Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/539

 poet; and from her to Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada, whose husband was in 1838 created earl of Lovelace. The barony of Wentworth was thereafter held by the descendants of this nobleman in conjunction with the earldom of Lovelace.

(1533–1593). a prominent member of parliament in the reign of Elizabeth, was a member of the Lillingstone Lovell branch of the family (see above). His father Sir jSIicholas Wentworth (d. 1557) was chief porter of Calais. Paul Wentworth was of puritan sympathies, and he first came into notice by the freedom with which in 1566 he criticized Elizabeth’s prohibition of discussion in parliament on the question of her successor. Paul, who was probably the author of the famous puritan devotional book The Miscellanie, or Regestrie and Methodicall Directorie of Orisons (London, 1613), died in 1593. Pie became possessed of Burnham Abbey through his wife, to whose first husband, William Tyldesley, it had been granted at the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.

(1530–1596) was the elder brother of the above-mentioned Paul, and like his brother was a prominent puritan leader in parliament, which he first entered as member for Barnstaple in 1571. He took a firm attitude in support of the liberties of parliament against encroachments of the royal prerogative, on which subject he delivered a memorable speech on the 8th of February 1576, for which after examination by the Star Chamber he was committed to the Tower. In February 1587 Sir Anthony Cope (1548–1614) presented to the Speaker a bill abrogating the existing ecclesiastical law, together with a puritan revision of the Prayer Book, and Wentworth supported him by bringing forward certain articles touching the liberties of the House of Commons; Cope and Wentworth were both committed to the Tower for interference with the queen’s ecclesiastical prerogative. In 1593 Wentworth again suffered imprisonment for presenting a petition on the subject of the succession to the Crown; and it is probable that he did not regain his freedom, for he died in the Tower on the 10th of November 1596. While in the Tower he wrote A Pithie Exhortation to her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, a famous treatise preserved in the British Museum. Peter Wentworth was twice married; his first wife, by whom he had no children, was a cousin of Catherine Parr, and his second a sister of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state. His third son, Thomas Wentworth (c. 1568–1623), was an ardent and sometimes a violent opponent of royal prerogative in parliament, of which he became a member in 1604, continuing to represent the city of Oxford from that year until his death. He was called to the bar in 1594 and became recorder of Oxford in 1607. Another son, Walter Wentworth, was also a member of parliament.

(1592–1675) was a grandson of Peter Wentworth, being the son of Peter’s eldest son Nicholas, from whom he inherited the manor of Lillingstone Lovell. As sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1634 he was charged with the duty of collecting the levy of ship-money, in which he encountered popular opposition. He was member for Tamworth in the Long Parliament, but refused to act as a commissioner for the trial of Charles I. He was a member of the council of state during the Commonwealth; but was denounced for immorality by Cromwell in April 1653, and his speech in reply was interrupted by Cromwell’s forcible expulsion of the Commons. Sir Peter, who was a friend of Milton, died on the 1st of December 1675, having never been married. By his will he left a legacy to Milton, and considerable estates to his grand-nephew Fisher Dilke, who took the name of Wentworth; and this name was borne by his descendants until dropped in the 18th century by Wentworth Dilke Wentworth, great-grandfather of (q.v.).

WENTWORTH, WILLIAM CHARLES (1793–1872), the “Australian patriot,” who claimed descent from the great Strafford, but apparently without sufficient reason, was born in 1793 in Norfolk Island, the penal settlement of New South Wales, where his father D’Arcy Wentworth, an Irish gentleman of Roscommon family, who had emigrated in 1790 and later became a prominent official, was then government surgeon. The son was educated in England, but he spent the interval between his schooling at Greenwich and his matriculation (1816) at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in Australia, and early attracted the attention of Governor Macquarie by some adventurous exploration in the Blue Mountains. In 1819 he published in London a work on Australasia in two volumes, and in 1823 he only just missed the chancellor’s medal at Cambridge (won by W. M. Praed) with a stirring poem on the same subject. Having been called to the bar, he returned to Sydney, and soon obtained a fine practice. With a fellow barrister, Wardell, he started a newspaper, the Australian, in 1824, to advocate the cause of self-government and to champion the “emancipists”—the incoming class of ex-convicts, now freed and prospering—against the “exclusivists”—the officials and the more aristocratic settlers. With Wardell, Dr William Bland and others, he formed the “Patriotic Association,” and carried on a determined agitation both in Australia and in England, where they found able supporters. The earlier object of their attack was the governor, Sir Ralph Darling, who was recalled in 1831 in consequence, though he was acquitted by a select committee of the House of Commons of the charges brought against him by Wentworth in connexion with his severe punishment of two soldiers. Sudds and Thompson, who had perpetrated a robbery in order to obtain their discharge (a favourite dodge at the time), and one of whom. Sudds, had died. Wentworth continued, under the succeeding governor. Sir Richard Bourke, who was guided by him, and Sir George Gipps, with whom he had constant differences, to exercise a powerful influence; and in 1842, when the Constitution Act was passed, it was generally recognized as mainly his work. He became a member of the first legislative council and led the “squatter party.” He was the founder of the university of Sydney (1852), where his son afterwards founded bursaries in his honour; and he led the movement resulting in the new constitution for the colony (1854), subsequently (1861) becoming president of the new legislative council. But things had meanwhile moved fast in the colony, and Wentworth’s old supremacy had waned, since Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke) and others had come into prominence in the political arena. He had done his work for colonial autonomy, and was becoming an old man, somewhat out of touch with the new generation. For some years before 1861 he stayed chiefly in England, where in 1857 he founded the “General Association for the Australian Colonies,” with the object of obtaining from the government a federal assembly for the whole of Australia; and in 1862 he definitely settled in England, dying on the 20th of March 1872. His body was taken to Sydney and accorded a public funeral by the imanimous vote of the New South Wales legislature.

WENZEL, KARL FRIEDRICH (1740–1793), German metallurgist, was born in Dresden in 1740. Disliking his father’s trade of bookbinding, for which he was intended, he left home in 1755, and after taking lessons in surgery and chemistry at Amsterdam, became a ship’s surgeon in the Dutch service. In 1766, tired of sea-life, he went to study chemistry at Leipzig, and afterwards devoted himself to metallurgy and assaying at his native place with such success that in 1780 he was appointed