poet; and from her to Byron’s daughter Augusta Ada, whose husband was in 1838 created earl of Lovelace. The barony of Wentworth was thereafter held by the descendants of this nobleman in conjunction with the earldom of Lovelace.
Paul Wentworth (1533–1593). a prominent member of parliament in the reign of Elizabeth, was a member of the Lillingstone Lovell branch of the family (see above). His father Sir jSIicholas Wentworth (d. 1557) was chief porter of Calais. Paul Wentworth was of puritan sympathies, and he first came into notice by the freedom with which in 1566 he criticized Elizabeth’s prohibition of discussion in parliament on the question of her successor. Paul, who was probably the author of the famous puritan devotional book The Miscellanie, or Regestrie and Methodicall Directorie of Orisons (London, 1613), died in 1593. Pie became possessed of Burnham Abbey through his wife, to whose first husband, William Tyldesley, it had been granted at the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII.
Peter Wentworth (1530–1596) was the elder brother of the above-mentioned Paul, and like his brother was a prominent puritan leader in parliament, which he first entered as member for Barnstaple in 1571. He took a firm attitude in support of the liberties of parliament against encroachments of the royal prerogative, on which subject he delivered a memorable speech on the 8th of February 1576, for which after examination by the Star Chamber he was committed to the Tower. In February 1587 Sir Anthony Cope (1548–1614) presented to the Speaker a bill abrogating the existing ecclesiastical law, together with a puritan revision of the Prayer Book, and Wentworth supported him by bringing forward certain articles touching the liberties of the House of Commons; Cope and Wentworth were both committed to the Tower for interference with the queen’s ecclesiastical prerogative. In 1593 Wentworth again suffered imprisonment for presenting a petition on the subject of the succession to the Crown; and it is probable that he did not regain his freedom, for he died in the Tower on the 10th of November 1596. While in the Tower he wrote A Pithie Exhortation to her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, a famous treatise preserved in the British Museum. Peter Wentworth was twice married; his first wife, by whom he had no children, was a cousin of Catherine Parr, and his second a sister of Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state. His third son, Thomas Wentworth (c. 1568–1623), was an ardent and sometimes a violent opponent of royal prerogative in parliament, of which he became a member in 1604, continuing to represent the city of Oxford from that year until his death. He was called to the bar in 1594 and became recorder of Oxford in 1607. Another son, Walter Wentworth, was also a member of parliament.
Sir Peter Wentworth (1592–1675) was a grandson of Peter Wentworth, being the son of Peter’s eldest son Nicholas, from whom he inherited the manor of Lillingstone Lovell. As sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1634 he was charged with the duty of collecting the levy of ship-money, in which he encountered popular opposition. He was member for Tamworth in the Long Parliament, but refused to act as a commissioner for the trial of Charles I. He was a member of the council of state during the Commonwealth; but was denounced for immorality by Cromwell in April 1653, and his speech in reply was interrupted by Cromwell’s forcible expulsion of the Commons. Sir Peter, who was a friend of Milton, died on the 1st of December 1675, having never been married. By his will he left a legacy to Milton, and considerable estates to his grand-nephew Fisher Dilke, who took the name of Wentworth; and this name was borne by his descendants until dropped in the 18th century by Wentworth Dilke Wentworth, great-grandfather of Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke (q.v.).
See W. L. Rutton, Three Branches of the Family of Wentworth of Nettlestead (London, 1891); Joseph Foster, Pedigrees of the County Families of Yorkshire (2 vols., London, 1874); Charles Wriothesley, Chronicle of England during the Reigns of the Tudors, edited by W. D. Hamilton (2 vols., London, 1875–1877): Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs: Charles I. to the Restoration (London, 1732); John Strype, Annals of the Reformation (7 vols., Oxford, 1824); Mark Noble, Lives of the English Regicides (2 vols., London, 1798) containing a memoir of Sir Peter Wentworth; Lord Clarendon, History of the Rebellion (7 vols., Oxford, 1839), and Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers; S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War (10 vols., London, 1883–1884), and History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (3 vols., London, 1886–1891; J. A . Froude, History of England (12 vols., London, 1856–1870); G. E. C., Complete Peerage, vol. viii. (London, 1898). See also articles “Wentworth” by A. F. Pollard, C. H. Firth and Sir C. W. Dilke, in Dict. Nat. Biog. (London, 1899). (R. J. M.)
WENTWORTH, WILLIAM CHARLES (1793–1872), the
“Australian patriot,” who claimed descent from the great Strafford, but apparently without sufficient reason, was born in 1793 in Norfolk Island, the penal settlement of New South Wales, where his father D’Arcy Wentworth, an Irish gentleman of Roscommon family, who had emigrated in 1790 and later became a prominent official, was then government surgeon. The son was educated in England, but he spent the interval
between his schooling at Greenwich and his matriculation (1816)
at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in Australia, and early attracted
the attention of Governor Macquarie by some adventurous
exploration in the Blue Mountains. In 1819 he published in
London a work on Australasia in two volumes, and in 1823
he only just missed the chancellor’s medal at Cambridge (won
by W. M. Praed) with a stirring poem on the same subject.
Having been called to the bar, he returned to Sydney, and soon
obtained a fine practice.
With a fellow barrister, Wardell, he
started a newspaper, the Australian, in 1824, to advocate the cause of self-government and to champion the “emancipists”—the incoming class of ex-convicts, now freed and prospering—against the “exclusivists”—the officials and the more aristocratic
settlers. With Wardell, Dr William Bland and others,
he formed the “Patriotic Association,” and carried on a determined agitation both in Australia and in England, where they
found able supporters. The earlier object of their attack was
the governor, Sir Ralph Darling, who was recalled in 1831 in
consequence, though he was acquitted by a select committee
of the House of Commons of the charges brought against him
by Wentworth in connexion with his severe punishment of two
soldiers. Sudds and Thompson, who had perpetrated a robbery
in order to obtain their discharge (a favourite dodge at the
time), and one of whom. Sudds, had died. Wentworth continued,
under the succeeding governor. Sir Richard Bourke, who was
guided by him, and Sir George Gipps, with whom he had constant
differences, to exercise a powerful influence; and in 1842, when
the Constitution Act was passed, it was generally recognized as
mainly his work. He became a member of the first legislative
council and led the “squatter party.”
He was the founder of
the university of Sydney (1852), where his son afterwards founded
bursaries in his honour; and he led the movement resulting in
the new constitution for the colony (1854), subsequently (1861)
becoming president of the new legislative council. But things
had meanwhile moved fast in the colony, and Wentworth’s
old supremacy had waned, since Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord
Sherbrooke) and others had come into prominence in the political
arena. He had done his work for colonial autonomy, and was
becoming an old man, somewhat out of touch with the new
generation.
For some years before 1861 he stayed chiefly in
England, where in 1857 he founded the “General Association for
the Australian Colonies,” with the object of obtaining from the
government a federal assembly for the whole of Australia; and in 1862 he definitely settled in England, dying on the 20th of March 1872. His body was taken to Sydney and accorded a public funeral by the imanimous vote of the New South Wales legislature.
WENZEL, KARL FRIEDRICH (1740–1793), German metallurgist, was born in Dresden in 1740. Disliking his father’s trade of bookbinding, for which he was intended, he left home in 1755, and after taking lessons in surgery and chemistry at Amsterdam, became a ship’s surgeon in the Dutch service. In 1766, tired of sea-life, he went to study chemistry at Leipzig, and afterwards devoted himself to metallurgy and assaying at his native place with such success that in 1780 he was appointed
