Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet
British politician and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (1783-1847)
Sir John Eardley Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet (21 February 1783 – 3 February 1847) was a politician in the United Kingdom who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for North Warwickshire and then as Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (later called Tasmania).
Biography
Eardley-Wilmot was the son of John Eardley Wilmot (1748–1815), barrister, and grandson of Sir John Eardley Wilmot, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. He was created a baronet in 1821 and in 1822 published An Abridgment of Blackstone's Commentaries. He was a member of the House of Commons, representing North Warwickshire from 1832 until March 1843. In 1840 he attended an international meeting on 12 June 1840 on anti-slavery. A large painting in the National Portrait Gallery records that event and Eardley-Wilmot is shown with Dr Stephen Lushington, a judge, behind the main speaker.
In 1844 Eardley-Wilmot suggested that the 1842 Act (setting a £1 per acre minimum land price) should not apply in Van Diemen's Land – to which the British government agreed in 1845.
Wilmot married first Elizabeth Emma, daughter of Caleb Hillier Parry in 1808 and then Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Robert Chester in 1819. There were sons and daughters of both marriages, including John's successor, Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 2nd Baronet, and the clergyman Edward Revell Eardley-Wilmot.
Wilmot features as a main character in T. S. Flynn's historical novel Part an Irishman: The Regiment.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet” as british politician and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (1783-1847). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british politician and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land (1783-1847). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1699911. VIAF identifies the subject as 28532978. The Library of Congress control number is n85351983. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1783, 1847, 1748 and 1815.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sir John Eardley-Wilmot, 1st Baronet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.