Basset was baptized at
Charlbury,
Oxfordshire on 7 September 1757 and was educated at
Harrow School (1770–71),
Eton College (1771–74) and
King's College, Cambridge (1775). In 1777 he left university early to perform a
Grand Tour in Italy, with Rev. William Sandys acting as his
Cicerone. In Rome, he had his portrait painted by
Pompeo Batoni, who did not finish it until after Basset's departure. It was despatched to England on board the
Westmorland, which was seized by the French and sold to the Spanish. Two portraits of him by Batoni are today in the collections of the
Prado and the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, Madrid. He returned to England in 1778, and partly due to his family's great influence in Cornwall, was appointed to the honourable position of
Recorder of
Penryn in Cornwall. Like his father, he served as a
Member of Parliament for his family's
pocket borough of
Penryn in Cornwall (in 1760 his father was possessed of 82 tenements in the borough, 36 more in the parish, and about 60 of his tenants were electors), which seat he held between 1780 and 1796. The constituency returned two MPs, and the other, also elected due to the Basset family's control of the borough, was at some time his first cousin
Sir John St Aubyn, 5th Baronet. At 21, Basset was made a Freemason on 12 Apr 1779, at Somerset House L. No. 2. In August 1779 as part of the national move to counter a Franco-Spanish invasion fleet gathered in connection with the
American War of Independence, he marched 600 Cornish miners to Plymouth and strengthened that town's defences and fortified
Portreath. As a reward, he was created by the King a
Baronet, "of
Tehidy, County Cornwall" on 24 November 1779. Following his marriage in 1780, he finally graduated from King's College as a
Master of Arts in 1786. He purchased
Radnor House on the banks of the
River Thames in
Twickenham, which he owned from 1785 until 1793. He was one of the dominant political figures in Cornwall, rivalled in influence only by Viscount Falmouth and
Sir Christopher Hawkins, 1st Baronet. Each of them sought to use their powers of patronage to control elections to the House of Commons (Cornwall, with 44 seats, was grossly over-represented in Parliament given its population). Basset was personally on bad terms with Hawkins, and they fought a notorious
duel in 1810, although neither was injured. Not surprisingly, he was a determined opponent of
electoral reform, which he saw as a threat to his own power base. He was elevated to the
peerage on 17 June 1796 as
Baron de Dunstanville, and later on 30 November 1797 also as
Baron Basset of Stratton, with
special remainder to his daughter. ==Marriage and children==