For the next four years he was employed, on the one hand in political, on the other in profligate, life.  He shone in both; and was no less admired, by the wits of those days, for his speeches, his arguments, and his zeal, than for the utter disregard of public decency he displayed in his vices.  Such a promising youth, adhering to the government, merited some mark of its esteem, and accordingly, before attaining the age of twenty-one, he was raised to a dukedom.  Being of age, he took his seat in the English House of Lords, and had not been long there before he again turned coat, and came out in the light of a Jacobite hero.  It was now that he gathered most of his laurels.

The Hanoverian monarch had been on the English throne some six years.  Had the Chevalier’s attempt occurred at this period, it may be doubted if it would not have been successful.  The ‘Old Pretender’ came too soon, the ‘Young Pretender’ too late.  At the period of the first attempt, the public had had no time to contrast Stuarts and Guelphs:  at that of the second, they had forgotten the one and grown accustomed to the other; but at the moment when our young duke appeared on the boards of the senate, the vices of the Hanoverians were beginning to draw down on them the contempt of the educated and the ridicule of the vulgar; and perhaps no moment could have been more favourable for advocating a restoration of the Stuarts.  If Wharton had had as much energy and consistency as he had talent and impudence, he might have done much towards that desirable, or undesirable end.

The grand question at this time before the House was the trial of Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester, demanded by Sir Robert Walpole.  The man had a spirit almost as restless as his defender.  The son of a man who might have been the original of the Vicar of Bray, he was very little of a poet, less of a priest, but a great deal of a politician.  He was born in 1662, so that at this time he must have been nearly sixty years old.  He had had by no means a hard life of it, for family interest, together with eminent talents, procured him one appointment after another, till he reached the bench at the age of fifty-one, in the reign of Anne.  He had already distinguished himself in several ways, most, perhaps, by controversies with Hoadly, and by sundry high-church motions.  But after his elevation, he displayed his principles more boldly, refused to sign the Declaration of the Bishops, which was somewhat servilely made to assure George the First of the fidelity of the Established Church, suspended the curate of Gravesend for three years because he allowed the Dutch to have a service performed in his church, and even, it is said, on the death of Anne, offered to proclaim King James III., and head a procession himself in his lawn sleeves.  The end of this and other vagaries was, that in 1722, the Government sent him to the Tower, on suspicion of being connected with a plot in favour of the Old