English law officer and Lord Chancellor, whose opinions shaped the law the Isle of Man was governed against.

He rose through the crown offices. As Attorney-General he argued in the Commons through the 1720s, on the South Sea Company prosecutions, on the quarantine bill against the plague then raging in the south of France, and on the pardon of an attainted peer. He was made Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, and afterwards Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. He resigned the seals in November 1756 and died in March 1761.

His name attaches to two things in the parliamentary record. The Clandestine Marriage Bill of 1753 was carried through the Lords under his hand, and its passage is documented in the Hardwicke Papers. And in the argument over the law of libel, the doctrine that a jury had nothing to do with whether a paper was a libel was said to have his sanction as Attorney-General, a claim disputed in the Commons in 1770. After the acquittal of the Craftsman a ballad went about at his expense, to the effect that Sir Philip's innuendos would serve him no longer in verse or in prose, twelve honest men having decided the cause.

A contemporary life of Wilkes calls him the greatest perhaps of all English lawyers and a politician of infinite sagacity, and the firm ally of the Duke of Newcastle.