THOMAS

See also:

• BAKER, HENRY (1698-1774)
• BAKER, SIR BENJAMIN (1840-1907)
• BAKER, SIR RICHARD (1568-1644/5)
• BAKER, SIR SAMUEL WHITE (1821-1893)
• THOMAS BAKER (1656-1740)
• BAKER, VALENTINE [BAKER PASHA] (1827-1887)

BAKER (1656-1740)  , English antiquary, was born on the 14th of September 1656 at Lanchester, Durham . He was the grandson of Colonel Baker of Crook, Durham, who won fame in the civil war by his defence of Newcastle against the Scots . He was educated at the free school at Durham, and proceeded thence in 1672 to St John's College, Cambridge, where he afterwards obtained a fellowship . Lord Crew, bishop of Durham, collated him to the rectory of Long-Newton in his diocese in 1687, and intended to give him that of Sedgefield with a prebend had not Baker incurred his displeasure by refusing to read James II.'s Declaration of Indulgence . The bishop who disgraced him for this refusal, and who was after-wards specially excepted from William's Act of Indemnity, took the oaths to that king and kept his bishopric till his death . Baker, on the other hand, though he had opposed James, refused to take the oaths to William; he resigned Long-Newton on the 1st of August 169o, and retired to St John's, in which he was protected till the loth of January 1716-1717, when he and, one - and - twenty others were deprived of their fellowships . After the passing of the Registering Act in 1723, he could not be prevailed on to comply with its requirements by registering his annuity of £40, although that annuity, left him by his father, with £20 per annum from his elder brother's collieries, was now his whole subsistence . He retained a lively sense of the injuries he had suffered; and inscribed himself in all his own books, as well as in those which he gave to the college library, socius ejectus, and in some rector ejectus . He continued to reside in the college as commoner-master till his sudden death from apoplexy on the 2nd of July 1744 . The whole of his valuable books and manuscripts he bequeathed to the university . The only workshe published were, Reflections on Learning, showing the Insufciency thereof in its several particulars, in order to evince the usefulness and necessity of Revelation (Lond., 1709-1710) and the preface to Bishop Fisher's Funeral Sermon for Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1708)—both without his name . His valuable manuscript collections relative to the history and antiquities of the university of Cambridge, amounting to thirty-nine volumes in folio and three in quarto, are divided between the British Museum and the public library at Cambridge;;—the former possessing twenty-three volumes, the latter sixteen in folio and three in quarto .

The

life of Baker was written by Robert Masters (Carob., 1784), and by Horace Walpole in the quarto edition of his works .