Edward Wortley Montagu (diplomat)
British ambassador; (1678-1761)
Edward Wortley Montagu (8 February 1678 – 22 January 1761) was an English coal-owner and politician. He was British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, husband of the writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and father of the writer and traveller Edward Wortley Montagu.
Life
Son of Sidney Wortley Montagu and grandson of Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich, Wortley Montagu was educated at Westminster School and was admitted at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1693. He entered the Middle Temple, also in 1693, and the Inner Temple in 1706. He was called to the bar in 1699.
In 1700–1701 Montagu went on a Grand Tour, some of the time accompanied by Joseph Addison. He visited France and Switzerland.
Montagu was a prominent Whig politician, and first elected as Member of Parliament for Huntingdon in 1705. In a close election in the two-member seat, with much bribery by the victors, he was returned with Sir John Cotton, ahead of John Pedley. He became a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, serving from 1714 to 1715.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7526634. VIAF identifies the subject as 90993925. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1678, 1761, 1693 and 1706.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edward Wortley Montagu (diplomat)” 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.