Regency Personalities Series-Charles Grant (British East India Company)

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Charles Grant (British East India Company)
16 April 1746 – 31 October 1823

Charles Grant

Charles Grant (British East India Company) was born at Aldourie, Inverness-shire, Scotland on the same day his father, Alexander Grant, was killed fighting for the Jacobites, against the British Crown, at Culloden. However, Charles Grant himself was one of the growing number of Scots who prospered in the service of the British Empire. In 1767, Grant travelled to India to take up a military position. Over subsequent years, he rose in the ranks of the British East India Company. Initially, he became superintendent over its trade in Bengal. Then, in 1787, having first acquired a personal fortune through silk manufacturing in Malda, Lord Cornwallis the Governor-General appointed Grant as a member of the East India Company’s board of trade. Grant lived a profligate lifestyle as he climbed through the ranks, but after losing two children to smallpox he underwent a religious conversion. Viewing his life, including his efforts in India, from his new evangelical Christian perspective, moulded his career for the rest of his life.

Grant returned to Britain in 1790 and was elected to Parliament in 1802 for Inverness-shire. He served as an MP until failing health forced him to retire in 1818. However, his relationship with the East India Company did not end. In 1804, he joined the Company’s Court of Directors, and in 1805, he became its chairman. He died in Russell Square, London at age 77.

His eldest son, Charles, was born in India and later followed his father into politics, eventually becoming a British peer as Baron Glenelg. His other son, Robert, followed his father into the Indian service and became Governor of Bombay, as well as being a Christian hymn writer.

Grant opposed the Governor-General Richard Wellesley’s combative and expansionist policies in India, and later supported the unsuccessful parliamentary move to impeach Wellesley. Grant saw Indian society as not only heathen, but also as corrupt and uncivilised. He was appalled by such native customs as exposing the sick, burning lepers, and sati. He believed that Britain’s duty was not simply to expand its rule in India and exploit the subcontinent for its commercial interests, but to civilise and Christianise.

In 1792, Grant wrote the tract “Observations on the State of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain.” This famous essay pled for education and Christian mission to be tolerated in India alongside the East India Company’s traditional commercial activity. It argued that India could be advanced socially and morally by compelling the Company to permit Christian missionaries into India, a view diametrically opposed to the long-held position of the East India Company that Christian missionary work in India conflicted with its commercial interests and should be prohibited. In 1797, Grant presented his essay to the Company’s directors, and then later in 1813, along with the reformer William Wilberforce, successfully to the House of Commons. The Commons ordered its re-printing during the important debates on the renewal of the company’s charter.

He was largely responsible for the foundation of East India Company College, which was later erected at Haileybury.

As Chairman of the Company, Grant used his position to sponsor many chaplains to India, among them Claudius Buchanan and Henry Martyn.

Grant was part of an evangelical Anglican movement of close friends which included such luminaries as the abolitionist Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, John Venn, Henry Thornton, and John Shore, who lived in close proximity round Clapham Common south west of London. For some years from 1796, Grant himself lived in a large villa called Glenelg in proximity to Wilberforce and Thornton. This ‘Clapham sect’ welded evangelical theology with the cause of social reform. Both in India and in Britain’s Parliament, Grant campaigned for the furtherance of causes of education, social reform, and Christian mission. In 1791, he helped established the Sierra Leone Company, which gave refuge to freed slaves. Also in 1791, as an influential supporter of the abolition of slavery in all its forms, he was elected to the London Abolition Committee. He served as a vice-president of the British and Foreign Bible Society from its establishment in 1804, and also supported the Church Missionary Society and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. As a director of one of the largest businesses of the day, Grant was a remarkably effective social reformer.

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Regency Personalities Series-Henry Thornton

Regency Personalities Series
In my attempts to provide us with the details of the Regency, today I continue with one of the many period notables.

Henry Thornton
March 10 1760-January 16 1815

Henry Thornton

Henry was the son of John Thornton of Clapham, who had been one of the early patrons of the evangelical movement. At the age of five, Henry attended the school of Mr Davis at Wandsworth Common, and later with Mr Roberts at Point Pleasant. From 1778 he was employed in the counting house of his cousin Godfrey Thornton, two years later joining his father’s company, where he later became a partner.

In 1784 Thornton joined the banking firm of Down and Free of London, later becoming a partner which became known as Down, Thornton and Free. It was under his direction that this became one of the largest banking firms in London, with regional offices in other British cities.

In 1782 Henry Thornton had been urged to seek a seat in Parliament, and applied to contest one of the two seats for Hull. He withdrew when he learned that it was custom to pay each voter two guineas to secure their vote. Thornton was then elected as member for Southwark, London. He became respected as a man of morals and integrity.

As an independent MP, Thornton sided with the Pittites. In 1783 voted for peace with America. In general he tended to support Pitt, Addington and the Whig administration of Grenville and Fox. He seldom spoke in the House of Commons. His contribution was in various parliamentary committees on which he sat. In 1795 he became the treasurer of the committee responsible for the publication of the Cheap Repository Tracts.

He served on committees to examine the public debt (1798), the Irish exchange (1804), public expenditure (1807) and the bullion committee (1810). The report of the bullion committee, was written by Thornton. It argued for the resumption of gold payments in exchange for notes and deposits, which the Bank of England (which his elder brother, Samuel Thornton, was a director) had suspended in 1797. The recommendation was not well received at the time, and gold redemption on demand was not restored until 1821. In the next few years he continued to press for these measures to be implemented, publishing two reports in 1811.

This period 1797–1810 was a time of major change and great confusion in the British banking system, and the currency crisis of 1797 led to Thornton’s greatest contribution as an economist, for which he is most remembered today. In 1802 he wrote An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain, in which he set out to correct common misconceptions, such as the view that the increase in paper credit was the principal cause of the economic ills of the day. (DWW-such careful thought and then explanation would be invaluable.) This was a work of great importance, and gave a detailed account of the British monetary system. It also provided detailed examination of ways in which the Bank of England could counteract fluctuations of the pound.

Henry Thornton was one of the founders of the Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers and a foremost campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade. A close friend and cousin of William Wilberforce, he is credited with being the financial brain behind their many campaigns for social reform and philanthropic causes which the group supported.

For some years Thornton and Wilberforce shared a house called Battersea Rise which Thornton had bought in 1792. The cousins spent much time here co-ordinating their activities and entertaining their friends. After their marriages in 1796–7 they continued to live and work in close proximity for another decade.

In 1791 Thornton played a major part in the establishment of the Sierra Leone Company, which took over the failed attempt by Granville Sharp to create a colony for the settlement for freed slaves in Africa. As the company’s foremost director, he virtually administered the colony as chairman of the company until responsibility was transferred to the Crown in 1808. It was at this time that he became a friend of Zachary Macaulay, who was governor of the colony 1794–99.

In 1802 Thornton was one of the founders of the Christian Observer, the Clapham Sect’s journal edited by Zachary Macaulay, to which he contributed many articles. He was also involved in supporting the spread of Christian missionary work, including the founding of the Society for Missions to Africa and the East (later the Church Missionary Society) in 1799, and the British and Foreign Bible Society (now the Bible Society) in 1804, of which he became the first treasurer. A friend of Hannah More, he assisted in the writing and publication of her Cheap Repository tracts. In 1806, Thornton served as Manager of the newly formed London Institution.

In 1796 Thornton married Marianne Sykes, daughter of Joseph Sykes. Henry and Marianne died in 1815 and their children were adopted by a family friend, Sir Robert Inglis. The eldest child, Marianne Thornton, was a bluestocking who lived in Clapham for most of her long life. She was the subject of a biography by her cousin, E.M. Forster, the novelist, who was one of Henry Thornton’s great-grandchildren.

The oldest son, Henry Sykes Thornton, succeeded his father in the banking business, but the firm was merged into Williams Deacon’s Bank following the financial crisis of 1825–6. One of the younger daughters, Sophia Thornton, married John Leslie-Melville, 9th Earl of Leven. Another daughter, Isabella, married the clergyman Benjamin Harrison who became a Canon of Canterbury and Archdeacon of Maidstone.

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