Erasmus Smith

Erasmus Smith (1611–1691) was an English merchant and a landowner with possessions in England and Ireland. Having acquired significant wealth through trade and land transactions, he became a

Erasmus Smith was born in 1611 and baptised on 8 April of that year at

In July 1642 Roger Smith subscribed £225 under the terms of the Adventurers' Act 1640, whereby money loaned to the government of Charles I for the purpose of suppressing the Irish rebellion was secured by lands to be confiscated in that country. The lands had been confiscated in law but it would require the overthrow of the rebels in order to realise those property assets. The subsequent Doubling Ordinance of 1643 allowed those who had subscribed to receive twice the amount of land if they added a further 25 per cent of their initial financial aid: Roger Smith accepted those terms, contributing a further £75 in July 1643 and then two more payments of £75 in August and in October of that year.^[7][b]

Erasmus Smith had become a "Turkey merchant".^[c] He was a Protestant and, like his father, by 1650 he was supplying foodstuffs^[d] to Oliver Cromwell's armies in the civil wars of that time. This applied in particular to military activities in Ireland, where the rebellion of 1641 was believed by him and others to have resulted in part from a failure of education in that country.^[3][8][9]

W. J. R. Wallace, in his history of Smith and the eponymous Trust, notes that the first record of Erasmus being in Ireland is from 1648 and that

Erasmus was clearly a businessman first and foremost; any attempt to put him into a political stereotype as a Roundhead and then accuse him of political double-dealing seems inaccurate.^[11]

By the time that the rebellion was suppressed in 1653, and just prior to the first assignments of land under the terms of the Settlement of Ireland Act, 1652, Roger had registered the transfer of his investment to Erasmus.^[3][7][e] Erasmus had speculated by buying out the interests of other subscribers, who had tired of the delay in seeing a reward from their investment; and he was also entitled to further land grants in payment for his supplies to the army. What began as a grant of 666 acres (270 ha) eventually became — by the 1680s, after various wranglings and adjustments — over 46,000 acres (19,000 ha) situated in nine counties,^[10] and Erasmus had an estimated worth of £120,000.^[3][8][9][f] Some of these lands, notably those in Connaught, may have been obtained fraudulently by Erasmus, who together with his nephew Edward Smith, sat on the committee based at Grocers' Hall whose purpose was the allocation of lots for the distribution of land between the debenture holders. Edward Smith was subsequently appointed to a Court of Claims in Dublin, where he may also have favoured his uncle Erasmus in his applications for land.^[4]

Philanthropy

Ireland

Although Smith visited Dublin while overseeing his land purchases,^[4] he had no desire actually to live in Ireland. In 1655 – the year that his father died – he proposed that some of the profits from his Irish lands should be used to support five Protestant schools for boys. A Trust was established for this purpose in 1657, in relation to which Smith and the Grocers' Company had various powers of oversight. There were 18 trustees, the principal of whom was Henry Jones, who was soon to become Protestant Bishop of Meath.^[3][4][14] There have been various suggestions since at least the 19th century that creating the trust may not have been an altruistic act but rather one intended to curry favour and counter any possible legal challenges to holdings over which he had a tenuous claim, such as those obtained in Connaught.^[4] Writing in 1824, Hely Dutton said in his Statistical Survey of County Galway that

Well knowing that his titles and tenures were very precarious, and liable at a future period to be litigated, he very cunningly made a grant of lands for the founding and endowment of Protestant schools, and other charitable purposes, for which he [later, in 1669] obtained a Charter ... appointing the bench of bishops, the lord chancellor, the judges, the great law officers, all for the time being, governors and trustees; well knowing that if any flaw should ever appear in the patents, titles or tenures, under which he got the estates, the law officers would always protect and make the title good to his heirs.^[4]

The Trust initially encompassed 3,381 acres (1,368 ha) of his land. In keeping with his religious views, the schools were to teach their pupils "fear of God and good literature and to speak the English tongue", and both prayers and

Wallace argues that Smith

adapted to the different versions of Protestantism which were favoured by successive governments during the Commonwealth and the Restoration. Since these did not involve denial of any of the fundamentals of his faith, the changes were probably not too painful. He retained his sympathy for the Puritan divines of his youth to the end of his life, as witnessed by some of the bequests in his will.^[17]

A

During his lifetime, the Irish schools were not as successful as Smith had anticipated. He and others attributed this to the resentment shown by Catholics, and there was also resentment from those charged with sending Irish rent money to England's Christ's Hospital.[3]

The arrangement by which an annual grant was given to

Smith was a benefactor during the period of reconstruction. He became frustrated that, during a time when the hospital was so clearly in need of financial assistance, the trustees of his Irish munificence were choosing to procrastinate in their remittances of the annual grant.[20] By the mid-1670s he had determined to use the powers granted to him under the terms of the Royal Charter in order to divert surplus funds from the Trust to the hospital,^[21] and by 1681 relations between Smith and the trustees were so strained that both the governments in London and in Dublin were involved in attempts to determine who had responsibility both for the administration and collection of income and for the distribution thereof. One such involved person was Sir John Temple, the Solicitor-General for Ireland, who asserted that anomalies between the stipulations of 1667 and the Charter of 1669 showed that the revenue should stay in Ireland, and also that there was in fact no surplus available in any event because the Trust had not at that time met with all of its responsibilities in Ireland under the terms of the Charter.^[22]

Various parties then engaged in legal actions and in petitions to both Charles II and his successor from 1685, James II. With the added complication of James II being overthrown by William of Orange, the dispute remained unresolved at the time of Smith's death.^[23]

Death and legacy

Smith had married Mary Hare, the 20-year-old daughter of Hugh Hare, the 1st Baron Coleraine, in 1670 when he was 59. The couple had nine children, five of whom were baptised in Clerkenwell, where he had lived at St John's Court for many years.^[3][15]

In 1683 he bought the manor of

Smith's six sons and three daughters mostly died young. One, Hugh Smith, inherited Weald and Hamerton from his older siblings in 1732 and appointed his two daughters as co-heirs. One of those daughters, Lucy, married into the Stanley family. Her husband changed his surname to become James Smith-Stanley, Lord Strange, and the couple were the parents of Edward Smith-Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby.^[25][26]

As of 2016^[update], the Erasmus Smith Trust continues to operate.^[27]

Recognition

Four professorships at Trinity College are named after him:^[8]

• Erasmus Smith's Chair of Natural and Experimental Philosophy
  (established 1724)
• Erasmus Smith's Chair of Hebrew (1724)
• Erasmus Smith's Chair of Modern History
  (1762)
• Erasmus Smith's Chair of Mathematics
  (1762)

References