[a] He was the only son of Sir Francis Dashwood, 1st Baronet, and his second wife Mary, eldest daughter of Vere Fane, 4th Earl of Westmorland.

[1] In 1732, Dashwood formed a dining club called the Society of Dilettanti with around 40 charter members who had returned from their travels with an appreciation of classical art.

On 2 March 1746, when John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich was suspended from his office of archmaster for "his misbehaviour to and contempt of the Society", Dashwood was elected in his place.

This connection, coupled with the dismissal of his uncle, the Earl of Westmorland, from his colonelcy of the first troop of horse guards, made Dashwood a violent opponent of Robert Walpole's administration.

Walpole's fall made no difference to Dashwood's position, and as a courtier of Frederick Lewis he was in opposition to all of George II's governments.

[12] In 1747 he introduced a poor-relief bill that recommended commissioning public works (such as the Hellfire Caves he later had excavated at West Wycombe Park) to combat unemployment.

[13] Dashwood was re-elected for New Romney on 26 June 1747, and in January 1751 disavowed Jacobitism, of which Andrew Stone and others of the household of George, Prince of Wales were suspected.

[14] On 13 April 1749 he was created Doctor of Civil Law of Oxford University, and on 19 June 1746 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society[15] Dashwood was too young to have been a member of the first Hellfire Club, founded by Philip, Duke of Wharton in 1719 and disbanded in 1721, but he and John Montagu are alleged to have been members of a Hellfire Club that met at the George and Vulture Inn throughout the 1730s.

It was again at the George and Vulture that in 1746 Dashwood founded the precursor of his own Hellfire Club, a group called the "Knights of St. Francis".

[25] According to Horace Walpole, who visited the abbey, the members' "practice was rigorously pagan: Bacchus and Venus were the deities to whom they almost publicly sacrificed; and the nymphs and the hogsheads [casks of spirits] that were laid in against the festivals of this new church, sufficiently informed the neighbourhood of the complexion of those hermits."

Dashwood's garden at West Wycombe contained numerous statues and shrines to different gods: Daphne and Flora, Priapus, Venus and Dionysus.

to have performed obscene parodies of Christian rites, as well as orgies of drunkenness and debauchery in which Dashwood used a communion cup to pour out libations to heathen deities.

Charles Churchill, who previously labeled Dashwood "a disgrace to manhood" over his actions at Medmenham Abbey,[29] and John Wilkes criticized this, implying it to be disingenuous.

[31] On 28 March 1761, he found a new seat in Parliament for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis; he was re-elected on 9 June 1762 on his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he owed to his dependence upon the Prime Minister, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute.

[i] By 1763 Dashwood was premier baronet of England, and he was made Lord-Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, being succeeded in the colonelcy of the militia by John Wilkes.

[35] Horace Walpole described her as "a poor forlorn Presbyterian prude";[36] The marriage had no effect upon Dashwood's profligacy; according to Wraxall he "far exceeded in licentiousness of conduct any model exhibited since Charles II".

[38] His sister Rachael illegally assumed the title Baroness le Despencer, but on her death the abeyance was once more terminated in favour of her cousin, Thomas Stapleton.

[33] Francis Dashwood has appeared in works by the following authors: Notes Citations Bibliography Biography Writings The Hellfire Club Other