Earl Bathurst
earldom in the Peerage of Great Britain
Earl Bathurst, of Bathurst in the County of Sussex, is a title in the Peerage of Great Britain.
The medieval English word was Botehurst, thought to date at least from the 13th century. Bote is the origination of Battle, although the family may have settled there post-dating the Conquest. This translated as 'a wood in a wood' which may in contradistinction have meant a clearing. The name of Apsley adopted by the family derived from Thakenham, near Pulborough in east Sussex, which may have referred to apse - lea or a 'church in a meadow'. The Bathurst estates were at Cirencester Park and Paulerspury, Northamptonshire, which Bathursts inherited before the park was laid out in the Cotswolds.
History
The title Earl Bathurst was created in 1772 for Allen Bathurst, 1st Baron Bathurst, a politician and an opponent of Sir Robert Walpole. Bathurst was known for his wit and learning, for his connections with poets and scholars of his time, and for the famous landscape garden he created at his seat, Cirencester House, in Gloucestershire. He was the son of Sir Benjamin Bathurst, Cofferer of the Household and Governor of the British East India Company, by his wife Frances, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley. He had previously been elevated to the Peerage of Great Britain sixty years before in 1712 as Baron Bathurst, of Battlesden in the County of Bedford.
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This entry incorporates text from “Earl Bathurst” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.