,’ preserved a blameless character throughout the troubles which only ended with her death in Gerrard Street, Soho, on 14 April 1726. Philip Wharton deserted her soon after marriage. Within a year of that event both his parents died, and he succeeded to the marquisate and an estate of about 14,000l. a year, including his mother's jointure of 6,000l.

Early in 1716 Wharton, in obedience to injunctions left by his father, went abroad with a Huguenot governor to be educated and confirmed in strict protestant principles at Geneva. They set out by way of Holland and the Rhine, and the young marquis's vanity was flattered by the attentions he received at the smaller German courts. He began promptly to exceed the allowance made him by his father's trustees and to run into debt. Meanwhile his tutor disgusted him by his ‘dry, moral precepts and the restraints he endeavoured to lay upon him.’ The Geneva discipline proved no less intolerable, and after a brief space, ‘cutting all entanglements,’ Wharton abandoned the Huguenot to the society of a young Pyrenean bear, which he had partially tamed, and, ‘as if he had been flying from an infection, set out post for Lyons,’ where he arrived on 13 Oct. 1716. His next proceeding was to write a letter to the Pretender, then residing at Avignon, which he forwarded with the present of ‘a very fine Stone-horse.’ The chevalier, in return, sent for him to his court, where he spent a day, and where he is said to have received an offer of the title of the Duke of Northumberland, a title which was actually conferred upon him by the Pretender in 1726. He arrived in Paris by the end of October and called upon the English ambassador, Lord Stair. Stair gave him some good advice, which he is said to have requited by drinking the Pretender's health at the ambassador's own table. In November 1716 he visited the widow of James II (Marie Beatrix) at St. Germains and borrowed 2,000l. of her, upon the pretext that the money should be used in promoting the Jacobite cause in England. In December he returned to England and acted in direct opposition to the Jacobite sentiments he had so recently expressed. Early in 1717 he crossed over to Ireland in company with the poet Edward Young, to whom he was a liberal patron as long as he had any money. Young dedicated to him his ‘Revenge: a Tragedy,’ in 1721, and Wharton acknowledged the compliment by a gift of 2,000l. In August 1717, though he was not yet nineteen years old, Wharton was allowed to take his seat in the Irish House of Peers, being introduced as the Marquis of Catherlough by the Earls of Kildare and Mount Alexander. He soon distinguished himself in debate by his zeal for the government, and became member of several committees. As chairman of one of these, in November 1717, he drew up a congratulatory address to George I upon ‘a happy increase in the royal family.’ Early next year the ministry thought it desirable to secure his talents to the whig party by raising him to the highest rank in the English peerage, and on 28 Jan. 1717–18 he was created Duke of Wharton, Westmorland. Charles II had bestowed dukedoms upon some of his bastards when they were, in the legal sense, infants; otherwise this ‘was certainly the most extraordinary creation of an English dukedom on record.’ After mentioning the recipient's ‘personal merit,’ the preamble to the patent recounts how much the ‘invincible king, Will. III,’ owed to the grantee's father, ‘that constant and courageous asserter of the public liberty and protestant religion,’ and how the same ‘extraordinary