Monument to Lord Henry Pagett in St John the Baptist's Church, Hillingdon
Henry Paget, 1st Earl of UxbridgePC (13 January 1663 – 30 August 1743), of Beaudesert, Staffordshire, and West Drayton, Middlesex, was a British landowner and Tory politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons from 1695 until 1712 when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Burton as one of Harley's Dozen. He was a Hanoverian Tory, supportive of the Hanoverian Succession.[1]
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 honour 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. In 1740, he became a justice of the peace for Cambridgeshire.
Personal life
In 1686, he married Mary Catesby, the eldest daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Catesby of Whiston and Ecton and Margaret Samwell (a daughter of Richard Samwell of Upton). Together, they were the parents of:[3]
Lady Uxbridge died suddenly on 3 November 1734, and was buried at West Drayton on 9 November. On 7 June 1739, Lord Uxbridge remarried Elizabeth Bagot (b. 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.[3]
The Earl of Uxbridge died at West Drayton on 30 August 1743, aged eighty. As his son Thomas, Lord Paget had predeceased him the previous year, he was succeeded in his titles by his grandson Henry, who became the 2nd Earl. His widow Lady Uxbridge died on 2 September 1749.[3]
