occupied during this summer with an elaborate project for the restoration of the Pretender by means of an alliance between the emperor, the czar, and the court of Spain. The plan, in cipher, eventually fell into the hands of the Duke of Newcastle. Towards the close of 1726 he went to Rome with his wife, in order to be nearer his master; but ‘he could not keep himself within the bounds of the Italian gravity,’ and to avoid scandal he was ordered back to Spain. In the spring of 1727 he asked permission of Philip IV to serve as a volunteer at the siege of Gibraltar, and was appointed aide-de-camp to the Conde de los Torres. For this act, having been indicted for high treason, he was (informally) outlawed by a resolution of the House of Lords on 3 April 1729. He was wounded in the foot during the siege operations by the bursting of a grenade, and was rewarded by a commission as ‘colonel aggregate’ in the Irish regiment ‘Hibernia’ in the Spanish service.
His presence being tabooed at Rome, Wharton seems to have made some overtures of reconciliation to the British government (see his letter in Coxe, Walpole, ii. 633). At Paris, in May 1728, he was received with cold politeness by Lord Walpole, and proceeded straight from the ambassador's house to dine with the attainted bishop of Rochester. The idea of his submission was now given up, and the trustees in England were ordered to send him no more money. His last three years were spent in rambling about western Europe in a state of beggary, drunkenness, and almost complete destitution. Such doles as he received from the Pretender were at once absorbed either in new acts of dissipation or by a clamorous rabble of creditors. In the autumn of 1729 he returned to his regiment in Catalonia, with the idea of living upon his pay of eighteen pistoles a month. He was much depressed by humiliations inflicted upon him by the military governor of Catalonia, and in the winter of 1730 his health completely broke down. He died, aged 32, in the monastery of the Franciscans at Poblet on 31 May 1731, and was buried next day in the church there (for the epitaph see Notes and Queries, 9th ser. i. 91). His widow left Madrid for England, and survived until 13 Feb. 1777, subsisting upon a small Spanish pension (cf. Gent. Mag. 1766, p. 309). She died in Golden Square, and was buried in Old St. Pancras churchyard. With Wharton's death all his titles became extinct.
Wharton was occupied at various periods of his life by literary projects. His aim, according to Pope, was to emulate Rochester as a wit and Cicero as a senator. The fragments of his writing that remain do little to justify either pretension. In 1731 appeared in octavo, at Boulogne, ‘Select and Authentick Pieces written by the late Duke of Wharton, viz. His speech on the passing the Bill to inflict Pains and Penalties on Francis, Lord Bishop of Rochester. His single Protest on that occasion. His Letter to the Bishop in the Tower. His Letter in “Mist's Journal,” Aug. 24, 1728 [an attack on Walpole in the form of an allegory]. His Reasons for leaving his native country and espousing the cause of his royal Master, King James III.’ Next year appeared in two volumes the ‘Life and Writings of Philip, Duke of Wharton’ (London, 8vo), comprising the ‘True Briton’ and the speech on behalf of Atterbury. These volumes contain practically all that Wharton wrote, with the exception of a few parodies and satires, notably a humorous epistle in verse from Jack Sheppard to the Earl of Macclesfield, and ‘On the Banishment of Cicero’ (i.e. Atterbury), which appear in the first volume of the ‘New Foundling Hospital for Wit’ (1784, pp. 221–30), and a ballad called ‘The Drinking Match at Eden Hall,’ in imitation of ‘Chevy Chase.’ This last appeared in ‘Whartoniana’ (London, 1727, 2 vols. 12mo), reprinted in 1732 as ‘The Poetical Works of Philip, late Duke of Wharton,’ the catchpenny title of a worthless miscellany containing three or four short pieces at most from the duke's pen (cf. Nichols, Misc. Poems, v. 25; Ralph, Misc. Poems, pp. 55, 131).
The career of Wharton seems specially adapted to point a moral, and it is stated, though not very conclusively, that Dr. Young and Samuel Richardson had him in view when they elaborated the portraits respectively of Lorenzo (in ‘Night Thoughts’) and Lovelace (in ‘Clarissa’). He is said by Pope to have been intimate with Colonel Francis Charteris [q. v.], the greatest scoundrel of his age, but he lacked Charteris's consistency, and was subject to ague fits of superstition in the intervals of blasphemy and libertinage. He appears also to have been an arrant coward, a trait which, according to Swift, he inherited from his grandfather. His dominant characteristic, perhaps, was a kind of puerile malice, such as that which prompted him to smash the windows of the English ambassador at Paris in 1716, or to place a libellous caricature of Pope in the hands of Lady Wortley (or, as he called her, ‘Worldly’) Montagu. Horace Walpole relates that he promised his loyal
