William Talbot, Bishop of Durham, a descendant of the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, and Catherine King.

Among his contemporaries he enjoyed the reputation of a wit; he was a patron of the poet James Thomson, who in The Seasons commemorated a son of his to whom he acted as tutor; Joseph Butler dedicated his famous Analogy to Talbot, as was Upton's edition of Epictetus.

The title he assumed derived from the Hensol estate in Pendoylan, Glamorgan, which came to him through his wife.

The opinion was relied upon widely before the decision of Lord Mansfield in Somersett's Case.

They had five sons, of whom three survived him: After an illness during which the King and Queen enquired after his health every day, Talbot died on 14 February 1737 at his home in Lincoln's Inn Fields.