GUIDOTT, William (?1671-1745), of Laverstoke and Preston Candover, Hants.

Descended from a family of Florentine merchants, settled in Southampton in the sixteenth century, Guidott acted as agent for the Duke of Marlborough. Returned for Andover as a Whig for nearly twenty years on his own interest, he voted with the Administration on the septennial bill in 1716, was absent from the division on the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, voted for the peerage bill, and was classed by Craggs in 1719 as to be approached through Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. In 1727 he was sued in Chancery by the Duchess for the recovery of £9,547, which she claimed he had embezzled. The court ordered him to pay £5,494, which on appeal was increased by £754.1Add. 38056, ff. 121-6; LJ, xxiii. 207. In the same year he lost his seat at Andover, where he had quarrelled with the corporation. Recovering it at a by-election in 1730 and re-elected unopposed in 1734, he voted with the Opposition in every recorded division except that on the place bill in 1740, from which he was absent. Defeated in 1741, he died 30 Aug. 1745.