Wrottesley, a barrister on the Chester circuit, was the younger brother of the Member for Lichfield, who through his parliamentary patron the Marquess of Stafford, applied to Lord Grenville to make him solicitor to the Board of Control in February 1806. The request was granted. Grenville, who referred to the office as ‘counsel to the India Board’, noted that it would give him ‘£300 p.a. and leaves him in his profession’. Wrottesley was to have stood for Honiton on his cousin the 3rd Viscount Courtenay’s interest in April 1806, but declined. To his gratification the Portland administration did not deprive him of his place, as he had expected. In 1809 he was of service to Grenville in his canvass of Oxford University. In December 1810 he was Stafford’s nominee for a vacancy at Brackley, where he replaced a ministerialist fellow lawyer.
Wrottesley soon made his commitment to the Whig opposition apparent, voting with them on the Regency, 1, 21 Jan. 1811. On 14 Feb. he joined Brooks’s Club and on 22 Feb. he voted against the Irish secretary’s treatment of the Catholics. His sympathy with them further appeared in his votes of 11 Mar., 16, 31 May and 11 June 1811, and on 19 July he voted against the bank-note bill. This conduct soon left him poorer by ‘£300 p.a.’ He was reported by Lady Williams Wynn to be
sadly in the dumps ... at having lost his appointment of solicitor to the Board of Control which he had expected would have been taken from him at first, but having then escaped, he thought himself safe. It is taken away on the plea of reform, and of course they are too glad to take a friend of ours to make the example of.
Grenville also decried it as a convenient form of political revenge.
Wrottesley remained in opposition during the first session of the Parliament of 1812. He voted for the sinecure regulation bill, 29 Mar. 1813, and for Catholic relief throughout, acting as chairman in committee, 9 Mar. He became a more frequent speaker in debate, but mostly on points of law and procedure. He voted for a committee on the civil list, 27 May 1813—his last obvious vote with the Whig opposition. He was in the minority against Christian missions to India, 12 July 1813. Next session he spoke on indifferent questions, but did not appear in the minority lists. Although on failing to secure an adjournment of the debate on Lord Cochrane’s conduct, 5 July, he allegedly voted against the expulsion, this vote was contradicted.
Wrottesley’s conversion into a government supporter reached its climax on 26 Feb. 1817 when he derided radical orators as ‘meddling persons’ who deserved to be ‘hooted out of town’, as they had been in Staffordshire. Ponsonby, the Whig leader, remarked in retaliation that he was now ‘closely pinned to the back of the right honourable gentlemen of the Treasury bench’; and the House was further amused by Brougham’s ingenious allusion to Wrottesley as a rat (the Whig wits had already dubbed him ‘Ratsley’). He went on to support the suspension of habeas corpus, 23 June 1817, and proceedings arising from it, 10, 11 Feb. 1818, by vote. Henceforward, despite his vote for Catholic relief, 9 May 1817, and for the opposition candidate for the Speaker’s chair, 2 June, if he tried to speak on critical issues the opposition gave him no peace. On 16 Apr. 1818 they shouted him down when, against the Speaker’s advice, he attempted to read an extract from a former speech of Ridley’s to make out a case for the Duke of Cumberland’s marriage grant. On 27 May 1818 and 4 Mar. 1819 they carped at his suggestion that the bankrupty commissioners, short of space at the Guildhall, should be accommodated at Furnival’s Inn. He nevertheless obtained a select committee on the problem. He paired against reform of the criminal law, 2 Mar. 1819. He voted with ministers on the case of Wyndham Quin, 29 Mar., against Tierney’s censure motion, 18 May, for the foreign enlistment bill, 10 June 1819, and remained in town as late as 23 Dec. in support of restrictive legislation against radicalism. He died 17 Feb. 1825.