PAGET, Thomas Catesby, Lord Paget (1689-1742).

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1715-1754, ed. R. Sedgwick, 1970
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

1715 - 1727

Family and Education

b. 1689, 1st surv. s. of Henry Paget, M.P., 1st Earl of Uxbridge, by Mary, da. and coh. of Thomas Catesby of Whiston, Northants. educ. Trinity, Oxf. 1707. m. 6 May 1718, Lady Elizabeth Egerton, da. of John Egerton, M.P., 3rd Earl of Bridgwater, 2s.

Offices Held

Gent. of the bedchamber to Prince of Wales, 1719-27; ld. of the bedchamber 1727-36.

Biography

At George I’s accession Paget’s father, a Hanoverian Tory, who had represented Staffordshire 1695-1712, adhered to the Whig government. Rewarded with an earldom at the coronation, he put up Paget for Staffordshire, asking Lord Gower, the leading local Tory, to ‘be merciful to the young man at first setting out, and not exert his interest to the utmost’.1 Returned unopposed, Paget voted with the Opposition, except on Lord Cadogan, speaking against the septennial bill. Appointed to the Prince of Wales’s household in 1719, he was again returnedwithout a contest in 1722. In 1727 he gave up Staffordshire to contest Middlesex as a Whig but was defeated and never stood again. He resigned his post at court in 1736 owing to ill-health, which prevented him from performing his duties.2

Horace Walpole records that ‘in the intervals of bad weather in hunting seasons’, Paget ‘published some pieces, particularly An Essay on Human Life in verse 1734, quarto; Some reflections upon the Administration of Government, a pamphlet in 1740’, adding: ‘in both these pieces there is much good sense, the former is written in imitation of Pope’s Ethic Epistles, and has good lines, but not much poetry’.3

Paget died 4 Feb. 1742, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Ref Volumes: 1715-1754

Author: Eveline Cruickshanks

Notes

  • 1. HMC 5th Rep. 188.
  • 2. Cal. Treas. Bks. and Pprs. 1735-8, p. 220; HMC Bath, ii. 182.
  • 3. Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors (1758), ii. 131.