William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford

William Wentworth, 2nd Earl of Strafford (8 June 1626 – 16 October 1695) was a member of England's House of Lords.

He was born in Wentworth Woodhouse, Yorkshire, the only surviving son of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford and his second wife Arabella Holles, the daughter of John Holles, 1st Earl of Clare. His mother died in childbirth when he was five years old; his father later remarried Elizabeth Rhodes, who was a kindly stepmother to William and his sisters. He studied at Trinity College Dublin. When his father was executed for treason in 1641, William left the England for several years, mainly for fear of reprisals (although most of his father's enemies bore no ill-will to his widow or children), and lived for a time in France. In 1652 he was allowed to return on taking an oath of abjuration. In 1662, the bill of attainder against his father was reversed by Parliament, and he regained the title of Earl of Strafford and was invested a Knight of the Garter in 1661. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1668 but was expelled in 1685.

According to his father's biographer, he led a rather "obscure, undistinguished and uninteresting life". She does however praise his speech in the House of Lords in 1667 protesting against the banishment of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, on the grounds that no crime had been proved against him; his attitude is the more creditable since Clarendon had been one of his father's bitterest enemies. He became a member of the Privy Council in 1674, and attended the crucial meeting in 1678 when Titus Oates first revealed his fabricated Popish Plot. During the Exclusion Crisis, he supported James II, and made a point of calling on him when James travelled through Yorkshire on his way to Scotland in 1679.

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