[1] The son of Sir John Dashwood-King, 3rd Baronet and half-nephew of Francis Dashwood, 11th Baron le Despencer, he shared little of their cultured and hedonistic ways and was a pious churchgoer.
On 29 August 1789, he married Mary Anne Broadhead (d. 19 January 1844), the great-granddaughter of Theodore, Baron Brinckman; they had seven children: An unfortunate incident ensued in 1800, when he suspected his wife of being overly intimate with the Prince of Wales and made her leave London for Bourton.
An independent Tory, he was mobbed in Wycombe for his opposition to the Reform Bill in 1831, and left Parliament in 1831, preferring not to contest the election of 1832.
He disliked his country seat at West Wycombe as unsuitable for hunting and too expensive to maintain and attempted to sell it to the Duke of Somerset, but was unable to do so.
Due to heavy investment in land in Buckinghamshire, he died burdened by poverty and crushing debt and was succeeded in the baronetcy by George Henry, who was Liberal Member for Buckinghamshire and for Wycombe until his death in 1862, when it passed briefly to George Henry's brother John Richard and then to the son of his other brother Edwin.