Philip Yorke (antiquary)

At the 1774 British general election, Yorke and his brother-in-law Francis Cockayne-Cust stood as candidates at Helston and were returned on petition on 15 March 1775.

On 17 January 1792 he was returned as MP for Grantham by his brother-in-law, on the united Brownlow and Rutland interest, as a seat-warmer until his son Simon Yorke came of age.

He began to study closely the ancestors of his wife, a descendant of Marchudd ap Cynan, lord of Uwch Dulas and said that he had come to "think the race of Cadwallon more glorious than the breed of Gimcrack," as he wrote in his Tracts of Powys, his first book on Welsh history and genealogy, which was published in 1795.

whoſe integrity of heart, ſuavity of manners, and intellectual endowments, whilſt they endeared him to ſociety, were to his own breaſt a perpetual ſource of peace, complacency, and ſatisfaction.

Dedicated to Thomas Pennant of Downing, it was based on a limited range of printed sources as well as on correspondence with scholars such as Walter Davies.

The work details the history of the descendants of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, offers a stern riposte to Polydore Vergil's negative appraisal of the early Britons, and devotes some space to the crown lordships of Powys.

Yorke was initially sympathetic to the origin myth of the Welsh people, including the traditions which traced its descent from Trojan forebears, but later rejected such theories.