BAGOT, Sir Walter Wagstaffe, 5th Bt. (1702-68), of Blithfield, Staffs.

Bagot, a Tory, consistently voted against the Walpole and Pelham Administrations. At the general election of 1754 he withdrew from Parliament in favour of his son, William.1W. R. Ward, Georgian Oxford, 224. But when on 30 Nov. 1762 he was urged by Thomas Jenner, president of Magdalen, to stand at the Oxford University by-election, he reluctantly agreed, though he felt

unequal to undertake so high a trust, at my time of life; who have many years since ... withdrawn myself from it; as knowing my health would not permit me to give that attendance to the House it was my duty to do.2W. Bagot, Mems. Bagot Fam. 86-87.

On 16 December Jenner informed him that his candidature had upheld ‘the peace and honour of the University’, and he had been returned unopposed. On the 18th Bagot himself wrote to the chancellor (Lord Lichfield) of the need to defend ‘that great bulwark of the Church of England, who in these our days, has so many enemies to cope with; which makes me wish, now our constitution is at so ticklish a crisis, that the University had fixed on some person better qualified to serve them in Parliament, than it is in my power to do’.3Ibid.

Bagot’s first reported vote during this Parliament was with Administration, 10 Feb. 1764, against repealing the cider tax. And on 24 Apr. 1764 George Grenville wrote to Bagot’s son, William: ‘No man can have greater honour for Sir Walter or a more sincere desire to cultivate his friendship and his family than I have.’4Grenville mss (HL). In Rockingham’s list of July 1765 he was classed as ‘doubtful’, and in that of November 1766 as ‘Tory, Bute’. His only other reported vote was with Opposition on the land tax, 27 Feb. 1767. There is no record of any speech by him during his second period in the House.

Bagot died 20 Jan. 1768.