Charles Whitworth, 1st Baron Whitworth

Charles Whitworth, 1st Baron Whitworth (14 October 1675 – 23 October 1725) was a British diplomat.

Whitworth was possibly born at Blore Pike, near Eccleshall, Staffordshire. He entered Westminster School as a Queen's Scholar in 1690, and then entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1694. He graduated with a BA in 1699 and became a Fellow the next year.

Whitworth entered diplomatic service in 1700 as secretary to George Stepney, envoy at Berlin. In November 1701 he was appointed as British aide to Cardinal Lamberg, the Holy Roman Emperor's chief commissary at the Congress of Regensburg. He also deputised at Vienna for Stepney, when he was absent from the embassy there.

In 1704, Whitworth was appointed as Ambassador Extraordinary to Russia. His initial role was to regularise the position of the Russia Company which had mismanaged the tobacco monopoly granted it in 1698. He succeeded in this between 1707 and 1711, but not in the wider object of obtaining a commercial treaty. He also had to handle Russian sensibilities over the arrest for debt in 1708 of the emperor's envoy Andrey Matveyev, sent to London to seek British mediation in the Great Northern War. He remained accredited in Russia until 1712, but was increasingly absent on diplomatic business elsewhere in eastern Europe. He wrote an Account of Russia as it was in the Year 1710, which (though not published until 1758) influenced British views of Russia for much of the century.

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