Barclays Bank History Series III-A

A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank  

 

Addendum to Part III - Financing the Brewery

 

From Welsh Nobility to Scottish Quakers

Robust Recount in 1642

One thing we discovered during research was that many have told the Thrale story without much accountability to accuracy. If you can imagine yourself going to see Henry VIII, playing at the Globe in 1613, you may hear the crackling of flames as the thatched roof catches fire and destroys the theater, putting it out of commission until the next year. 

 

 Henry Thrale, who had been rejected in his proposed return to his Parliamentary seat in 1780 which he and his father, Ralph Thrale, had long held in Southwark, died in April 1781. It was his death that forced the Anchor Brewery to be sold. 

 

In the preceding years, Henry had confessed to his wife and their friend, Dr. Samuel Johnston, that his brewing experiments had disastrously almost ruined the beer. His wife then took control, and in a few years had reversed that trend, paying off all his debts, but also earning enough to buy the brewery outright from Edmund Halsey. 

 

She took title in a manner she devised, in an estate planning instrument known as an entailment. At the time she had two sons, who would unpredictably die in the decade to come, so her best-laid plans did, alas, go badly awry.

Phoenix and the Turtle

Hester's Welsh Ancestors - Cotton and Salusbury

 

By having married Hester Lynch Salusbury in 1763, Henry had thus considerably advanced his station in life, since Hester's ancestry connected her to Henry VII's Welsh family who once lived in Penmynydd, North Wales, possibly in the same house in which her mother grew up. The context comes straight out of Shakespeare, who even wrote a poem about Hester's family called The Phoenix and the Turtle, which has been interpreted by so many literary experts, I don't pretend to understand what it's even about.

 

Shakespeare's poem first appeared in an anthology of work published in 1601, two years after the Globe opened at Bankside, by Robert Chester, and was dedicated to Welsh statesman Sir John Salusbury and his wife Ursula Stanley. We leave it for those more steeped in Shakespearean intrigues to settle the question for themselves. Our only point here is in recognizing that the brewery bought by Robert Barclay and his cousins in 1781 was awash in the history of warring royal families long before Barclay took title.

 

Henry VII

Brief Context of Events:  When Henry VI died in 1471, Edward IV became King. Henry (son of Edmund Tudor, Earl of Richmond), who had been brought up in Wales, fled to Brittany in northern France, for safety. Twelve years later, the King died, setting up a contest between two factions claiming the right to the Crown. That contest, of course, led to war, and this one played out in Leicestershire, England--at the Battle of Bosworth Field--where Richard III was killed. The outcome "not only ushered in the Tudor dynasty but also ended the Plantagenet dynasty."

 

 

 

End of the Plantagenets

 Henry then made his way to London, where he was crowned, pledging to his naysayers that he would legitimize his accession by a marriage to Edward's daughter, a deed he accomplished in 1486. 

 

Beaumaris Castle

Before that marriage, however, while Henry had been in Brittany, he was rumored to have fathered at least one child. That's where Hester comes in--as a descendant of that child, Tudur ap Robert Vychan, "a natural son of Henry VII, whom Henry made constable of Beaumaris castle." This illegitimate son is further identified as "the father of Jane, wife of Robert Vychan of Berain in Denbighshire. 

 

Katheryn of Berain - Mother of Wales 

 

Hester's grandfather, John Salusbury, at the age of 14, was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1581, making him only 19 when he married Ursula Stanley, one of many illegitimate children of Henry, 6th Earl of Derby. John and Ursula had a daughter known as Katheryn of Berain, often called "Mam Cymru, The Mother of Wales." 

 

She reminds me of Katherine Gordon born in Scotland in 1621, whom we met in Part One of this series. I think of them as the two Kates--one in Scotland, the other in Wales--who had similar roles in helping bring their respective countries into a United Kingdom.

 

Lleweni Hall, Wales

The irony is not missed by us, however, as we see direct descendants of each woman coming together in Southwark in the year 1781. Hester Thrale, an heir of the Welsh protector of the Queen, sells off her hard-earned brewery to David Barclay, a lineal descendant of the Scottish White Rose, whose father also protected the Stuart royalty. Possibly I've been too influenced by conspiracy theories, but it strikes me as more than a touch ironic. It is, in fact, a symbol of the amalgamation itself--the Scottish and Welsh mothers which united the new kingdom.

 

Could that powerful symbol--Barclay & Perkins Brewery--be more than a symbol? Could it have been acquired by hidden owners, represented by nominee bankers? The question is not only rhetorical, but an honest inquiry posed because of how later events would reveal how vast the wealth was that stemmed from this enterprise.  

 

Barclay Wedding in 1647 

 

To put the players and their timelines in context, recall that Col. David Barclay married Katherine Gordon in Scotland in 1647. This was three generations after his wife's grandfather, Alexander Gordon Sutherland, was kidnapped and forced to marry Barbara Sinclair before his ultimate marriage to Lady Jean, followed by his death in 1594. Jean herself outlived Sutherland, marrying Alexander Ogilvy of Boyne in 1599.

 

War was the only unchanging constant in Scotland as it was in Wales during the same times. Hester Thrale's mother, Hester Maria Cotton, grew up as the daughter of Sir Thomas Cotton, bart., of Combermere and Lleweni and married John Salusbury, who came from "a family of powerful oligarchs in Wales which at the time controlled most of Denbighshire along with their cousins, the Cotton baronets."  

 

The Cottons and Salusburys thus were the pro-Royalist forces in the area of northeastern Wales and England to the south of Liverpool and Manchester. It was this same territory that Hester Thrale made a tour in 1774 with Dr. Samuel Johnson not long after she learned she had inherited Bachegraig House from an uncle. 

 

One of her ancestors, Thomas Salusbury, a traitor to the royal family, was executed as an accomplice to the Jacobites' Babington Plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I. Hester Thrale's father had been educated in Rugby and Westminster Schools, followed by collegiate training in Mathematics at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He then was sent by the Queen to Nova Scotia and returned home by way of Ireland, dying in 1762, almost a year before Hester married Henry Thrale, a brewer in Southwark, in compliance with her mother's advice.

 

Hester--Descendant of Katheryn of Berain 

Each of Hester's parents--not surprisingly, since so many British marriages were between first cousins--was a descendant of Katheryn of Berain, the Welsh counterpart of the White Rose of Scotland. Katheryn, who died in 1591, was the daughter of one of Queen Elizabeth's Welsh protectors, and at one time she became a ward of the Queen. Hester Lynch Salusbury (aka Hester Thrale) was born a century and a half after Katheryn's death. With her father often missing while on missions for the Queen, it has been said that, when told his daughter was to marry Thrale, "a wealthy brewer whose father had the misfortune of being born in a dog kennel on one of Salusbury's estates," he had a heart attack, delaying the marriage until 1763. 

 

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Dr. Johnson, who lived in Lichfield, not far from Birmingham, had lost his wife ten years earlier and had only met James Boswell in 1763, the same year Hester married. Two years later he met the Thrales, who gave him his own nest at Streatham Park about seven miles from the Anchor, and made it his home for the next 17 years or so, several years after Henry Thrale died. 

 

Despite rumors that Hester would marry Dr. Johnson--rumors mostly spread by literary friend James Boswell--she shocked everyone by marrying the piano teacher to her eldest daughter (Johnson dubbed her "Queenie"). Thus did her decades-long friendship with Johnson and Boswell suddenly end.

The Anchor Brewery was, as was common in those days, "entailed" by a deed Hester had herself set up when she paid off the brewery's debt to the previous owner. She received advice about what to do with the brewery when her husband died in 1781 from her close friends--Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. 

 

Since there was no surviving son, the terms of the ownership of the business mandated it be sold. According to Peter Mathias, "Johnson presided over the sale as an executor ...and the brewery was bought for £135,000 by John Perkins and the rich Quaker relatives of his wife—Robert Barclay, David Barclay, and Sylvanus Bevan." 

 

Admiral Elphinstone

This David Barclay is the one we met in Part III, who had been acquainted with Dr. Johnson when he visited Birmingham on one occasion. Barclay also had a relationship with John Perkins, who may have approached him or one of the Bevans about financing the purchase. 

Twenty-five years after the brewery changed from Hester Thrale's hands to David Barclay's, Hester Maria "Queenie" Thrale in 1806 became the second wife of Admiral William George Keith Elphinstone, otherwise known as 1st Viscount Keith Elphinstone, who had fought in the American revolutionary war on the side of Britain--the losing side. Elphinstone remained a soldier and did better in England's war against Napoleon a few years later. Still later, "as the Prince Regent's representative, he received Napoleon's final surrender and supervised the deposed French Emperor's removal to his last exile on St. Helena in 1815. He was elevated to Viscount in 1814."  

 

If war was an unchanging constant during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries in Scotland and Wales,  a close second was the bloody brutality that occurred among the rival clans. You can read a broader synopsis of the rivalry at the "Sutherland Clan History," excerpted below:

During the 1715 Jacobite Rising normal service was resumed and the 16th Earl took arms on the side of the King George I and defended Inverness castle against the Jacobites. Sutherland men were again in the fray on the Government side at the battle of Glenshiel in 1719 which all but ended this chapter of the Jacobite rising. At this time John Gordon, the 16th Earl officially changed his name to Sutherland and was recognised officially as chief in the name and arms of Sutherland by the Lord Lyon.

By John Pettie

When Charles Edward Stuart [aka "Bonnie Prince Charlie] arrived in Scotland to begin the 1745 Jacobite rising the Sutherlands once again came out on the Government side. The Jacobites led by George MacKenzie the Earl of Cromartie took Dunrobin Castle, Sutherland’s clan seat at Golspie – the chief narrowly escaped them by leaving via a back door and making it to the sea where he sailed for Aberdeen. ...

In 1766 William Sutherland the 18th Earl died leaving an only daughter, Elizabeth. ... Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun also threw his hat in and a three way dispute ensued. The case was taken to the House of Lords in 1771 and settled in favour of Elizabeth.

Maybe if the decision had gone differently the fate of the highlands might have been better, Elizabeth married George Leveson Gower, Marquess of Stafford who became the first Duke of Sutherland in 1833. Sutherland knew nothing of the responsibilities of being a clan chief and cared even less. He ruthlessly and aggressively cleared the Sutherland lands aided by his notorious henchman Patrick Sellar. together they cast a black shadow on the landscape that is there to this day.

FROM THE PEERAGE: 

Alexander Gordon, 12th Earl of Sutherland and Lady Jean Gordon had a son--John Gordon, 13th Earl of Sutherland, born on 20 July 1576, and married Agnes Elphinstone, daughter of Alexander Elphinstone, 4th Lord Elphinstone and Jean Livingstone, on 1 February 1600.2 He died on 11 September 1615 at age 39. He succeeded as the 13th Earl of Sutherland on 6 December 1594 (the year Alexander died) and surrendered the Hereditary Shrievalty and Earldom of Sutherland. On 29 April 1601 he was regranted the Hereditary Shrievalty and Earldom of Sutherland with special remainder to his brothers Robert and Alexander, and then to Adam, third son of the 1st Marquess of Huntly.

 

We decided to do a simple google search of some of the names above. The result was:

Lady Mary Frances Elphinstone (née Bowes-Lyon) (1883-1961), Wife of 16th Baron Elphinstone; daughter of 14th Earl of Strathmore

That took us to a photograph of the Christening of Queen Elizabeth II by Vandyk     

Portrait of Lady Mary Frances Elphinstone (née Bowes-Lyon)

 

 

 

 Sitters:

    Prince Arthur, 1st Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (1850-1942), Field Marshal, Governor General of Canada; son of Queen Victoria. Sitter associated with 167 portraits. Identify
    Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022), Reigned 1952-2022. Sitter associated with 976 portraits. Identify
    Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002), Queen of George VI. Sitter associated with 587 portraits, Artist or producer of 1 portrait. Identify
    Lady Mary Frances Elphinstone (née Bowes-Lyon) (1883-1961), Wife of 16th Baron Elphinstone; daughter of 14th Earl of Strathmore. Sitter in 1 portrait. Identify
    King George V (1865-1936), Reigned 1910-36. Sitter in 503 portraits. Identify
    King George VI (1895-1952), Reigned 1936-52. Sitter associated with 569 portraits. Identify
    Queen Mary (1867-1953), Queen consort of King George V. Sitter associated with 411 portraits. Identify
    Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood (1897-1965), Princess Royal. Sitter in 298 portraits. Identify
    (Cecilia) Nina Bowes-Lyon (née Cavendish-Bentinck), Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne (1862-1938), Mother of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother and grandmother of Elizabeth II. Sitter in 5 portraits. Identify
    Claude George Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne (1855-1944), Landowner; grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II. Sitter in 14 portraits. Identify

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barclays Bank History Series III

A Genealogical Study of the Families Who Created the Bank

Part Three--Barclays Buy a Brewery

Southwark--All the World's a Stage 

 

Anchor Brewery next to Globe

In the last year of the 16th Century, William Shakespeare opened his new play, Henry V, in a new theater at Southwark at the south bank of the River Thames. Some say the first play performed was Julius Caesar, though others argue the first was Henry V.

 

"Legend has it that the Globe’s motto was totus mundus agit histrionem, paraphrased in As You Like It (first performed in 1599) as 'all the world’s a stage.'" Shakespeare was a genius, unexcelled to this day. The Anchor Brewery started life immediately next door to the Globe Theatre on Bankside in 1616, two years after the rebuilt Globe reopened.

 

The brewery's owner was Edmund Halsey, who entrusted operation of the brewery to Ralph Thrale and his son Henry, who with their heirs controlled the site during most of the following century, long after the theater was abandoned in 1642. 

 

Victor Keegan, author of "Vic Keegan’s Lost London 1666: The world-leading Anchor Brewery," at On London webpage, explains what makes this brewery relevant to our story:

Barclay & Perkins Brewery 1781

The brewery’s expansion continued when purchased by David Barclay (of the Barclay Quaker banking family) who brought in his nephew Robert Barclay from America who, in the 1780s, teamed up with a senior employee, John Perkins, under the trading name Barclay & Perkins. By 1809 they were producing a world-leading 260,000 barrels a year. In 1955, Barclay Perkins merged with a rival London brewer, Courage. Brewing continued there until the early 1970s. The buildings were demolished in 1981.

The back story about the Anchor Brewery will appear in Part Four, and will put into context the people in whose orbit Robert Barclay was living amongst in the 1780s. It gave him a contact both with members of the ancient Welsh nobility and with members of England's literati of that day, such as Dr. Samuel Johnson and his friend James Boswoth. Once David Barclay (1729-1809) put the brewery into the hands of his nephews, Robert Barclay and, Sylvanus Bevan, it continued to grow until it controlled a large percentage of all beer produced in England. Stay tuned for the story of Barclay & Perkins, in Part Four. 

 

David Barclay's Wife--Daughter of Lloyds Bank Founder

Logo for Lloyds Bank

According to a genealogy of the Lloyd's banking family, David Barclay's second wife was Rachel Lloyd, daughter of Sampson and Rachel Champion Lloyd of Birmingham, who were married in 1767 at the Friends Meeting of Birmingham. 

David Barclay

Two years later they moved into a house he purchased in Hertfordshire, north of London, called Youngsbury, which they had upgraded.He spent his time working on the linen export business, mostly in America, by working with his father's old friend William Penn in Philadelphia. 

Once he saw the revolution and war were inevitable, however, he: 

managed the firm's gradual withdrawal from the export trade. The firm ceased trading altogether in 1783, but by then he had taken up a partnership with the bank. 

He inherited a plantation in Jamaica and its slave population, and in line with his Quaker principles he freed the slaves, paid for them to be taught a trade or handicraft skills, and resettled them on his property in Pennsylvania. He was also one of the close family members who put up the capital to enable his nephew Robert Barclay (1751-1830) to buy the Anchor brewery and establish his highly successful business there. In 1768 he became the first member of the family to own a country house (Youngsbury (Herts)), although it was just a small villa in an unfinished landscaped garden when he acquired it, and he enlarged it considerably and improved the setting. 

Barclay plantation in Jamaica

According to another Quaker website, David and his brother John Barclay inherited property in the West Indies from their mother, Priscilla nee Freame, who died in 1769. 

Seven years later, the year he and wife Rachel Lloyd moved to Youngsbury, he became an active partner in the bank which was then renamed Barclay, Bevan and Bening, which then began developing into a network of "country banks" connected with Norwich and with Birmingham, where it would finance the building of bridges, canals and other trading enterprises, in addition to its old standby of textiles.

David Barclay's youngest sister, Lucy, born in Cheapside in 1737, returned to the Barclays' roots in Scotland by marrying her cousin Robert, born in Scotland in 1732, described by one Blogger as follows:

Robert Barclay (1732) was MP for Kincardineshire from 1788 until his death in 1797, being re-elected in 1790 and 1796 and was a friend of William Pitt the Younger (1759 – 1806), the United Kingdom’s youngest-ever prime minister.  Robert was also involved in local affairs in Kincardineshire as a Commissioner of Supply and as a member of the Board of Agriculture.  He was married twice, firstly to his cousin, Lucy Barclay, the daughter of David Barclay of Cheapside ... in 1756.  He was a great grandson and she was a granddaughter of Robert Barclay (1648), the Apologist.  Lucy died in childbirth the following year, though her daughter, also Lucy, survived. 

Eugenics of Francis Galton

Lucy junior married Samuel John Galton (1753).  One of their sons, Samuel Tertius Galton (1783) married Francis Ann Violetta Darwin, the cousin of Charles Darwin of “Origin of Species” fame.  In turn, one of their children was Francis Galton (1822) an outstanding 19th century polymath, responsible for major contributions in many fields of study, such as the identification of individuals by their fingerprints and the inheritance of human genius.

The second Lucy's marriage thus returned this branch of the family back to England, into the domain of the Lloyd family and the Quaker Meeting at Birmingham. The Galtons were of a scientific bent, involved in the anti-slavery movement, but also made their fortune manufacturing guns. In addition, Sir Francis Galton developed the concept of eugenics which would be used to justify autocratic actions even to the present day.

Though Barclay's banking partners had previously been Quakers, after a generation or two they had become separated from the sect because of marrying outside their faith, and they failed to retain the doctrine of anti-slavery that the Barclays continued to practice.  As a member of the Meeting for Sufferings Committee on the Slave Trade which met from 1783 to 1792, David Barclay no doubt objected when his non-Quaker banking partners--less concerned about owning slaves than he was--nevertheless financed plantation mortgages in the West Indies Trade. As a result:

The brothers [David and John] were mortgagees of an estate called Vaucluse and the enslaved people attached to it on Barbados c. 1780. Sometime around 1785 John and David Barclay took possession in lieu of debts of a 2000 acre cattle pen named Unity Valley in St Ann, Jamaica. 

His book, An Account of the Emancipation of the Slaves of Unity Valley Pen, in Jamaica, published in Dorking in 1825, can be read online. Other research shows that John died in 1787, after the end of the revolutionary war, and "David Barclay took full possession of the estate and determined to emancipate the remaining 32 enslaved people still on Unity Valley. In 1795 he dispatched his agent William Holden to Jamaica with instructions to enact the manumission and then remove all freed persons to Philadelphia, where they would be delivered into the care of the Society for Improving the Condition of Free Blacks, run by Quaker acquaintances."

We saw in Part Two how the Freames had lost a big investment in the South Sea Corporation, so perhaps David Barclay felt justified in rejecting their manner of conducting business. His marriage to his second wife brought him in contact with a Quaker banking family headed by Sampson Lloyd of Birmingham, who provided credit to small manufacturers in the West Midlands. Rachel Lloyd Barclay's younger brother, Charles Lloyd of Bingley House, born in 1748, had received his banking training at the Barclays' counting house in London, but later went to work for the family bank, Hanbury, Taylor, Lloyd, and Bowman--only a couple of doors away from his brother-in-law at 54 Lombard. [Source: Samuel Lloyd, The Lloyds of Birmingham (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1908), p. 32].

 

Other Barclay Relatives

 

The next generation of Barclays came to fruition in 1781 when the David Barclay mentioned above bought the Southwark brewery and put his nephew Robert in place there. The previous year Robert and Rachel Gurney Barclay, became the parents of a son to whom they gave an unusual name--Charles--one of a very few of that name in the Barclay family, and they began a new life in Clapham, not far from Southwark. Eventually, the brewery enabled them to move up to a mansion at Bury Hill, 75 miles west of Clapham.

Bury Hill in Dorking

 

Before she married Robert Barclay, Rachel Gurney had spent an idyllic childhood at her family's rented mansion in Norfolk called Earlham, where five generations of Gurneys lived as happy Quakers while their respective Gurney fathers worked at their profitable woolen and worsted mills in Norwich, located within the orange highlighted territory called East Anglia, show to the right. 

 

Her mother was Elizabeth Kett, whose ancestors had been somewhat notorious in Wymondham, Norfolk a century or two earlier because of the protest they led. Robert Kett had a rebellion named for him, and both he and his brother William Kett were hanged in Wymond-ham in Norfolk in 1549--the same village where Elizabeth Kett, the youngest daughter of Richard Kett of Norwich, grew up many years later.  

 

Kett Ancestor

Robert Kett was an upper middle-class tanner who got caught up in a protest begun by poor villagers in Edwardian days. Sympathizing with his neighbors, who were distraught because common areas they had used for centuries had suddenly been enclosed by fences--Kett saw the enclosure orders were made to benefit wealthy landowners engaged in the woolen trade and were issued by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the uncle of 11-year-old King Edward VI (heir of Henry VIII). 

 

Both Robert and his brother were hanged from local public buildings in a most distasteful manner.  There was a lesson in that, I suppose, for that day. Many generations later, in 1736, Elizabeth Kett married John Gurney of Earlham, a scion of the "principal Quaker family of Norwich." 

 

Norfolk, heart of textile trade

Their son, John Gurney II, later became master of Earlham Hall, where he raised his children, including daughter, Anna Maria Kett, who married her cousin Charles Barclay in 1804.

 

Charles' first cousin Agatha (daughter of David Barclay--1729-1809) had already united the Barclays and Gurneys. Agatha's marriage to Rachel Gurney's older brother, Richard Gurney, was one of numerous weddings between the two Norfolk Quaker families--Gurneys and Ketts--over the centuries, according to The Ketts of Norfolk, a yeoman family, 1836-1914, by Louisa Marion Kett and George Kett (1921).  

 

Barclays, Tritton & Bevan

Barclays, Tritton, and Bevan in 1803

 

At about the same time as his marriage, Charles' name began to appear in newspapers showing his name as a director of one company or another, notable for the fact that the companies whose boards he sat on had  securities being underwritten by Barclays, Tritton and Bevan at 54 Lombard Street. As one example, we show a clip to the right of one such company formed in June 1803, called the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway, which, despite the name, appears to have been only a track bed which charged a toll for those wishing to transport products by horse-pulled wagons over it. 

 

The financing was handled by George Tritton of Wandsworth (1761-1831), one-time High Sheriff of Surrey, assisted by Robert and Charles Barclay, and their banking partners. [Source: Hampshire Telegraph and Naval Chronicle, (Portsmouth, Hampshire, England,13 June 1803), Page 2].

 

George Tritton, like Robert Barclay, at that time, was a brewer and wanted the "railway" built to distribute beer from Wandsworth to Croydon, about 9 miles south of his home at Clapham. This distribution line probably helped the Trittons get a better price for their Ram Brewery, along with its 80 pubs, when they sold in 1831. Ram Brewery produced a different type of beer from that the Anchor Brewery (Barclay & Perkins) made in Southwark.

 

For a decade or two the common interest in brewing beer and being Quakers would unite the Barclay, Bevan and Tritton families as they also became banking partners. 

 

 Charles, on the Barclay side of the brewery, entered the business at a young age, according to Charles Wright Barclay, A history of the Barclay family, with full pedigree from 1066 to 1933 (London, The St. Catherine Press, 1924-34). Soon after 1812, his father, Robert, retired, throwing the main responsibility for management of Barclay & Perkins on Charles' shoulders--or more likely on those of John Perkins.  

Charles found time to "take up political work." He was elected to the traditional seat the Thrales had held in 1815, as the Member of Parliament for Southwark in the Conservative Party. He supported Sir Robert Peel, but was not re-elected in 1818, remaining out of Parliament for some years. 

He and Anna Maria had a country house in Suffolk (Henstead), where the family spent summers until 1823, when they moved to London--43 Grosvenor Place--directly across the street from Buckingham Palace. From there he stood again for Paliament and returned to the House of Commons as  the Member for Dundalk, Ireland, "having purchased the seat, as was the custom before the Reform Bill." [C.W. Barclay, above]

 

They also rented Betchworth Castle, near Dorking, but only until 1830 when he inherited the estates at Bury Hill left by his father Robert. It was just in the nick of time perhaps, as Bletchworth Castle now stands in ruins. That village gets its claim to fame in modern days from the fact that its church appeared in many scenes from the 1994 romantic comedy, "Four Weddings and a Funeral, " with Hugh Grant. 

 

Charles succeeded Robert Barclay Allardice as head of the family of Barclay of Urie and Mathers (also related to Lucy Barclay Galton) in 1854--receiving the "Arms as borne by Colonel David anno 1666." He and Anna Maria Kett Barclay had four sons and three daughters. These children's marriages clearly indicate the family's close relationships with other notable Quaker bankers:

• Daughter Caroline Barclay (1814-78) was married in 1837 at Dorking to John Gurney Hoare (1810-75) of Hampstead--the eldest son of Samuel and Louisa Gurney Hoare. Their son, Samuel Barclay Hoare born in 1841 would become Sir Samuel Hoare, P.C., C.M.G., C.S.I., eventually Secretary of State for India.
• Rachel Juliana Barclay (1816-86) became the second wife of  her brother-in-law, Joseph Hoare, giving birth to John Gurney Hoare in 1847, a few years after their marriage.  

Inbreeding common for royals

The Hoare brothers--John Gurney and Joseph--were not the first Hoare men intermarried with famous Quaker banking families. Marriages between Gurney women and Hoare men, for example, had been going on for generations by then. Their mother and grandmother had been Gurneys, and their Barclay wives shared a grandmother who had also been a Gurney. Marriages between first cousins, although frowned upon by Quaker doctrine, was often easily ignored. 

 

John Gurney and Caroline Barclay Hoare's marriage did result in at least two powerful male descendants: 

1. Samuel John Gurney Hoare, named First Baronet on 7 August 1899, and 
2. His son of the same name, created Viscount Templewood at  Whitehall, July 14, 1944. Both titles, however, became extinct when Viscount Templewood, allegedly a homosexual, though he married Maud Lygon. He died in 1959.

Charles Barclay's eldest son, Arthur Kett Barclay, named for his maternal grandfather, was schooled at Harrow for several years and in 1824 went to work in the brewery in Dorking and became a partner in it in 1828, shortly before romance entered the tale:

 

Prestigious public school

Robert met Rachel Hanbury and fell deeply in love with her. Their mutual attachment was declared and there was no obstacle to their union except Robert’s youth, and his father decreed that he must see a little more of the world before thinking of marriage, so sent the brothers abroad.

They visited Norway, Sweden, Finland, St. Petersburg, and then, “placing their carriage on a sledge, set out for Moscow,” eventually returning home by Smolensk, Warsaw, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Brussels, Lille and Calais. Arthur’s journal records that during the latter part of the journey they travelled day and night “in order to try to keep pace with Robert’s anxious wish to return, and on the 25th day of January, 1830, we drove up to the door at Betchworth in the same little carriage which we had taken from England, wrapped in the furs and Russian dresses which had enabled us to bear the cold of one of the most severe winters known for years.”

Shortly after their return, Robert was admitted into partnership with his uncle David Barclay (of Eastwick, Bury Hill) and Robert Foster Reynolds, constituting the house of business of Barclay Brothers, Merchants. His wedding took place in the following February. [Source: Charles Wright Barclay, op cit.]

Master of Brewers Co.

Arthur Kett Barclay had received the title of Ury and Mather when Charles Barclay died in 1855, two weeks after suffering a serious riding accident, when “in consequence of meeting the hounds, he lost command of his horse, and fell to the ground, sustaining so much injury as to result in his death.”  After Arthur's death in 1869, his son Robert succeeded to the Scottish titles.

Arthur's youngest brother, Thomas George Barclay, lived in Dorking and became Master of the Brewers Company in 1863. During his career he was elected as a director of the Imperial Insurance Company, located at 16 Pall Mall and Old Broad Street, along with other members of the family we will meet in a subsequent segment--Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, Augustus Henry Bosanquet, and James Gordon Mudoch, among others. David Bevan's daughter, Louisa Priscilla Bevan, married Bosanquet in 1825. He died in 1894, leaving no children.

 

 

 

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.