Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 05.djvu/388

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Booth
380
Booth

flections against him in Burnet’s 'History of his own Time,' He died on 2 Aug. 1758, and was buried in the vault at Bowden. His wife died in 1740. Their only child, Mary, married, in 1736, Henry Grey, fourth earl of Stamford, who inherited the estates in Cheshire and Lancashire, and in whose son the title of Earl of Warrington was revived in 1796.

[Biog Brit. (Kippis), ii.; Walpole’s Royal and Noble Authors (Park). iv. 231–41; Luttrell’s Relation of State Affairs.]

T. F. H.


BOOTH, GEORGE (1791–1859), Latin verse writer, was born 12 Nov. 1791 at Masborough House, Rotherham, and was the youngest son of William Booth of Masborough, and of Brush House, Ecclesfield, a descendant of an old and considerable family at Newton-le-Willows, Lancashire. After being at Eton he went to Cambridge as pensioner of Trinity College in May 1809. He left Cambridge in consequence of delicate health and removed to Oxford, where he matriculated as commoner of Lincoln College in May 1811. He took his B.A. degree in 1813, that of M.A. in 1816, and in 1823 was created bachelor of divinity. He was ordained deacon as curate of Nether Hoyland, Wath-upon-Dearn, in the diocese of York, in December 1815, and priest in the following month. In 1816 he was elected to a fellowship of Magdalen College, Oxford, which he retained until 1834. Of this college he was made vice-president in 1830, and dean of divinity in 1832. In 1833 he was instituted to the vicarage of Findon, Sussex, which he held until his death, a period of twenty-six years. He died at Findon 21 June 1859, aged 67.

He was author of ‘Nugæ Canoræ,' Oxon. 1826, 4to, and ‘Sicut Lilium, ad Choristes Coll. S. M. Magd. Oxon. Carmen hortativum,' 1854.

[Infomation supplied by Rev. J. R. Bloxam, D.D. from his MS. Register of Magdalen Coll.]

C. W. S.


BOOTH, HENRY (1652–1694), second Baron Delamere and first Earl of Warrington, lord of the treasury under William III, was the second son of George, Lord Delamere [q. v.] by his second wife, Elizabeth Grey, eldest daughter of Henry, earl of Stamford, and was born on 13 Jan. 1651–2. In 1673 he succeeded his father as custos rotulorum of the county of Chester. Like his father, he was warmly attached to the principles of civil liberty, and, as knight of the shire for Cheshire, strenuously opposed the vacillating and intermittent attempts of Charles II to strengthen the royal prerogative. He strongly denounced the fatal expedient of substituting government by favourites for the support of an honest and loyal parliament, asserting that for monarchs to dispense with parliaments was ‘to lay aside the staff that supports them to lean upon a broken reed.' He proposed the introduction of a bill disqualifying those members of the ‘pension parliament’ who had received bribes from the court for serving in parliament in future or for holding under the government any office civil or military, and compelling those who had received money for secret service to the crown to refund it. As was to he expected from the decided character of his religious beliefs and his extreme protestant sentiments, he was also especially active in promoting the Exclusion Bill. While thus zealously defending what he regarded as the constitutional and religious liberties of England, he denounced with great boldness the corruption and tyranny which had crept into the administration of justice. He protested against the prerogative assumed by the privy council of imprisoning suspected persons without trial, and proposed that inquiry should he made into the corruption of the judges, who he asserted had ‘perverted the law to the degree, turning the law upside down that arbitrary power may come in upon their shoulders.'

This uncompromising course aroused so much displeasure at court that he was removed from the commission of the peace, and from the office of custos rotulorum of Cheshire. In 1683 he was committed to the Tower on suspicion of being concerned in the Rye House plot, but on 28 Nov. he was admitted to bail (Proceedings upon the Bayling of the Earl of Macclesfeld, &c., 1683). On the death of his father in 1684, he succeeded him as Lord Delamere. Shortly after the accession of James II (1685) he was again committed to the Tower, and although for a short time admitted to haul, he was, on 26 July 1685, committed a third time. On the assembling of parliament in November he stated his case in a petition to the House of Lords, who, having sent a deputation to wait upon the king to know why Lord Delamere was absent from his place, were answered that directions had already been given for his trial for high treason. The special charge against him was that at the time of Monmouth's rebellion he had gone secretly to Cheshire with the view of inciting a rising in the north of England. That Delamere fully sympathised with the designs of Monmouth is placed beyond doubt by the argu-