“DEAR Bishop, I’m sorry I pissed all over your church” was the gist of a letter written on August 15 1682, to the Bishop of Gloucester, by Tom Wharton, the future Baron Wharton, Marquess of Malmesbury, Marquess of Catherlough and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

It sounds like quite a party: Tom and a few of his aristocratic pals were holidaying in Gloucestershire and, having spent the day drinking, came up with the idea of breaking into St Mary’s parish church, Great Barrington, where they amused themselves by ripping up the Bible, cutting off the bell ropes, smashing the pulpit and the font, and relieving their bladders (though whether the latter was an act of fun or of urgency is debatable.) They were only caught because they made so much noise with the bells that the villagers came to investigate.

“Honest” Tom Wharton, as he was ironically known in politics, went on to become an important figure in the history of the British constitution, which just goes to show, I suppose, that none of us need be defined by our mistakes (provided we’re aristos, obviously.)

He was born on an unknown day in August 1648 — unknown to history, that is, though I daresay his mother remembered it. The Whartons owned large parts of Buckinghamshire, along with useful chunks of Yorkshire, Westmorland and Cumberland. Their great wealth didn’t conflict, at least in their own minds, with being very pious dissenting Protestants, who had supported the parliamentary side during the civil wars.

However, the satirist Jonathan Swift later described Honest Tom as being “an atheist grafted upon a dissenter,” while historian Thomas Macaulay reckoned “of all the liars of his time he was the most deliberate, the most inventive.” Certainly his lifestyle didn’t match the austere theology in which he was raised; in his youth he became famous as a rakehell, obsessed with horse-racing and a compulsive fighter of duels.

Wharton was a member of parliament for 17 years until succeeding his late father in the Lords in 1696. Like most politicians of the time, he was in and out of favour over the years depending on who was in power.

His influence in politics was partly down to his brilliance as an electioneer, which won many contests for his Whig party. He learned, better than any contemporary, where and how to deploy election funds, mostly as bribes, and according to his memoirs spent more than £80,000 of his own money on elections during his career.

He wasn’t able to do much about the 1685 general election, though, which resulted in a Tory landslide. As one of the few Whigs left in the Commons, he became an accidental leader of the party.

The one great cause of his life was protecting Protestant England from ever again being ruled by Catholics. To him, as to many others, this was more a political and cultural crusade than a theological one; for them, Protestantism represented English liberty against the continental tyranny of the Roman faith.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 — deposing a Catholic king and replacing him with his Protestant daughter — pretty much settled that question finally, but it’s of more importance for establishing (albeit not for the first or last time) that no-one could occupy the English throne without the consent of parliament. This was a significant step on the long, and as yet unfinished, road to democracy.

Honest Tom was at the centre of various plots against King James II, especially as a founder of what its own members called the Treason Club, which otherwise consisted of army officers planning war against the king. But his greatest contribution to the revolution was probably writing the words of a hit song.

His original lyrics to Lillibullero, satirising James, became a national craze, sung and whistled everywhere, especially by soldiers. Wharton himself later claimed that he had “whistled James out of three kingdoms,” meaning England, Scotland and Ireland.

Unsurprisingly, the church-smashing incident haunted him through the years. It had been bad enough in reality, but when retold by his enemies, it grew into something uniquely monstrous.

In 1705, when the Tories in the House of Lords were pretending to believe that the established religion was in danger because the government contained so many low-church worshippers, Wharton made the mistake of demanding to know what they were afraid of.

The reply famously silenced that renowned orator, as one lord explained that he did not feel the Church of England was entirely safe in the hands of “any that had pissed against a communion table or done his other occasions in the pulpit.”

(I didn’t mention the “other occasions in the pulpit” earlier because I didn’t think you needed to know, but now the Duke of Leeds has given the game away. Sorry.)

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