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  of Ireland, in succession to the Duke of Richmond, a post which he held until October 1817. In the same month he was created an English peer as Viscount Whitworth of Adbaston; on 2 Jan. 1815 he was promoted to the grand cross of the Bath, and on 25 Nov. was created Baron Adbaston and Earl Whitworth of Adbaston. After the restoration of the Bourbons in France, which as a political expedient he highly approved, he visited Paris in April 1819 with the Duchess of Dorset and a numerous train. His official capacity was denied, but he was generally deemed to have been charged with a mission of observation. He visited Louis XVIII and the princes, but carefully avoided any interview with the ministers. He revisited Paris in the following October on his way to Naples, where he was received with great distinction, though political significance was again disclaimed for the visit. He returned to England and settled at Knole Park in 1820, his last public appearance being as assistant lord sewer at the coronation of George IV on 19 July 1821. He died without issue at Knole on 13 May 1825, when all his honours became extinct. His will was proved on 30 May by the Duchess of Dorset, his universal legatee, the personalty being sworn under 70,000l. The duchess died at Knole on 1 Aug. following, and was buried on 10 Aug. at Withyam, Sussex, twenty-two horsemen following her remains to the grave. Her only son (by her first husband), the fourth Duke of Dorset, having died in 1815, her large property (estimated at 35,000l. per annum) was divided between her two sons-in-law, the Earls of Plymouth and De la Warr. ‘Knole in Kent was judiciously bequeathed to the former, he being the richer man of the two, on the express condition that his lordship should expend 6,000l. per annum on this favourite residence of the Sackvilles for several centuries’ (Sussex Herald, ap. Gent. Mag. 1825, ii. 647).

Whitworth, according to Napoleon, was a ‘fort bel homme’ (Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, ed. 1862, p. 104, April, May, July 1817), and this description is confirmed by the portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, an engraving from which appears in Doyle's ‘Official Baronage.’ There is a very fine mezzotint engraving of this portrait by Charles Turner. The original forms one of the small collection of British masters in the Louvre at Paris. A portrait of ‘Captain Whitworth’ of much earlier date, engraved by R. Laurie after A. Graff, is identified by J. Chaloner Smith as a portrait of the diplomatist (Mezzotinto Portraits, p. 809).



WHITWORTH, JOSEPH (1803–1887) baronet, mechanical engineer, the son of Charles Whitworth (d. 16 Jan. 1870), a schoolmaster, and eventually a congregationalist minister, first at Shelley, Leeds, and then at Walton, near Liverpool, by Sarah, daughter of Joseph Hulse, was born at Stockport on 21 Dec. 1803. In 1815 he was sent from his father's school to William Vint's academy at Idle, near Leeds, where he remained until he was fourteen, being then placed with his uncle, a cotton-spinner in Derbyshire. He mastered the construction of every machine in the place, but, like Watt and Babbage, he found that the machinery was very imperfect, and true workmanship in consequence very rare. The prospect of a regular business partnership was not alluring to him; he was already conscious of the true bent of his genius, and, being unable to emancipate himself in a more regular manner, he ran away to Manchester. There in 1821 he entered the shop of Crighton & Co., machinists, as a working mechanic. His first ambition was to be a good workman, and he often in later years said that the happiest day he ever had was when he first earned journeyman's wages.

In February 1825 he married Fanny, youngest daughter of Richard Ankers, a far-