On being asked to review a book about the career of Thomas Wharton between 1660 and 1688 my first reaction was one of surprise: surely there was insufficient material to document in detail the political apprenticeship of one of the most important Whig leaders in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne. Having perused this fluent and readable book I found that my initial thoughts have been substantially vindicated.

The book has a standard biographical format, discussing Wharton's early life, his education in France, his first marriage, various notorious pranks (especially the desecration of Great Barrington Church), his election to the House of Commons and activities therein, his horse racing, and his dueling. However, large sections of the book only concern Wharton tangentially. The 1670s and 1680s are surveyed, and general political events are discussed at length. Wharton's exploits are fitted into this narrative as and when details have been uncovered. The relative absence of material on Wharton cannot be attributed to the author's lack of effort. On the contrary the endnotes reflect an immense effort to find and utilize all possible sources of information. Private Wharton papers have been scoured for detail and the public archives mined for relevant court cases in both Chancery and the Court of Common Pleas. More laudable still, the author has made extensive forays into the English countryside to provide a topographical context for the events he is describing. The judgments made of Wharton are always judicious, and there are some interesting allusions to his later career, particularly his speech to the House of Lords in 1705 during the “Church in Danger” debates. However, if the book as a whole demonstrates anything, it is that the material is just not extant for a fuller treatment of the young Thomas Wharton.

The reader is left with a political history of the 1670s and 1680s that fits in with the author's declared aim to be “both accurate and readily comprehensible to twenty-first-century readers” (7), if a little old-fashioned in tone and determinedly Whiggish in interpretation. What counts against the political narrative is not the author's decision to “use primary sources as much as possible” (7), but the near total absence of recent secondary works from the bibliography. For example, no book dealing with the Exclusion Crisis can be deemed to be complete that does not make reference to the work of scholars such as Tim Harris, Mark Knights, Alan Marshall, and Jonathan Scott, much of which has been in print for at least a decade. Indeed, the author does not acknowledge their existence, and it would be a misnomer to describe any of these historians as young. Long-established scholars of the Restoration, such as John Miller, are only cited for their earliest works, published in the 1970s. These omissions are even more puzzling given that certain scholars, such as Howard Nenner, are cited for works published as recently as 1996.

In short, the historian who eventually sits down to write the definitive study of Thomas Wharton will find that this book provides a solid basis for the initial chapters. The remaining years of Wharton's life, and clearly the most important ones, still await their biographer.