Henry Englefield
British antiquarian

Sir Henry Charles Englefield, 7th Baronet FRS FRSE FSA FLS (1752 – 21 March 1822) was an English antiquary and astronomer.
Life
He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Englefield, 6th Baronet (d. 1780) and his second wife, Catherine, daughter of Sir Charles Buck, 3rd Baronet. His father, who was the son of Henry Englefield, of Whiteknights Park at Earley near Reading, had in 1728 succeeded to the title and the Engelfield estates at Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire, so that he inherited both Whiteknights and Wootton Bassett on the death of his father, 25 May 1780. They were descended from the Englefield family of Englefield House in Berkshire.
In 1778 aged 26 Englefield was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in the following year Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. For many years he was vice-president of the latter, and succeeded George Townshend, Earl of Leicester as president. Owing, however, to his being a Catholic, objection was taken to his re-election; another factor was his opposition to the 1797 election to the Society of the architect James Wyatt. He was replaced by the Earl of Aberdeen. Under his direction the society produced between 1797 and 1813 a series of engravings of English cathedrals, to which he contributed dissertations on Durham, Gloucester, and Exeter.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Englefield” 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.