STUART WORTLEY, Hon. Charles James (1802-1844), of Wortley Hall, Yorks.

Stuart Wortley, like his father, initially pursued a military career. In April 1830 it was reported that he was to marry the daughter of Admiral Frank Sotheron, Member for Nottinghamshire, but this did not come off. Lonsdale mss, Beckett to Lowther, 9 Apr. 1830. At the general election that summer he was returned on the family interest for Bossiney, probably as a locum for his elder brother John, who had quit his seat there to contest Perth Burghs. The duke of Wellington’s ministry listed him as one of their ‘friends’, and he voted with them in the crucial civil list division, 15 Nov. 1830, his only recorded action in the Commons. His brief parliamentary career ended in February 1831 when he vacated for his brother, who had been unseated on petition. At the general election that spring the Tory party managers in London sent him and James Lockhart, the editor of the Quarterly Review, to contest Milborne Port, but they found Lord Anglesey’s interest to be impregnable and beat a hasty retreat. Cent. Kent. Stud. Stanhope mss U1590/C 346. In February 1831 he married Lady Emmeline Manners, who had once been courted by Prince Leopold of Coburg, and who subsequently became a well-known poet and author. Oxford DNB sub Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley. He apparently knew the prince and was reacquainted with him when he travelled to Belgium in December 1832 to observe the siege of Antwerp. Although he had no official standing, he carried letters from the foreign secretary Lord Palmerston* to Sir Robert Adair†, the special envoy to Brussels, and to Colonel John Hobart Cradock*, the government’s observer at Antwerp. He published a record of his experiences in his Journal of an Excursion (1833). He died, apparently intestate, at his brother’s London house in May 1844. Gent. Mag. (1844), i. 103.