Goodwin Wharton

Goodwin Wharton (8 March 1653 – 28 October 1704) was an English Whig politician and autobiographer, as well as an avid mystic, alchemist and treasure hunter. His unpublished manuscript autobiography, in the British Library, "ranks high in the annals of psychopathology" according to the historian Roy Porter. Early life Goodwin Wharton was the third and youngest son out of the seven children of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton and Jane Goodwin, daughter and heiress of Arthur Goodwin (died 1643), of Upper Winchendon, Buckinghamshire. He was privately educated in France and attended a Protestant academy in Caen in 1663–64. In public and family life he was overshadowed by his forceful older brother, Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton and Malmesbury. Elected a member of Parliament for East Grinstead in 1680, he made a hot-headed speech in favour of excluding the Duke of York (later James II) from the throne and had to go into hiding for a time. Fairies and visions Wharton sent two expeditions to Tobermory to try to raise a galleon from the Spanish Armada wrecked there. Some of his singularly unsuccessful treasure-hunting was done on the advice of a lover, the self-professed medium Mary Parish, who claimed to have placed him in contact with fairies. The soldier-politician John Wildman also became fascinated by Parish's predictions in 1684.