DUTTON, Sir John, 2nd Bt. (1684-1743), of Sherborne, Glos.

The Duttons owned extensive estates in Gloucestershire, where they had purchased the manor of Sherborne in 1551. John Dutton, whose father wasted the family fortune in coursing and gambling, was educated for the bar at the expense of his grandfather, Dr. Barwick, making a wealthy marriage in 1714, by which time his father’s debts amounted to almost £10,000.2Blacker Morgan, Hist. and Gen. Mems. Dutton Fam. 63, 233; Cal. Sherborne Muniments, loc. cit. In 1727 he was returned unopposed for Gloucestershire as a Whig, voting against the Administration except on the excise bill, when he was absent, and on the repeal of the Septennial Act, when he voted with the Government. Before 1734 he agreed to stand on a compromise with the Tories ‘in order to cover the weak state of the Whig interest here, which before another election I thought might be cemented and secured from breaking to pieces’; but when John Stephens, the son of Thomas Stephens intervened, breaking the compromise, Dutton withdrew. He did not stand again, declaring that ‘it has been long my determined resolution to live quietly and to serve my King and country in the best manner I am able in a private station and never more to be dragged into public life as I have once been if I can honestly avoid it’. During the campaign of 1740 he wrote: ‘I am very sure I never took ... [such] ... pains in any election before and have almost wrote myself blind by labouring in it.’3Dutton to Hardwicke, 4 Sept. 1742, Add. 35601, f. 130; J. Neale to Walpole, 24 Sept. 1733, Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss; Dutton to Hardwicke, 28 Apr. 1739, Add. 35586, f. 164; Blacker Morgan, 237. He died 4 Feb. 1743, leaving his property to his nephew James Lenox Naper, with remainder to his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Reade and his brother George Reade.4PCC 227 Boycott.