William Stone (mercer)
Sir William Stone (died 1607) was a London mercer and alderman who sold fabrics to the British royal family.[1]
Career
He was a son of Reginald Stone, a London fishmonger. He was based at Cheapside but seems also to have owned a house at Leyton.[2]
He sent silks to Scotland worth £200 for the royal wedding in 1589.[3]
He was knighted by King James I at Ruckholt, the house of Michael Hicks, on 16 June 1604.[4] Hicks's brother, Baptist Hicks, was a mercer trading like Stone.
In January 1605, Anne of Denmark's vice-chamberlain George Carew was given £6,108 from the treasury to pay her debt to Stone.[5] In February 1607, Carew received another amount to pay the queen's debts to Stone and others.[6][7]
Stone supplied fabric used for masque costumes at court. With Thomas Henshawe, and the brewer Francis Snellinge, he petitioned the Earl of Salisbury for a debt of £300 for goods sold to the French ambassador, Christophe de Harlay, Count of Beaumont.[8]
Stone was Master of the Clothworkers' Company, and welcomed King James to Clothworkers' Hall on 12 June 1607.[9] He was also a member of the Turkey Company. The Clothworkers' Company has his portrait, showing a carpet on a table.[10]
John Chamberlain wrote that Stone died at his house in Leyton on 14 September 1607 of a fever, after drinking a quart of sack to toast King James' health. He was buried at St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street.[11]
His wife was called Barbara. Arrangements were made to pay a royal debt of £1000 to her in 1608.[12] His daughter Julian Stone married Nicholas Herrick, a London goldsmith, and was the mother of the poet Robert Herrick. Elizabeth Stone married Sir William Campion.[13]
Richard Johnson dedicated his 1607 work The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson, The Merry Londoner (London, 1607) to Stone.
References
- ↑ Sarah A. Bendall, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens: Gender and Work in the Royal Wardrobe and the Fashion Marketplace (Bloomsbury, 2026), p. 98.
- ↑ Peter Edwards, Horses and the Aristocratic Lifestyle in Early Modern England (Boydell, 2018), 188.
- ↑ William K. Boyd and Henry W. Meikle, Calendar State Papers Scotland, 10 (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 162 no. 226.
- ↑ John Nichols, Progresses of James I, 1 (London, 1828), 439.
- ↑ Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar State Papers Domestic, 1603–1610, 189.
- ↑ Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer (London, 1836), 55–57.
- ↑ Memoirs of George Heriot, pp. 224–225.
- ↑ HMC Salisbury Hatfield, 19 (London, 1965), 249.
- ↑ John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, 2 (London, 1828), 133–34.
- ↑ 100 Objects: Clothworker's Company
- ↑ Maurice Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624 (Rutgers UP, 1972), 101.
- ↑ Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar Stone Papers Domestic, 1603–1610, 449.
- ↑ R. A. Houston, Punishing the Dead: Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830 (Oxford, 2010), 126.