Family and Education

bap. 17 June 1599,1 1st s. of Thomas Wentworth I* of Henley, Oxon. and Dorothy, da. and coh. of Thomas Keble of Newbottle, Northants.2 educ. L. Inn 1615, called 1622.3 m. (1) aft. 1621, Margaret (bur. 12 Aug. 1636),4 da. of John Wentworth of Darsham, Suff., wid. of William Freston of Mendham, Suff., s.p.; (2) Elizabeth, da. of one Johnson, s.p.5 suc. fa. 1627.6 bur. 18 Sept. 1638.7

Offices Held

Freeman, Oxford 1628.8

Biography

Wentworth followed his father to Lincoln’s Inn and a career in the law. His victory over Sir Henry Croke* at the parliamentary election at Oxford in 1628 must be taken as a mark of the esteem in which his father had been held in the city.9 His only appearance in the records of Parliament was on 27 May 1628 when, on the motion of Sir James Perrot*, he delivered in the arms bill fostered by the elder Wentworth in 1626, for the use of an open committee to which he had not been named.10

In the 1630s Wentworth was employed with William Noye* in planning the 4th earl of Bedford’s great fen drainage project.11 Before the death of his first wife in 1636 he had settled in Kent near his cousin Sir Thomas Walsingham II*. He made his will on 14 Sept. 1638, leaving his only source of income, the lease of the tithes of Warkworth in Northumberland, to be shared between his widow and his numerous brothers and sisters. He was buried three days later in the neighbouring parish of Bexley.12 His cousin Sir Peter Wentworth sat for Tamworth in the Long Parliament until the expulsion of the Rump in 1653.

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: Alan Davidson / Rosemary Sgroi

Notes

• 1. Wood’s City of Oxf. ed. A. Clark (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xxxvii), 200.
• 2. A. Baker, Northants. i. 659.
• 3. LI Admiss.; LI Black Bks. ii. 236.
• 4. The Gen. n.s. i. 225.
• 5. W.L. Rutton, Three Branches of Wentworth Fam. 300-2, 304.
• 6. PROB 11/156, f. 373.
• 7. The Gen. n.s. i. 225.
• 8. Oxf. Council Acts ed. M.G. Hobson and H.E. Salter (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xcv), 10.
• 9. Ibid. 9.
• 10. CD 1628, iii. 629.
• 11. J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 407.
• 12. PROB 11/177, f. 428.