Family and Education

b.? 1703, 1st s. of Robert Nedham of St. Thomas in the Vale and St. Catherine’s, Jamaica by Elizabeth, da. of William Shirley of Jamaica. educ. Trinity, Oxf. 30 May 1723, aged 19; 1. Temple 1725. m. 21 May 1733, Catherine, da. of Robert Pitt, of Stratford sub Castle, Wilts., sis. of Thomas Pitt of Boconnoc and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, 3s. 1da. suc. fa. 1738.

Offices Held

Biography

Robert Nedham, whose grandfather had gone to Jamaica after the civil war, was descended from a younger son of the 1st Viscount Kilmorey [I]. Having settled in England, he did not inherit his father’s Jamaica estates.1 Brought in at Old Sarum in 1734 by his brother-in-law, Thomas Pitt, he voted against the Government on the Spanish convention, 8 Mar. 1739, but thereafter he seems to have gone over to the Administration, as he is included in two lists of ministerial supporters who were absent from divisions on the right of search, 21 Nov. 1739, and the Address, 18 Nov. 1740.2 Presumably for this reason he was not put up by Pitt in 1741 and 1747. When Pitt proposed to bring him into Parliament in 1754, Newcastle noted that it was ‘utterly impossible’.3 He died August 1762.

Ref Volumes: 1715-1754

Author: R. S. Lea

Notes

• 1. M. C. Owen, Sewells of the Isle of Wight, 104-5.
• 2. Cholmondeley (Houghton) mss.
• 3. Add. 32995, f. 120.