Henry Paget, 1st Earl of Uxbridge (first creation)

Monument to Lord Henry Pagett in St John the Baptist's Church, Hillingdon

Henry Paget, 1st Earl of Uxbridge PC (13 January 1663 – 30 August 1743) was a British nobleman and politician.

Family

He was the son of William Paget, 6th Baron Paget, and his wife Frances, daughter of Francis Pierrepoint and a granddaughter of Robert Pierrepont, 1st Earl of Kingston-upon-Hull. In 1686 he married Mary Catesby, and his children with her included an eldest son, Thomas Catesby Paget.

Career

Paget was appointed a deputy lieutenant for Middlesex on 6 April 1689 and Staffordshire on 14 May 1689. He was elected Member of Parliament for the latter county on 7 November 1695 as a Tory. In 1702 he was made a deputy lieutenant for Buckinghamshire.

On 30 April 1704 Paget was appointed one of the Council advising the Lord High Admiral, Prince George of Denmark, and served until the Prince's death on 28 October 1708. He was also a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury between 10 August 1710 and 30 May 1711. On 13 June 1711 he was appointed Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard, being made a Privy Counsellor the next day and being raised to the House of Lords as Baron Burton, of Burton in the County of Stafford, on 1 January 1712. On 26 February 1713 he succeeded his father as 7th Baron Paget of Beaudesert, and was also appointed to succeed him as Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire.

On 1 May 1714 he was appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Elector of Hanover, but refused to go unless he was made an Earl, which Queen Anne refused. However, when the Elector succeeded as King George I of Great Britain on 1 August, he raised Paget in the peerage as Earl of Uxbridge in the County of Middlesex, on 19 October 1714, and appointed him to the new Privy Council, 16 November 1714. In 1727, the Town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts Colony, was named in honor of Henry Paget, First Earl of Uxbridge.

Later life

In 1715 Lord Uxbridge ceased to be Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard and Lord Lieutenant, and took on the post of Recorder of Lichfield, in which he served until his death.

Lady Uxbridge died suddenly on 3 November 1734, and was buried at West Drayton on 9 November. On 7 June 1739 Lord Uxbridge remarried to Elizabeth Bagot (born 3 March 1674). She was a member of another Staffordshire county family, the daughter of the late Sir Walter Bagot, 3rd Baronet (to whose Parliamentary seat Uxbridge had succeeded in 1695). He was seventy-six and she was sixty-nine. In 1740, he became a justice of the peace for Cambridgeshire.

The Earl of Uxbridge died at West Drayton on 30 August 1743, aged eighty. As his son Thomas, Lord Paget had predeceased him, on 4 February 1742, he was succeeded in his titles by his grandson Henry, who became the 2nd Earl. His widow Lady Uxbridge died on 2 September 1749.

Sources

• http://thepeerage.com/p5567.htm
• http://www.leighrayment.com/commons/Scommons4.htm
• http://www.leighrayment.com/peers/peersB6.htm
• http://www.leighrayment.com/peers/peersU.htm
• Haydn's Book of Dignities
• Doyle, James William Edmund (1885). The Official Baronage of England. London: Longmans, Green. p. 548.