ment, he was suddenly menaced in September by the arrival of the French fleet, under the Comte d'Estaing, with a large military force on board. Savannah was immediately besieged, and Wright is said to have saved the place from surrender by his casting vote. On 9 Oct. a final assault was repelled and the siege raised. Wright took advantage of this triumph to press for severe measures against the revolutionary party. He strongly objected to the general amnesty offered by Sir Henry Clinton (1738?–1795) [q. v.], who landed in Georgia in February 1780, and hastened to summon an assembly before the security it offered to the disaffected could influence the character of the representatives chosen. Immediately on the meeting of the assembly an act was passed granting the home government a duty of two and a half per cent. on all exports. In retaliation for the attainder of royalists by the republican legislature, Wright procured the passage in May 1780 of two acts, attainting 150 republicans of high treason, and disqualifying them from holding any office in Georgia.
On 12 May Sir Henry Clinton captured Charleston, and for a time relieved Georgia from apprehension of invasion. Wright urged the British to secure their position in the south before undertaking decisive operations. His advice had some weight with Clinton, but when Cornwallis assumed the command in 1781 he disregarded Wright's opinion and commenced the famous march which ended in the capitulation of Yorktown. After the surrender of Cornwallis, most of the south was regained by the republicans. Wright appealed strongly for reinforcements, but without avail. On 14 June 1782 he received orders to abandon the province, and on 11 July, after obtaining favourable terms for the loyalists, he evacuated Savannah and returned to England. He had been attainted in the Georgian assembly on 1 March 1778, and his property confiscated. In 1783 the American refugees placed him at the head of the board of agents of the American loyalists for prosecuting their claims for compensation. In return for his services and in compensation for the loss of property, worth 33,000l., he received a pension of 500l. a year. He died in Fludyer Street, Westminster, on 20 Nov. 1785, and was buried in the north cloister of Westminster Abbey on 28 Nov. Wrightsborough, in Columbia county, Georgia, was named after him. He married at Charleston, in 1740, Sarah (d. 1763), only daughter and heiress of James Maidman, a captain in the army. By her he had three surviving sons and six daughters. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son, James, but the succession was continued in the line of his second son, Alexander, who settled in Jamaica.
A valuable report made by Wright to the colonial secretary on the condition and resources of Georgia, dated 20 Nov. 1773, together with his official correspondence with the colonial secretaries between 1774 and 1782, was published in 1873 in the ‘Collections’ of the Georgia Historical Society. His official correspondence with Lord Shelburne is preserved among the Shelburne manuscripts in the possession of the Marquis of Lansdowne (Hist. MSS. Comm. 5th Rep.).
[Burke's Peerage and Baronetcy, 1839; Foster's Admission Registers of Gray's Inn, p. 375; Jones's Hist. of Georgia, 1883, vol. ii. passim; Collections of Georgia Hist. Soc., 1873, iii. 157–378; Acts passed by the General Assembly of Georgia, 1755–74, Wormsloe, 1881; Stevens's Hist. of Georgia, 1859, vol. ii. passim; m'Call's Hist. of Georgia, Savannah, 1811–16; White's Hist. Collections of Georgia, New York, 1855, pp. 188–96; Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, 1792, pp. 4, 35; Sabine's Loyalists of the American Revolution, 1864; Davy's Suffolk Collections in Addit. MS. 19156, ff. 233, 244; Chester's Registers of Westminster Abbey, 1876, p. 440.]
WRIGHT, JOHN (1568?–1605), conspirator, was a grandson of John Wright of Ploughland Hall, Yorkshire, who had been seneschal to Henry VIII, and migrated thither from Kent in the thirty-third year of that king's reign. His son Robert had by his second wife, Ursula Rudston of Hayton, two sons, John and Christopher (see below), both gunpowder plotters, and two daughters, one of whom married Thomas Percy (1560–1605) [q. v.], who was engaged in the same conspiracy.
John, the elder brother, was baptised at Welwick on 16 Jan. 1568 (Poulson, Holderness, ii. 516). He is said to have been a schoolfellow of Father Tesimond [q. v.] the jesuit, and of Guy Fawkes (Cal. State Papers, Dom. James I, xvii. 18). Father Gerard, his contemporary, describes him as ‘a strong, stout man, and of very good wit, though slow of speech.’ He was an excellent swordsman and much disposed to fighting. Camden, writing to Sir R. Cotton in 1596 when Queen Elizabeth was sick, says that both the Wrights, with Catesby, Tresham, and others, were put under arrest as men likely to give trouble in case of the queen's death (Birch, Orig. Letters, 2nd ser. iii. 179). However, according to Gerard, John Wright became a catholic only about the time of Essex's rising, in
