BAKER, Sir Richard, author of the Chronicle of the Kings of England, was born at Sissinghurst, in Kent, about the year 1568. He was educated at Oxford, took the degree of Master of Arts, and in 1603 received the honour of knighthood. In 1620 he was made high sheriff of Oxfordshire; but having engaged to paysome debts of his wife’s family, he was reduced to poverty, and obliged to betake himself for shelter to the Fleet prison, where he died, February 18, 1645. During his confinement he composed numerous works, historical, poetical, and miscellaneous. Amongst these are Meditations and Disquisitions on the Lord’s Prayer ,∖ Meditations, <fcc., on several of the Psalms of David; Meditations and Prayers upon the Seven Days of the Week; Cato Variegatus, or Cato’s Moral Distichs; Theatrum Triumphans, or Theatrum Redivivum, being a reply to Prynne’s Histriomastix, &c. His principal work, the Chronicle of the Kings of England, inexact and uncritical, but written in a pleasant and readable style, quickly acquired a high reputation. It was continued to 1658 by Edward Phillips, Milton’s nephew, and has passed through many editions.

BAKER, Thomas, a learned antiquary, descended from an ancient family distinguished by its loyalty, was born at Crook in 1656. He was educated at the free school at Durham, and proceeded thence, in 1674, to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he afterwards obtained a fellowship. Lord Crewe, bishop of Durham, collated him to the rectory of Long-Newton in his diocese, in 1687, and further intended to give him that of Sedgefield, with a golden prebend, had not Baker incurred his displeasure for 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 1690f>and retired to St John’s, in which he was protected till the 20th of January 1716-17, 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 £40, although that annuity, left him by his father, with £20 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 death on the 2d 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 Insufli ciency thereof in its several particulars, in order to evince the usef ulness and necessity of Revelation, Lond. 1709-10, 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 volumes in folio and three in quarto, are divided between the British Museum and the public library at Cambridge,—the former possessing twenty-three volumes, the latter sixteen in folio and three in quarto. The life of Baker has been written by Robert Masters, 8vo, 1784, and by Horace Walpole, in the quarto edition of his works.