NOTABLE CLOTHWORKER: SIR WILLIAM HEWETT Senior Archivist, Jessica Collins
S
ir William Hewett is popularly remembered as the father of Anne Hewett, the young girl who (according to John Stow) fell into the Thames and was rescued by her father’s apprentice, Edward Osborne (later Sir). However, Sir William had a most interesting and varied career – a founding member of The Clothworkers’ Company, a wealthy merchant, a prisoner, a reluctant civic official and a trusted servant of Elizabeth I, not to mention being called upon to accompany Lady Jane Grey to her execution. Having recently been gifted a portrait of the gentleman by his descendant Derek Hewett of Singapore, following its long-term loan to the Museum of London, it is apposite that we consider Sir William’s interesting life more closely. William Hewett (also Huett/Hewet) was born in Wales, a hamlet in the parish of Laughton-en-le-Morthen in the West Riding of Yorkshire c. 1496. After university at Queen’s College, Cambridge, and a stint at Gray’s Inn, he was apprenticed to a London Clothworker. The date of his apprenticeship predates our earliest extant membership records. However, Hewett must have become a Freeman by 1529, when he is first recorded as taking an apprentice through The Company. Apart from Osborne, these included his cousin William Hewett (later a substantial benefactor of The Company), Robert Barnett and Richard Foster (both bequeathed £5 in Hewett’s will – half the sum required to ‘set up shop’ as a small master) and Henry Boswell (or Bosville), brother of Gilbert, whose sister in law by marriage was ‘Bess of Hardwick’ – or Lady Cavendish, who built Chatsworth. Hewett became a very wealthy
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THE CLOTHWORKER | SPRING 2019
merchant, operating from a property called the Three Cranes in Candlewick Street in the City, originally the centre of London’s clothmaking district. Also a member of The Merchant Adventurers’, Hewett prospered in the Iberian trade, importing hundreds of pounds of goods per annum by the 1560s. In one year alone, a fleet of 40 merchant vessels brought him Spanish wool and iron, fustians from Genoa and Ulm in addition to other commodities such as frying pans, flax, straw hats, madder, and copper from other European ports. In 1536, he had married Alice Leveson, the third daughter of Nicholas Leveson of Halling, Kent, Mercer, and the couple set up home in Philpot Lane, off Fenchurch Street, although they had a country house in Highgate and owned many other properties. These also included a house on the old London Bridge, where Hewett’s infant daughter (and only surviving child) was once accidentally dropped from a window into the Thames. According to tradition, Edward Osborne jumped out and saved her from drowning. When she grew up, Anne could have had her pick of suitors as a wealthy heiress-to-be, but her father allegedly remarked ‘Osborne saved her, let Osborne enjoy her’, and the two later went on to marry. So important was this event in Clothworker legend, that a mural depicting Anne’s rescue was commissioned for the Red Drawing Room in the Victorian fifth Hall from W.R. Beverley in 1864. Hewett became Master of The Company in 1543, a pivotal time in Clothworker history – in this period The Company petitioned the Lord Mayor and Aldermen for sole
control of clothworking (there being artisan clothworkers in other livery companies) and tried unsuccessfully to reconstitute its yeomanry or craft element. Such was the uneasy relationship between the largely mercantile Court and Livery, and the yeomanry, that a two-tier membership effectively operated within The Company with divergent interests in relation to the export of unfinished cloth (which would threaten its stability in subsequent decades). In 1565, the Clothworkers almost ceded their rights of oversight and control of cloth finishing to The Merchant Taylors’ – a move that would have required the entire yeomanry to translate to the other Company. Perhaps preoccupied by the gravity of this Clothworker business or indeed his own extensive affairs, Sir William initially refused to serve as Alderman of Vintry Ward when elected in 1550 and was committed to Newgate Prison. Upon his release, having had a change of heart, he became heavily involved in the great political and public affairs of the age. Whilst Sheriff in 1553, he was charged with carrying out the sentence of execution upon Lady Jane Grey. He subsequently received a grant of arms from Queen Mary I for his loyalty. As the first Protestant and first Clothworker Lord Mayor in 1559, he was given many important tasks by the new Queen Elizabeth. Only a few weeks into his post, the Privy Council sternly wrote to him requiring that he ‘might cause speedy reformation of divers enormities in the same city’, including imposing sumptuary laws,
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