In 1807, Joseph Farington recorded this bulletin from a recent visitor to Burley:
Lord Winchilsea does not reside there much as it would be too expensive for his circumstances, but lives in a high style when he is there. He is a bachelor ... and very agreeable in his manners ... His Lordship visits a lady, Mrs. Thomson, who resides at Brompton at a beautiful villa ... but always returns at night to his house in South St. He has a son, 13 years of age, who is called Finch or Thomson, and was with him at Burleigh.
Farington Diary, viii. 3137.
Winchilsea, ‘a nobleman of the old school’, whose mother was governess to the royal family for 30 years, was a favourite of George III and held household posts as a lord of the bedchamber, 1777-1812, and groom of the stole, 1804-12. By seconding Charles Lennox in his duel with the duke of York in 1789 he incurred the lasting displeasure of the prince of Wales, and after the establishment of the regency he was seldom seen at Court.
At the general election of 1820 he was returned for Lymington by its patron Sir Harry Neale*, who had served in the royal household with his father. On 6 June 1820 he took six weeks’ leave of absence, but in 1821 he proved a reliable supporter of the Liverpool ministry, with whom he voted in defence of their conduct towards Queen Caroline, 6 Feb., and against repeal of the additional malt duty, 3 Apr., electoral disqualification of ordnance officials, 12 Apr., and parliamentary reform, 9 May. He voted for Catholic relief, 28 Feb. He is not known to have spoken in debate in this period and in May 1821 he vacated his seat for its previous occupant. (He was subsequently returned three times to the reformed House.) In February 1825 the prominent huntsman Lord Frederick Cavendish Bentinck* noted with approval that Finch had ‘taken to the chase’.