Barclays Bank History Series II

 A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank

PART TWO - From Feudalism to Banking 

Continued from Part One 

Remnants of Feudalism

In the previous section, we introduced you to Robert Barclay, known as "The Apologist." In 1676, the same year his "Apology for the True Christian Divinity" was published, Robert traveled with his fellow Quaker, William Penn, to Holland and Germany, seeking help for a colony Penn was setting up in America. 

While Robert was away from the family residence in Ury, his father, Col. David Barclay, had been imprisoned. Colonel David Barclay, as we learned previously, had fought numerous battles as a protector of the English and Scottish King James, designated I and VI in the respective countries, and had a hand in assuring that Queen Elizabeth was placed on the throne.  

Robert Barclay, Apologist

Elizabeth I was a daughter of Henry VIII by one of his wives, and her half-sister Mary was another of Henry's daughter by a different wife. Elizabeth adopted the established Church of England, while Mary, who spent her childhood in exile in France, favored Roman Catholicism. Because Scotland had been closely aligned with Catholic France in the past centuries, decades of wars occurred before the two countries could be fused into what is today called the United Kingdom.

Col. David Barclay decided in 1666 to become neutral in the raging civil wars, reflected by his conversion to the Quaker religion. Robert was also leaning in that direction and was already close to the higher-ups in the movement, such as William Penn. It was his father's imprisonment which motivated him to write the treatise (see above) for which he is noted. 

Robert’s writings were not only effective in helping to free his Quaker friends and family from prison, but he was consequently rewarded in 1679 by being raised to the lowest rung on the ladder of upper class during the last days of Scottish feudalism. The lands Col. David Barclay acquired at Ury received a royal charter as a “free barony.” [Source:  Ancestry.com. North America, Family Histories, 1500- 2000 (database on-line). Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016, p. 72. 

A more well-known example of a free barony is one created for Sir George Carteret, a contemporary of Colonel Barclay, in his family lands in the Channel Islands:

Carteret's Seigneuries

Carteret had defended Elizabeth Castle on his native Isle of Jersey until 1651, making it the last fortress to fly the royal banners during the “interregnum” in which Parliament controlled the government and the king’s sons were in exile. Carteret had also proclaimed Charles II King of England at “old” Jersey’s capital city of St. Helier soon after his father’s execution. [Source:  Joseph R. Klett, “The Founding of New Jersey,” © 2016 Discover NJ History.org.]

Sir George Carteret--grandson of Helier Carteret--was a son of Helier's eldest son, Philippe, who succeeded Helier as Seigneur of St. Ouen and Sark. The Carteret family had established itself centuries earlier on the Island of Sark, in time spreading to Jersey, where Helier's third son, William, became a Jurat of the Royal Court. Sir George's uncle, Amias, founded the line of "de Carterets of Trinity" to become Jurat of the Royal Court of Guernsey, then its Lieutenant Governor and Bailiff. 

The Channel Islands, as remnants of the Duchy of Normandy, are still held directly by the crown on a feudal basis as self-governing possessions of the British Crown with the "seigneurial class" having been paramount in social hierarchy of the islands for many centuries. Seigneurs are commonly referred to by the names of their original fiefs and still participate annually in the Court of Chief Pleas in Guernsey and the Assize d'Heritage in Jersey. Purchasing a Channel Island fief is possible for anyone, regardless of nationality or citizenship, although sales occur infrequently, since fiefs tend to pass down within families. 

Carteret Seigneury

Seigneuries at the Isle of Jersey--St. Ouen in the northwest corner of the island and Trinity Manor, pictured to the right. It's easy to confuse our Barclay family with that of "Lord John Berkeley," who was named as a partner of Carteret in the Carolina colony, and who at one time had an interest in New Jersey. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Carteret was one of the eight original proprietors in 1663 to whom King Charles II granted the area of Carolina in North America. 

The following year Carteret also received property rights to half of New Jersey, which he named for his birthplace, Jersey in the Channel Isles. Friction arose in the new colony when Swedes and Dutch settlers there made prior claims to part of the land claimed for their respective Crowns. Carteret's co-owner, John Berkeley, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton, sold out to a Quaker group controlled by William Penn and his Barclay family associates in 1674. These new owners joined with Carteret in dividing New Jersey into two halves in 1676, a century before the American Revolution would begin. 

American Colony--East Jersey

The Quakers took the West half, and Carteret kept  East Jersey, but not long after the division, he died, and his heirs sold East Jersey it to William Penn and his associates, the Barclays being the largest investors. 

Col. David Barclay after his marriage to the White Rose of Scotland, also was favored by King Charles II and his brother James (then the Duke of York), close relatives of Katherine Gordon. But it was his connection to William Penn and his fellow Quakers which caused  David and his son Robert to be successively elected Governor of  East Jersey, albeit an election ratified by King Charles II. We have no evidence either of the two Barclay governors visited America. What we do know is that David's youngest son, David, Jr. made two successful trips to New Jersey. On his third return, in 1684, he was unfortunately lost at sea. Following his death, an older sibling, John, moved to America and lived out his remaining life at Perth Amboy, New Jersey.  [Source: Joseph R. Klett, “The Founding of New Jersey,” © 2016 Discover NJ History.org.] 

Referring back to Part One, the chart titled Pedigree I leads us to the end of the line of the Barclay family through which the title of Laird of Ury passed--five generations in all to rely on the feudal land system that had mostly been displaced over time by a merchant class that challenged the importance of royal patronage.

Robert Barclay, the Quaker Apologist, close friend of William Penn, lived only four years after his father's death. He and his siblings remained in that part of Scotland between Aberdeen and Dundee for the remainder of their lives, where his eldest surviving son, Robert of Ury, continued the tradition of passing the title Laird of Ury to each successive generation of eldest sons named Robert. 

  

Barclay and Freame

The next branch of the Barclay family begins with the second son of  Robert the Apologist. David, named for his grandfather. Born in 1682, this David Barclay gradually established a new branch of the family, which began when he left Scotland for London to apprentice himself to a linen draper in Cheapside, an area in north London composed mostly of Quakers. 

Over time, the firm became increasingly focused on supplying German, Scottish and Irish linen products to the colonies in America, and when David retired in 1767, his firm was one of the largest in the north American trade, owning ships, and trading to New York, Pennsylvania, the Chesapeake, and the West Indies," according to an excellent website by Nicholas Kingsley.

David's first marriage to Anne Taylor, who died in 1720, left him with two young sons and several daughters to raise. He was at that time a member of  a large group of Quakers which since 1666 had been meeting at Devonshire House (formerly the London home of the Cavendish family). A prior headquarters at the Bull and Mouth Inn had been destroyed in the Fire of London. The Bull and Mouth would be rebuilt, and we find it mentioned later in the family genealogy as a site for family weddings or funerals.

From "A Handbook of London Bankers: With Some Account of Their Predecessors the Early Goldsmiths...," by Frederick George Hilton

 

At Devonshire House, David met his second wife, then the 21-year-old Priscilla, whose father was a fellow Quaker named John Freame, They married in 1723, and their first child was born in March 1727 at Cheapside. Priscilla was barely older than the six children (born between 1708-18) during David's first marriage, to whom she became stepmother.

Barclay the "Pedestrian"

David's eldest son James (born to Anne Taylor Barclay) married Sarah Freame, a younger sister of his stepmother, and worked at the bank until his death in 1766. His daughter Anne Barclay was married in 1756 to James Allardyce of Scotland and had one daughter, Sarah Anne, born shortly before Anne's death. Sarah grew up to marry Robert Barclay of Ury, known as "the Pedestrian," because of his penchant for doing long walks. 

In the meantime, James’ brother, Alexander Barclay (1711-71), quickly ran through his modest inheritance from his mother. Since David had prospered to the point he was estimated to be worth £100,000 at his death, he was able to secure for Alexander an appointment as Comptroller of Customs in Philadelphia, a post which became very useful to David's export business. Alexander married in Philadelphia, had a son named Robert born there in 1751. 

Although Alexander remained in Philadelphia until his untimely death in 1771, Robert returned to London to join his grandfather and uncle James in the business, which was expanding, particularly in the area of England where textiles were woven, mostly Norfolk.

After David's second marriage, he continued focusing on the textile trade, but also joined his new father-in-law, John Freame, in some other enterprises. Freame had a grocery and goldsmith business on Lombard Street called Freame & Gould. In 1728, Freame's son Joshua replaced Thomas Gould. After John Freame's death in 1745, Joshua moved into a new building at 54 Lombard Street with a new partner, David Barclay. The business was identified by the "Sign of the Black Spread Eagle." In time, Barclays would adopt this sign as their own logo. 

An excellent website called "Landed families of Britain and Ireland" tells us the Barclays 

"first gave up their commission merchant business, and then gradually wound down their linen export business (which finally ceased trading in 1783). In 1773 Robert went back to America for a couple of years to tidy up his father's affairs, and in 1776 David became a partner in the Freame bank, the oldest-established Quaker bank in London."

So it seems the year 1776 was significant in more ways than one. Partnerships were formed between Freame and Barclay family members, each with a new firm name that sometimes included other partners as well. Each one adopted as an official logo a variation of the sign that hung outside the original Freame business. [See Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah, Barclays: The Business of Banking 1690–1996, the copyright of which is owned by the bank itself.]

Click to enlarge. Credit to Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah ©Barclays Bank PLC 2001

The Quaker Factor

John Freame's influence in the Quaker community had been profound. "The Friends deposited their ‘national stock’ (that is, their central funds, amounting to £1100 in 1695) in his bank from an early stage, and he knew the Quaker luminaries of the day intimately. He was frequently called upon to arbitrate in Quaker business (as well as religious) matters and served as clerk to the Friends' supreme body, the yearly meeting, in 1711." [Source: Ackrill and Hannah].

 

Although Quakers were noted for their moderation, they sometimes hid behind that placid veneer a more avaricious inclination. Take the South Sea Bubble for example. The same authors revealed a side of John Freame he had tried to hide for the last years of his life:

John Freame spent more time on Quaker affairs after his son entered the bank. He also reconstructed the London Lead Company (of which he became governor), following revelations in the later 1720s of misuse of its funds by Quaker fraudsters in the South Sea Bubble affair. He died in 1745, his wife having predeceased him in 1727; his funeral at Winchmore Hill, in the burial-ground of the Quaker meeting-house near his country home, Bush Hill, north of London, was the Friends' equivalent of a Westminster Abbey interment. ["Quaker Bankers in Britain".]

Click to enlarge

An American Quaker historical site reported that David Barclay, was in the early 1700s an investor in the Pennsylvania Land Company, which in a roundabout way was involved in a slave-smuggling enterprise that began when a man named Hoskins, Barclay's fellow investor in Pennsylvania lands, took the company’s capital and invested it in the South Sea Company. The South Sea Company (SSC), another joint-stock company, was a forerunner to today's corporate shells. Part of its business was to acquire enslaved Africans to be used by investors in land in South America. During its heyday,  SSC transported "just over 34,000 enslaved people across the Atlantic, with a mortality rate of 11%." 

While James Barclay's father, David Barclay had only invested in Pennsylvania lands, his father-in-law John Freame had made an investment in the South Sea Company itself. Quakers, however, were not the only investors in he South Sea Company. Both Kings George I and George II were governors of SSC and were heavily invested in the South Sea Company, according to David Conn's 2023 article in the Guardian. The “South Sea bubble” looked then like what we call today a massive Ponzi scheme, based on a contract to supply 4,800 adult, healthy males to Latin America annually. It would be more than a hundred years later before the trade in African slaves would be abolished in England, even longer in America.

Hoare to Lloyds Bank

One of the first Quakers to form a society to stop the human trafficking in African slaves was Samuel Hoare, Jr. (1751-1825), who also has a prominent role in the Barclay genealogy. As a teenager, Samuel became an apprentice to Henry Gurney, a woollen manufacturer in Norwich, where he met and married Sarah Gurney and a few years later would be notable as a partner in Barnett, Hoare & Co., a bank which traded under the sign of the black horse. 

Mergers followed, to form Barnetts, Hoares, Hanbury & Lloyd and ultimately in 1884, Lloyds Banking Company took over Barnetts, Hoares, Hanbury & Lloyd in a bid to gain a foothold in London and acquired the black horse sign which continues in use as the Lloyds Bank logo. As banking families tend to marry among themselves, we find several marriages of Barclays not only to Gurneys, but to Hoares and Hanburys as well.

Norfolk's Textile Mills  

In the meantime, Alexander's American-born son, Robert Barclay, arrived in London at the age of 12 and was taken under the wing of his English family of Quakers. His marriage to Rachel Gurney, daughter of a wealthy textile merchant banker, reflected the importance of that industry to Robert's grandfather David and his Freame in-laws. 

Norwich mills

The Gurney family's silk and woollen mills were located in Norwich, a textile center of Norfolk, where “master weavers” owned and managed dozens of woolen looms, some becoming very wealthy “by handling funds and extending credit to their fellow weavers,” and the most successful, like the Gurney and Harvey families, forming what was called “country banks.” [Source: Peter Clark, “Norwich since 1550,” The English Historical Review, Volume CXXI, Issue 491, April 2006, Pages 544–546, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cel024. 

Grandfather David Barclay (1682-1769), although he had left Scotland during his youth, maintained the feudal connection shared with his relations at Kincardine or Aberdeen, Scotland, through subsequent marriages between his children and cousins. Col. David's daughter Jean, for example, who had married Ewen Cameron of Lochniel, saw her daughter, Una Cameron, become the wife of Robert Barclay, 4th Laird of Ury. Their son Robert inherited the title as 5th Earl of Ury and later married Lucy, the youngest sister of David's sons, James and Alexander, though she died in 1757 when her daughter Lucy was born.  After Robert, the Laird of Ury, married Sarah Allardyce, combining their two last names before his death in 1797, the Barclay estates in Ury had been more or less dissipated from neglect, as the Barclays moved up in Scottish society and left their house behind. The second Lucy Barclay (daughter of Robert Barclay Allardyce and his cousin Lucy) married an associate of Charles Darwin, Samuel John Galton. A Barclay grandson, Sir Francis Galton, developed the concept of eugenics, which some have called "race science." 

When Lucy Galton's half-sister, Margaret Barclay, married another cousin, Hudson Gurney, whose parents, Richard and Agatha Barclay Gurney had married in 1773, there is evidence that the two families may have had a close relationship with each other even before they left the established religion to become Quakers. Richard's uncle Edmund Gurney had been a highly educated Anglican priest before he was found guilty of offensive speeches in a sermon in Great St Mary's, Cambridge in 1609. 

Timothy Bevan

Possibly the most important of his children's marriages was that of David's daughter Elizabeth's wedding to Timothy Bevan in 1735. Timothy Bevan had been born in Swansea in South Wales, but when he was four years old, his father, Sylvanus Bevan, took a risky step by signing on to an eight-year apprenticeship with a London apothecary. By 1715, his internship completed, Sylvanus opened his own pharmacy at Plough Court off Lombard Street, which at his death in 1727 went to his sons, Sylvanus II and Timothy Bevan. The Bevan brothers were engaged in exporting merchandise to the American colonies as early as 1733.

By the time of his death in 1769, David Barclay had become one of the richest merchants in London, possibly due in large part to his connections with other Quaker merchants in the textile trade. Rachel Gurney's family, for example, founded Gurney's Bank of Norwich in 1770, as a result of their huge trade in woolen and silk fabrics in that region. 

During his career, as David Barclay became more and more prosperous, he relocated his residence first from Cheapside to a community north of London called Winchmore Hill, where the Society of Friends had built a meeting house in 1688. It was there he was laid to rest in 1769.

End of Part Two.