HILL, Trevor (1693-1742), of Hillsborough, co. Down, and Turweston, Bucks.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

30 Apr. 1715 - 1722
1722 - 13 Dec. 1722

Family and Education

b. 1693, 1st s. of Rt. Hon. Michael Hill, M.P., of Hillsborough by Anne, da. and h. of Sir John Trevor, M.P., of Brynkinalt, Denb., master of the rolls and Speaker of the House of Commons. m. bef. 1717, Mary, da. and coh. of Anthony Rowe, M.P., of Muswell Hill, Mdx., clerk of the Green Cloth, wid, of Sir Edmund Denton, 1st Bt., M.P., of Hillesden. Bucks, 4s. 1da. suc. fa. 1699; cr. Baron Hill of Kilwarlin and Visct. Hillsborough [I] 21 Aug. 1717.

Offices Held

M.P. [I] 1713-17.

P.C. [I] 20 Sept. 1717; gov. co. Down 1729.

Biography

Hill was descended from Moyses Hill who went to northern Ireland with the Earl of Essex in the reign of Elizabeth I. His mother became the 3rd wife of Alan Brodrick, 1st Visct. Midleton [I]. At the general election of 1715 he stood unsuccessfully as a Whig for Saltash, which his father had represented 1692-5. Returned three months later for Aylesbury at a by-election, he voted for the septennial bill and the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, but against the peerage bill December 1719. In September 1720, when owing Walpole some £9,000 for South Sea stock, he refused to pay and ‘already bankrupt ... fled to Newmarket in the hope of recuperating on horses what he had lost on the shares.’ He is described by Horace Walpole as ‘one of the most profligate and worthless men of the age, with good parts and a friend of the Duke of Wharton’, by whom he was returned for Malmesbury in 1722, only to be unseated on petition.1 Defeated at Appleby in 1723, he did not stand again.2

Hearne refers to him in July 1725 as

a very handsome man [who] had two hundred graces in his lips. [He] ... is one of those wanton, immodest gentlemen that, a year or two ago, used to ride naked and make strange work with young women ... till at last a carter happened to whip some of them, as they were thus naked, at a place in Buckinghamshire, after which we heard no more of their pranks.3

He died 5 May 1742.

Ref Volumes: 1715-1754

Author: R. S. Lea

Notes

  • 1. Plumb, Walpole, i. 318-19; Corresp. H. Walpole (Yale ed.), xxxiv. 260.
  • 2. HMC 10th Rep. IV, 345.
  • 3. Hearne, Colls. (Oxf. Hist. Soc.), viii. 405.