[2] Instead of taking a degree, he decided to complete his education with a continental Grand Tour from 1769 to 1770, being tutored by Georges Deyverdun, who was a contact of Edward Gibbon, a family friend.

[1][3] After his return to Britain Worsley served as High Sheriff of Hampshire for 1773–1774 and then entered the House of Commons in 1774 for the constituency of Newport.

[5] Worsley failed to win a seat at the Hampshire by-election of December 1779 and lost all his offices when the North administration fell in 1782.

Worsley left for Spain, Portugal, and France (1783–1784, quitting his parliamentary seat after his departure) and wintered in Rome.

He managed to escape Venice when the French invaded, transferring soon after his departure from a civilian convoy to a 14-gun Royal Navy sloop, leaving his art collections from Venice on the convoy with instructions to stay at Fiume to await a more peaceful situation in which to continue to England.

Having been re-elected in absentia for Newtown in 1796, Worsley held that seat until Pitt the Younger resigned in February 1801, ending his participation in public life.

In Rome he bought more antiquities from Thomas Jenkins and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and became a friend of the Spanish ambassador, Jose Nicolas de Azara, and the antiquary Ennio Quirino Visconti (who would later write the text for Worsley's publication of his collections (1794–1805)).

Worsley went into seclusion, principally at Sea Cottage (later known as Marine Villa), which he built in the early 1790s near St Lawrence, in the Undercliff of the Isle of Wight, adding small classical temples in its grounds and making a failed attempt to add a vineyard.

In 1801 he received news from a British government agent that a French privateer had brought the ship carrying his art treasures into Málaga and that the paintings onboard had been bought up cheaply by Lucien Bonaparte.

Poor health prevented Worsley from taking part in defending the Isle of Wight against the Napoleonic invasion threat, but he carried on collecting until his death.

Appuldurcombe passed to his niece, Henrietta Anna Maria Charlotte (daughter of John Bridgeman Simpson), who married the Hon.