WHITTLE, Francis.

Little has been ascertained about this Member.1No response is recorded to W. R. Williams’s query about him in N. and Q. (ser. 12), ii. 148 [1916]. No address was given when he came in for Westbury on Lord Harewood’s interest until (Sir) Manasseh Masseh Lopes negotiated the purchase of the borough. He vacated his seat a year later, without having spoken in Parliament. His only recorded activity is a minority vote against Perceval’s motion on the Duke of York’s misconduct of army patronage, 17 Mar. 1809, and votes with ministers on the address and on the Earl of Chatham’s conduct, 23 Jan. and 5 Mar. 1810. The Member is probably to be identified with the Francis Whittle of Kingston, Jamaica, who in November 1807 was a subscriber to the Academical Institution of Belfast and who was also the Francis Whittle, merchant, of Jamaica whose son James matriculated at Trinity College, Dublin in 1815, aged 16. In his father-in-law’s will dated 12 Aug. 1813, Whittle was described as of Thistleborough, near Belfast. Subsequently, he appears to have taken up residence in Antrim, first at Muckamore Lodge and afterwards at Castle Upton, where he was a magistrate and a member of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (1833). He had been dead for some time by June 1838.2Add. 35647, f. 52; Burke, Irish LG (1904), 88; (1958), 524; J. Greene, Ped. of Greene, 6; information from PRO, Belfast; Gent. Mag. (1854), ii. 189; PCC 570 Bridport.