Edward Seymour (afterwards Duke of Somerset). In 1527 he was a member of the household of Henry VIII's sister Mary, and on 17 Oct. 1528 succeeded his father at Nettlestead. He was returned as knight of the shire to the ‘Reformation’ parliament summoned to meet on 3 Nov. 1529, but on 2 Dec. 1529 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Wentworth. He adopted with apparent sincerity Reformation principles, and to his influence John Bale attributed his conversion (Bale, Vocacyon, p. 14). Subsequently he took some part in the proceedings against heretics, but probably with much reluctance. In 1530 he signed the peers' letter to the pope, requesting that Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon might be granted, and in 1532 he attended the king on his visit to Calais to meet Francis I. In May 1536 he was one of the peers who tried and condemned Anne Boleyn, and in December 1539 he was sent to Calais to receive Anne of Cleves. He must be distinguished from the Sir Thomas Wentworth who was captain of Carlisle from 26 June 1537 to 24 Oct. 1541. He did not benefit by Henry's will, but in February 1546–7 Paget declared that it was the late king's intention that Wentworth should be granted the stewardship of all the bishop of Ely's lands. In July 1549 he served under the Marquis of Northampton against the insurgents in Norfolk, and in the following October he was one of the peers whose aid Warwick enlisted to overthrow Somerset. He joined the conspirators in London on the 9th, and henceforth sat as a member of the privy council. He was further rewarded by being appointed one of the six lords to attend on Edward VI, and on 2 Feb. 1549–50, when Warwick deprived the catholic peers of their offices, Wentworth succeeded Arundel as lord chamberlain of the household; he was also on 16 April following granted the manors of Stepney and Hackney. He was a constant attendant at the privy council meetings until 15 Feb. 1550–1. He died on 3 March following, and was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 7th with a magnificence that contrasted strangely with the council's refusal to go into mourning the previous July on the death of Wentworth's aunt, who was also Somerset's mother and Edward VI's grandmother. A portrait of Wentworth is among the Holbein drawings at Windsor; it was engraved by Dalton, by Bartolozzi in 1792, and by Minaso in 1812; another portrait was lent by Mr. F. Vernon-Wentworth of Castle Wentworth to the South Kensington loan exhibition of 1866 (No. 169); a third, painted by Theodore Bernards, belongs to Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, bart., and was reproduced as a frontispiece to Mr. W. L. Rutton's ‘Three Branches of the Wentworth Family’ (1891).
Wentworth married, about 1520, Margaret, elder daughter of Sir Adrian Fortescue [q. v.], by his first wife, granddaughter and heir of John Neville, marquis of Montagu [q. v.] Sir Anthony Fortescue [q. v.] and Sir John Fortescue (1531?–1607) [q. v.] were her half-brothers, and Elizabeth, the wife of Sir Thomas Bromley (1530–1587) [q. v.], was her half-sister. Her daughters by Wentworth married equally well; Jane (d. 1614) became the wife of Henry, baron Cheney of Toddington; Margaret of first John, baron Williams of Thame [q. v.], secondly Sir William Drury [q. v.], and thirdly Sir James Crofts; and Dorothy of first Paul Withypole (d. 1579), secondly Martin Frobisher [q. v.], and thirdly Sir John Savile of Methley. Of the sons, Thomas succeeded as second baron, and is separately noticed; and John and James were lost with the Greyhound in March 1562–1563 (Machyn, pp. 304, 394). Wentworth had issue sixteen children in all.
[Letters and Papers of Henry VIII; Acts of the Privy Council, ed. Dasent; Chron. of Calais, Machyn's Diary, and Wriothesley's Chron. (Camden Soc.); Lit. Remains of Edward VI (Roxburghe Club); Hamilton Papers; Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. App. p. 178; Lords' Journals; Burnet's Hist. of the Reformation; Strype's Works; Davy's Suffolk Collections in Brit. Museum Addit. MS. 19154; Rutton's Three Branches of the Wentworth Family; Burke's Extinct Peerage and G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerages.]
WENTWORTH, THOMAS, second Baron Wentworth of Nettlestead (1525–1584), born in 1525, was the eldest son of Thomas Wentworth, first baron [q. v.] He is said to have been educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, but he took no degree, and on 9 Feb. 1545–6 married, at Gosfield, Essex, his cousin Mary, daughter of Sir John Wentworth of that place. In September 1547 he accompanied the Protector Somerset, whose second cousin he was, on his invasion of Scotland, distinguished himself at the battle of Pinkie (10 Sept.), and was dubbed a knight-banneret by the Protector at Roxburgh on the 28th. Meanwhile he was on 26 Sept., during his absence, returned to parliament as one of the knights of the shire for Suffolk, retaining his seat until his succession to the peerage at his father's death on 3 March 1550–1. He was a docile tool of the Earl of Warwick, and on 1 Dec. 1551 was one of the peers who tried and condemned the Duke of Somerset. On 16 May
