Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/426

Wharton house to look to the distracted state of Scotland, and to refrain from irritating the dissenters at home. Unpopular as the success of these manœuvres rendered Wharton with the majority in the House of Commons, he was rendered still more obnoxious by the underground influence which he wielded throughout the Aylesbury franchise case. Throughout 1703 and the following year he gave his steady support to Matthew Ashby, the burgess of Aylesbury, against the returning officer, who was also mayor of Aylesbury, William White. Local feeling was naturally very strong in favour of Ashby's right to exercise the franchise that he had inherited, and Wharton saw in the affair a sure means of extending whig influence in a borough in which he was already powerful. It was mainly through Wharton's advice and aid that Ashby was enabled to appeal to the House of Lords in February 1704, and he maintained Ashby and his fellow burgesses in Newgate (whither they were committed by the commons for breach of privilege) until, in March 1705, the queen, by proroguing parliament, put an end to this complicated dispute between the two houses (Parl. Hist. vi. 225, 376;, State Trials, xiv. 695; , Constitutional Hist. ii. 436).

The success of the whig tactics throughout this affair was soon made evident, and Wharton followed it up by the unparalleled exertions which he made on behalf of the whig interest in the election of 1705; he is said to have expended upwards of 12,000l., ‘whence his other payments ran deeply in arrear;’ but the remarkable success which attended his efforts (as manifested in the new house which assembled in October) greatly increased his influence with the leaders of the party. On 16 April 1705, when the queen went from Newmarket to Cambridge to dine in Trinity College hall, Wharton attended her majesty and was admitted LL.D. In December, upon the occasion of the debate about the church being in danger, Wharton intervened with a greater freedom of speech than had hitherto been sanctioned by usage in the upper house. When the archbishop of York proposed that judges should be consulted as to means of suppressing the seminaries of dissenters, Wharton moved that judges should also be consulted as to nonjurors' seminaries, it being well known that the archbishop's own sons were at such a school (, p. 217). Wharton indeed kept the earlier part of this debate alive by his impertinencies, and Dartmouth observed with grave regret that he had introduced the vulgarities and flippancies of debates in another place into the more august assembly. Wharton was only suppressed when the veteran Duke of Leeds got up and hinted not obscurely at some gross indecencies perpetrated within a church of which common report held him guilty.

On 10 April 1706 Wharton was named an English commissioner for the treaty of union with Scotland (, p. 221). On 10 May in this year he forwarded to the elector of Hanover, by Halifax, a complimentary letter in which he claimed the merit of having tried to serve his country (the letter, in French, is in Stowe MS. 222, f. 394); he received a polite reply dated 20 June, and answers similarly conceived were sent to Somers, Newcastle, Bolton, Sunderland, Godolphin, and Orford. The date may be taken to mark the point from which he continued to act deliberately in concert with the whig junta—Halifax, Orford, Somers, and Sunderland. On 23 Dec. 1706 he was created Viscount Winchendon and Earl of Wharton, but the capitulation of Godolphin and Marlborough to the whig junta, complete though it was, was not of itself sufficient to satisfy him. In November 1707, in the course of the debate on the address, he took the opportunity to harangue the lords upon the decay of trade and agriculture. Marlborough took Wharton aside after the debate, and, after some rather heated expostulation on both sides, the ‘discontented earl’ was mollified by a promise of the viceroyship in Ireland as soon as ever a vacancy should be created (, p. 311). Just a year later (25 Nov. 1708), on the Earl of Pembroke being advanced to be lord high admiral, Wharton was appointed to succeed him in the lord-lieutenancy, a post which he held down to October 1710. He appointed as his secretary Joseph Addison, whom he soon afterwards put into his borough of Malmesbury (20 Dec. 1709). Wharton landed at Ringsend on 21 April 1709, opened the Irish parliament a fortnight later (5 May), and during the session ‘procured an admirable bill to prevent the growth of popery’ by which it was enacted that the estates of the Irish papists should descend to their protestant heirs (passed 30 Aug. 1709). He thus ‘did more towards rooting out popery in three months than any of his predecessors had done in three years.’ He left Dublin in September for Chester, and the Irish parliament conveyed their humble thanks to the queen for having sent a person of so ‘great wisdom and experience to be our chief governor.’ The high-church party were not quite so complacent (cf., Collectanea, iii. 71, 100). Several of