Shrewsbury and Waterford are the oldest earldoms in their peerages held by someone with no higher title (the oldest earldoms in each peerage being held by the Duke of Norfolk and Duke of Leinster), and as such the Earl of Shrewsbury is sometimes described as the premier earl of England and Ireland.

[3][4] The first creation occurred in 1074 for Roger de Montgomerie, one of William the Conqueror's principal counsellors.

He was one of the Marcher Lords, with the Earl of Hereford and the Earl of Chester, a bulwark against the Welsh; he was granted great powers, and his territory, which extended from Shropshire (of which Shrewsbury is the county town) into Mid-Wales (the county of Montgomeryshire being named after him), was outside the ordinary administration; he was also granted lands across England.

Lord Shrewsbury was entrusted with the custody of Mary, Queen of Scots, and also served as Earl Marshal from 1572 to 1590.

Shrewsbury was succeeded by his son from his first marriage to Lady Gertrude Manners, the seventh Earl.

He had no sons and on his death in 1616 the baronies of Talbot, Strange of Blackmere and Furnivall fell into abeyance between his three daughters.

He was one of the Immortal Seven who in 1688 invited William of Orange to invade England and depose his father-in-law James II and later served under William and Mary as Secretary of State for the Southern Department and Secretary of State for the Northern Department.

On his death the titles passed to his nephew George, the fourteenth Earl (who was the son of the Hon.

He began in 1812 the creation of the extensive gardens at Alveton Lodge, Staffordshire (later renamed Alton Towers) which estate had been in the family since the 15th century.

When he died the titles were inherited by his nephew John, the sixteenth Earl who was the son of the Hon.

By his will he left his estates to Lord Edmund Howard (by Royal Licence from 1876-1922: Talbot), son of the Duke of Norfolk, a will contested by three distant relatives and after a long and expensive legal case the House of Lords ruled in 1860 in favour of Henry John Chetwynd-Talbot, 3rd Earl Talbot, who thus became the eighteenth Earl of Shrewsbury and Waterford.

His eldest son, the nineteenth Earl, also served as Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, an office he held from 1874 to 1877 under Benjamin Disraeli.

He is also hereditary Lord High Steward of Ireland and as the holder of this office is allowed to bear a white staff at the Coronation of the British Monarch.

The other family crypt – that of the Chetwynd-Talbot Earls of Shrewsbury – is at the Church of St Mary The Virgin, Ingestre, Stafford.

John Talbot, son of the first Earl of Shrewsbury by his second wife Margaret Beauchamp, was created Viscount Lisle in 1451.

Sir Reginald Talbot, third son of the eighteenth Earl, was a soldier, politician and colonial governor.

Also Marquess of Alton The heir apparent is the present holder's son James Richard Charles John Chetwynd-Talbot, Viscount Ingestre (born 1978).