enjoy his new honours long, and was only destined to enjoy, as it were, a Pisgah view of the era of whig prosperity he had done so much to promote. He fell ill in March, and was attended by Garth and Blackmore, but died at his house in Dover Street on 12 April 1715 (his will, dated 8 April, was printed shortly after his death). He was buried at Winchendon on 22 April. His second wife, whom he married in July 1692, was Lucy (d. 5 Feb. 1716), daughter and heiress of Adam Loftus, viscount Lisburne, a lady who brought him a huge fortune, and whose gallantries he bore with the indifference of a stoic. Lady Wortley-Montagu calls her ‘a flattering, fawning, canting creature, affecting prudery and even sanctity, yet in reality as abandoned and unscrupulous as her husband himself’—that ‘most profligate, impious, and shameless of men.’ By her Wharton left issue Philip, second marquis and first duke of Wharton [q. v.]; Jane, who married first John Holt and secondly Robert Coke of Hillingdon; and Lucy, who married and was divorced from Sir William Morice.
Wharton was in some respects a pupil of Danby, while in not a few he was a precursor of Walpole; at least, he was the most thoroughgoing party man and party organiser on the whig side between 1700 and 1714. His partisanship was far from disinterested, but it had at least the merit of sincerity. Introduced into public life about 1678, when the factious spirit had just begun to rage with all the virulence of a new epidemic, he retained through life his conception of a tory as no true Englishman, but one who, with fine phrases about church and crown on his lips, was at heart a Jacobite and a favourer of papists, was in fact an unmitigated scoundrel and an enemy of his country.
Wharton's success at gaining elections, writes his panegyrist, ‘made him the butt of the tories' hatred and scandal, which he despised, and went on his own way, weakening and mortifying them as much as lay in his power, looking on them not as his enemies so much as they were enemies of his country.’ His unbounded success at elections was no mystery. He spared no expense, took a pride in making his constituents drunk on the best ale, and knew all the electors' children by name. One of his rules was never to give and never refuse a challenge, and such was his skill in fence that he always succeeded in disarming his adversary—notably in two election duels: one in July 1699 with Viscount Cheyney (cf. Macaulay, chap. xxv.), and the other with a son of Sir Robert Dashwood at Bath on 2 Sept. 1703 (Luttrell, v. 334). Another of his rules, said his enemies, was never to refuse or to keep an oath; and certain it is that ‘honest Tom Wharton,’ as he was commonly called, had a tremendous reputation for lying. So fluent and so insolent was he in this respect that Lord Dartmouth once asked him how he could run on in such a manner, to which he replied, ‘Are you such a simpleton as not to know that a lie well believed is as good as if it were true?’
Apart from his private grievance (that Wharton had refused him the chaplaincy in 1709), Swift hated Wharton as ‘an atheist grafted upon a dissenter,’ and in his famous sixpenny chap-book, entitled ‘Short Character of T[homas] E[arl] of W[harton] L.L. of I[reland],’ and published at the Black Swan on Ludgate Hill in the winter of 1710–11, he dissects his character ‘with the same impartiality that he would describe the nature of a serpent, a wolf, a crocodile, or a fox.’ Swift is probably not far wrong in summing up Wharton as wholly occupied by ‘vice and politics, so that bawdy, prophaneness, and business fill up his whole conversation.’ On Macky's description his well-known comment is—‘the most universal villain I ever knew.’
According to Bishop Warburton, who became possessed of a number of Wharton's papers, the marquis was the author of the pretended letter of Machiavelli to Zenobius Buondelmontius in vindication of his writings appended to the English translation of Machiavelli, which appeared in folio in 1680; but this affirmation of the bishop is open to the gravest doubt (see Walpole, Royal and Noble Authors, 1806, iv. 66 sq.). Steele dedicated the fifth volume of the ‘Spectator’ to Wharton in 1713, and John Hughes (1677–1720) [q. v.] dedicated to him his version of Fontenelle's ‘Dialogues of the Dead’ in 1708.
The portrait of Wharton by Kneller, as a member of the Kit-Cat Club, was engraved in mezzotint by J. Simon (for sale by Tonson), also by T. Johnson, and by John Faber for the ‘Kit-Cat Club’ (1735); but the best engraving is that on steel by Houbraken, dated ‘Amst. 1744.’
