As a canvasser he was irresistible.  He never forgot a face that he had once seen.  Nay, in the towns in which he wished to establish an interest, he remembered, not only the voters, but their families.  His opponents were confounded by the strength of his memory and the affability of his deportment, and owned, that it was impossible to contend against a great man who called the shoemaker by his Christian name, who was sure that the butcher’s daughter must be growing a fine girl, and who was anxious to know whether the blacksmith’s youngest boy was breeched.  By such arts as these he made himself so popular that his journeys to the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions resembled royal progresses.  The bells of every parish through which he passed were rung, and flowers were strewed along the road.  It was commonly believed that, in the course of his life, he expended on his parliamentary interest not less than eighty thousand pounds, a sum which, when compared with the value of estates, must be considered as equivalent to more than three hundred thousand pounds in our time.

But the chief service which Wharton rendered to the Whig party was that of bringing in recruits from the young aristocracy.  He was quite as dexterous a canvasser among the embroidered coats at the Saint James’s Coffeehouse as among the leathern aprons at Wycombe and Aylesbury.  He had his eye on every boy of quality who came of age; and it was not easy for such a boy to resist the arts of a noble, eloquent and wealthy flatterer, who united juvenile vivacity to profound art and long experience of the gay world.  It mattered not what the novice preferred, gallantry or field sports, the dicebox or the bottle.  Wharton soon found out the master passion, offered sympathy, advice and assistance, and, while seeming to be only the minister of his disciple’s pleasures, made sure of his disciple’s vote.

The party to whose interests Wharton, with such spirit and constancy, devoted his time, his fortune, his talents, his very vices, judged him, as was natural, far too leniently.  He was widely known by the very undeserved appellation of Honest Tom.  Some pious men, Burnet, for example, and Addison, averted their eyes from the scandal which he gave, and spoke of him, not indeed with esteem, yet with goodwill.  A most ingenious and accomplished Whig, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics, described Wharton as the most mysterious of human beings, as a strange compound of best and worst, of private depravity and public virtue, and owned himself unable to understand how a man utterly without principle in every thing but politics should in politics be as true as steel.  But that which, in the judgment of one faction, more than half redeemed all Wharton’s faults, seemed to the other faction to aggravate them all.  The opinion which the Tories entertained of him is expressed in a single line written after his death by the ablest man of that party; “He was the most universal villain that ever I knew."480