John Conduitt

During the following year, he was made a captain in a regiment of the dragoons serving in Portugal, but by September 1713 he had been appointed Deputy Paymaster General to the British forces in Gibraltar.

In June 1721, Conduitt was elected, on petition, as a Member of Parliament for Whitchurch, Hampshire, which he represented during the 1720s as a loyal supporter of Robert Walpole's Whig government.

[4] By the early 1730s, Conduitt had become a relatively prominent parliamentary speaker, defending the government on a number of issues, including Walpole's maintenance of the Septennial Act.

The Act marked the definitive end of witch-hunting in Great Britain, introducing instead a maximum penalty of one year's imprisonment for pretending to exercise magical powers.

After what must have been a whirlwind romance, they applied to the Faculty Office for a licence, which was granted on 23 August 1717, to marry at St Paul's, Covent Garden.

Perhaps in an effort to dignify himself for his impending marriage to one of London's famous daughters, Conduitt obtained for himself a grant of arms from the College of Heralds on 16 August.

Partly as a result of his antiquarian interests, Conduitt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 1 December 1718, proposed by the president, and his uncle by marriage, Sir Isaac Newton.