The Lord Mayor

Sir Thomas Bennet was born in 1550 in Clapcot, Berkshire. He and his older brother Richard, both younger sons, were apprenticed to the Mercers’ Company. Such apprenticeships were much sought after. After he became free of the company, his nephew, known as Thomas junior, became his apprentice, a member of the company in 1586 and, ultimately, an alderman and a knight himself.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans loved luxurious textiles. Their portraits displayed their taste for rich silks, finely worked embroideries, deep velvets, and elaborate lace collars and cuffs. Sumptuary laws, which sought to limit luxury fabrics according to status, proved difficult to enforce and lapsed after 1604. Sir Thomas began to trade in cloth in the 1570s and, by the 1580s, was importing luxury textiles from Stade near Hamburg and Flushing in the Low Countries. Between 1587 and 1588, for instance, Sir Thomas imported silk sarcenet, grosgrain, velvet taffeta, camlets – originally costly Eastern fabric combining silk and camel or goats hair, silk and crepe from Cyprus called “sipers,” Milan fustian, linen cloth, and buckram from Stade, altogether rated by the customs at £1,638-16-4. The next year he imported velvet, sipers, Holland cloth, “sisters thread,” the name for the best-bleached thread, for a total value of £500-17-8.Footnote ⁴ In addition to his wholesale trade, Bennet may also have had a retail shop on Cheapside.Footnote ⁵ The last year in which Sir Thomas traded in cloth was 1604, the year he served as Lord Mayor.Footnote ⁶

Bennet proved to be an especially civic-minded City official. Beginning in the 1590s, after more than twenty years as a cloth merchant, Bennet moved into City government, becoming alderman for Vintry in 1593/1594, sheriff in 1594/1595 and, later, alderman for Lime Street in 1603/1604 and for Bassishaw from 1611 to 1627. After serving as Lord Mayor in 1603/1604, King James knighted him. Well known for his charity and service to the city, Bennet served as president of Bridewell and Bethlehem Hospitals and patron of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Plague repeatedly swept London while Bennet served as sheriff and mayor, and again in 1625 while he was alderman. His work on behalf of the capital was remembered in his 1627 funeral certificate, which recorded that “he remained the only father and protector of all the inhabitants of that city in all their extremity to his immortal praise.”Footnote ⁷

At the beginning of King James’ reign, Bennet turned from the cloth trade to court finance. The symbiotic relationship between Crown, courtiers, and great City merchants became a feature of early Stuart administration. Several of the most successful cloth merchants turned from trade to customs farming. Forming syndicates that took over the administration of the Crown’s revenue on wine, textiles, and other commodities, they paid rent to the Crown for the privilege. The Crown relied on wealthy merchants for short-term loans, while the merchants profited from the privatization of royal authority, the transfer to them of royal power to collect duties, taxes, rents, and fees. George Lowe, Sir Thomas’s son-in-law, was among the merchants who had made money in the cloth trade who wanted to become a customs farmer.Footnote ⁸ The very lucrative customs farms created a secondary market in which people bought and sold shares. Sir Thomas held a twenty-fourth share of the French and Rhenish wine farm worth £300; he sold half and kept half for himself.Footnote ⁹

Crown finance allowed Bennet to diversify his wealth. With his capital from the cloth trade, Bennet joined Sir Arthur Ingram in loaning money to the Crown and, with Lionel Cranfield he took part in the sale of Crown lands between 1607 and 1614. On June 13, 1609, for instance, Bennet was listed as one of the General Contractors for Crown lands along with other leading merchants including Cranfield, Sir Baptist Hicks, and Sir William Cockayne as well as Sir Thomas Lake, the Secretary of State. Bennet invested £3,000 while Cranfield put in £11,000, Lake, £10,000, and Cockayne, £1,100. Together with others, they invested a total of £67,000.Footnote ¹⁰ Bennet put £500 of the Crown lands in his son Simon’s name.Footnote ¹¹

Credit was a key element in the early modern economy. In the absence of a banking system, merchants often lent their surplus capital at interest. Sir Thomas Bennet provided loans to the Crown, to Ingram and Cranfield, noblemen and noblewomen, and other merchants. In 1613 Bennet was one of six aldermen who were willing to lend King James £2,000 despite a delay in the Crown’s repayment of the royal loan of 1610.Footnote ¹² Bennet also provided credit to the wine farm. Charles Howard, Earl of Nottingham, had the royal grant of the custom duties on wine imports that Cranfield and other merchants administered for him. In 1607 Cranfield endorsed as “notes of great importance” a reckoning between himself and William Massam on the one hand and James Cullimore on the other. It showed “the sums to be charged upon and paid out of the wine account for moneys borrowed and interest due to Sir Thomas Bennet and others.”Footnote ¹³

Sir Thomas Bennet reinforced his close relationship with Sir Arthur Ingram with the marriage of his son Simon to Elizabeth, Sir Arthur’s daughter (see Plate 1). Elizabeth brought Simon a £6,000 portion, twice the size of his sister Mary Bennet’s portion. Elizabeth’s portrait, c. 1620, displays her as well-to do, with a beautiful deep lace collar and cuffs on her black dress, a broad brimmed hat with a handsome feather, sitting in an oversize rich red velvet chair. She wears a long double rope of pearls and a shorter diamond or emerald pendant set in gold. Her long earrings have fashionable black ribbons. She resembles a rich merchant’s wife more than a Jacobean court lady.Footnote ¹⁴

Plate 1 Portrait of Elizabeth Ingram, Lady Bennet, daughter of Sir Arthur Ingram and wife of Sir Simon Bennet, circle of George Jameson, on loan to Temple Newsam House, Leeds, West Yorkshire, Leeds Gallery and Museum. Elizabeth served as Sir Simon’s executor, oversaw his donation to University College, Oxford, and left a substantial sum to his heir, Simon Bennet.

© The Halifax Collection

Sir Thomas consistently provided Ingram with substantial financial support. When Ingram needed to pay Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, who held the patent on the customs on silk, Sir Thomas Bennet provided 70 percent of the £1,000 Ingram needed. Ingram wrote to Lionel Cranfield: “If you can with the rest of my good friends make up … the full £1,000, you may much pleasure me. If you care not to make up Sir Thomas Bennet’s £700 … send me word.” In 1611 Ingram wrote to Cranfield just after his son died. “I am not willing to come from Bow as yet, whereby I am deprived of my means to supply my lord of Salisbury his occasions, except it may stand with your great good favour to supply my credit which is deeply in this action engaged to my lord … Sir Thomas Bennet hath promised me £700.”Footnote ¹⁵ Bennet’s financial relationship with Sir Arthur Ingram appears most fully in the case of Sir Edward Grevile, who bought Crown lands and owed Sir Thomas Bennet £10,000. Ingram leveraged Grevile’s debts to Bennet to marry Grevile’s daughter Mary as his third wife in 1615 and to take over Grevile’s estate while paying off Bennet.Footnote ¹⁶

Prominent aristocratic women also borrowed money from Sir Thomas Bennet and sometimes used their London furnishings to secure their loans. Thus, Dame Grissell Woodroffe, the widow of Sir Nicholas Woodroffe, Lord Mayor of London and MP, sold the wainscot, glass, and other movables in a property near Brooke Street to Sir Thomas. Lady Mary Chandois conveyed the furniture of her house in Brooke Street Stepney to him as security for a debt.Footnote ¹⁷ Some transactions did not end happily. Bennet served as trustee of one-quarter of Sherfield manor for Lady Dorothy Wharton who had inherited it from her father.Footnote ¹⁸ Lady Dorothy and her husband Philip, Lord Wharton, sued Sir Thomas over manors conveyed to Bennet for money she had borrowed.

In addition to using his capital to lend money to the Crown and the aristocracy, Sir Thomas also invested in property. As Richard Grassby has pointed out, well-to-do seventeenth-century businessmen diversified their holdings and Sir Thomas Bennet was no exception.Footnote ¹⁹ Real estate investment allowed merchants not only to reallocate their assets but also to invest in properties in the City that were increasing in value, in suburbs in the east or west, or a manor in the neighboring shires. Some merchants returned to their gentry roots or created them. Sir Thomas Bennet invested in property both in London where he lived and in the country. But he did not return to the county of his birth.

Sir Thomas owned a house in St. Olave Old Jewry and had property in St. Martin Ludgate, St. Clement Danes, on Brock Street in Stepney, and Grays Inn Fields. He also owned property in Shelton, Norfolk, Selston, Nottinghamshire, and Salton, Sinnington, and Marton in Yorkshire.Footnote ²⁰ Bennet did not always accumulate property through purchase. In 1624 Lord Eure agreed to transfer Salton to him for the debts owing from Lord Eure’s father. Because Eure was a recusant, King James served as an intermediary granting Bennet the manor, prebend, and rectory.Footnote ²¹

Sir Thomas also bought new country houses for two of his sons. Sir Thomas purchased Beachampton and Calverton in Buckinghamshire, which he settled on his son Simon.Footnote ²² For his son Richard, he purchased the sixteenth-century manor and manor house of Broad Marston in Pebworth, Gloucestershire, in 1622.Footnote ²³ Sir Thomas continued to live in the City.

In his major study of Jacobean aldermen, Robert Lang estimates that Sir Thomas Bennet left an estate of £24,000 in movables besides his real estate. While he was not as wealthy as Sir Baptist Hicks and Sir John Spencer, and the fewer than ten great Jacobean aldermen who left estates worth between £50,000 and £125,000, Bennet ranked in the top twenty-four of Lang’s sample of 140 aldermen who served between 1600 and 1624.Footnote ²⁴

Sir Thomas married Mary Taylor, daughter of Robert Taylor who was also a member of the Mercers’ Company (see Plate 2). Her c. 1590 portrait by the Netherlands artist Hieronymus Custodis shows Lady Bennet wearing a fashionable vest embroidered with the kind of silks imported by the mercers and holding a dog, symbol of loyalty. Sir Thomas and Lady Bennet used education and marriage to ensure that their children and grandchildren became part of a larger Stuart elite that incorporated those who had made their fortunes in land and trade. The couple provided university educations for their sons, all four of whom went to Oxford, and made socially advantageous marriages for their children and grandchildren that in some cases linked their family to the nobility and to the royal court.

Plate 2 Portrait of Mary Taylor, Lady Bennet, daughter of Robert Taylor and wife of Sir Thomas Bennet, c. 1590. She wears a vest embroidered with the kind of silks imported by Sir Thomas Bennet.

Hieronymus Custodis (fl.1589–93), Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Temple Newsam House), UK/Bridgeman Images

The Bennets had two daughters. Anne married first William Duncombe, a member of the Haberdashers’ company, and second, George Lowe. Anne’s daughter Mary married Sir Ralph Dutton. A younger son with his own estate, Dutton was knighted in 1624, the year of his marriage, and was later named a gentleman of Charles I’s Privy Chamber.Footnote ²⁵ Sir Thomas’s younger daughter Mary married George Croke in 1610, then a highly regarded and well-to-do Inner Temple lawyer. Knighted in 1623, Croke later became one of the Justices of the King’s Bench who voted against King Charles in the Ship Money Case in 1637. Sir Thomas provided Mary with a portion of £3,000.Footnote ²⁶

Sir Thomas Bennet’s emotional world was geographically broad and generationally rich. In his will he remembered more than fifty people, three London hospitals, and three London prisons. Marked by legacies that went considerably beyond his nuclear family, Sir Thomas provided gifts for sisters and their children, in-laws and their children, extended cousins and their children, and servants, employees, and artisans. For instance, Bennet left £40 to his nephew Anthony Burt, a carrier of Worcester; £13-6-8 to William Bennet of Moulford, Berkshire, a bargeman, who lived close to Sir Thomas’s ancestral home; and £5 to James the Joyner “that wainscoted my little parlor.”

After an optimistic statement of his belief in his salvation and request to be buried next to his wife in the Mercers’ Chapel, Bennet turned to his sons, daughters, and grandchildren. Since his wife predeceased him, he divided his personal estate in two according to the custom of London. One-half was divided among his four sons to ensure that each received £3,000. If the estate proved larger, Sir Thomas’s daughter Mary, who had already received her £3,000 on her marriage to George Croke, would share equally with her brothers in any additional money. Because Sir Thomas had spent £500 on building, furniture, and plate at Beachampton, Buckinghamshire, which he gave to his son Simon, it would be deducted from Simon’s share. Similarly, he had made a £1,000 loan to his son Richard that would be subtracted from his portion.

Bennet left legacies to his daughters’ families. He left £100 to his deceased daughter Anne’s husband, George Lowe, and £250 more to Anne and George Lowe’s son. He left £66-13s-4d to Anne’s daughters and £50 apiece to her grandchildren. He provided £200 each to his daughter Mary and her husband, Justice Croke, and £200 each to their four daughters. All of the children were to receive their inheritance when they were 21. As he recalled family and friends, Bennet returned to two of his sons. He added another £500 each to Ambrose and John Bennet. For John’s baby son Thomas, his godson, Sir Thomas left £20 “towards the placing of him an apprentice to such a trade or profession as he shallbe found most fittest.” He also remembered his godson Thomas Dale.

Bennet’s will is marked by charity and hospitality. He left £5 for his parish priest, Thomas Tuke, a moderate puritan, whose sermons were influenced by William Perkins. He provided legacies for three hospitals, Christ Church, St. Thomas in Southwark, and Bridewell, and three City prisons, Newgate, the Counters in Wood Street, and Poultry. Finally, Sir Thomas left money for dinners at the three hospitals (£13-16-6 each), as well as at St. Olave’s (£15) and at the Mercers’ Company (£40) on the day of his funeral.

In a codicil to his will a year later, Sir Thomas sorted out his real estate. Two of his sons, Ambrose and Simon, were childless. Sir Thomas sought to consolidate most of his real estate in the hands of Simon and Richard and Richard’s son Simon, the toddler who attended Sir Thomas’s funeral. At the same time, he made sure that if that young boy did not survive, other heirs, particularly his youngest son John’s children, including young Thomas, who had also attended the funeral, might inherit. In addition, he gave or confirmed land to Ambrose and John and his grandsons George Lowe and Thomas Croke. Finally, he confirmed his gift of the Bennet home and land in St. Olave Old Jewry to Richard Bennet and his heirs.Footnote ²⁷ While a nobleman might create an entail, this wealthy merchant placed his hopes in his very elaborate will and codicil.

Sir Thomas Bennet had acted none too soon. By the early 1630s all of his sons were dead. Ambrose died unmarried in 1631. John, the youngest, became a rich merchant with a house on Barge Court, Bucklersbury, near Cheapside, but died in 1632. John’s son Thomas died young, but his younger son John established his family as country gentry with court connections in Cambridgeshire.Footnote ²⁸ Another of John’s sons, Ambrose, spent several years in Virginia.

The Mercer

Richard Bennet became a mercer and cloth trader like his father after attending Merton College, Oxford. He married Elizabeth Cradock, daughter of William Cradock of Stafford, Sir Baptist Hick’s cloth factor in Hamburg. In the 1620s, as his business interests broadened, he began to look to Asia and the New World for new goods. He traded to the East Indies and became a member of the Virginia Company.Footnote ²⁹ While investing in the East India Company, he hedged his risk with contracts struck with other investors such as the grocer Edmund Scott. Scott sued Richard’s widow Elizabeth over such an agreement in the 1630s.Footnote ³⁰ At his death Bennet’s warehouse held over 100 pounds of tobacco, the product of his trading with Virginia or elsewhere in the Americas.Footnote ³¹

Richard died shortly after his father, Sir Thomas Bennet, in 1628. The Inquisition Post Mortem taken at Gloucester Castle that year reveals Richard’s expansive real estate holdings, many inherited from his father, others the family’s city and country homes. Richard was in the midst of expanding his father’s house in St. Olave Old Jewry and his own manor house at Broad Marston. Even today Broad Marston retains its handsome Jacobean staircase, mullioned windows and ceiling beams.Footnote ³² The manor of Broad Marston, a hamlet in Pebworth, Gloucestershire, contained 100 acres of pasture, and Richard had also purchased Pebworth’s rectory. In London, in addition to the family property in St. Olave Old Jewry, he had property in Candlewick now Cannon Street. In the country, Richard owned the Calverton and Stony Stratford properties in Buckinghamshire, which his father had purchased. He also held land in Deanshanger and Passenham, in Northamptonshire, and the manor of Shelton and Thorpe, Nottinghamshire, with 370 acres of land, meadow, pasture, and wood and ten cottages. In addition, he had 20 acres of woods in Hasler parish, Warwickshire.

Richard’s will of 1627 left his young son Simon his lands in Calverton, Deanshanger, Passenham, and Shelton, his tenement near London, and “dwelling house” in St. Olave in Old Jewry. He gave his wife Elizabeth the two tenements being built next to his house until Simon was 24. Should she remarry, the profits were to go to Simon. During her widowhood, Richard gave Elizabeth his “mansion house of Broad Marston with all its lands,” woods, and the rectory and parsonage at Pebworth. After her death or remarriage, all were to go to Simon. Significantly, three-quarters of the lands in Broad Marston were held by knight’s service. Therefore, Simon, aged 3 years and 11 months, became a royal ward and heir to a future fortune.Footnote ³³ Richard left one-third of his estate to Elizabeth, and made her his executor, supervisor of his son’s education, and a very wealthy widow.

The Benefactor

Richard’s older brother, Sir Simon Bennet, was not a City merchant but a country gentleman. He continued his father’s philanthropy but on a grander scale. Sir Simon attended University College, Oxford, married Elizabeth Ingram, and was made a baronet a few months after Sir Thomas’s funeral in 1627. Sir Simon emphasized his ties to his sisters and brothers-in-laws and his father in law, Sir Arthur Ingram, in his 1631 will. He provided £100 to be divided among “twenty poor maids that have dwelt in my house or in Beachampton or in Calverton for five years” after their marriages providing his executor, overseers, or the ministers of Beachampton and Calverton approved their matches.Footnote ³⁴ The property Sir Simon had inherited from his father was already designated for his nephew, young Simon Bennet.

But Sir Simon wished to make a major donation of his own. In 1630 he paid King Charles £6,000 for Handley Park, 863 acres of royal forest in Whittlewood, Northamptonshire. With the income, timber, and capital from this large property, Sir Simon proposed to endow University College, Oxford, with new scholarships, new fellowships, and new buildings.Footnote ³⁵ University College, a small and poor if ancient Oxford college, had long wanted to expand, like all colleges then and now. Efforts under Master John Bancroft, later Bishop of Oxford, twenty years earlier had gone for naught.Footnote ³⁶ Sir Simon left Handley Park to his wife Elizabeth, his executor, for her lifetime with reversion to University College. He made Sir Arthur Ingram, his father-in-law, and Sir George Croke, his brother-in-law, the trustees of his gift. Sir Simon’s donation was on a grand scale. With one gesture he increased the college’s income by 40 percent. One twentieth-century commentator writes that it was “much the richest benefaction made to the college since 1249, producing over three times as much as any other single endowment and increasing our annual revenue by something between one-third and one-half.”Footnote ³⁷

Beginning in 1634, the overjoyed College commissioned architectural models for the new buildings. They held several timber sales of Handley Park oak and rented out the property using the proceeds to begin to build a new hall, chapel, and the main quadrangle. The latter had cost more than £5,200 by 1642, “of which all but £1800 came from Handley timber.”Footnote ³⁸ This significant legacy, however, was made conditional by his executor Elizabeth, Lady Bennet, on the college’s naming the buildings “Sir Simon Bennet’s Lodgings and Hall.” The college agreed. In his will Sir Simon had been vague about the number of scholarships and fellowships to be established. The trustees of the gift, led in the 1630s and early 1640s by Sir Arthur Ingram and Sir George Croke after the death of Lady Bennet, raised the question of the number of Bennet scholars and fellows, the amount of rent to be had from Handley Park for their support, and their relationship to the eight old foundation fellows.Footnote ³⁹

In 1640, in the midst of political crisis between King Charles and parliament, the college turned to Archbishop Laud who advised that four fellowships and scholarships were the prudent number and the rent from Handley Park should be set at £350 a year. Some trustees, however, wanted to increase the rent to £400 or £500 to support eight Bennet scholars and fellows, with half allocated to Bennet kin or associates. Meanwhile, the guardians of young Simon Bennet, presumably his mother Elizabeth, Lady Finch, and Francis Finch, questioned the benefaction itself. They refused to turn over the property until forced to do so by a court decree in 1639.Footnote ⁴⁰

During the 1630s the college continued to build, providing the chapel with painted glass windows along Arminian lines and planning its Gothic quadrangle even as it engaged in litigation with the Bennet family and its trustees. With the advent of the Civil War, however, the college stopped building and did not fill the Bennet fellowships at all. In response, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chancellor of the University of Oxford, wrote in the strongest terms to the college in 1648 that they had failed to fulfill their duty under the terms of the gift. He called it “a great scandal not only upon your particular society but the university also, and a general discouragement to all persons charitably affected, to see so bountiful and eminent a gift so much abused.”Footnote ⁴¹ In 1649 the Court of Chancery decided for the Bennet trustees. Parliament put in a new master who increased the rent on Handley Park and doubled the number of Bennet fellows and scholars to eight each with half reserved for Bennet kin.Footnote ⁴² The Bennets responded by sending letters of recommendation on behalf of relatives and friends for Bennet fellowships.Footnote ⁴³

At the Restoration, the Master of University College sued again and the number of scholars and fellows were reduced and settled once more at four each for fellows and scholars.Footnote ⁴⁴ The College completed its new quadrangle with handsome buildings now facing the High Street. Although the college did not name the new buildings “Sir Simon Bennet’s Lodgings and Hall,” one side of the quadrangle was named for the donor and a small portrait of Sir Simon Bennet hangs in the Hall. Two Bennet relations, Ambrose and Thomas Bennet, held fellowships in the later seventeenth century. Ambrose managed Handley Park before leaving abruptly for Jamaica and, later, Virginia, while the cleric Thomas Bennet, descended from Sir Thomas Bennet’s youngest son John, became Master of the college in 1691 before dying in office a year later.Footnote ⁴⁵ By the later twentieth century, Sir Simon Bennet’s gift was still one of the three largest in the history of University College.Footnote ⁴⁶

The Moneylender

Sir Simon’s nephew and namesake, young Simon Bennet, was rich and well connected. Born in 1624, as a three-year-old he had attended his grandfather’s funeral in London in his nurse’s arms. In 1628 his father died and, a year later, his mother Elizabeth married Sir Heneage Finch, Speaker of the House of Commons. (Her lively courtship, marriage, and family life are discussed in Chapter 3.) Because Simon became a royal ward when he inherited land held directly from the king, the young boy was an attractive financial commodity. Charles I granted his wardship to Walter Steward (c. 1586–1649) who then assigned it to two other courtiers, Sir Richard Wynn, the Queen’s Treasurer, and Sir William Uvedale, Treasurer of the Privy Chamber. Simon’s mother Elizabeth, now Lady Finch, had to purchase his wardship from Walter Steward and his assignees at a cost of £4,000.Footnote ⁴⁷

Sir Heneage Finch joined Lady Finch as Simon’s guardian until his death in 1631. His brother, Francis Finch, then took his place with the consent of the Court of Wards. Simon’s education differed from that of his Finch stepbrothers and sisters. Heneage, Francis, and John Finch went to Oxford and Cambridge as teenagers. Heneage later practiced law and began his judicial career, while John studied medicine and became a diplomat. Frances and Anne were educated at home. In contrast, Simon entered Lincoln’s Inn on January 29, 1646, at the age of twenty-two.Footnote ⁴⁸

Figure 1.1 Monument to Simon Bennet, Beachampton, Buckinghamshire, 1680s, by Jasper Latham? The funeral monument with its lengthy inscription was paid for with the proceeds of a bad debt.

Photograph by A. F. Kersting, H 14111. The Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

Simon’s accounts along with other evidence shed light on his business, his marriage, his investments, and his politics. Simon had a fortune to look after when he came of age. He was not only his father’s heir but also his uncle’s. Sir Heneage and Lady Finch provided sureties that they would provide Simon with his legacy and an account of his estate.Footnote ⁴⁹ To that end, they sued the philanthropist Sir Simon Bennet over Sir Thomas Bennet’s will. At issue was whether or not as executor Sir Simon was collecting outstanding debts, providing the appropriate share to young Simon, and rendering them a proper account.Footnote ⁵⁰ When Sir Simon Bennet died in 1631, young Simon inherited his fortune and his house in Beachampton, Buckinghamshire, originally purchased by his grandfather, Sir Thomas Bennet.

Until 1645 Simon was both a royal ward and, as the son of a London merchant, a London orphan whose estate was administered by the Court of Orphans. His mother, Lady Finch, had to pay rent to the king on Simon’s lands while he was a minor. In 1645 she sued a group of merchants, who held her bond, to pay the requisite monies into the Court of Wards. Three well-known City merchants, William Courten, Sir Edward Littleton, and David Goubard “stand bound to the said petitioner in the sum of two thousand pounds for the payment of one thousand and forty pounds at a day now past the better to secure the debt of one thousand pounds and more which the said petitioner oweth and is indebted to his Majesty for the rents of the lands of Symon Bennet his Majesty’s ward.” Lady Finch petitioned the court to accept the bond for her payment, which it did.Footnote ⁵¹ That same year, when Simon turned twenty-one, he sued his mother to be removed from wardship.

Two years later he demanded an accounting of his inheritance. Even in his early twenties, Simon Bennet was acutely aware of the extent of his fortune and took steps to gain control of it. Although Lady Finch had actively tried to safeguard Simon’s estate while he was a minor through lawsuits against Sir Simon Bennet and University College, Oxford, Simon now insisted on an accounting from his mother and Francis Finch.Footnote ⁵² “Coming above two years ago to full age of twenty-one years, and having as yet no accompt from his said guardians of diverse and great sums of money that he conceives to be due to him which they have received during his minority, he himself presents to his said guardians his demands.”

Sir Thomas Bennet had left his family a personal estate of £24,000 when he died in 1627. Simon’s “demands” reveal that he had inherited an even larger personal fortune from four of his Bennet kin, his father, two uncles, and an aunt. Simon claimed an annual income of over £2,145 a year from real estate and a personal estate of £31,941-19-11.Footnote ⁵³ This estate was made up of several income streams. To begin with, Simon was entitled to one-third of his father’s personal property amounting to £4,186-14-11 from the time of his father’s death sixteen years earlier. Simon’s father also left him £500 a year. After sixteen years that now totaled £8,000. His uncle, Sir Simon Bennet, left young Simon £1,500 a year. After paying rent to the king, Simon netted £820 a year, which after fourteen years now amounted to £11,480. Simon’s uncle Ambrose left him a legacy of £170 a year that after fourteen years equaled £2,380. His aunt Elizabeth, Lady Bennet, left him £655 a year, which after nine years provided Simon with another £5,895. In addition, the Court of Wards had ruled that he was entitled to 4 percent a year interest on all the income that his guardians had received on his behalf over the past sixteen, fourteen, and nine years. With interest on his capital Simon’s inheritance might have added up to as much as £47,329.Footnote ⁵⁴

To put Simon’s inheritance in perspective, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the median amount a testator might leave was well under £200, and forty years later Gregory King estimated a temporal lord had an income of £2,800 a year.Footnote ⁵⁵ Simon’s guardians’ accounts have not survived. His fortune, which had been made by his grandfather and father in international trade and court finance between 1570 and 1628, was, by 1647, now invested in land, rents, houses, leases, and loans.

Simon ended on a conciliatory note, asked his guardians for a fair accounting without resort to the law, expressed his willingness to accept amendments, and hoped that they would not blame him for making these claims. “This demandant having for a year and a half and above with all respective patience expected an accompt, and though it hath been often desired by the friends of this demandant of his guardians yet he nor they have not as yet received any accompt at all, and that delay hath forced this demandant to make these demands as aforesaid.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Whether his guardians had been able to collect all the income detailed by Simon; whether they were able to deduct expenses such as living costs or the cost of his wardship; and whether Sir Simon’s legacy had declined because of his bequest to University College, it is not clear how much money Simon actually received. Nevertheless, Simon Bennet’s inheritance was indeed very substantial.

Two years later, on the eve of his marriage in 1649, Simon and his mother, Elizabeth, reached an agreement to release each other from further accounting and suits in regard to his inheritance. The indenture dated October 20, 1649 showed that Simon had already taken up residence at Sir Simon’s former house at Beachampton, Buckinghamshire. He had inherited land from his father in Gloucestershire, Nottinghamshire, Norwich, the City of London, and Calverton, Buckinghamshire, as well as manors in Yorkshire. “For the love and affection that he oweth and beareth unto her, as also for that she the said Lady Finch out of her tender love and affection to him … hath released him by deed … all and every sum that she may any way claim of him upon his marriage of otherwise,” he released her of all the sums or accounts owing for Richard Bennet’s estate.Footnote ⁵⁷ A few days later, Lady Finch signed a similar release.Footnote ⁵⁸ Nevertheless, Simon sued his mother and Francis Finch over lands in Calverton and Beachampton and Yorkshire in 1650.

In 1648, just as Simon Bennet came into his inheritance, the political world around him exploded. The outbreak of the second Civil War, the political role of the New Model Army, the continuing agitation by the Levelers, and Pride’s Purge at the end of the year set the stage for the trial and execution of Charles I in January 1649. Simon’s account book for the period 1648–1650 sheds light not only on his business but on his activities in London as it was convulsed with political fervor. Simon’s earliest accounts begin in 1648 and show the young businessman buying newsletters and books that sprang from the press in a London no longer fettered by censorship. Politically he accepted office under the Commonwealth, while his Finch stepbrothers were royalists or traveling abroad. Simon moved regularly from Beachampton to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn and to Kensington where his mother lived. His accounts are otherwise frustratingly silent on politics, yielding only rents collected, loans made, and lawsuits filed.

The Marriage of Simon Bennet and Grace Morewood

In the months after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Simon Bennet met and married Grace Morewood, the pretty daughter of Gilbert Morewood, an East India Company merchant. In October of that year, he took a coach to Mr. Morewood’s “about perusing the writings.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Gilbert Morewood offered Simon a handsome £6,000 portion. In exchange Simon settled on Grace his two Buckinghamshire manors, Beachampton and Calverton, with nearby Stony Stratford and its fairs, markets, and fishing on the Ouse, which Sir Thomas Bennet had originally purchased.Footnote ⁶⁰

Simon and Grace married on October 20, 1649, at St. Bartholomew the Less. Despite puritan emphasis on simplicity in the new Republic, Simon’s accounts show large amounts of money spent on gifts to the bride, ribbons, trumpeters, and a banquet at Kensington House, the Finch family home. The confectioner charged £23. Ribbons, ribbons, and more ribbons festooned the wedding and the wedding party: 250 yards of silver ribbon for £43-15, 206 more yards of ribbon for £51, and yet another bill for gloves and ribbons, perhaps as gifts. Ribbons played an important part in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English marriage rituals. Decorating bridal clothes, tied around arms or legs, given as favors to guests, ribbons celebrated the festive occasion of the marriage.Footnote ⁶¹ In contrast, the amounts paid at the church were small. Simon paid the minister and clerk at St. Bartholomew a pound each with another pound for the poor and something for the bell ringers.

Simon presented Grace with a muff and tippet for which he paid £51 plus a pair of wedding garters and a wedding ring made of angel-gold. He bought a pair of spurs, presumably for himself. Gilbert Morewood paid Simon £4,000 of the £6,000 of Grace’s portion and Simon deposited it with Alderman Thomas Vyner, one of England’s early bankers. Simon also spent £10 for the drawing up of the deeds of jointure. In December 1649, Gilbert Morewood paid the remaining £2,000 of the dowry and Alderman Vyner returned the £4,000 to Simon.Footnote ⁶²

Finance and Moneylending

At twenty-three Simon Bennet had thought he knew pretty well what his inheritance amounted to, and he did not wait long to put his capital to use. Moneylending and credit took place at all levels of society in medieval and early modern England. Gentlemen wrote to one another requesting £50; women loaned each other money and took out loans from City merchants; bankers backed kings with finance for wars. Suits for debt increased greatly in the late Elizabethan period.Footnote ⁶³ Even as moneylending was merely a part of the business activities of many shopkeepers and merchants, it gradually became a profession in itself. Early banking from the 1640s on took two forms centered on goldsmiths like Sir Thomas Vyner and his half-nephew Sir Robert Vyner, and scriveners like Robert Abbott and his son-in-law Sir Robert Clayton. According to Frank Melton, goldsmiths like the Vyners moved into Crown finance, while Sir Robert Clayton worked in private finance, lending money especially to country gentry during the 1650s and the Restoration.Footnote ⁶⁴

Simon Bennet provides a case study in the new kind of private banking that developed after the Civil War, but he found his niche in real estate and private finance not in deposit banking. Simon used his father, uncles’ and aunt’s legacies as well as Grace’s portion of £6,000 to make even more money. He prospered by focusing on one of the areas that Sir Thomas Bennet, Richard Bennet, and Gilbert Morewood invested in too, property and loans. Simon was a property magnate and made short-term loans secured by bonds or mortgages. Although he was in finance, Simon Bennet appears to have taken no deposits. He was self-funding.

Simon’s interest rate was regulated by parliamentary statute. While the Elizabethan statute of 1571 expressed doubts about the morality of taking interest, it allowed it, and by 1627 parliamentary legislation permitted interest of 8 percent. In 1651 the Rump parliament, however, drew attention to the problems of debt suffered by those in trade and agriculture:

To deal with such indebtedness, the statute reduced the rate of interest to 6 percent. The Interregnum statute was confirmed at the Restoration in 1660. While moral injunctions against borrowing and lending had a long history, expanding trade, agricultural change, and the consumer society in seventeenth-century England made credit a centerpiece of economic life.

As a landlord and a moneylender, Simon Bennet owned and rented out property in as many as twelve counties, cities, and towns and lent money at interest on short-term bonds which were secured either by larger amounts of money or by mortgages. He might loan money at first without a mortgage, but when the debt came due and the debtor wanted to continue the loan or to borrow more money, Simon would ask that the security be backed by a mortgage on property. According to the common law, should the debtor default, Simon had the right to take the property. The risk of the business to Simon lay in the creditworthiness of the debtor, the value of the property, and the legality of the mortgage. At times, Simon Bennet and his heirs found themselves facing debtors who had mortgaged the same piece of property several times over. The risk to the debtor, of course, was the loss of the property securing the mortgage.

Simon first ran his business from London. His associate was Thomas Russell of the Inner Temple who witnessed Simon’s marriage settlement and whom his mother called cousin in her will. Later, living in Calverton, Buckinghamshire, Simon sent orders to Roger Chapman, who identified himself as of the “Inner Temple” and coordinated his mortgages and loans. The records of Simon Bennet’s business range from the late 1640s to 1680. The records kept by Russell and then by Chapman list the receipts and expenditures of the business by date. They included receipts of interest and rent, payments to Simon’s mother, Lady Finch, of the monies due on her jointure, payments in gold to Simon’s wife Grace, and money brought by Simon from the country to be placed upon the Exchange at interest.Footnote ⁶⁶

Simon Bennet’s clients ranged widely from London shopkeepers to the king, but most appear to have been the landed. He appears to have loaned money mainly to those who were already in debt and who used the loans to keep afloat rather than using the money for investment in new ventures or new land purchases. Simon built his business from his own properties and securities, adding to his capital from the rents, properties, interest, and mortgages he accumulated.Footnote ⁶⁷

Early examples from the accounts show small-scale loans to Londoners and actions taken against debtors. In 1648 Thomas Russell recorded that he had received overdue rent from Mr Swale the cheese monger after going to the bailiff and paid £11-9-0 to an attorney for trying to arrest one Gibbons. Russell loaned £200 “by order of my cousin Benet to Mr. Thomas Trotter at the Signe of the Legg in Newgate market upon his bill sealed to be repaid with interest at 6 per cent at 7 days notice.”

By November 1650, at the age of just twenty-six, Simon was of sufficient wealth and connections to be appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire by the Council of State. Richard Grenville compiled a list of the yearly estate values of Buckinghamshire gentry in the 1650s. Three men had estates with values higher than Simon Bennet’s: Robert Dormer, Earl of Carnarvon, listed by Grenville as having an estate of £7,000 a year, and Sir John Borlase and Sir Thomas Lee, both with £4,000 a year. Borlase and Lee came from leading county families who often sat in the House of Commons. Grenville listed Simon Bennet as having an estate worth £3,000 a year along with Sir William Drake, a lawyer, official, and Member of Parliament, Sir Robert Dormer, and Sir Peter Temple. Dormer and Temple were members of old Buckinghamshire families who often were chosen to represent the county in the House of Commons as knights of the shire. By comparison, Sir Ralph Verney, from another old Buckinghamshire family, had an estate with an annual value of only £1,400. In short, young Simon was one of the richest gentlemen in the county, the economic equal of baronets and knights who were the political leaders of Buckinghamshire.Footnote ⁶⁸

During the Interregnum, Bennet served not only as sheriff but also as assessor of taxes in 1652 and 1657 under the Rump and the Protectorate. He traveled to France in April 1657, apparently on behalf of the Cromwellian regime, just after the Anglo-French alliance signed in March 1657 against the Spanish culminated in the successful Battle of the Dunes or Dunkirk in June 1658. On April 10, Captain William Whitehorne wrote to Robert Blackborne, Secretary to the Admiralty,

Henry More wrote to Simon’s half sister Ann Finch, in May 1657, wondering if “French air helps Simon Bennet’s consumption.”Footnote ⁷⁰ On the eve of the Restoration, Bennet was named to committees to oversee the militia and to raise taxes.Footnote ⁷¹

Business knew no politics. Simon Bennet loaned money to royalists and parliamentarians, many of them noblemen in need of money once the wars were over. For instance, on April 15, 1657, Bennet received £90, the annual interest on £1,500 for “Thomas Lord Grey of Groby deceased.” Lord Grey of Groby fought with the parliamentary armies, supported Pride’s Purge and signed King Charles’s death warrant. He made his will on April 4, 1657, and died shortly thereafter with many outstanding debts.Footnote ⁷² In contrast, two months later, on June 6, 1657, Sir Edward Hopton paid Simon £150 on the £2,500 he had borrowed. Hopton had fought with the royalist armies, although his father favored parliament.Footnote ⁷³ Hopton paid interest again on the same £2,500 in 1659, this time £76 for six months and thirteen days.

Sir Christopher Hatton (1605–1670), one of Charles I’s courtiers who fought on his side, was made Baron Hatton in 1643. He went abroad after the king’s defeat returning to England in 1656. Based on Hatton’s estate, worth £2,200 a year, Simon Bennet repeatedly loaned him money on his property holdings beginning in 1658. “The Lord Hatton and his sonne upon a mortgage of Hatton House and gardens and the manor of Gretton in Northamptonshire £4000 payable with interest viz 22 August 1659 £240; 22 Aug. 1660 £240; 22 Aug 1661, £4240.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Later, in 1663, Hatton, Bennet, and Russell leased a piece of land in Holborn belonging to Hatton House for forty-two years.Footnote ⁷⁵ Bennet also loaned money to his royalist brother-in-law, Sir Clifford Clifton, £30 here, £100 there, as well as loaning £400 to his cousin Ambrose Bennet who was one of the Bennet scholars at University College, Oxford.

In 1659 Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda offering pardons to those who had participated in the Civil War except for the signers of Charles I’s death warrant. In June 1660, Simon Bennet declared that he laid hold of the king’s pardon granted at Breda and promised future obedience.Footnote ⁷⁶ Once pardoned, Bennet became one of Charles II’s moneylenders and was again appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire in the 1660s. Such a position was not without patronage. When his cousin Sir Henry Bennet, who now held a position at court and later as Earl of Arlington became one Charles II’s chief ministers, asked to name the under sheriff, Simon regretfully made his excuses saying that he had just named someone himself.Footnote ⁷⁷

By the late 1650s, Bennet had picked up property in the heart of Westminster. Cannon Row was the site of a series of noble houses in the Elizabethan period.Footnote ⁷⁸ In June 1658, Bennet loaned Edward More £1,000 backed by mortgages on manors in Surrey and property on “Channon” Row. Three months later he lent him another £1,300 with interest on another property.Footnote ⁷⁹ More was apparently unable to keep up his payments and the Cannon Row property came into Bennet’s hands. Years later, between 1676 and 1680, lawyers for Emanuel Hospital, an almshouse for poor women established by Ann, Lady Dacre, by her will in 1601, sued Bennet. They claimed that More’s grandfather had granted the hospital 40 shillings a year rent out of his mansion house on Cannon Row, which had now been converted into “Bennet’s court and held by Simon Bennet.” When the City of London subpoenaed Bennet in Buckinghamshire on behalf of the hospital, his attorney repeatedly postponed his answer. Finally, the exasperated attorney for London and the Hospital noted that if Bennet and his attorney asked for further time, “acquaint the court that … the suit being but for a charity of 40s per annum and the charges falling upon … the poor Hospital they ought not to be delayed by the Exceptant who is a very rich man.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Simon’s attitude toward the hospital differed from his grandfather’s who had been the president of two London hospitals and the benefactor of three.

By 1666 Sir Robert Vyner had taken over Sir Thomas Vyner’s goldsmith and banking business and had become one of Charles II’s major sources of funds. Indeed, Simon Bennet had deposited £4,000 of Grace Morewood’s portion in the Vyner bank in 1650. But the Anglo-Dutch War drained Vyner’s finances. On December 2, 1666, Simon Bennet, now a banker himself, ordered Chapman to loan Sir Robert Vyner £2,000.Footnote ⁸¹

By 1674, according to Roger Chapman’s accounts, Simon Bennet held 155 securities or instruments of debt. In comparison, between 1672 and 1677, Sir Robert Clayton, the leading scrivener banker of the day, had 250 securities for debt on his books.Footnote ⁸² Although Simon Bennet’s business was not as large and he is unknown today, his contemporaries referred to him as “Great Bennet” and regularly sought him out for loans. His clients ranged from the greatest to the ordinary, their debts from great sums to small. In 1676 Simon Bennet loaned Charles II £10,000 at 6 percent and in 1678 another £2,000.Footnote ⁸³ In contrast, the year before Richard Wooley, citizen and barber surgeon, agreed to a bond for £60 for a loan of £38.Footnote ⁸⁴ After Simon’s death, his executor Ralph Lee acknowledged to the Court of Common Pleas that Sir Anthony Chester, Baronet, Sheriff of Buckinghamshire, and Member of Parliament, had satisfied the judgment for his £700 debt to Simon Bennet.Footnote ⁸⁵

Mortgages were fungible. In 1658 Henry Gooderick paid off the £3,000 principal that Simon had lent to Haycourt Layton on a mortgage in 1655 “whereupon the estate was reconveyed to Mr. Goodericke and Mr. Layton’s bond of £6,000 for performance was delivered up to the said Mr. Goodericke.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Sir Clement Clark of Ridge in Shropshire and his wife Sarah made a mortgage with Philip Holman on the manor of Hotgrove and adjoining Pledall farm. By an indenture, 23 Charles II, Clark assigned it to Simon Bennet “to whom there is now due £3,640.” Simon now lent Clark a further £360.Footnote ⁸⁷

But Bennet did not always agree to lend. Simon had been an important lender to the Ingoldsby family in Buckinghamshire who had intermarried with the Cromwells as well as a cousin of Bennet’s. Francis Ingoldsby, the oldest brother, sat in the Cromwellian parliaments while his brother Richard signed King Charles’s death warrant but was pardoned at the Restoration. Francis was deeply in debt and ultimately had to sell the family estate in the 1670s. Before that, he turned to Simon Bennet for a series of large loans in the 1660s. In March 1666–1667, Mr. Ingoldsby paid £1,000 “for £2000 there remaining and for interest £48 for which he and his sonne have given bonds and a new security of lands for the £2000 and a bond of £4000 to perform covenant whereupon the old writings and statute were delivered up according to my Cosens Benet’s order.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In October 1672, however, Simon Bennet received a request for funds from a Mr. Robinson and asked Roger Chapman’s advice in a letter marked “Mr. Ingoldsby’s business.” Chapman counseled him against immediately providing further loans because in the previous ten months, from December 17, 1671, to October 2, 1672, Ingoldsby and Robinson had become bound for loans on four different occasions. That totaled £361 plus interest, Chapman sternly wrote, “towards all these we have received towards principal and interest besides charges at several payments £188.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Although the sums were not large, the frequency of the requests gave Chapman pause. The refusal of new loans by Bennet and others and the outstanding debts may have led to the sale of the family estate.

“Once a Mortgage, Always a Mortgage”

Mortgage law was undergoing change in the period when Simon Bennet was making his fortune as a moneylender. Court decisions set new limits to the ability of moneylenders to foreclose on debtors. The common law had allowed the holders of mortgages to foreclose when debtors did not pay their debts on time, even when the amount owed was less than the value of the property. From the fifteenth century on, however, but especially in the seventeenth century, Lord Chancellors developed a doctrine called “the equity of redemption” that provided debtors with equitable relief. By the principle of the equity of redemption, the borrowers always had the right to repay their mortgages even when they missed the payment if they repaid it within a reasonable amount of time. Most importantly, in 1681 Heneage Finch, Earl of Nottingham and Lord Chancellor, in his decision in Newcomb v. Bonham, stated that “Once a mortgage always a mortgage.” Mortgages were taken out to secure loans not to convey property, and with the equity of redemption, the creditor received his money and the debtor kept his land.Footnote ⁹⁰ That Simon Bennet, the Lord Chancellor’s stepbrother, was in the mortgage and loan business provides an additional and previously unknown context for Nottingham’s views.

In the last years of his life, Simon Bennet was still lending money. Roger Chapman’s account book for 1681 shows both the deeds he presented to Simon and the accounts he received and paid out. Thus he delivered deeds to Simon Bennet from Mary Grey, Countess of Kent, John Tracy, 3rd Viscount Tracy of Rathcoole, Sir Walter Bagott, Baronet and Member of Parliament for Staffordshire, Nicholas Barnes, Mr. Hartley, Mr. Maynard, and others including Franklin’s deeds for a shop at Stratford.Footnote ⁹¹ William Carpender, the rector of Calverton Church, Bennet’s local minister, audited the books.

Simon Bennet’s large fortune glittered brightly in Buckinghamshire. While Simon brought money to London to invest at interest at the Royal Exchange, his wife Grace received very fine and very valuable gold coins from the business.Footnote ⁹² Grace kept her collection of gold pieces at home in Calverton. Even as new financial instruments appeared, many people still kept gold on hand. Grace Bennet’s hoard, however, would have tragic consequences.

Conclusion

Sir Thomas Bennet demonstrated how provincial younger sons could make commercial fortunes in international trade and then diversify assets into Crown finance, property, and moneylending. Two of Sir Thomas’s sons, Richard and John, also became City merchants, while two eschewed business and identified themselves as country gentlemen. One, Sir Simon, made an extraordinary donation to University College, Oxford that transformed its architecture and fellowship.

Richard, a mercer like Sir Thomas Bennet, began importing cloth but later expanded his business into the East India trade and new goods such as American tobacco. Richard’s son, Simon Bennet, became a private banker in the late 1640s as it was developing in the better-known businesses of Richard Abbott, Robert Clayton, and the Vyners. To his grandfather’s wealth from the international trade in luxury fabrics and Jacobean Crown finance, Simon added profits from the East and West Indies inherited from his father Richard and the lands and legacies of his Bennet uncles and aunt. Simon’s accounts provide insight into the seventeenth-century mortgage market. His business, based on real estate and moneylending, built on the expanding need for credit by the Crown, the nobility and gentry augmented by City shopkeepers.

Simon’s marriage to Grace Bennet, daughter of Gilbert Morewood, grocer and East India merchant, also brought Simon wealth from global trade. How Gilbert Morewood made his fortune is the story, we will turn to in the next chapter. By the third generation, all of Sir Thomas’s male descendants identified themselves as country gentleman, even Simon, described as “great Bennet of Buckinghamshire.” In the 1670s and 1680s, Simon and Grace Bennet invested their capital in large marriage portions to ensure their daughters married well. Even earlier, the Bennet and Morewood fortunes had begun to underwrite their entry into the Stuart elite, a political and social network including the court, the nobility, as well as the upper gentry that did not reject but most often welcomed their wealth made in trade and finance.Footnote ⁹³