Nevil Maskelyne, D.D., F.R.S., Astronomer Royal. 127 
right, he bestowed the Christian name of Nevill on his son. 
Nevill Maskelyne succeeded his father as “lord of the manor and 
borough and hundred of Cricklade,” and sat as M.P. for Cricklade 
in 1660. His great-grandson, Edmund Maskelyne, father of the 
astronomer, was a clerk under the Duke of Newcastle in the 
Secretary of State’s Office, Whitehall—a Foreign Office clerk 
‘would be his modern description. At the time of his marriage he 
resided in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, but subsequently 
removed to a house in Kensington Gore, and about four years after 
the birth of Nevil, his youngest son, settled in Tothill Street, 
Westminster. Here, in 1744, he died, having had the pleasure of 
seeing two of his sons, William and Edmund, elected King’s 
scholars on the ancient foundation of St. Peter’s College, or 
Westminster School, hard by, where Nevil, the youngest, j oined 
them in 1743. 
The mother of the astronomer was Elizabeth Booth, only child 
of John Booth, of Chester (by Elizabeth his wife, daughter and 
coheir of Edward Proger, Ranger of Bushey Park, and Gentleman 
of the Bedchamber to King Charles II.) and granddaughter of 
George Booth, Prothonotary of Chester, whose translation of 
“Diodorus Siculus” shows him to have been a scholar. Of this 
lady there is a portrait at Basset Down, and there is a letter from 
her hand preserved among the MSS. of Thomas Pelham, Duke of 
~ Neweastle (now in the British Museum), appealing to the Duke, 
~ at her husband’s death-bed, in behalf of their second son. 
_ Edmund Maskelyne’s whole anxiety when dying, was, as appears 
from his will, for his daughter (afterwards Lady Clive) and two 
younger sons. His eldest boy, William, educated, as we have 
seen, at Westminster, and afterwards Fellow of Trinity College, 
_ Cambridge, where he was, in July, 1753, a candidate for the Hebrew 
4 professorship, had been in the previous year put beyond want by 
the care of his godfather and great-uncle, William Bathe, who 
~ bequeathed to him the whole of his estate with land, and the in- 
teresting old moated house now called The Ponds, at Purton Stoke, 
subject only to some legacies. Relieved from all pressure of 
" poverty, William made no name for himself in the world. 
