John Wilmot (politician)

John Eardley Wilmot (1748 – 23 June 1815) was a Member of the Parliament of Great Britain.

The younger son of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Wilmot was born at Derby in 1748, and was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, where he went on to become a fellow of All Souls. He studied for the church under Dr William Warburton, but afterwards decided to pursue the law instead and was called to the Bar, which his father called "quitting a bed of roses for a crown o' thorns."

In 1776, about five years after his call to the bar, Wilmot was returned to parliament for Tiverton in Devon; and, taking part with the opposition, attacked the ministerial party in a pamphlet, denouncing the continuance of the American Revolutionary War. In 1781, he was appointed a master in Chancery; and, in 1782, was commissioned, in conjunction with others, to inquire into the distribution of the sums destined for the relief of the American loyalists. In the following year, he spoke on the subject in parliament; and, in reply to Charles James Fox's condemnation of the large sums expended on the American sufferers, he declared "he would share with them his last shilling and his last loaf."

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