biography text
Harvey was returned after a contest for Bletchingley at the first general election of 1679, a month before reaching his majority. Considered ‘honest’ by Shaftesbury, he neither spoke nor sat on any committees in the first Exclusion Parliament. On 25 Apr. he was given leave to go into the country, but he returned to vote for exclusion. He did not sit again until the reign of Queen Anne. By this time he had become a Tory, and after the Hanoverian succession he was an ardent Jacobite, ‘continually talking of designs to bring back the Stuarts’. He died at Dunkirk on 24 Oct. 1736. His son Michael sat for Milborne Port as a Tory with two intervals from 1717 to 1747, but ruined himself by expensive election contests.1Manning and Bray, i. 402.