Blackwell Family
Blackwell Family
John Blackwell of Mortlake, Surrey, was Gentleman of the Board Green Cloth to King Charles 1st and he served as Sheriff of his County in 1657. His son and heir was John Blackwell, Greengrocer of Bethnal Green, Middlesex and Surrey, who married 1st Elizabeth Smithsby, daughter of James Smithsby. His second wife, daughter of General John Lambert, she was the mother of Lambert Blackwell. He fathered 17 children.
John Blackwell.
Blackwell Family Tree.
Blackwell Heraldic Arms.
Sprowston Hall.
Purchased the Manor in 1717
Sir Lambert Blackwell’s father John, himself the son of a City merchant, active in the Parliamentarian cause during the Civil War, was a Captain in Cromwell’s regiment in the New Model Army, subsequently serving as a treasurer for War under the Commonwealth and Protectorate. His first wife was distantly related to Oliver Cromwell; the second was a daughter of General John Lambert. After the Restoration John Blackwell settled for a time in Ireland, where he had acquired property, confiscated in the Cromwellian conquest, then immigrated to New England.
Quickly developing landed and commercial interests there, he was appointed lieutenant-governor of Pennsylvania by William Penn in 1688 but quarrelled with the colonial assembly and threw up the office within a year. Sir Lambert Blackwell, a younger son, and possibly the first son of the second marriage, was ‘bred a merchant’ in the Turkey trade, and by the Revolution was well established at Leghorn.
Sir Lambert Blackwell was appointed by King William, in 1697, Knight Harbinger and gentleman of the Privy Chamber. In the next year he was Knighted, and accredited envoy extraordinary to the court of Tuscany, and Republic of Genoa, and remained in office during the whole of King William`s and the first three years of Queen Anne. In 1719 he was returned to Parliament by the borough of Welton, in Wiltshire, and was created a Baronet by King George 1st.
Returning to England, he was knighted, was named as knight harbinger and envoy to Genoa and Tuscany, and contracted a profitable marriage. He had embarked again by the end of the year, and arrived in Genoa in May 1698, having survived insults and violence from ‘some person`s belonging to the Duke of Berwick’ encountered on the way. This second spell in Italy lasted seven years. He was not universally popular among the English merchants and gentlemen who applied to him for help, giving an impression of snobbishness, though Swift, for one, considered him ‘a very good natured man’.
Sir Lambert Blackwell.
General John Lambert.
Blackwell Map 1770.
Macky’s Memoirs sketched him at this stage in his career: “He affects much the gentleman in his dress, and the minister in his conversation; is very lofty, yet courteous, when he knows his people; much envied by his fellow merchants; of a sanguine complexion, taller than the ordinary size.” Having in the summer of 1704 made approaches to friends in England for their help in moving him from his present ‘troublesome, expensive employment’ and effecting his reappointment as envoy to Venice, ‘which will entitle me to an envoy’s pay’, Blackwell found himself instead recalled by letters dated November 1704, and took leave of the Grand Duke of Tuscany for the last time in February 1705. Back in England he continued his unsuccessful solicitations for senior ambassadorial postings and looked for a seat in Parliament, coming in for Wilton in 1708, where his mercantile interests, maintained throughout his stay in Florence and Genoa, were a distinct asset. Classed as a Whig in a list of 1708, his election reckoned a ‘gain’ by Lord Sunderland (Charles, Lord Spencer), he voted in 1709 for the naturalization of the Palatines, and a year later for the impeachment of Dr Sacheverell.
His one tellership occurred on 5th April 1709, against a bill to make two Dutch-built vessels free ships. His ambitions and commitments made it easy to present him as one ‘apt to follow the Court’: during the 1708 Parliament he was petitioning the crown for a re-grant of his father’s estate in Ireland, and was awaiting payment of various expenses incurred as envoy. He found himself opposed by stauncher Whigs at Wilton and did not stand again. Blackwell was still of value to government after 1710 as a financier: he and a partner advanced some £60,000 to the crown in 1710–11, and under George I he acted as an intermediary in the raising of international loans, using his Genoese connexions.
South Sea Company
He was also prominent, though not especially active, in the South Sea Company, in which he had invested £13,000 at the outset, becoming a director in 1715. At about this time he began to acquire extensive property in east Norfolk, accumulating a rent roll of between £3,500 and £4,000 p.a. by 1720–1. This, together with his personal estate of around £30,000, became liable to sequestration under the terms of the South Sea Sufferers’ Act of 1721.
Although Blackwell, who pleaded that he had no share in the ‘secret management’ of the scheme, and had been ‘more weak than blameable’, suffered less severely than others, his landed estate had to be dispersed. Blackwell died on 27th October 1727, leaving not a will but two ‘testamentary schedules’, subsequently proved, which detailed the repayment of a £7,000 loan to his wife, and a bequest of £2,000 to his surviving daughter, the residue of the estate passing to his son, Sir Charles, 2nd Bt. Sir Charles Blackwell married Anne Clayton, daughter of Sir William Clayton, Surrey; she married secondly a Doctor John Thomas, Bishop of Rochester. Sir Lambert Blackwell (1732-1801) died unmarried.
