WHARTON, THOMAS, first Marquis of Wharton (1648–1715), third but eldest surviving son of Philip, fourth baron Wharton [q. v.], by his second wife, Jane, was born in August 1648. The boy's first years were, in the picturesque language of Macaulay, passed amid Geneva bands, heads of lank hair, upturned eyes, nasal psalmody, and sermons three hours long. When he emerged from parental control the cavaliers may well have been startled by the dissoluteness of the ‘emancipated precisian,’ who early acquired and retained to the last the reputation of being the greatest rake in England. But the abruptness of the transition was mitigated by the fact that he spent two years, 1663 and 1664, in foreign travel, in company with his brother Goodwin, visiting Italy and Germany in addition to France and the Low Countries. He entered parliament in 1673 as member for Wendover, retaining that seat until 1679, when he was returned for Buckinghamshire along with Richard Hampden, and he continued to represent the county until the death of his father early in 1696. Shortly after his entry into parliament he was, on 16 Sept. 1673, married at Adderbury, Oxfordshire, to Anne, daughter of Sir Henry Lee, fifth baronet of Ditchley, with whom he had 10,000l. dowry and 2,500l. a year [see Wharton, Anne]. The match, which was arranged by Lord Wharton, was a very advantageous one, but we are told that the lady's person was ‘not so agreeable to the bridegroom as to secure his constancy,’ and there were no children to the marriage, despite the pious hope of the poet Waller that heaven would ‘Mistress Wharton's bed adorn with fruit as fair as by her Muse is born.’ Wharton characteristically put off setting out to Wooburn to sign the marriage contract until within three hours of the time appointed. He then drove the distance of twenty-two miles in little over two hours—a notable feat upon the roads of those days. He remained to the very close of his life a great connoisseur of horse flesh, and possessed one of the costliest studs in the country. The payment of his wife's dowry enabled him to make a conspicuous figure at Newmarket, among the earliest annals of which place the doings of his horses Snail, Colchester, Jacob, Pepper, and Careless are recorded. Careless, a horse for which Louis XIV had in vain offered a thousand pistoles, was beaten in a famous match for 500l. in 1695 by the king's horse Stiff Dick. Careless carried nine stone, Stiff Dick a feather, yet so great was the reputation of Careless that the odds were seven to four against Stiff Dick (Muir, Newmarket Calendar; Memoirs, p. 98). In April 1699 this same horse won 1,900l. in stakes at Newmarket (Luttrell); but Wharton's greatest delight in horse-racing was to win plates from tories and high-churchmen, and several triumphs of this kind are recorded by Luttrell, notably the victory of his horse Chance for the Quainton Plate in September 1705. In 1704, being then fifty-six, he was severely hurt by a fall from a horse while coursing.
Wharton's interest in politics is not marked until 1679, when he joined his friends Lords Russell, Cavendish, and Colchester in backing the exclusion bill. He did not speak in the lower house against the succession of the Duke of York, and it was commonly supposed that, ‘his father being a presbyterian, he was afraid of incurring the reproach of fanaticism.’ In 1680, however, on 26 June, he signed the presentment to the grand jury of Middlesex, urging the indictment of James for non-attendance at church; he voted for the exclusion bill in November 1680, and was one of the members who carried it up to the House of Lords on 15 Nov. In May 1685 Wharton was one of the very small minority who voted against settling the revenue upon James for life, on the ground that a portion of this sum would be devoted to the maintenance of a standing army. Next month he was suspected of complicity with Monmouth, and his house at Winchendon, where he habitually lived in preference to Wooburn, was ineffectually searched. He corresponded with the prince of Orange during 1688, and in November he joined him at Exeter, where he had a large share in drawing up the address, signed by Sir Edward Seymour and Sir William Portman.
But the most effective blow that Wharton dealt against the old dynasty was delivered in 1687, when he composed the words of a satirical ballad upon the administration of Tyrconnel, describing the mutual congratulations of a couple of ‘Teagues’ upon the coming triumph of popery and the Irish race. The verses attracted little notice at first, but set to a quick step by Purcell, the song, known by its burden of ‘Lilli Burlero, Bullen-a-la,’ became a powerful weapon against James. ‘The whole army,’ says Burnet, ‘and at last all people in city and country were singing it perpetually. Perhaps never had so slight a thing so great an effect’ (it was first printed
