BAKER, George (d. 1723), of Crook Hall and Elemore in Lanchester, co. Dur.

Baker was the great-grandson of Sir George Baker, the recorder of Newcastle who had held the town for the Royalists and suffered severe losses during the Civil War. His father was a benefactor of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and his uncle Thomas Baker, the celebrated antiquary, was a non-juror who found refuge at St. John’s until being ejected for refusing to take the oaths to George I. Rather surprisingly, however, Baker himself was sent neither to Durham school nor to Cambridge, unlike the rest of his family. Returned unopposed for Durham in 1713, in partnership with his father-in-law Thomas Conyers, he was classed as a Tory in the Worsley list. Baker continued to sit for Durham in the 1715 Parliament but was defeated at the 1722 election. He died, at Bristol, on 1 June the following year, and was buried at Lanchester on the 12th.2Ibid.