died at Sandford Orleigh on
the 30th of December 1893.

See, besides his own writings, _Sir Samuel Baker, a Memoir_, by T. Douglas
Murray and A. Silva White (London, 1895).

BAKER, THOMAS (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 afterwards 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 1690, and retired to St John's, in which
he was protected till the 20th 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 L40, although that annuity,
left him by his father, with L20 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
1740. The whole of his valuable books and manuscripts he bequeathed to the
university. The only works he published were, _Reflections on Learning,
showing the Insufficiency 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