left to his wife all his crown leases in the property ‘of the late dissolved monastery’ of Burnham, and the rectories of Dornye (or Dorney) and Burnham, and many other things. The manor of Clewer and Clewer's Court, and his Berkshire property, he left to his son Peter. He left large sums of money to his daughters, making them come of age at twenty-five. The inquisition after death is dated 36th Elizabeth (1593–4).
Either Wentworth or his nephew Paul [see under Wentworth, Peter (1530?–1596)] was the author of the famous devotional work, Wentworth's ‘The Miscellanie, or a Regestrie and Methodicall Directorie of Orizons,’ published in 1615 (London, 4to, 2 parts) and dedicated to King James. There are copies in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library. A third copy belonged to Mr. John Wentworth, mayor of Chicago, and was burnt in the Chicago fire of 1871.
[Cal. State Papers, Dom. passim; Cal. Hatfield MSS.; Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent; D'Ewes's Journals; Rutton's Three Branches of the Wentworth Family; John Wentworth's Wentworth Genealogy, English and American, first privately printed in two volumes, and then published in three volumes, Boston, 1878, 8vo; some authorities attribute to Paul Wentworth the speech of 20 April 1571 about the chameleon [see Wentworth, Peter]. ‘Mr. Wentworth’ is often used in the ‘Parliamentary History’ when both Peter and Paul were members.]
WENTWORTH, PETER (1530?–1596), parliamentary leader, born about 1530, was descended from the Wentworths of Nettlestead, Suffolk [see under Wentworth, Thomas, first Baron Nettlestead]. His father, Sir Nicholas Wentworth (d. 1557), held the office of chief porter of Calais. He is variously styled chief porter, master porter, or knight porter. He was knighted by Henry VIII at the siege of Boulogne, 1544, and died in 1557. He married the sister of Sir Thomas Josselyn, K.B., and lived at Lillingstone Lovell, then a detached bit of Oxfordshire surrounded by Buckinghamshire. Lady Wentworth survived to live with her younger son, Paul Wentworth [q. v.], at Burnham Abbey, and was buried in Burnham church.
Sir Nicholas's eldest son, Peter Wentworth, succeeded to Lillingstone Lovell, Buckinghamshire, which Sir Nicholas had held only for eleven years (by exchange with the king for lands in Northamptonshire). His first wife was Letitia, daughter of Sir Ralph Lane of Horton, by Maud Parr, first cousin of Queen Katherine Parr. But long before his father's death Peter had married his second wife, Elizabeth, sister of Sir Francis Walsingham [q. v.], and aunt by marriage to Sir Philip Sidney [q. v.] and to Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex [q. v.]
In 1571 Wentworth was returned to parliament for Barnstaple. He continued to sit in the House of Commons for twenty-two years, through six parliaments, representing successively Barnstaple, Tregony, and Northampton. He was certainly over forty when first elected to the house in 1571. On 20 April, on the first reading of a ‘bill for fugitives or such as were fled beyond the sea without licence,’ he attacked Sir Humphrey Gilbert [q. v.] for a speech delivered on 14 April deprecating interference by the house with the prerogative. ‘He noted’ Gilbert's ‘disposition to flatter and fawn upon the prince,’ comparing him to ‘the chameleon which can change himself into all colours saving white; even so … this reporter can change himself into all fashions but honesty.’ He declared that Gilbert's speech was an injury to the house, that it tended to no other end than to ‘inculcate fear into those who should be free,’ and ‘requested care for the credit of the house, and for the maintenance of free speech, to preserve the liberties of the house, and to reprove liars—inveighing greatly out of the scriptures and otherwise against liars.’
Wentworth was a member of a committee on a bill by which several of the Thirty-nine articles were rejected, and on 25 April six members were appointed to attend the archbishop of Canterbury for answer touching matters of religion (D'Ewes; Strype, Annals). ‘The said Mr. Wentworth (a man of hot temper and impatient for the new discipline) was one of them, and undertook to talk to the archbishop in behalf of their book that they had drawn. The archbishop asked “why they did put out of their book … the article of the homilies, and that for the consecration of bishops, and some others?” And when Wentworth had answered, “Because they were so occupied in other matters that they had no time to examine them how they agreed with the word of God,” the archbishop replied, “Surely you mistake the matter. You will refer yourself wholly to us therein,” to which the hot gentleman presently made answer, “Know, by the faith I bear to God, we will pass nothing before we understand what it is. For that were to make you popes; make you popes who list, for we will make you none.”’ (In his Life of Parker Strype misdates this interview 1572, but gives it correctly in his Annals, and is confirmed by Wentworth's own
