CORNWALLIS, Hon. John (1706-68).

John Cornwallis shared the family borough with his elder brother Stephen, at first voting regularly with the Government. He spoke against the repeal of the Septennial Act in 1734 and may be the ‘Mr. Cornwallis’ recorded as speaking on other occasions (see Cornwallis, Stephen). When the Prince of Wales went into opposition in 1737 Cornwallis gave up his post of equerry to the Prince ‘because the pension he had from the King was more than the salary from his place and he feared if he continued in the one, the other would be stopped’.1Hervey, Mems. 839. However, during the last days of Walpole’s Administration he is said to have been ‘decoyed away’ to vote with the Opposition on Pulteney’s motion for a secret committee to inquire into the war, for which his brother, Lord Cornwallis, ‘next day turned him out of doors’.2Sir R. Wilmot to Devonshire, 26 Jan. 1741, Devonshire mss. Rejoining the Prince of Wales, among whose followers he is classed both in the Cockpit list of October 1742 and the list of the division on the Hanoverians in 1746, he was not renominated by Lord Cornwallis for Eye, which he contested unsuccessfully in 1747. He was put down for a seat at Eye in the 2nd Lord Egmont’s list of persons to be brought into Parliament on Frederick’s accession, but did not stand again. He died 9 June 1768.