2?ewl Maskelyne, F.E.S., Astronomer Royal 127 



right, he bestowed the Christian name of Nevill on his son. 



Nevill Maskelyne succeeded liis 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, joined 

 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, Panger 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 

 Newcastle (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 

 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. 



