WHARTON, Thomas (1623-69), of Warcop, Westmld., and Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

The Whartons of Warcop were descended from a younger son of Thomas, 2nd Baron Wharton of Wharton Hall, Westmorland; Wharton himself was a cousin (probably second cousin) of the parliamentarian grandee Philip, 4th Baron Wharton.20E.R. Wharton, The Whartons of Wharton Hall, 59. In a suit brought by Wharton’s father before the court of chivalry in 1638 after he had been called ‘a base beggarly fellow and no gentleman’ by one of his Westmorland neighbours, the prosecuting counsel stated that the Whartons of Warcop had been gentry for 200 years.21BHO, The Ct. of Chivalry 1634-1640 , ‘700 Wharton v Farer’.

Wharton seems to have spent most of the civil war studying at Cambridge, but he had returned to Westmorland by January 1646, when he signed the indenture returning James Bellingham and Henry Lawrence as knights of the shire for the county.22C219/43/3/50. Within just a few years of his admission to Gray’s Inn in 1648, and certainly before his call to the bar in 1655, Wharton had been retained by numerous royalist gentlemen in Cumberland and Westmorland to represent their cases before the Committees for Compounding* and Advance of Money*.23CCC 957, 3288, 3305; CCAM 101, 732, 1071, 1370; The Flemings in Oxford ed. J.R. Magrath (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xliv), 26-7, 33-5, 36-7, 373; Cumb. RO (Carlisle), DLONS/L/4/1/48: Wharton to Lady Eleanor Lowther, 26 Aug. 1651. Between 1651 and 1655, he purchased numerous parcels of land from the treason trustees – in almost every case, it seems, as an attorney for the original owner, their agents, or another third party.24C54/3804/9; CCC 1116, 1698, 1701, 1727, 1766, 2073, 2308, 2321, 2531, 2634, 2905, 2916, 3010, 3032, 3077, 3138, 3206, 3224; Lancs. RO, DDK/1462/2, 6; DDK/1472/10. His clients included Sir Thomas Sandford* and the leading Westmorland royalist Sir Philip Musgrave*.25C54/3728/13; SP23/115, pp. 961, 967; CCC 2308. Wharton also represented the tenants of Lady Anne Clifford – wife of the parliamentarian peer Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke – in their dispute with her in 1649-50 over her ‘oppressive and unwarrantable’ demands for rent.26G.C. Williamson, Lady Anne Clifford (Wakefield, 1967), 207. His legal practice was in such a thriving condition by the mid-1650s that he was able to purchase lands in Cumberland worth £600 and an estate in East Sussex worth about £1,500 a year.27C54/3784/6; C6/178/114.

Despite his services to so many ‘delinquents’, Wharton seems to have enjoyed the good opinion of the northern well-affected. Thus at some point in the early 1650s, his neighbour, the parliamentarian officer Christopher Lister* of Warcop, wrote to Captain Adam Baynes*, requesting that Wharton be appointed farmer of the excise in Cumberland and Westmorland. ‘He is desired by some of both counties to farm it both for the good of the state and the countries [sic] … As my neighbour, I can tell you he will be punctual in performance of his contract’.28Add. 21426, f. 208. It is not clear whether Wharton was indeed granted this office.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Wharton was returned for Westmorland – probably on his own interest as one of the county’s most active and well-connected gentlemen. He was named to eight committees in this Parliament, including those set up on 5 February to supply England and Wales with a pious, learned ministry and, on 1 April, to consider the affairs of Scotland and Ireland.29CJ vii. 600b, 622b, 623a, 623b, 632a, 637b, 639a. He made several minor contributions on the floor of the House, often in the form of motions to clarify or advance a particular debate.30Burton’s Diary, iii. 40, 79, 83, 150; iv. 119, 142, 171, 233, 439. On 8 February, for example, he attempted to limit a long debate on the bill for recognising Richard Cromwell as protector by moving that the House come to a vote on the matter; but his motion was successfully countered by both conservative and republican opponents of the Cromwellian constitution.31Burton’s Diary, iii. 150.

The re-admission of the secluded Members in February 1660 seems to have brought Wharton into favour at Westminster, and in March he was appointed to the Westmorland and Cumberland benches and added by the Commons to the Westmorland militia commission.32CJ vii. 870b. In April, he was one of six candidates (including Thomas Burton* and Jeremiah Baines*) who challenged for Westmorland’s two county seats in the elections to the 1660 Convention, but he withdrew from the contest before the poll in deference to his cousin Sir Thomas Wharton and to Sir John Lowther, who were duly returned.33Lowther Fam. Estate Bks. ed. C. B. Phillips (Surt. Soc. cxci), 164-5. According to Lowther, Wharton and the other unsuccessful candidates had spent more than six weeks and a considerable sum of money in treating the county’s 3,000 electorate.34Lowther Fam. Estate Bks. ed. Phillips, 164-5.

Wharton probably welcomed the Restoration – in part, perhaps, because he seems to have favoured the re-establishment of episcopacy and the Prayer Book. In 1661, he was retained by one of the northern churchmen to help with the restitution of church lands appropriated since the civil war.35CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 467. Furthermore, in his will, he asked to be buried ‘without the least pomp or ceremony than what the rites of holy church allows’.36PROB11/330, f. 348. His apparent lack of puritan sympathies is certainly consistent with his appointment as secretary to the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, at some point during the 1660s.37Morant, Essex, i. 481. It was probably in the 1660s that he purchased an estate at Thorpe le Soken, in Essex.

Wharton died on 6 August 1669 and was buried in the chancel of Thorpe le Soken church.38Morant, Essex, i. 481. In his will, he charged his estate with an annuity of £100 and legacies of £2,000.39PROB11/330, ff. 348v-349. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.