Before that year the goldsmiths had really been bankers, and proper laws had long been advocated for their better establishment in the craft. This list fixes their residence chiefly in our ancient Lombard Street. Of fifty-eight, the whole number of them, thirty-eight lived there. Of the rest, we have Blanchard and Child, partners, in Fleet Street, at the Mary-gold; and James Hore in Cheapside, at the Golden Bottle, for then every house of business had its sign.
Other banking names are striking, viz. the Cornish Bolitho, the Lancashire Hornby, the Yorkshire Duncomb. These men may be presumed to have enriched their descendants who are still conspicuous among us. The rest of the Goldsmiths of 1677 seem to have been little remarkable in the next generation, when, after the revolution of 1688, joint-stock banking, and safe facilities in paper currency took the start which constitutes an era in finance. The capitalists of London in the reign of Charles II. were sorely damaged by his iniquitous shutting of the Exchequer against their legitimate claims. They were content at last to be simply the first holders of stock in the national debt, into which their claims were turned. But Michael Godfrey, the first deputy-governor of the bank, and Sir N. Herne, afterwards zealous supporters of the new system of banking after 1694, are here only simple merchants. Two other names of the Goldsmiths, James Fowles and James Heriot, deserve special mention. They were Scots; and the Fowles appear to have been long settled in London in connection with their countrymen. In 1695, the Lord Provost of Edinburgh was to address his letters on the subject of Darien to William Paterson at the house of one of the name; and it is no idle speculation to suppose that this goldsmith (a rising banker) of 1677 afforded Paterson, then a pedlar, or incipient merchant, the benefit of his financial experience.
James Heriot has a stronger association with a Scottish worthy of finance, George Heriot, the goldsmith, and the munificent benefactor of Edinburgh, who came south with his patron, King James; and, as his biographer tells us, he prospered here as he had prospered in the north. Besides his bequests to his native town, he left ample legacies to his brothers-german, of whom one was James; and their wealth and name were assuredly represented by the James Heriot the goldsmith of this list.
In it also stands John Peatterson, a merchant already, and so giving a body to the tradition in Dumfriesshire which places William Paterson of the Bank of England in the counting-house of a relation of his own name in London about 1677.
The spelling of the two names Fowles and Peatterson is correctly phonetic, so as to show the Scottish nationality of the men; and in the latter case showing also the tact with which Eliot Warburton in his “Darien” makes a Scottish friend criticise his clumsy English pronunciation of the word Paterson.
Another name in the general list, that of Alexander Pope of Broad Street, has an even more famous association, as Mr. Camden Hotten shows in his Adversaria for July, 1857. The locality was then a charming suburb of gardens; and although the poet Pope, when taken away with his father, the popish merchant, to be educated in Windsor Forest by a priest, may have been too young to know how genial a home he was losing, he need not have been too vain, as it is feared he was, to revisit in after life the pleasant abode of his earliest years.
Gresham’s garden was in Broad Street, with its lectures on music and all science. King Richard’s Crosby Hall, and Shoreditch with its unhappy leman of Edward IV, were hard by; whilst Milton’s birth-place, his retreat, and his grave were close at hand.
The picturesque character of old London, graced by the sparkling Thames of olden time, is a circumstance not to be forgotten, when we are calling up the memories of any class of its inhabitants.
In 1677 the city was full of fine residences for merchants; and in this list we meet with names of entertainers of wits of the time. Here is Fountain, doubtless father to the wealthy knight with whom Dean Swift was familiar, as shown in his letters to Stella. Here, too, is Kiffen, the Baptist Alderman whom James II. could neither affright nor seduce, with a less respectable name of the same class, that of William Lob.
Here is Benjamin Bathurst, the founder of the family distinguished on the Bench and in the State, with Bragg their connexion. Here is a tribe of the Houblons, who furnished the Bank of England with its first Governor, Sir John; and whose names, seven in number, may be read in documents recorded at the Board of Trade claiming convoys for their fleets. These seven names are found in the more interesting record—the sermon of Bishop Burnet at the funeral of this Houblon—with his eulogy and city descent from Henry the VIIIth’s time. The Vansittarts will find their wealthy forefather here, and many more Dutch members of the old church of their nation in Austin Friars. The Van Milderts of this list were doubtless progenitors of the learned late Bishop of Durham of that name; and the predominance of Dutch over Flemish merchants settled in London is to be attributed to the ultra-Protestant feeling of that time. Puckle the wit, and the eager projector, is here in the persons of his father and uncle. Nor are the Barnardistons, Ducanes, the Fredericks, Beckfords, and Papillons, Burdetts, Batemans, Biddulphs, Bulteels, Carbonnels, Coventrys, the Dominiques, Crisps, Furleys, and the Holfords, to be omitted.