said to have been rector. His 'Oratio coram Patribus et Clero habita 16 October 1553' was published in that year (London, 8vo), and disputations are printed in Foxe's Actes and Monuments.' His moral delinquencies are detailed by various protestant writers of the time, and especially in Michael Wood's preface to the 1553 edition of Gardiner's 'De Vera Obedientia' (Lansd. MS. 980, f. 266; Jewel, Works, i. 115; Original Letters, Parker Soc. pp. 305, 373). Edward Weston [q. v.] was his great-nephew.
[Authorities cited; Ashmole MSS. 815 f. 32 b, 840 f. 615; Strype's Works (General Index); Gough's Index to Parker Soc. Publ.; Wood's Athenae Oxon. i. 295; Cooper's Athenae Cantabr. i. 187; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500-1714; Welch's Queen's Scholars, p. 5; Kennedy's Nov. Rep. Eccl. Londinense; Widmore's Westminster Abbey, pp. 135-6; Stanley's Memorials, p. 399; Fuller's Church Hist. ed. Brewer; Burnet's Hist. Ref. ed. Pocock; Foxe's Actes and Mon. ed. Townsend; Dixon's Hist. Church of England; Froude's Hist, of England; Tanner's Bibl.; Le Neve's Fasti Eccl. Angl. ed. Hardy; Simms's Bibl. Staffordiensis.]
WESTON, JEROME, second Earl of Portland (1605–1663), born on 16 Dec. 1605, was the eldest son of Richard Weston, first earl of Portland [q. v.], by his second wife, Frances, daughter of Nicholas Waldegrave of Borley, Essex. Early in 1627-8 he entered parliament as member for Gatton, Surrey, being returned with Sir Thomas Lake [q. v.] by a Mr. Copley as 'sole inhabitant;' this election was apparently a job perpetrated by the government, and on 26 March the indenture of the return was torn off the file by order of the House of Commons, Sir Ambrose Brown and Sir Richard Onslow, who had also been returned for Gatton, taking their seats for that borough. Weston, however, continued to sit in that parliament, though for what constituency does not appear in the returns, and on 2 March 1628-9 he defended his father, the lord treasurer, against Sir John Eliot [q. v.], who demanded his impeachment (Gardiner, Hist. vii. 73). Early in the following year, in pursuance of his father's pacific policy, he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to Paris, and in April a peace was concluded with France. In 1632he was again sent on an embassy to Paris and Turin to urge Louis XIII to declare in favour of the restitution of the palatinate; in November Charles instructed him to protest against the proposed division of the Spanish Netherlands between France and the Dutch. He returned in March 1632-3 with Richelieu's proposals for a defensive alliance against the house of Austria; he also brought with him letters written by Henry Rich, earl of Holland [q. v.],who was intriguing against the lord treasurer; the opening of these letters led Holland to challenge Weston, but Charles I approved of his conduct and sent Holland to prison.
Weston, who was styled Lord Weston after his father's creation in February 1632-3 as Earl of Portland with remainder to his issue by his second marriage, succeeded as second earl by the same limitation on 13 March 1634-5, but his father's death deprived him of most of his political importance. He had, however, been appointed governor of the Isle of Wight on 18 Nov., and a commissioner to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction on 17 Dec. 1633, and on 28 May 1635 he was made vice-admiral of Hampshire, and keeper of Richmond New Park on 15 June 1637. On 3 June 1641 he was appointed joint lord lieutenant of Hampshire, but his royalist and religious sentiments rendered him suspect to parliament, and on 2 Nov. the House of Commons resolved to deprive him of the government of the Isle of Wight; upon conference with the House of Lords on the 18th this 'resolution was put off,' the lords professing themselves much satisfied with Portland's 'solemn protestation of his resolution to live and die a protestant, as his father did' a somewhat dubious promise, considering that his father died a Roman catholic (Cal. State Papers, 1641-3, pp. 154, 167). His sequestration was not, however, long delayed, for by August 1642 he had been committed to the custody of one of the sheriff's of London on suspicion of complicity in the plot to deliver Portsmouth into the king's hands (ib. p. 366; Clarendon, Rebellion, bk. v. 136, bk. vi. 401; The Earl of Portland's Charge, London, 11 Aug. 1642, 4to). Clarendon admits that Portland had remained in London ' as a place where he might do the king more service than anywhere else' (ib. bk. vii. 174), and there is no doubt that he had some share in the plot of his friend Edmund Waller [q. v.] Waller himself accused Portland, but the poet's statements were not believed, and, after Portland had bluntly denied the charge, he was on 31 July 1643 released on bail (cf. Tanner MS. lxii. 111). A fortnight later he made use of his liberty to take refuge with the king at Oxford, where he sat in the royalist parliament and signed the peers' letter to the Scots. As a further reward for his loyalty Charles on 1 March 1643 appointed Portland lord president of Munster, an office coveted by Murrough O'Brien,
