Charles Welch

“ CHILD, Sir FRANCIS, the elder (1642–1713) , banker and lord mayor of London, son of Robert Child, clothier, of Headington in Wiltshire, was born in 1642. He came to London at an early age, and was apprenticed in March 1656 to William Hall, a goldsmith of London, for a term of eight years, on the expiration of which he was admitted, 24 March 1664, to the freedom of the Goldsmiths' Company, and on 7 April 1664 to that of the city of London. ”

“ The extravagance of the court and the expenses of the Dutch war exhausted the means of the bankers to continue their advances, even to pay the sailors, who threatened if they were not paid to go over to the Dutch. Pepys records the run of the aristocracy and the public upon the bankers, and fears they ‘are broke as to ready money.’ To relieve the king and his ministers from their embarrassment, two members of the Cabal cabinet proposed the shameful expedient of closing the exchequer, which then possessed advances from the bankers amounting to 1,300,000l. ”

“ Twice during Edward's reign, apparently by his advice, the English merchant fleet was detained when on the point of sailing for Antwerp until the owners of the goods agreed to advance certain sums of money to be repaid within three months in London at a high rate of exchange fixed by the crown. On 3 Oct. 1552 a loan of 40,000l. was thus obtained from the merchant adventurers. On 28 April 1553 Gresham, in a letter to the council, boasts that he has so plagued foreign merchants and intimidated English merchants that they will both beware of meddling with the exchange for London in future. ”

“ The rents of the Royal Exchange were, with Gresham House, to be vested in the hands of the corporation of London and of the Mercers' Company, who were to appoint seven lecturers. The lecturers' salaries were fixed at 50l. per annum, and they were to lecture successively on the sciences of divinity, astronomy, geometry, music, law, medicine, and rhetoric. The professors were required to be unmarried men, and each was to be provided with a separate suite of apartments. The college did not prove very successful. Lady Gresham sought to divert its endowment after Gresham's death. ”

“ Clough showed that the queen's revenue from the customs might be increased by at least 5,000l. a year. Gresham was again in Antwerp for a few weeks in March 1562. On the 27th he appealed to the queen to reward his services as she had promised. Once more in Antwerp in the summer of 1562, he entertained there, from 7 to 16 Aug., Cecil's eldest son Thomas and his tutor, Thomas Windebank. They had come from Paris to see the principal towns of the Low Countries and Germany. He furnished them with money, and promised to look after the young man as if he were his own son. ”

“ EDMONDES, Sir CLEMENT (1564?–1622) , clerk to the council, was born at Shrawardine in Shropshire. His parentage is not known, but he is described in the Oxford matriculation register as a yeoman's son, 'pleb. f.' (Oxf. Hist. Soc. xi. 152) . This disposes of the statement made by some of his biographers, that he was the son of Sir Thomas Edmondes [q. v.] , comptroller and afterwards treasurer of the household to James I. The latter, besides being only three years the senior of Clement Edmondes, was born at Plymouth, and there is no evidence of a relationship between them. ”

“ Her father, the elder William Wheeler, had died in 1663, and his widow married Robert Blanchard, who succeeded to the business at the Marygold, and took Child into partnership, probably about the time of his marriage in 1671. In the little London Directory of 1677 the names of 'Blanchard and Child at the Marygold' are found among the goldsmiths 'that keep running cashes.' On the death of Blanchard in 1681, Child inherited the bulk of his fortune, and also that of the Wheelers, and in July of the same year the firm became Francis Child and John Rogers. ”

“ Thomas Harley, Esq., lord mayor . . . By an Alderman of London,' London, 1768; the former is known to have reached four editions. Five days later Wilkes was returned for Middlesex, and in the riots which followed the mob avenged themselves on Harley for his successful opposition to Wilkes at the poll in the city by breaking the windows of the Mansion House and doing other damage (Hughson, Hist. of London, i. 573-5) . Harley displayed much vigilance and ability throughout the Wilkeite riots, and was thanked for his services by the House of Commons at the close of his mayoralty. ”

“ On 23 Jan. 1570-1, says Stow, the queen, attended by her nobility, made her progress through the city from Somerset House to Bishopsgate Street, where she dined with, Gresham. Afterwards returning through Cornhill, Elizabeth entered the burse, and having viewed every part, especially the 'pawn,' which was richly furnished with all the finest wares of the city, 'she caused the same burse by an herralde and a trompet to be proclaimed the Royal Exchange, and so to be called from thenceforth, and not otherwise' (Survey, ed. 1598, p. 194) . ”

“ Cosin, bishop of Durham, was descended from an old Kentish family originally named Attegare, whose representatives were connected with the city of London for more than two centuries. Two of his ancestors were lord mayors, Sir William Garrard in 1555, and the first baronet, Sir John Garrard, in 1601; and intermarriages took place between the Garrards and the city families of Roe, Gresham, and Barkham. Garrard, who was born in 1650, was a grandson of the first baronet, and carried on business as a merchant first in Watling Street and afterwards in Warwick Court, Newgate Street. ”

“ During his second mayoralty, when William IV and Queen Adelaide had arranged to visit the city in order to open new London Bridge, Key suffered some loss of popularity by advising the king and his ministers not to come to the city on account of the supposed unpopularity of the Duke of Wellington. ”

“ In 1693 the ship Redbridge, of which he was part owner, being detained at the instance of the East India Company, which claimed a monopoly of the trade with India, he asserted at the bar of the House of Commons his right to trade wherever he pleased, unless restrained by parliament. ”

“ The Goldsmiths' Company possess a good three-quarter portrait of Viner in his official robes as lord mayor, and an inferior copy of this painting is in the council-room of Christ's Hospital. Viner knew how to enjoy the favour both of Charles I and Charles II and Cromwell, retaining his lucrative appointments during the whole of that troublous period. He is strongly abused for his gains during the Commonwealth (Mystery of the Good Old Cause, 1660, p. 46) , but nevertheless obtained a baronetcy at the Restoration. ”

“ The most literary conversation that I ever enjoyed was at the table of Jack Ellis, a money-scrivener behind the Royal Exchange, with whom I used to dine generally once a week.' Ellis, though not ambitious of publication, did not discontinue writing verses for more than seventy years, and used frequently to recite with energy and vivacity poems of a hundred lines after the age of eighty-eight years. ”

“ By the management of foreign capitalists the rate of exchange, over which no English merchant had hitherto had any control, was reduced to 16s. Flemish for the pound sterling. An enormous rate of interest was also demanded by the money-lenders on the renewal of a debt, and the king was compelled to purchase jewels and other wares at exorbitant prices from the Fuggers or other foreign traders who furnished the loan. Within two or three years Gresham raised the exchange at Antwerp for the pound sterling from 16s. ”

“ Cooke lived seven years after this, and though he was probably again heavily fined, he left a large amount of landed and other property. In 1483, when the Duke of Buckingham addressed the citizens of London in the Guildhall in favour of the pretensions of Richard III to the throne, he referred at length to the sufferings and losses of Cooke as a notable instance of the tyranny of the late king (Holinshed, ed. 1808, iii. 391) . Cooke died in 1478, and was buried, in compliance with his wish, in the church of the Augustine friars, within the ward of Broad Street in London. ”

“ Crosby died in 1475, and was buried in St. Helen's Church, Bishopsgate, where the altar-tomb erected to his memory and that of his first wife, Agnes, still exists. By his first marriage he had several children who died during his lifetime. He married secondly Anne, the daughter of William Chedworth, who survived him and was probably the mother of a John Crosby who presented Robert Henshaw to the living of Hanworth in 1498. The previous presentation was made in 1476 by the trustees of Crosby's real estate, doubtless in consequence of the minority of his son. ”

“ The exchange soon became a fashionable lounge for citizens of all classes, and the shops in the upper walk or pawn fetched high rents, and were regarded as one of the sights of London. A record exists in the Inquest Book of Cornhill ward of the `presentment' of the exchange in 1574 for the disturbance occasioned there on 'Sondaies and holy daies' by the `shoutinge and hollowinge' of young rogues, that honest citizens cannot quietly walk or hear themselves speak (Burgon, ii. 355) . Gresham's exchange was destroyed in the fire of 1666. ”

“ But it was Gresham's son, and not Gresham himself, who carried out this design. Gresham opposed rigorously the issue of a proclamation forbidding merchants to make exchanges, by which it was thought the exchequer suffered loss. He showed that the order would lead to the exportation of gold from England, and maintained that ‘merchants can no more be without exchanges and rechanges than the ships in the sea can be without water’ (Ward, Lives of the Gresham Professors, App. i.) It appears that the draft of this proclamation was, by Cromwell's order, submitted to Gresham for his opinion. ”

“ La Mothe states that Gresham also secretly supplied the merchants in London with money, so that the greater part of the value of two cloth fleets sent to Hamburg (estimated at 750,000l.) never returned to this country in specie or merchandise, but remained in Germany to strengthen Elizabeth's credit on the continent. Gresham now advised the council to endeavour to obtain from the London merchants the loans for which they had hitherto depended upon foreign money-lenders. ”

“ Thomas, his eldest son and heir, was knighted by Charles I, and removed the family mansion from Killerton to Grange in the parish of Broadhembury, which has ever since remained the seat of the family. ”

“ He served the office of sheriff of London and Middlesex in 1747–8. In December 1748 he took a prominent part, at the head of the committee of city lands, in passing through the common council an act for the relief of the orphans of the city of London, whose estates, vested in the guardianship of the corporation, had greatly suffered through the exactions of the civil war period and the illegal closing of the exchequer by Charles II (Maitland, History of London, 1756, i. 670) . ”

“ He assured Cecil of the popularity of Elizabeth and her people with the Netherlander, although the queen's credit had suffered by delaying the payment of her debts. The English merchants at Antwerp were in constant fear of the seizure of their goods, and Gresham had increasing difficulty in procuring the military stores, which Elizabeth's government ordered on an immense scale. ”

“ Dunthorn as a Yorkist no doubt took an especial pleasure in transcribing them into his book, and was indeed very probably the author of the reply.
On 13 July 1486 a yearly allowance of ten marks was granted to Dunthorn by the mayor and aldermen (ib. ix. fol. 114) . This was doubtless in addition to the salary previously awarded to him, and in the following year an article was added to the oath of the recorder, common serjeant, common clerk, and under sheriffs, forbidding the receipt of any gift or reward beyond their lawful fees. Dunthorn continued to hold office until his death in 1489 ”

“ Edmondes had a high reputation for learning and as a writer on military art. Anthony à Wood says 'he was a learned person, was generally skill'd in all arts and sciences, and famous as well for military as for politic affairs, and therefore esteemed by all as an ornament to his degree and profession.' Fuller writes: 'This author may pass for an eminent instance to what perfection of theorie they may attain in the matter of war who were not acquainted with the practick part therof.' His name appears among the subscribers to Minsheu's polyglot dictionary in 1617. ”