Edward, 2nd Baron Hastings (d. 1506), and the grandson of William, Baron Hastings, who was put to death by Richard III. in 1483. Being in high favour with Henry VIII., he was created earl of Huntingdon in 1529, and he was one of the royalist leaders during the suppression of the rising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536. His eldest son Francis, the 2nd earl (c. 1514–1561), was a close friend and political ally of John Dudley, duke of Northumberland, sharing the duke’s fall and imprisonment after the death of Edward VI. in 1553; but he was quickly released, and was employed on public business by Mary. His brother Edward (c. 1520–1572) was one of Mary’s most valuable servants; a stout Roman Catholic, he was master of the horse and then lord chamberlain to the queen, and was created Baron Hastings of Loughborough in 1558, this title becoming extinct when he died.
The 2nd earl’s eldest son Henry, the 3rd earl (c. 1535–1595), married Northumberland’s daughter Catherine. His mother was Catherine Pole (d. 1576), a descendant of George, duke of Clarence; and, asserting that he was thus entitled to succeed Elizabeth on the English throne, Huntingdon won a certain amount of support, especially from the Protestants and the enemies of Mary, queen of Scots. In 1572 he was appointed president of the council of the north, and during the troubled period between the flight of Mary to England in 1568 and the defeat of the Spanish armada twenty years later he was frequently employed in the north of England. It was doubtless felt that the earl’s own title to the crown was a pledge that he would show scant sympathy with the advocates of Mary’s claim. He assisted George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, to remove the Scottish queen from Wingfield to Tutbury, and for a short time in 1569 he was one of her custodians. Huntingdon was responsible for the compilation of an elaborate history of the Hastings family, a manuscript copy of which is now in the British Museum. As he died childless, his earldom passed to his brother George. Another brother, Sir Francis Hastings (d. 1610), was a member of parliament and a prominent puritan during Elizabeth’s reign, but is perhaps more celebrated as a writer. George, the 4th earl (c. 1540–1604), was the grandfather of Henry, the 5th earl (1586–1643), and the father of Henry Hastings (c. 1560–1650), a famous sportsman, whose character has been delineated by the 1st earl of Shaftesbury (see L. Howard, A Collection of Letters, &c., 1753). The 6th earl was the 5th earl’s son Ferdinando (c. 1608–1656). His brother Henry, Baron Loughborough (c. 1610–1667), won fame as a royalist during the Civil War, and was created a baron in 1643.
Theophilus, the 7th earl (1650–1701), was the only surviving son of the 6th earl. In early life he showed some animus against the Roman Catholics and a certain sympathy for the duke of Monmouth; afterwards, however, he was a firm supporter of James II., who appointed him to several official positions. He remained in England after the king’s flight and was imprisoned, but after his release he continued to show his hostility to William III. One of his daughters, Lady Elizabeth Hastings (1682–1739), gained celebrity for her charities and her piety. Her beauty drew encomiums from Congreve and from Steele in the pages of the Tatler, and her other qualities were praised by William Law. She was a benefactor to Queen’s College, Oxford.
The 7th earl’s sons, George and Theophilus, succeeded in turn to the earldom. George (1677–1705) was a soldier who served under Marlborough, and Theophilus (1696–1746) was the husband of the famous Selina, countess of Huntingdon (q.v.). Theophilus was succeeded by his son Francis (1729–1789), on whose death unmarried the baronies passed to his sister Elizabeth (1731–1808), wife of John Rawdon, earl of Moira, and the earldom became dormant.
The title of earl of Huntingdon was assumed by Theophilus Henry Hastings (1728–1804), a descendant of the 2nd earl, who, however, had taken no steps to prove his title when he died. But, aided by his friend Henry Nugent Bell (1792–1822), his nephew and heir, Hans Francis Hastings (1779–1828), was more energetic, and in 1818 his right to the earldom was declared proved, and he took his seat in the House of Lords. He did not, however, recover the estates. Before thus becoming the 11th (or 12th) earl, Hastings had served for many years in the navy, and after the event he was appointed governor of Dominica. He died on the 9th of December 1828 and was succeeded by his son Francis Theophilus Henry (1808–1875), whose grandson, Warner Francis, became 14th or 15th earl of Huntingdon in 1885. Another of the 11th earl’s sons was Vice-admiral George Fowler Hastings (1814–1876).
See H. N. Bell, The Huntingdon Peerage (1820).
HUNTINGDON, SELINA HASTINGS, Countess of (1707–1791), English religious leader and founder of a sect of Calvinistic Methodists, known as the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, was the daughter of Washington Shirley, 2nd Earl Ferrers. She was born at Stanton Harold, a mansion near Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, on the 24th of August 1707, and in her twenty-first year was married to Theophilus Hastings, 9th earl of Huntingdon. In 1739 she joined the first Methodist society in Fetter Lane, London. On the death of her husband in 1746 she threw in her lot with Wesley and Whitefield in the work of the great revival. Isaac Watts, Philip Doddridge and A. M. Toplady were among her friends. In 1748 she gave Whitefield a scarf as her chaplain, and in that capacity he frequently preached in her London house in Park Street to audiences that included Chesterfield, Walpole and Bolingbroke. In her chapel at Bath there was a curtained recess dubbed “Nicodemus’s corner” where some of the bishops sat incognito to hear him. Lady Huntingdon spent her ample means in building chapels in different parts of England, e.g. at Brighton (1761), London and Bath (1765), Tunbridge Wells (1769), and appointed ministers to officiate in them, under the impression that as a peeress she had a right to employ as many chaplains as she pleased. It is said that she expended £100,000 in the cause of religion. In 1768 she converted the old mansion of Trevecca, near Talgarth, in South Wales, into a theological seminary for young ministers for the connexion. Up to 1779 Lady Huntingdon and her chaplains continued members of the Church of England, but in that year the prohibition of her chaplains by the consistorial court from preaching in the Pantheon, a large building in London rented for the purpose by the countess, compelled her, in order to evade the injunction, to take shelter under the Toleration Act. This step, which placed her legally among dissenters, had the effect of severing from the connexion several eminent and useful members, among them William Romaine (1714–1795) and Henry Venn (1725–1797). Till her death in London on the 17th of June 1791, Lady Huntingdon continued to exercise an active, and even autocratic, superintendence over her chapels and chaplains. She successfully petitioned George III. in regard to the gaiety of Archbishop Cornwallis’s establishment, and made a vigorous protest against the anti-Calvinistic minutes of the Wesleyan Conference of 1770, and against relaxing the terms of subscription in 1772. Her sixty-four chapels and the college were bequeathed to four trustees. In 1792 the college was removed to Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, where it remained till 1905, when it was transferred to Cambridge. The college is remarkable for the number of men it has sent into the foreign mission field.
The connexion in 1910 consisted of 44 churches and mission stations, with a roll of about 2400 communicants under 26 ordained pastors. The government is vested by the trust deed, sanctioned by the court of Chancery on the 1st of January 1899, in nine trustees assisted by a conference of delegates from each church in the trust. The endowments of the trust produce £1500 per annum, and are devoted to four purposes: grants in aid of the ministry; annuities to ministers over sixty years of age who have given more than twenty years’ continuous service in the connexion, or to their widows; grants for the maintenance and extension of the existing buildings belonging to the trust; grants to assist in purchasing chapels and chapel sites. In addition the trustees may grant loans for the encouragement of new progressive work from a loan fund of about £8000.
See The Life of the Countess of Huntingdon (London, 2 vols., 1844); A. H. New, The Coronet and the Cross, or Memorials of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon (1857); Sarah Tytler, The Countess of Huntingdon and her Circle (1907).
HUNTINGDON, a market town and municipal borough and the county town of Huntingdonshire, England, on the left bank of the Ouse, on the Great Northern, Great Eastern and Midland
