Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 63.djvu/276

  of Finglass [q. v.], matriculated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1663, was admitted of Lincoln's Inn on 23 Feb. 1660–1, was called to the bar in 1668, and sat as M.P. for Salisbury (1681 and 1685–7). The third son, William, is the ancestor of the Wyndhams of Dinton, Salisbury. In 1657 Sir Wadham became owner of the house at Salisbury known as St. Edmund's College; this he devised (will dated 20 Aug. 1663) to his fourth son, Wadham (d. 1736), grandfather of [q. v.] Wyndham's opinions and judgments are cited in the 1730, 1744, and 1755 editions of Fitzherbert's ‘Natura Brevium.’



WYNDHAM, WILLIAM (1687–1740), baronet, politician, was born at Orchard-Wyndham, Somerset, in 1687, the only son of Sir Edward Wyndham, second baronet, and Catherine, daughter of Sir William Leveson-Gower, bart. His grandfather, William Wyndham of Orchard-Wyndham, was created a baronet on 9 Sept. 1661, and died in 1683; he was the eldest son of John Wyndham, and nephew of Sir [q. v.] He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, whence he matriculated on 1 June 1704. Afterwards he went abroad, and on his return he was chosen at a by-election to represent Somerset in parliament on 28 April 1710, a few months before the fall of the whig government (Return of Members of Parliament). In the autumn of that year the general election was held, and Wyndham found his party in office. Owing to his court influence ( says that the queen was interested in his education) he joined the new administration as master of the buckhounds, and was promoted to the secretaryship at war on 28 June 1712. On 1 March in this same year his house in Albemarle Street, for which he had given 7,000l., was burned down, and many valuable pictures destroyed, Wyndham and his family escaping with some difficulty. In November 1713 he was appointed chancellor of the exchequer. In the new parliament, which met on 16 Feb. 1714, the disruption between Bolingbroke and Oxford was complete, and the tory majority was paralysed by its division into Hanoverian tory and Jacobite. Wyndham was under the influence of Bolingbroke; his wife had intrigued at court against Oxford. By the end of 1713 rumours were afloat that Bolingbroke and Wyndham were in the ascendant, and the ‘Examiner’ began to prepare the minds of its tory readers for a change in the leadership. The night before Oxford's dismissal was announced Wyndham was one of those who dined with Bolingbroke, and he was selected to be head of the five commissioners who were to control the treasury under the new arrangement. The death of the queen in the midst of these intrigues put an end to Wyndham's official career.

Wyndham's short period of office is marked by two events which indicate both his political purpose and method. He spoke early in the debate on Steele's expulsion from the House of Commons, and is mentioned (Parl. Hist. vi. 1274) among the courtiers who pressed for a division. Steele's offence, as explained by Wyndham, was that some of his writings ‘contained insolent, injurious reflections on the queen herself and were dictated by the spirit of rebellion;’ in reality Steele's crime was that he was a whig, and in desiring his expulsion Wyndham was carrying out the deliberate policy of Bolingbroke to limit freedom of speech and secure absolute control of the executive pending the death of the queen. The other event was the Schism Act of which Wyndham was sponsor. The purpose of the measure was to defend the church by closing the schools of the dissenters, but, as neither Bolingbroke nor Wyndham was animated by religious motives, its real significance was political. It marks the final resolution of the party which Wyndham led in the commons to throw in its lot with the high church and the Jacobites.

During the ceremonies of the succession Wyndham performed his official duties, and spoke in favour of the payment of Hanoverian troops from the English exchequer. But when parliament met after the election of 1715, he recognised the plight into which his party had fallen, and began his leadership of the opposition by objecting so strongly to the terms of the king's proclamation calling the parliament that only Sir Robert Walpole's tact prevented his being sent to the Tower. After a long debate, in the course of which, the house having requested him to withdraw, he left with the whole of his party behind him, he was formally censured. During the next few months, though actively opposing the vote for the king's privy purse (, Hist. i. 183–4) and defending the treaty of Utrecht, he appears to have done little in the debates on the impeachment of the tory leaders.