THE BARINGS.*
ANEW family at last ! In the long roll of houses whose rise we have described there are many who owe their original greatness to trade, but among the political families of the land, the men who fill Cabinets and are thought of for high office, there is but this one belonging strictly to the order of merchant princes. The earliest ancestor to whom they can be traced is Peter Baring, Who lived between the years 1660 and 1670 at Groningen, in the Dutch province of Overyssel, the same province which produced the ducal house of the Bentincks. One of his descendants, Francis Baring, was pastor of the Lutheran Church at Bremen, and in his clerical capacity came over to London. His son John Baring being well acquainted with cloth-making, settled at Larkbeer, in Devon- shire, and there set up an establishment for that manufacture. He married Elizabeth, daughter of John Vowler,Esq., of Bellair, and had four sons and a daughter. The eldest son, John, and the third son, Francis, established themselves under the firm of John and Francis Baring at London, originally with a view of facilitating their father's trade in disposing of his goods, and to be in a position to import the raw material required, such as wool, dye-stuffs, &e., themselves directly from abroad. The elder brother afterwards withdrew, and retired to Exeter, and the House passed under the firm name of Francis Baring, and afterwards under that of Baring Brothers and Co., and rose gradually to the highest commercial rank, Francis Baring was born April 18, 1740, and became the intimate friend of Lord Shelburne, and his adviser in financial matters during his Ministry. The Minister styled him the "Prince of Mer- chants," and such was his recognized ability and influence in that capacity that William Pitt was glad to conciliate him by a baronetcy (May 29, 1793). He married in 1766 Harriet, daughter of William Herring, Esq., of Croydon, cousin and co-heiress of Thomas Herring, Archbishop of Canterbury, and by her had five sons and five daughters. His three eldest sons, Thomas, Alexander, and Henry, entered into the London establishment. The eldest, Thomas, who on the death of Sir Francis, 12th September, 1810, succeeded him in
the baronetcy, then withdrew from the House. Henry, the third son, was passionately devoted to gambling, and was so successful in it that he several times broke the " Entreprise Generale des Jeux " at Paris. But some scandal being created by one of the heads of such an establishment as the Barings passing night after night in the great gambling-houses, an understanding was come to for his with-
[ • We are indebted for the principal part of our information respect- ing the early history of this family to Mr. Vincent Notte's "Fifty Years in Both Hemispheres ; or, Reminiscences of a Merchant's Life" (1854), t`,13 facts detailed in which are understood to have been submitted to the -evision of the late Lord Ashburton.] drawal fram the firm. Alexander Baring, the second son, who thus remained at the head of the mercantile establishment, was born 27th October, 1774. He received a portion of his education in Hanover, and completed it in England. He commenced his mer- cantile career in the house of Messrs. Hope, where a friendship sprang up between him and Mr. Peter CEesar Labouchere (who became a partner in that house), which led to the marriage of the latter in 1796 to Alexander Baring's sister Dorothy. Their eldest son is the present Lord Taunton. When the Messrs. Hope returned to England in consequence of the occupation of Holland by the French under Pichegru, Alexander Baring left the House, and de- termined to visit the United States of America. At his departure his father confined his advice to two recommendations,—one of which was to purchase no uncultivated land, and the other not to marry a wife there. The reasons he gave for this advice were that uncul- tivated lands can be more readily bought than sold again, and a wife is best suited to the home in which she was brought up, and cannot be formed or trained a second time. However, Alexander Baring had not passed one year in the United States before he forgot both points of his father's advice. He purchased large tracts of land in the western part of the State of Pennsylvania, and laid out a not inconsiderable capital (100,000 dole, at the least) in the then Territory and now State of Maine, under the annexed condition of bringing a number of settlers thither within a certain term of years. He also married, in 1798, Anna, eldest daughter of Mr. William Bingham, of Philadelphia, who was at that time considered the richest man in the United States, and was a mem- ber of the Senate. On the death of her father his wife brought Mr. Baring a fortune of 900,000 dols. The House of Baring now entered on monetary operations on a gigantic scale and of Euro- pean importance. In 1818 Alexander Baring was enabled to perform a great national service to France. His House had taken a loan for that Government of 27,238,938 francs 5 per cent. rente, at 67 francs, and thereby had freed France from the in- tended cordon of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian armies of 50,000. each for five years. But the Paris Bourse received some severe blows by the fall of the State paper from 67 to 58. The cause of this was a fall of 30 per cent. in the price of goods which accom- panied the sudden reduction of four millions of pounds sterling in the English paper circulation on the part of the Bank of England, and numerous mad speculations in the London and Paris funds. The loan taken by Baring and Co. was concluded in two portions, one of 14,925,500 francs at 66 francs 50 centimes, and the other of 12,313,438 francs at 67. The rente fell to 58 francs before the contracting parties had the last portion in their hands. The whole Paris Bourse was violently agitated, the contractors saw that under such circumstances the strength was lacking to sustain so heavy an emission of State paper, and that there would be any number of failures in case so large an additional sum were put in circulation. Pretty nearly everybody lost their presence of mind except Alexander Baring. He persuaded the Due de Richelieu to annul the contract for the last half of the loan, and. prevailed on the bankers associated with him to relinquish it on their part. Mr. Baring on this occasion brought, it is said, the money power which he possessed over the plenipotentiaries at the Congress of Aix,—Metternich, Nesselrode, Hardenberg, &c., to bear on Richelieu to induce him to consent to this measure.
By his American wife Alexander Baring had four sons, the second of whom, Francis, born in May, 1800, the favourite of his father and. mother, was intended by the former to follow in his footsteps, and become the leading spirit of the firm in the next generation. With this purpose he was introduced into the London House, and allowed to transact several important matters in America and elsewhere on his own responsibility. But although described as being of a fine, manly, independent character, and generally liked, he had not the judgment to conduct mercantile enterprises, and was so unlucky ia all his speculations that at last, while retaining the nonainal head- ship of the firm, it was reduced by a new arrangement and his own disposition to a merely nominal partnership. He once bought all the land round the lake in which the city of Mexico stands, and his bills were honoured by his father, who, however, prevailed on the Mexican Government to cancel the contract as dangerous to the military security of the capital. He entered Parliament for Thetford, and sat for several years, but did not succeed in making any political position, being a bad speaker, and inheriting a natural stutter from his father. He married in 1833 Clare Hortense, daughter of Maret, Duke of Bassano, Napoleon's first Secretary of State, and settling at Paris, bought one of the most magnificent residences on the Place Vendome for 1,600,000 francs, and has just (1864) succeeded to the family peerage of Ashburton. It; was the death of Mr. Holland, the manager of the
Barings, that brought about in 1825 a considerable change in the ; composition of the mercantile firm. John, third son of Sir Thomas I Baring (elder brother of Alexander Baring), had, two years before this time, formed a commission-house in partnership with Mr. Joshua Bates, of Boston, under the firm of Bates and Baring. John Baring had brought into this firm 20,000/., and Mr. Bates about as much. Mr. Bates's ability and experience now led (on the advice of Mr. Labouchere) to an arrangement by which the firm of Bates and Baring was dissolved, and those gentlemen entered the House of Baring and Co. At the same time Mr. Thomas Baring, second son of Sir Thomas Baring, who had entered the House of Hope, at Amsterdam, but had found there no occupation suited to his talents and business spirit, also entered the London House of which his uncle, Mr. Alexander Baring, was the head. In 1828 Alexander Baring, who had now devoted him- self to politics, resolved to retire from the House he had hitherto conducted, and his son-in-law, Mr. Humphrey St. John Mildmay, entered it. There were thus five associates in the House—Francis Baring, H. St. John Mildmay, Joshua Bates, and the two brothers, Thomas and John Baring. No business was to be entered into without the assent of three partners, and as it was foreseen that the son and son-in-law of Alexander Baring would be likely to vote together and the two other Barings together, leaving to Mr. Bates the casting vote, an arrangement was made by which Francis .and John Bering were removed from all participation in any new business, and were to be called upon for their votes only when the active managers—Thomas Baring, Mildmay, and Bates, could not agree. The real head of the commercial House is now Mr. Thomas Baring, who has for several years represented Huntingdon in Parliament, and attached himself strongly to the Tory party, though always declining to accept office on the plea of his com- mercial engagements. During his lifetime 'Alexander Baring was one, at any rate, of the heads of the political House of Baring. Having entered Parlia- ment, he attached himself at first to the Opposition party after the peace of 1815, strongly opposed the continuance of the income-tax in 1816, and was with Messrs. Hope and Rothschild present nominally in a private, but really in a most important, capacity, at the Congress of Aix-le-Chapelle in 1818. On the 8th of May, 1820, he presented a petition from the merchants of London in favour of free trade. In 1821, on the debate upon the resumption of Bank payments, Mr. Baring made a remarkable speech, in which he spoke of the country being placed in the sixth year of peace in a situation without a parallel in any other nation or time. "No country before ever presented the continuance of so extraordinary a spectacle as that of living under a progressive increase in the value of money and decrease in the value of the productions of the people." "The difficulties of the country," he concluded, "arise from this, that you have brought back your currency to its former value so far as regards your income, but it remains at its former value so far as regards your expenditure." In 1826 he opposed the suppression of small notes. In the early part of 1830, together with Mr. Attwood, he proposed that a gold and silver standard should be substituted for the gold one, and that the Act for prohibiting the issue of bank-notes below 5/. should be repealed. In the same year he strongly denounced the Government of the Duke of Wellington for- reducing the taxation so as to render necessary the virtual abandonment of the Sinking Fund. On this occasion he separated from the Liberals, and allied himself with the extreme Tories. He now definitely took his side with the anti-Reformers, opposing the Reform Bill, and having his windows broken by the mob in 1831. When the Wing Ministry resigned on this question, and the Duke of Wellington made a vain attempt to form a Tory Cabinet, Mr. Baring was named for Chancellor of the Exchequer. After the dismissal of the Whig Ministry by the King in 1834, Mr. Baring became President of the Board of Trade and Master of the Mint in Sir Robert Peel's short-lived Ministry of '35. He was raised to the peerage April 10, 1835, as Baron Ash- burton of Ashburton in Devonshire. The choice of this title was dictate by the fact of the well-known lawyer John Dunning, who married a sister of Sir Francis Baring, and consequently an aunt of Alexander Baring, having borne this title, which became extinct with his son, the first cousin of the subject of the new creation. But the political question with which the name of Alexander Baring, first Lord Ashburton of that family, will be chiefly associated is the celebrated treaty by which the north- eastern boundary line of the United States and British America was determined. This treaty, usually called the "Treaty of Washington," or the " Ashburton Treaty," and by its opponents in England "the Ashburton capitulation," was signed at Wash- ington by Lord Ashburton as the Commissioner of the Govern-
ment of Sir Robert Peel. The question in dispute had arisen from a doubtful passage in the treaty of 1783, by which a certain line of highlands was assigned as the boundary. Two lines of high- lands were put forward by England and the United States re- spectively as the line intended by the treaty, which were at an interval of about 100 miles from each other. At the treaty of Ghent in 1814 it had been resolved to submit the matter to the arbitration of the then King of the Netherlands, who, after devot- ing himself assiduously to it, in despair of arriving at any satisfac- tory solution, proposed in 1831 another line as a compromise fol- lowing the bend of the St. John River, and down the middle
of that stream. The whole area of the disputed territory was estimated at 6,750,000 acres, and by this award the King of the Netherlands assigned to England 2,636,160 acres. According to Mr. Thomas Colley Grattan (who assisted in the Ashburton nego- tiation), Lord Palmerston was willing at that time to accept this award, as were also President Jackson and the American Govern- ment, but some other American negotiators were opposed to it, and raised such a storm in the United States against it that Jack- son, then about to stand a second time for the Presidency, was afraid to accept it, and accordingly intimated that the King had exceeded his power as arbitrator in fixing a third arbitrary line, and rejected it. The English Government afterwards made several vain attempts to persuade the Americans to consent to this com- promise, and at last Lord Palmerston withdrew the adhesion to it of England also, and the matter seemed to be fast hastening to a decision by the sword when the accession of Sir Robert Peel, in 1841, took the nation out of the hands of Lord Palmerston. Peel determined to settle it at once, and selected for this purpose Lord Ashburton as the fittest person to negotiate the treaty. Mr. Grattan says of this choice, that he was "a nobleman well adapted to the occasion, from his connection by marriage and property with the United States. He was not a trained ambassa- dor; but his general knowledge of business, straightforwardness, and good sense, were qualities far more valuable than those to be generally found in professional diplomatists, whose proceedings so often embroil instead of conciliating." This appointment created a very favourable impression in the United States, and Lord Ashbur- ton arrived at New York in March, 1812, under most encouraging auspices, and immediately repaired to Washington, where he agreed with Mr. Webster, the American Secretary of State, "that frank- ness and fair play were to be the basis of the negotiation, that sub- terfuge was to be discarded ; that everything was to be done by con- versation, not writing ; and, in short, that all honest means were to be taken for a prompt solution of the dispute and the conclusion of a reasonable treaty." At first the treaty flagged, owing to the obsti- nacy of one of the Commissioners from the State of Maine ; but the American Cabinet showed a singular disposition not to insist on a more favourable solution of the difficulty than that suggested by the King of the Netherland's proposition, which, taken with their con- tinual declarations of the justice of their full claim to the whole of the disputed territory and their previous:violence on the subject, might have roused a suspicion on the part of a practised diplomatist or of such a man as Lord Palmerston that there was something in the background which led to this strange change of tone. But Lord Ashburton, honest and conciliatory himself, was not alive to such suspicions, and his chief at home, Lord Aberdeen, was too desirous of settling a matter on which the Whigs had failed to effect anything to raise such a point. Accordingly, on the 9th of August, 1842, a treaty was signed which Mr. Grattan pronounces to be more favourable to England than the award of the King of the Netherlands, not only strategically but also by 700,000 acres. By it the disputed territory:was thus divided :—To the United States were assigned 3,413,000 acres ; to Great Britain, 3,337,000, there being thus a balance of 76,000 in favour of the United States. The treaty was denounced both in England and America, in the former country by Lord Palmerston, but the Conservative majority of the Minister, supported in this instance by the mercantile community, proved too strong for the Whig statesmen. Almost immediately after the signature of the treaty, however, it transpired that the American Cabinet had in
their possession during the whole time of the negotiation a copy of the map made by Franklin at the time of the treaty of 1783, in which the boundary line was distinctly marked, and agreed entirely with the English claim ; so that by a piece of diplomatic chicanery England had been cheated out of 3,413,000 acres. It is right to add that two eminent men of the United States at least expressed great indignation when they heard of this deceit on the part of their Government—Mr. Justice Story and Dr. Channing.
Lord Ashburton died on the 13th May, 1848, and was succeedPg1 by his eldest son, William Bingham Baring, who. had ssit in
Parliament for some years on Liberal-Conservative principles, being a supporter of Sir Robert Peel's free-trade policy, of which his cousin, Mr. Thomas Baring, was a strenuous opponent. His public life requires no further notice. He is now succeeded, as above stated, by his next brother, Francis Baring, third Baron Ash- burton, whose son, Alexander Hugh Baring, succeeded his father in the representation of Thetford. A legal question arose just before the birth of this latter gentleman, whether, being born in France,
he could be the rightful heir according to the English law, his father having been born at Philadelphia, his mother at Paris, and his grandmother at Philadelphia. The point was referred to eminent English counsel, who decided that his rights would not be affected by his birth in France, and so there was no occasion to avail themselves of the offer of the English Ambassador, Lord Granville, to have the birth take place within the precincts of the English Embassy. The elder branch of the Borings, meanwhile, had ac- quired some political position in the ranks of the Whig party. Sir Francis Thornhill Baring, third Baronet, eldest son of Sir Thomas Baring, and elder brother of the present head of the commercial firm, born in April, 1796, who has just announced his intention of retir- ing from public life, has been for many years one of the leaders of the Whig party in the House of Commons. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne's Ministry, and subsequently first Lord of the Admiralty on the return of the Whigs to power in 1846, and has long been member of Parliament for Portsmouth. Whatever, may be thought of him as a financier, his ability is undoubted, and his political position has always been a highly respectable one, both within and without the House. He has been twice married, and his eldest son, Thomas George Baring, has filled some subordinate posts in Whig Ministries, and is a member of Parliament. The family retain, like the Bentincks, the trace of their Dutch blood,—a steadiness and coolness of judgment which fits them well for their position as among the foremost representatives of the new commercial aristocracy. Their chief is, we suppose, Lord Overstone, one of the wealthiest subjects in the world—his fortune is estimated at five millions—but among them none have had so long a term of influence and respect as the, House of Baring.
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