Samuel Hood, 1st Viscount Hood was an English admiral in the Royal Navy. As a junior officer he saw action during the War of the Austrian Succession. At the outbreak of the Seven Years' War in 1756, the navy was rapidly expanded which benefited Hood. He was appointed in Commander-in-Chief, North American Station in July 1767. He returned to England in October 1770 and commissioned the building of Catherington House in the village of Catherington in Hampshire in 1771. In 1778, on the occasion of the King's visit to Portsmouth, Hood was made a baronet. The war was deeply unpopular with much of the British public and navy. Many admirals had declined to serve under Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty. When Rodney decided to return to Britain for the sake of his health in the autumn of 1781, Hood was ordered to take the bulk of the fleet to the North American coast during the hurricane months. Hood joined Admiral Thomas Graves in the unsuccessful effort to relieve the army at Yorktown, when the British fleet was driven off by the French Admiral, the Comte de Grasse, at the Battle of the Chesapeake.

On 12 April 1782 Hood took part in a British fleet under Rodney, which defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet that was planning an invasion of Jamaica. Hood was made an Irish peer as Baron Hood of Catherington in September 1782. Hood presided at the court-martial of some of surviving instigators of the mutiny on the Bounty, beginning on 12 September 1792. Following the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War, Hood became Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet in February 1793. Samuel Hood was created Viscount Hood of Whitley, Warwickshire in 1796 with a pension of £2000 per year for life (about £250,000 a year in 2023 terms). In 1796, he was also appointed Governor of the Greenwich Hospital, a position which he held until his death in 1816.