A 1683 engraving of Wharton

Sir George Wharton, 1st Baronet (4 April 1617 – 12 August 1681) was an English military officer, astrologer and poet who served as Treasurer of the Ordnance from 1670 to 1681.

Life

He was the son of a blacksmith in Westmorland. He went to Oxford to study, though not admitted to the university. He then returned to Westmorland, and in 1642 sold his family property, and raised his own troop of horse for the Royalist cause. He shared defeat at Stow-on-the-Wold, in 1643.[1] He is said to have served under Jacob Astley, 1st Baron Astley of Reading.[2]

He then went to Charles I at Oxford, and was given a paymaster position in the Ordnance, under Sir John Heydon.[3] At this period he became a friend of Elias Ashmole, helping him to a military commission.[4]

Wharton attended, with Ashmole, the first meeting in 1647 of the Society of Astrologers at Gresham College. It included both William Lilly and John Booker, Parliamentarians who had been on the other side of the astrological pamphlet exchanges in the Civil War that had ended in 1646.[5]

He was imprisoned in 1649, and might have been executed but his former opponent William Lilly spoke up for him with Bulstrode Whitelocke.[6] He was released by the intervention of Ashmole, who made him steward on his Berkshire estates.[7]

At the English Restoration of 1660, he was reinstated as a paymaster. He became Treasurer of the Ordnance in 1670, an office he held until his death. He was made a baronet in 1677.

Works

He took the pen name George Naworth, for his first almanac in 1641. He then issued an almost unbroken annual sequence, using his own name from 1645, not publishing in 1646, but expanding the work with history and continuing from 1647 to 1666.[8]

As a royalist pamphleteer and newsbook editor, he wrote Mercurius Elencticus from 1647. Mocking Parliament, it carried biographical material on its leaders. When Wharton was imprisoned, it continued with help from Samuel Sheppard.[9]

He attacked John Hall, who wrote Mercurius Britanicus, employed by William Lilly whom Mercurius Elencticus lampooned.[10][11] He also attacked John Booker, another astrologer in the Parliamentarian camp.[12]

His collected works were issued by John Gadbury, in 1683.

Notes

  1. ↑ Stephen C. Manganiello, The Concise Encyclopedia of the Revolutions and Wars of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1639-1660 (2004), p. 576.
  2. ↑ "Genuki: Kendal - History, Westmorland".
  3. ↑ Theophilus Cibber, The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) Volume II
  4. ↑ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Ashmole, Elias" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 2 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 733.
  5. ↑ Benjamin Woolley, The Herbalist (2004), p. 250.
  6. ↑ "The Life and work of William Lilly by David Plant".
  7. ↑ "Ashmole, Elias" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
  8. ↑ "Wharton, George" . Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
  9. ↑ "§5. Martin Parker, Sheppard, Wharton, Hall, Frost, Harris and Mabbott. XV. The Beginnings of English Journalism. Vol. 7. Cavalier and Puritan. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907–21".
  10. ↑ Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum(2004), p. 191.
  11. ↑ Joseph George Muddiman (1908), A history of English journalism to the foundation of the Gazette, online text, for details of Hall and the Wharton-Lilly feud.
  12. ↑ Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (2005), p. 194.
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