Charior & cunctis patria divitiis.
Ferre inopi auxilium, tristes componere lites
Dulce huic consilio quosque juvare fuit.
Qui pius exaudis miserorum vota precesque
Christe huic coeli des regione locum.[[243]]
Barrett, writing in 1789, speaks of this epitaph as still existing in his time.
Robert Thorne the younger was born in 1492[[244]] and was four years senior to his brother Nicholas Thorne.[[245]] They were both merchants, and carried on their father’s business, which seems to have been principally with the ports of Andalusia. Robert had a house in Seville and resided there for some years. The Thornes and other English merchants traded with the Canary Islands and even with the West Indies, sending their goods by way of Spain. Hakluyt, who was in possession of some of their ledger books and letters, mentions that in 1526 they dispatched two English agents in a Spanish ship to Santa Cruz in Teneriffe with a cargo of cloth and soap, with instructions to sell the goods in the Canaries.[[246]] From the same source we learn that an Englishman named Thomas Tison acted as a kind of secret factor for them in one of the West Indian islands, and distributed the goods which they shipped in Spanish vessels. Tison, the first recorded Englishman to reside in the West Indies, was a Bristol man who served as a mariner against the French in 1514. He is mentioned in Robert Thorne’s will, and returned in safety from the Indies, as we find him doing business at Cadiz in 1534.[[247]]
Robert Thorne the younger was held in great estimation in Seville. Dr. Lee, writing to Wolsey in 1526, mentions that the emperor had spoken to ‘a right toward young man as any lightly belongeth to England, called Thorne’. His geographical writings show him to have been a man of learning and originality of mind, while his distant enterprises, and especially his investment of a large sum in Cabot’s fleet of 1526 so that Englishmen might accompany it, indicate a breadth of view and a generous willingness to take risks for great results, in keeping with the best traditions of English commercial enterprise. In 1532 he was again in England, and, with his brother and others, set about the founding and endowing of a grammar school in Bristol. Before the completion of this purpose, however, he died unmarried on Whit-Sunday of the same year. The inventory of his goods, drawn up by his brother Nicholas, shows that his fortune amounted to nearly £17,000, a large sum for those days.[[248]] In his will,[[249]] made shortly before his death, he made numerous bequests to his sisters, his business friends and servants, and his brother. He left £400 towards ‘the making of a free school of St. Bartholomew in Bristol’. A reference to ‘Pawle Withipole, my master’ suggests that he belonged to the Company of Merchant Adventurers, of which body Withipole was then a prominent member. Barrett (p. 650) says that Thorne was buried in the Church of St. Christopher, London, with the following epitaph, for which he does not mention his authority:
Robertus cubat hic Thornus, mercator honestus,
Qui sibi legitimas arte paravit opes: