Henry Englefield

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.

Works Englefield's works were:

Tables of the Apparent Places of the Comet of 1661 (London, 1788); Letter to the Author of "The Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters" (London, 1790); On the Determination of the Orbits of Comets (London, 1793); A Walk Through Southampton (Southampton, 1801); Description of a New Transit Instrument, Improved by Sir H. Englefield (London, 1814); The Andrian, a Verse Translation from Terrence (London, 1814); Description of the Principal Beauties, Antiquities and Geological Phenomena of the Isle of Wight, with engravings from his own drawings, and a portrait (London, 1816); Observations on the Probable Consequences of the Demolition of London Bridge (London, 1821).

Joseph Gillow printed a list of his papers contributed to the transactions of the Society of Antiquaries, Royal Society, Royal Institution, Society of Arts, and the Linnaean Society, as well as to Nicholson's Journal and Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine.