The “Richard Steele” in the list must have been related to Sir Richard, who was more successful in the advocacy of the rights of trade with his pen than in his multifarious commercial schemes.
The special occupations of these merchants are not stated with much precision. After the Goldsmiths come the Black-well Hall factors, representing our ancient staple in woollens, whose privileges were the occasion of a great legal controversy shortly before the date of this little publication; and they were settled with prodigious learning in the Common Pleas by Chief Justice Sir Orlando Bridgman, as may be seen in his logical judgments. One particular address is very interesting. It is at “the Insurance Office,” then a new institution among us, and only extended with great success in the beginning of the next century, in the reign of Queen Anne.
The Royal Exchange was a prominent place of business for our merchants of 1677. The Dutch walk, the Turkey walk, the Irish walk, the Spanish walk, and the like, have a significance far beyond the agreeable cosmopolitan sentiments expressed in the Spectator upon Addison’s and Sir Richard Steele’s visit to the Exchange of their day, crowded with men from every clime. In these several walks could be found, in the earlier years of the reign of Charles II, the collected members of our various trades beyond sea; and it was from them that the Lord Mayor was directed by a royal order in Council, to have elected the body that was to assist ministers in the preparation of our laws of trade and the colonies. That original order in council, signed by Lords Clarendon and Southampton, is preserved in the City library in Guildhall. It contains an article of extreme interest at this moment, specially providing for the election of the Italian merchants to that body. This commercial tie with United Italy cannot fail to be strengthened so as to revive an alliance with us too long interrupted by religious prejudice on both sides. The list has a few Italian names, but more Portuguese—perhaps brought over from the connection with “the Royal House of Lisbon” in the person of Charles the Second’s Queen, received by us with becoming good humour, according to the pungent epigram which bade “the De’il take Hyde and the Bishop beside, that made her bone of his bone.”
The division of the merchants in their respective dignities is worth a passing reflection. Some are knights and baronets; some are aldermen; the mass are plain John or Thomas, with a considerable sprinkling of Misters—the master of olden times being an addition of worship. The Captains and Majors of the list were doubtless the officers of the train-bands, of no little historic fame in London, from King John and Magna Carta even to John Gilpin.
The homes of many of the merchants named in this list were in the suburbs of London, and there they seem to have transacted their business, not in the City. We find them at Highgate, so well known before as the residence of the philosophic Earl of Arundel, where Lord Bacon died,—at Newington Green, Islington, Clerkenwell Green, Hackney, Hogsden, Bethnall Green, Kingsland, Moorfields, Spital-fields, and Mile End Green,—places now so many centres of crowded population, not the sweet rural retreats, which we are content to go for farther a-field, being, like our fathers, fully awake to the delights of forest life.
The Hogsden of the list (our Hoxton) is shown to have been pretty full of merchants; and we know how delightful a group of gardens that suburb possessed in the olden time. Not very long after 1677, its worthy horticulturist Fairchild there practised his art with eminent success; and not only founded the annual sermon still preached by distinguished divines every year upon the bounty of the Creator in the gifts of nature, but tried hard with his pen to teach the citizens to adorn London with gardens. This is a consideration well worth pursuing at this moment of London’s revival. Her seventy graveyards, so long festering charnel-houses, may, under wise direction, become centres of floral beauty and instructive recreation to our youthful London population.
Some resided on “The Bridge,” the London Bridge for ages covered with dwellings, from one of which the daughter of a rich citizen fell into the Thames to be saved by the bold apprentice Osborne, who married her, and founded the ducal family of Leeds.
The painted portraits of the more distinguished of these fathers of our trade would deserve a special study. Sir John Houblon’s may be seen at the Bank of England; Benjamin Bathurst’s is assuredly piously preserved by his ennobled family; Sir John Tulse, who has left his name perpetuated on the picturesque hill near the Crystal Palace, must have possessed good taste enough to be a portrait-painter’s patron; and the letter in the Spectator asserting our superior appreciation of that branch of art is well justified in the numerous portraits scattered all over the land. Our commerce is indeed exceedingly rich in materials of historical portraiture, and in its products. Without ostentatiously boasting of a superiority which is not to be pretended over the statesmen who grace so many halls, our merchants, from the pencils of Holbein and Antonio More down to the latest dates, may challenge comparison with them. The City and its halls are full of them; and Sir Thomas Gresham’s design of an university in London could not be better revived and realized than by annexing a fine gallery of merchants’ portraits to its other branches of instruction. It is a good suggestion, that the profit got by the Treasury from the sale of his estate in Broad Street to a Banking Company, should be pursued to its legitimate issue,—the establishment of that university.
The topic of Gresham’s University has some elucidation from the list of 1677. Comparatively few merchants then resided in Broad Street, or in Bishopsgate Street. Rents were therefore low in that quarter. In 1760, when the Gresham property was sold, under an Act of Parliament, for the Excise Office, its income was less than 450l. a-year; and the government made it up to 500l. The sale, however, to the Gresham Chambers’ Company, a few years since, netted a very large sum to the Treasury. That surplus is believed to revert to the trusts of Sir T. Gresham’s will, since the Acts which have alienated the estate first from the Charity, and then from the Crown, are mere parliamentary titles—quite secure to the occupiers of the land, but not destructive of the rights of the objects of a founder. The matter is indeed under serious scrutiny before the Charity Commission; and it has special claims to the fair consideration of Her Majesty’s prime minister.