Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/419

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support to his father, Sir Robert, in the Atterbury case, and on the day previous to the debate called upon the minister to ask for a few hints; when the debate came on he utilised these hints for his great speech against the government. Pope's portrait of ‘Wharton, the scorn and wonder of our days,’ in his ‘Epistle [i] to Sir Richard Temple’ is a masterpiece of delineation, in which little exaggeration is apparent:

    Thus with each gift of nature and of art,
    And wanting nothing but an honest heart;
    Grown all to all; from no one vice exempt;
    And most contemptible to shun contempt;
    His passion still, to covet gen'ral praise,
    His life, to forfeit it a thousand ways;
    A constant bounty which no friend has made;
    An angel tongue, which no man can persuade;
    A fool with more of wit than half mankind;
    Too rash for thought, for action too refined;
    A tyrant to the wife his heart approves;
    A rebel to the very king he loves;
    He dies, sad outcast of each church and state,
    And, harder still, flagitious, yet not great.
    Ask you why Wharton broke through ev'ry rule?
    'Twas all for fear the knaves should call him fool.

In the portrait by Charles Jervas, in which he appears in his ducal robes and ermine, Wharton is depicted as resembling his father, but decidedly more handsome. Of the admirable mezzotint engraved by J. Simon but three copies were known to Chaloner Smith. One of these is in the British Museum print-room (Mezzotinto Portraits, p. 1124). The same portrait was engraved by G. Vertue as a frontispiece to the ‘Life and Works’ (1732), and by Geremia for Walpole's ‘Royal and Noble Authors.’

[A Memoir of Philip, Duke of Wharton, was issued separately in 1731 (London, 8vo), and was subsequently prefixed to the Life and Works. This forms the basis of the long notices in Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary, in the English Cyclopædia, and similar works. Joseph Ritson and Dr. Langhorne are both said to have formed a project of writing the duke's life, and to have collected materials; but the Memoir of 1731 was not superseded until 1896, when was published ‘Philip, Duke of Wharton,’ by Mr. John R. Robinson. See also Doyle's Official Baronage; G. E. C[okayne]'s Complete Peerage; Parliamentary History, vol. viii.; Gent. Mag. 1830, i. 16; Hist. Reg. Chron. Diary, 1729 p. 23, 1731 p. 29; Spence's Anecdotes, ed. Singer, p. 237; Seward's Anecdotes; Pope's Works, ed. Elwin and Courthope, iii. 62 sq.; Young's Works, ed. Doran, 1854; Walpole's Royal and Noble Authors, ed. Park, iv. 121–32; Armstrong's Elizabeth Farnese, 1892, pp. 189, 208; Russell's Eccentric Personages, ii. 180–202; Jesse's Court of England under the House of Hanover; E. R. Wharton's Whartons of Wharton Hall, 1898; Wharton's Wits and Beaux of Society; Chambers's Book of Days; Lipscomb's Buckinghamshire, ii. 195; Macaulay's Life of Atterbury; Zedler's Universal Lexikon, 1748, lv. 1483–7; Wharton Collections in the Bodleian Library; Brit. Mus. Cat.]

T. S.

WHARTON, PHILIP (pseudonym of John Cockburn Thomson, 1834-1860). [See under Thomson, Henry William (Byerley)), 1822-1867.]

WHARTON, THOMAS, first Baron Wharton (1495?–1568), born about 1495, was the eldest son and heir of Thomas Wharton, by his wife Agnes, daughter of Reynold or Reginald Warcup of Snydale, Yorkshire. The Whartons had held the manor of Wharton, on the river Eden, ‘beyond the date of any records extant’ (Camden, Britannia, p. 988); the first lord's great-grandfather, Thomas, represented Appleby in parliament in 1436–7; his grandfather, Henry Wharton, held Wharton of the Cliffords in 1452, and married Alice, daughter of Sir John Conyers of Hornby; his father, Thomas, appears to have been clerk of the wars with Scotland, and to have died about 1520. The young Thomas was soon initiated into the methods of border warfare, and in April 1522 served on a raiding expedition into Scotland. On 10 Feb. 1523–4 he was placed on the commission for the peace in Cumberland, and on 20 June 1527 he is said to have been knighted at Windsor, but the first occasion on which he is so styled in contemporary documents is on 30 June 1531. To the ‘Reformation’ parliament that met on 3 Nov. 1529, Wharton was returned for Appleby, but on the 9th he was pricked for sheriff of Cumberland (Letters and Papers, iv. 2691; Lists of Sheriffs, 1898, p. 28). On 30 June 1531 he was appointed commissioner for redress of outrages on the borders, and from this time onwards occurs in innumerable commissions for the same and similar purposes (State Papers, Henry VIII, vols. iv. v. passim). On 6 Feb. 1531–2 he was made justice of the peace for the East Riding of Yorkshire, and on 19 March for Northumberland, and he was almost invariably included in the commissions for Cumberland and Westmorland. In 1532 he appears to have been captain of Cockermouth, and, as comptroller, was associated with the Earl of Northumberland in the government of the marches, in which capacity he was said to ‘do the king great service by his wise counsel and experience.’ On 29 June 1534 Northumberland recommended Wharton's appointment as captain of Carlisle, ‘seeing as ye know his is mine own hand,’ and on 9 July he was commissioned