CHUTE, Francis (c.1696-1745).

On 4 Dec. 1733 Chute asked Walpole, who had given him hopes of legal promotion, whether there was any truth in a report that he was to be made a K.C. and succeed Francis Fane as solicitor-general to the Queen.Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss. In the event Fane retained his post till the Queen’s death, but Chute became K.C. in 1736. In 1741 he stood jointly with Luke Robinson for Hedon, where they were returned against Pulteney’s candidates, who petitioned. Horace Walpole, who took a personal interest in the matter as a friend of Chute’s brother, John, described it to Mann, 3 Dec. 1741, as

an ugly affair for the court, for Pulteney has asked votes of the courtiers, and said Sir Robert was indifferent about it; but he is warmer than I almost ever saw him; and declared to Churchill, of whom Pulteney claims a promise, that he must take Walpole or Pulteney.

On 10 Dec. Horace Walpole reported to Mann that Chute had spoken with ‘vast and deserved applause’ on the Address.

When I went home ‘Dear Sir’, said I to Sir R. ‘I hope Mr. Chute will carry his election for Hedon: he would be a great loss to you’. He replied ‘we will not lose him’.

On 21 January Chute spoke again for the Government against Pulteney’s motion for a secret committee. By March, when his election came before the House, Walpole had fallen and Chute and Robinson ‘would not take the trouble to defend a cause which they could not carry’.Walpole to Mann, 22 Jan. and 3 Mar. 1742. Unseated by the House of Commons, he died in April 1745, described by Horace Walpole (to Mann 29 Apr.) as ‘a most rising man and one of the best-natured and most honest that ever lived’.