TRAVERS, Samuel (?1655-1725), of Hitcham, nr. Windsor, Bucks.

The nephew of Walter Travers, a Puritan divine, Travers’s father, having been ejected from his living in 1662, became chaplain to John Robartes, 1st Earl of Radnor, a staunch Presbyterian, whose niece he had married. Travers himself was brought up under the protection of the Robartes family, with whose support he represented Bossiney and Lostwithiel as a Whig under William and Anne. In 1708 he was granted a 31-year duchy of Cornwall lease of Tintagel castle,Maclean, Trigg Minor, i. 203. subsequently establishing a controlling interest for one seat at Bossiney. His work as surveyor general had brought him into connexion with the borough of Windsor,See Tighe and Davis, Annals of Windsor, ii. 468, 489-91. in the vicinity of which he purchased Hitcham in 1712.S. Travers to Mr. Joynes, 24 Oct. 1712, Add. 19609 f. 133. Returned for Windsor on petition in 1715, he was appointed a member of the Prince’s household, voting for the septennial bill in 1716. Next year he went into opposition with the Prince’s party, voting against the Government on Lord Cadogan in June 1717, the repeal of the Occasional Conformity and Schism Acts, and the peerage bill in 1719. Brought in by the ministry for St. Mawes in 1722, he died 17 Sept. 1725, leaving his lease of Tintagel castle to his ‘good friend’ Walter Carey; a sum of money to erect a statue to ‘the glorious memory of my master King William III’, which was eventually put up in St. James’s Square; £500 p.a. for the foundation of what became the College of Naval Knights at Windsor; and the remainder of his estate to Christ’s Hospital to educate boys ‘in the study and practice of mathematics’.Gent. Mag. 1731, pp. 442-3.