Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/177

 dents the design failed. She also assisted in providing a ship, and on 4 May 1648 Colonel Hammond, the governor of the Isle of Wight, was warned that a ship had sailed from the Thames, and was waiting about Queenborough to carry the king to Holland. ‘Mrs. Whorwood,’ adds the letter, ‘is aboard the ship, a tall, well-fashioned, and well-languaged gentlewoman, with a round visage and pockholes in her face’ (Letters between Colonel Robert Hammond and the Committee at Derby House, 1764, 8vo, pp. 43, 45, 48;, p. 142; , Charles I in the Isle of Wight, pp. 147, 155, 159). Wood, who had often seen her, adds to this description that she was red-haired (Life, i. 227). After the frustration of this scheme Mrs. Whorwood continued to convey letters to and from the king during the autumn of 1648, and to hatch fresh schemes. She is often referred to in the king's letters under the cipher ‘N.’ or ‘715’ (, p. 240;, Vindication of King Charles the Martyr, 1711, pp. 142, 150, 152–7, 161–3). ‘I cannot be more confident of any,’ says the king in one of his letters, and in another speaks of the ‘long, wise discourse’ she had sent him. Wood identifies Mrs. Whorwood with the unnamed lady to whom the king had entrusted a cabinet of jewels which he sent for shortly before his execution, in order that he might give them to his children (Athenæ Oxonienses, ii. 700, art. ‘Herbert’). But a note in Sir Thomas Herbert's own narrative states that the lady in question was the wife of Sir W. Wheeler (, Memoirs, ed. 1702, p. 122).

The date of Mrs. Whorwood's death is uncertain. Her eldest son, Brome, baptised on 29 Oct. 1635, was drowned in September 1657, and buried at Holton (, Life, i. 226). Her daughter Diana married in 1677 Edward Masters, LL.D., chancellor of the diocese of Exeter (ib. ii. 331, iii. 403). Her husband represented the city of Oxford in four successive parliaments (1661–81), but, becoming a violent whig, was put out of the commission of the peace in January 1680. He died in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, on 12 April 1684, and was buried at Holton on 24 April (ib. i. 399, ii. 439, 460, 476, 523, iii. 93).

[Turner's Visitations of Oxfordshire (Harl. Soc.), 1871, p. 242; Life of Anthony Wood, ed. Clark; Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss; Lilly's Hist. of his Life and Times, ed. 1822.]  WHYTE. [See also .]

WHYTE, SAMUEL (1733–1811), school-master and author, born in 1733, was natural son of Captain Solomon Whyte, deputy-governor of the Tower of London. In a note to verses on himself Whyte says that ‘he was born on ship-board approaching the Mersey [and] Liverpool was the first land he ever touched’ (Poems on Various Subjects, 3rd ed.). His mother died after giving birth to him.

Whyte's first cousin, Frances Chamberlain (her mother was sister of Whyte's father), became the wife of Thomas Sheridan [q. v.] The Sheridans were very kind to Whyte; indeed, he termed Mrs. Sheridan ‘the friend and parent of my youth.’ He was placed as a boarder in Samuel Edwards's academy in Golden Lane, Dublin (, Dublin, iii. 200). His father died in 1757, and his estate passed to his nephew, who was Mrs. Sheridan's elder brother, Whyte receiving a legacy of five hundred pounds. On 3 April 1758 he opened a ‘seminary for the institution of youth’ at 75 (now 79) Grafton Street, Dublin. He described himself as ‘Principal of the English Grammar School.’ Mrs. Sheridan persuaded her husband's sisters, Mrs. Sheen and Mrs. Knowles, and other ladies to send their children to be taught, and, ‘thus favoured, young Whyte had a handsome show of pupils on first opening his school’ (Memoirs of Frances Sheridan, p. 83). Her own three children, the eldest not seven, were among them. Charles Francis remained a few weeks only, while Richard Brinsley and his sister Alicia were under Whyte's care as a schoolmaster for upwards of a year.

Whyte was proud of having had the famous Sheridan as a pupil. But in a footnote to page 277 of the third edition of his poems he made a fanciful statement which is the origin of the myth about Sheridan and his brother being styled by him ‘impenetrable dunces.’ He repeated the footnote story to Moore in after years, and Moore aided in diffusing it (Memoirs, i. 7). Miss Lefanu has exposed Whyte's inaccuracy (Memoirs of Frances Sheridan, p. 85), while Sheridan's elder sister, writing to Lady Morgan in 1817, charges the schoolmaster of her childhood with wilful misrepresentation (, Memoirs, ii. 61). On the other hand, Whyte was grateful for the kindness he received from Thomas Sheridan and his wife, and made a substantial return when fortune frowned upon them.

His first work was a ‘Treatise on the English Language,’ which, though printed in 1761, was not published till 1800. He wrote two tragedies and put them in the fire after Thomas Sheridan had undertaken to get them represented. He was a fluent versifier, and some of his verses appeared in