Talk:William Hedges (colonial administrator)

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HEDGES, William Co Co Bassishaw, 1677-80 Ald Portsoken, 1693-1701 (1) ? St Stephen Walbrook, 1674, Bassinghall Street, 1677, St Michael Bassishaw (2) MER, fr 1670, by R (£50), M, 1688, 1710 (3) b 12/14 Oct 1632 at Cork, Ireland, d 5 Aug 1701, bur ? Stratton St Margaret, Highworth, Wilts (4) Will PCC 113 Dyer pr, 20 Aug 1701 f Robert Hedges of Youghall, Ireland, m Catherine, da of Edward Wakeman, mar (A) Susan, da of Nicholas Vanacher of St Helen, (B) 1687, Anne, da of Paul Nicholl and Anne Kendrick of Hendon, Middx, wid of Col John Searle of Finchley, Middx (5) Merchant, Chief Officer of EIC in Bengal, 1681-7, Comm EIC, 1681-2, Gov of Bengal, 1682-4 Assis LC, 1675-9, 1681-2, 1688-9, 1694-9, Assis RAC, 1689-9, 1694, 1696 Director of Bank of Eng, 1694-1700 (6) Bank stock, 1698, £5,100, Welsh mining stock, RAC stock £500 of original stock, 1671 Personalty, Mar 1701/2 £10,656 (7) Land Cork, Ireland (8) Kt 6 Mar 1687/8 Sheriff, 1693 (1) Bro-in-law of Jeremy SAMBROOKE (B) bro, bro Sir Charles Hedges, LLD, Sec of State to William III and Anne (9)

From: 'Hackshaw - Hyatt', The Rulers of London 1660-1689: A biographical record of the Aldermen and Common Councilment of the City of London (1966), pp. 81-95. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=31884. Date accessed: 30 September 2006.

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On the following 3 Sept. he was chosen agent and governor of the company's affairs in the Bay of Bengal. He was instructed to put a stop to the growing exactions of the native rulers and their subordinates, to check the recently organized efforts of the 'interlopers' to break through the company's monopoly, and to punish the dishonesty of many of the company's own servants. In particular he was to arrest his predecessor, Matthias Vincent.

Hedges sailed from the Downs on 28 Jan 1682, anchored in Balasore Road on 17 July and reached Hoogly on 24 July. His want of tact and prudence brought him into constant collision with his associates in the council at Hoogly, especially with Job Charnock [qv]John Beard, and Francis Ellis, and in the end they proved too strong for him. His detention of Beard's letter to Sir Josiah Child, the contents of which he had contrived to know, subjected him to the ill-will of the latter. On 21 Dec. 1683 the court issued a formal revocation of his commission, which reached him on 17 July 1684, He accordingly left Hoogly, embarked on 30 Dec., visited Persia on his way, and landed in Dover 4 April1687. On 6 Mar. 1688 he was knighted by James II and became a member of the Mercer'sCompany. On 26 May 1690 he, together with Thomas Cook, was put forward by the church party as a candidate for the shrievalty of the city of London, but neither won. In June 1698 hewas chosen sheriff along with Alderman Abney. A month later he was 'elected alderman forPortsoken ward. In 1694 he was chosen one of the twenty-four directors of the 'New Bank'(Bank of England), and four or five years later resumed to a certain extent his connectionwith the East India Company. In 1698 the old company formed a 'grand committee' of twenty-six gentlemen associated with the twenty-six of their court to deal with certain resolutions hostile to their interests which had been passed by the Commons on 24 May.

A similar committee was again formed in Jan. 1699, and of this last Hedges and Sir John Letheuillier were members. The two were deputed on 17 Jan. in that year to open negotiations for coalitions with the new company. In 1700 Hedges was a candidate for the mayoralty, but was not successful. He died in London on 6 Aug. 1701, and was buried, as directed in his will, with his first wife at Stratton on the 16th. He was twice married.His first wife, Susanna, eldest daughter of Nicholas Vanacker of Erith, Kent, died in childbirth at Hoogly on 6 July 1683 leaving two sons, William and Robert, and a daughter Susanna. He married as his second wife, on 21 July 1687, Anne, widow of Colonel John Searle of Finchley, and by her had two sons, John and Charles. In 1698 he bought land to the value of £ 200 in Stratton, and settled it for an augmentation of the vicarage and better maintenance of the vicar and the vicar's widow forever. He also directed that a sermon on charity should be preached annually by the vicar ' the next Sunday to the sixth of July,' the day of his first wife's death. The sermon is suspended, though the endowment continues. Hedges's 'Diary,'commencing on 25 Nov. 1681, and terminating abruptly on 6 March 1688, was purchased by Mr.R. Barlow of a bookseller named Bohn in High Street, Canterbury, on 20 Sept. 1875. The manuscript has been presented by Mr. Barlow to the India Office, whence in all probability it originally came. It was printed by the Hakluyt Society under the editorship of Colonel Sir Henry Yule, in 1887. A second volume of biographical and miscellaneous illustrations of the time in India was issued in 1888.

"The Diary of (Sir) William Hedges, Esq. during his agency in Bengal; as well as on his voyage out and return overland (1681-1687)", transcribed by R. Barlow, Esq. Burt Franklin, publishers, New York, NY; originally published by the Hakluyt Society. In three volumes.

Transcribed for the Press, with introductory Notes, etc. by R. Barlow, Esq., and illustrated by Copious Extracts from Unpublished Records, etc. by Colonel Henry Yule, R.E., C.B., Ll.D., President of the Hakluyt Society. 1887 (1886).

The four-armed god Vishnu is one of the earliest recorded Indian sculptures to have entered a western museum. In 1690 the Ashmolean Book of Benefactors records the gift of this statue from Sir William Hedges, formerly governor of the East India Company in Bengal, to the newly founded Museum. This item exemplifies the early influx of Indian art into the West.

alderman of London

Henry Yule

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Hedges, Sir William (1632–1701), merchant, was born on 21 October 1632 at Coole, co. Cork, the eldest son of Robert Hedges (1604–70) of Youghal and his wife, Catharine (d. 1649), daughter of Edward Wakeman of Mythe, near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire. Robert Hedges also held land in Stratton, Wiltshire, the county of the family's origin, where their surname was changed from Lacy.

The early career of William Hedges is obscure. He became a Turkey merchant, was sent to Smyrna as a Levant Company factor, and by 1668 had become the company's treasurer at Constantinople. He was succeeded in that position by Dudley North. He returned to England in 1670 and became a member of the London Mercers' Company and purchased £500 of the original share capital of the Royal African Company. In 1677 he resided in Basinghall Street, near Guildhall, in the heart of the city's commercial centre. He was a Levant Company assistant in 1675–9 and 1681–2, and a common councilman for his ward of Bassishaw in 1677–80. A close neighbour in Bassishaw was his merchant brother-in-law Jeremy Sambrooke. Hedges' first wife, Susanna, eldest daughter of Levant merchant Nicholas Vanacker of Erith, Kent, was a sister of Sambrooke's wife. Hedges' marriage to the daughter of a merchant of Dutch extraction associated him with London reformed and dissenting protestants. His brother-in-law Sambrooke would become a leading urban dissenter. Hedges himself subscribed to a public loan to Charles II that was promoted by London dissenters in 1670 in the hope of blunting the Conventicle Act of that year, but he eventually identified with the Church of England.

In April 1681 Hedges joined Sambrooke as a member of the court of committees, or directing board, of the East India Company. In September of that year he was chosen as the company's agent or administrator for its factories in the Bay of Bengal. He arrived there in July 1682, taking up residence in Hooghly. His instructions were to renegotiate the terms of the company's operations in Bengal with the regime of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, to curtail the trade of English interlopers in the company's monopoly, and to better manage the company's Bengal factors. Hedges' fluency in Arabic and Turkish and his familiarity with Islamic conventions earned him the respect of the nawab of Dacca, Shaista Khan. The increasing importance of the English trade to the local economy also provided him with important leverage. The nawab agreed to petition the emperor for a renewal of the company's exemption from Mughal customs, which Hedges reckoned would save some £20,000 in annual expenses.

Hedges was less successful with his more unruly countrymen in Bengal, whose behaviour left the nawab fuming that the English were a ‘base, quarrelling people, and foul dealers’ (Diary, 1.153). The company had ordered Hedges to apprehend Thomas Pitt, the ancestor of two prime ministers, and the most successful interloper in India. But this ‘haughty, huffying, daring’ entrepreneur eluded him (ibid., 3.x). Hedges was similarly outmanoeuvred by Job Charnock, a thirty-year veteran of India and the chief factor at Cossimbazar, who presided over a trade that profited the company while lining its servants' pockets. When Charnock defied every effort Hedges made to impose order, he lamented that ‘It's absolutely necessary that one of us two be displaced’, and Hedges promptly was (ibid., 1.146). Charnock and his cronies had the ear of the sometime East India Company governor Sir Josiah Child, to whom they provided private intelligence. Hedges was sacked by the court of committees when he detained a letter directed to Child. In the meantime, his wife had died in childbirth at Hooghly in July 1683.

Hedges sailed from Bengal for the Persian Gulf in December 1684, with a cargo of Indian cloth. He arrived in Persia in May 1685. He travelled overland to Iskenderun with his goods, and apparently with his wife's remains, frequently negotiating with local officials and customs collectors and visiting English traders and other Europeans in Esfahan, Baghdad, Mosul, and Aleppo. He arrived in England in April 1687 and was interviewed by Lord Chancellor Sir George Jeffreys, who, according to Hedges, was sympathetic about his treatment by Child. Again taking up residence in Basinghall Street, where he kept at least one ‘Black-more servant’, Hedges also remarried, his second wife being Anne (d. 1724), daughter of Paul Nicholl and Anne Kendrick of Hendon, Middlesex, and the widow of Colonel John Searle of Finchley. They were married at St Michael Bassishaw in July 1687 by John Tillotson, dean of Canterbury.

Within months of his return Hedges was appointed by James II to the London lieutenancy commission; and in 1688 he was knighted by James and chosen master of the Mercers' Company. He was nevertheless an early subscriber to a January 1689 London loan to the prince of Orange. After the revolution of 1688 he remained on the London lieutenancy commission, also serving as colonel of a trained band regiment and on the Middlesex lieutenancy commission. Hedges re-entered civic politics in 1690. As the tory interest revived in London, he was unsuccessfully promoted by the ‘church party’ for the shrievalty (Luttrell, 2.47). In 1693 he was chosen for the London shrievalty with dissenting alderman Thomas Abney, apparently with whig support, against a tory candidate. Hedges was also chosen alderman for the ward of Portsoken, remaining in that office until his death. In 1694, when the subscription for the Bank of England was opened, he made an investment of £4000 and was chosen a director, continuing in that capacity until 1700. He had by that time also renewed his investments in the East India Company, from which he seems to have withdrawn after his Bengal experience.

Hedges' trading and investment interests, as well as his personal connections to both dissent and the church, placed him in the ambiguous middle of a whig–tory political divide being transformed by European warfare and the country's ‘financial revolution’. As a shareholder in the Bank of England and the ‘old’ East India Company, he straddled the fence between the aggressive commercial capitalism promoted by William III's wartime whig ministry and the established world of tory investment. As a Bank of England director and as a Levant Company assistant (again in 1688–9 and 1694–9), Hedges rubbed shoulders with investors and traders who took a leading role in the whiggish bank and ‘new’ East India Company of 1698. Yet his continuing involvement in both the ‘old’ East India Company and the Royal African Company (of which he was an assistant in 1689–90, 1694, and 1696) kept him in association with merchants and investors who were hostile to whig commercial initiatives. Hedges' cross-grained politics matched those of his kinsman Sir Charles Hedges, a ‘moderate tory’ who became secretary of state in 1700.

When the two East India Companies made early efforts to co-operate in trade in 1699, Hedges was appointed by the ‘old’ company as one of its representatives for dealing with agents of its new counterpart. In 1700 Hedges was promoted by the whigs, again with the dissenting Abney (a fellow Bank of England director), for the London mayoralty in opposition to two strong church tory candidates, one of whom was also deputy governor of the ‘old’ East India Company. Abney was chosen. Hedges also served as master of the Mercers' Company for a second time in 1700.

Hedges died at Basinghall Street, London, on 5 August 1701 and was buried ten days later at St Margaret's, Stratton, in Wiltshire, where his first wife had previously been interred. He was survived by his second wife, by two sons from each marriage, and by a daughter from his first marriage. He still owned land in co. Cork at the time of his death. An inventory of his estate recorded his possession of ten family portraits, another eighty-eight paintings and prints, and household furnishings that reflected his Eastern travels. He had previously settled land on the Stratton parish as an augmentation to the vicarage and had directed that an annual charity sermon be preached on the anniversary of his first wife's death.