NOELL, Martin (1614-65), of St Olave Jewry, London

Noell belonged, on his mother’s side, to a cadet branch of the well-established Staffordshire family the Noels of Hilcote and was distantly related to the Rutland peer Baptist Noel*, 3rd Viscount Campden.44Vis. Staffs. 175-6; LJ vii. 662b; PROB11/318, f. 99. His father, however, a Stafford mercer, came from more humble origins, and it was only through his success in London’s burgeoning mercantile sector that Noell acquired the rank and influence to gain him an electoral interest in his native Stafford.

A younger son, Noell was apprenticed to a London Scrivener who appears to have been his elder brother James, at the relatively advanced age of 23, which suggests that the arrangement was largely a formality, intended to give him better access to the capital’s business community.45Scriveners’ Co. Common Ppr. ed. Steer, 59, 117. Although he became an active member of the Scriveners’ Company, his commercial energies were focused on breaking into London’s mercantile elite – a task probably helped by his marriage in 1639 to the daughter of a wealthy London Draper.46St Olave Jewry par. reg.; PROB11/187, ff. 261v-262v. By 1647, he had established himself in the sugar and tobacco trade with the Caribbean, and specifically as one of the merchant-planters on Barbados – a group that included Maurice Thomson and other leading London merchants.47Hartlib Pprs. Online, 33/2/20B; CJ vi. 34b; LJ ix. 50; CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 348; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 52, 53, 54; R. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (2003), 162-3, 192; L. Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados 1627-60 (Oxford, 2003), 133, 134. That same year, he was admitted to the East India Company and was among the merchant adventurers behind the company’s ‘second general voyage’ of the late 1640s.48Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1644-9, pp. 219, 342-3; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 175-6. From then until the mid-1660s, he was involved in trading ventures not only to the far east (as the Japanese luxury-wares in his house attest) and the Caribbean, but also to the Baltic, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and to the west coast of Africa.49Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1655-9, 77-80, 122-6, 176; CSP Col. 1574-1660, p. 348, 404, 421, 422, 451; 1661-8, 2, 14, 24; CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 290; 1664-5, p. 124; LMA, CLA/002/02/01/0500.

As an associate of Maurice Thomson and the ‘new-merchant’ leadership, Noell was apparently on good terms with the City’s pro-army, Independent faction, which may help to explain his appointment to the Tower Hamlets militia commission in January 1648.50Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 514, 588-9. But it was the London alderman Thomas Noell who was named to the reconstituted London militia committee in January 1649, not Martin as one authority has claimed.51A. and O. i. 1261; J. Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes (Chicago, 2013), 214. And although Noell may have become acquainted with Oliver Cromwell* by the late 1640s through the latter’s former secretary and Noell’s business associate Robert Spavin, there is no evidence that he enjoyed the kind of influence under the Rump to warrant claims that he helped draft the 1651 Navigation Act.52Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 522; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 59. Nevertheless, Noell’s contacts among the City’s godly elite were doubtless important in securing him trading concessions in the West Indies and the farm of numerous public revenues – beginning in 1651 with his appointment as co-farmer of the excise on salt, at a rental of £15,000 a year.53E351/1296; CSP Col. 1574-1660, pp. 347-8; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 250. By 1654, he had moved into the manufacture of salt, investing many thousands of pounds in salt-works and employing, or so he claimed, a thousand workmen.54CSP Dom. 1655, p. 36. Richard Cromwell* was not joking when he styled Noell ‘the great salt master of England’.55Henry Cromwell Corresp. 308.

Under the protectorate, Noell was appointed the farmer or co-farmer of a whole range of revenues, including the farm of ‘silk mercery’ (for which the farmers paid £56,000 a year), the farm of additional duty in England (£65,000 a year) and the farm of customs on English and Scottish sea-coal exports (£22,000 a year).56E403/2523; SP25/78, f. 363; CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 41; 1657-8, p. 206; 1658-9, p. 113; Clarke Pprs. iii. 114; CJ vii. 627b, 628b; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 250, 378-9. Noell’s great friend and fellow Barbadian merchant Thomas Povey* thought that he had ‘swollen into a much greater person by being a farmer of the customs and excise’.57Add. 11411, f. 39v. Furthermore, by September 1655, Noell held the lucrative office of joint deputy postmaster-general to Secretary John Thurloe*, who may have been a relative by marriage.58Suff. RO (Ipswich), HD36/A/230; TSP vi. 714; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 250. His profit during the 1650s from these various enterprises has been conservatively estimated at £2,500 a year.59Aylmer, State’s Servants, 379. His wealth was such that when he was elected an alderman of London in 1657 his discharge fine was set at £520.60Beaven, Aldermen of London, i. 6. He invested a great deal of his annual turnover in advancing substantial loans to the protectorate and successive regimes towards the supply of the navy, the upkeep of embassies and generally for oiling the wheels of state.61TSP vi. 347, 588, 589, 603, 615, 620, 663, 783; vii. 50, 127, 150, 161, 380, 483-6, 624, 681; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 393; 1657-8, pp. 222, 370; 1659-60, pp. 159, 586. Indeed, it is likely that the protectorate depended more upon Noell for ready cash and credit than upon any other individual. In addition, he acted as money-lender to the Cromwell family.62E404/238 (warrant 20 Apr. 1659); Aylmer, State’s Servants, 75, 250. Not for nothing did Richard Cromwell, writing to his brother Henry* in 1657, refer to Noell as ‘our very good friend’.63Henry Cromwell Corresp. 307.

Noell’s financial power inevitably brought him a measure of political influence, particularly under the protectorate. He and Povey were highly influential in directing government policy towards the West Indians, and in particular Barbados, where Noell and his brothers had been acquiring property for a plantation since the mid-1640s.64Eg. 2395, ff. 123r-v; Add. 11411, ff. 11v-12v; Bodl. Rawl. A.37, f. 197; Rawl. A.57, f. 13; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 53-4, 92-3; C. M. Andrews, British Cttees., Commissions and Council of Trade and Plantations (Baltimore, 1908), 38, 46, 49-51, 54-5; G. A. Puckrein, Little England (New York, 1984), 61-2, 135. Noell was appointed to successive committees of trade and to a group of merchants for consulting with Oliver Cromwell and the protectoral council for the preservation of maritime commerce.65CSP Dom. 1655, p. 240; 1655-6, pp. 1, 200. And he was a major figure in the organisation and financing of Cromwell’s Western Design against Hispaniola of 1654-5, from which he profited in the form of a grant from the protector of 20,000 acres on Jamaica (where Noell and Povey planned to invest £20,000 in the development of a plantation).66Add. 11411, f. 16v; Bodl. Rawl. A.57, ff. 8-13; Abbott, Letters and Speeches, iii. 413-15, 856; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 134; Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes, 258; Menard, Sweet Negotiations, 109. Indeed, the intelligencer and reformer Samuel Hartlib identified Noell as ‘he who suggested the design of the West Indies’.67Hartlib Pprs. Online, 29/5/48A. Povey claimed in 1657 that Noell had been ‘rendered considerable everywhere by the extraordinary favour allowed him by his Highness’, and that he was ‘now a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen’.68Add. 11411, ff. 41v, 65v; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 133.

Noell’s financial investment, and its political rewards, was not confined to central government. At some point during the 1650s, he founded ‘a fair hospital’ and almshouses in Stafford – which, along with his impressive contacts at the Cromwellian court, would have made him an appealing electoral prospect to the town’s voters.69Staffs. RO, D1798/618/172; D. Lloyd, Memoires (1668), 629. Regardless, therefore, of his being to all intents and purposes a Londoner, he was returned for Stafford to the second protectoral Parliament in 1656.70Supra, ‘Stafford’. He was appointed to 30 committees in this Parliament, a significant proportion of which related to trade and the management of public revenues. An active member of the House’s standing committee for trade, he was also named to ad hoc committees concerning the arrears of excise, the arrears due to the Prize Office, the price of wines, a petition from the Levant Company, amending the excise bill, public revenue and for inspecting the treasuries of England, Ireland and Scotland.71CJ vii. 440a, 440b, 442a, 454b, 459a, 483a, 528a, 543a, 559a, 568a, 576a; Burton’s Diary, i. 221. His experience as an international merchant made him an obvious choice to help draft and report bills for naturalising foreign subjects.72CJ vii. 434b, 453a, 456b, 465a, 492b, 519a. Two of his three tellerships were in divisions for settling the price of wine and excise duty upon wine-retailers.73CJ vii. 514a, 568b. The majority of his contributions to debate also related to commercial issues.74Burton’s Diary, i. 328; ii. 23, 193-4. When the subject of settling state revenues under the Humble Petition and Advice – the new protectoral constitution – was raised on 24 April 1657, he took the opportunity to emphasise the importance of trade to public finances.

Your present revenue is, most of it, out of trade, which is uncertain: this will fail you, if you lay too great a force upon trade. I may compare it to a cow, that may give a great deal of milk, if she be well fed and tenderly used and none offer violence to her.75Burton’s Diary, ii. 23.

Another of Noell’s interests at Westminster – one that was closely linked to trade – was metropolitan affairs. He was named to several committees in the second protectoral Parliament on London issues; and on 19 December 1656, he spoke in support of a petition from the lord mayor, aldermen and Common Council, requesting that only those who contributed ‘with their pains and persons and purses’ to the government of the City should be eligible to made freemen.76CJ iii. 470b, 491a, 531b; Burton’s Diary, i. 176. ‘I have lost £20,000 since I have had the honour to be a freeman of London’, he declared, ‘and yet I never lost by being a freeman. I have a competency left yet, and I hope shall never lose by the relation’.77Burton’s Diary, i. 178. He moved to have the petition committed, and when this motion was accepted, he was named to the committee that was set up accordingly.78CJ vii. 470b.

As might be expected of the ‘personal paymaster’ to the Cromwell family, Noell was aligned with the court interest at Westminster.79Aylmer, State’s Servants, 250. On 17 October 1656, he was added to a committee for preparing a declaration in defence of the Western Design and the war against Spain.80CJ vii. 440a. On 20 March 1657, he was named to a committee for considering the best method under the Remonstrance (the precursor to the Humble Petition and Advice) for securing the peace of the kingdom against the royalists – in other words, for devising alternatives to the major-generals and decimation.81CJ vii. 508b. He was also a majority teller, on 30 April 1657, in a division on whether the Humble Petition should contain a clause for ratifying only such legislation passed between 1642 and 1653 that was not contrary to the terms of the new constitutional settlement.82CJ vii. 528b. This was a question that interested, and divided, the supporters of the Humble Petition much more than its opponents, and all four of the tellers were closely associated with the court.83Burton’s Diary, ii. 85-90. Noell’s final appointment in this Parliament was on 28 January 1658, when he was named to a committee for requesting the protector to have his self-justificatory speech to the Houses of 25 January printed.84CJ vii. 589a. The author of the Narrative of the Late Parliament was entirely justified in claiming that Noell was ‘deeply engaged with the court interest’ and in listing him among the ‘kinglings’ in the House.85A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 16, 22 (E.935.5).

Noell was returned for Stafford again in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659.86Supra, ‘Stafford’. He was named to only one committee, but was apparently more vocal on the floor of the House than he had been in 1656-8.87CJ vii. 622b. In a debate on 21 February 1659 concerning how to respond to the war between Denmark and Sweden – which, if it went the way of the Danes and their Dutch allies, threatened to close the Sound to English shipping – he spoke vigorously in support of the protector’s policy of sending a strong fleet to support the Swedes and to safeguard English trading interests in the Baltic. He began with the specious argument that if Sweden were defeated then the Protestant interest throughout Europe would be in danger. But it was the threat to English trading interests that really worried him, and here he was more convincing.

If the power of the Sound were once in the hands of those that now look for it, that is, the Dutch ... I know not what you can do for timber, for ammunition, for ships and for other common uses [dependent upon raw materials from the Baltic] ... you shall have but what they will give you.88Burton’s Diary, iii. 386.

When this debate resumed on 24 February he made an even more impassioned plea for vigorous intervention in the Baltic to curb Dutch aggression: ‘we that are merchants do see, and can see this business, that he [the Dutch] intends to bring us under subjection. Where they have power, they are the unpitifullest people in the world ... If you miss this opportunity, I shall repent that ever I was born in this generation’.89Burton’s Diary, iii. 479-80. He denied having any vested interest in urging this course of action: ‘I have naught but what I have scattered all the world over. I shall suffer as much by a Dutch war as any man; but I care not for my all, so posterity be cared for’.90Burton’s Diary, iii. 480. Finally, he insisted that the handling of this crisis should properly be left to the executive, rather than to the Commons as some of the republicans were demanding.

Not surprisingly, given his close links with the Cromwellian court, Noell came in for severe criticism from republican MPs as they grew increasingly frustrated at the direction of protectoral policy, particularly with respect to the army. He was forced to defend himself late in March 1659 against accusations that he had made an illicit profit from the transportation of royalist prisoners and other enemies of the protectorate to Barbados, where they had allegedly suffered ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’.91Burton’s Diary, iv. 255-8; M. Rivers, O. Foyle, Englands Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize (1659), 4-5 (E.1833.3). Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied that he had effectively sold them into slavery or that they had been harshly used.92Burton’s Diary, iv. 258. Indeed, he went so far as to claim that labour conditions on Barbados, where ‘the work is mostly carried on by the negroes’, were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’.93Burton’s Diary, iv. 259.

Following a series of reports to the House in mid-April 1659 concerning the state of public finances (in which the soldiers, with their growing arrears of pay, were greatly concerned), Noell came under fire again – this time for his role as a revenue farmer.94CJ vii. 627b, 628b. He pleaded that he had always acted with financial propriety and in the best interests of the state and offered to relinquish all such contracts rather than incur the House’s displeasure: ‘I am a merchant ... I have an estate in several parts of the world; and if I fall under your displeasure, the inconveniences may be greater than can be expressed’.95Burton’s Diary, iv. 416. But his excuses and contrition did him little good. Member after Member stood up to denounce ‘such persons’ and the losses the state incurred by employing them.96Burton’s Diary, iv. 417-21. The Commons ordered him to pay in arrears of £25,207 on two of his revenue farms, but this was not good enough for Sir Henry Vane II, who believed that the farmers’ excuse of cash-flow problems was merely playing for time: ‘the longer they keep money in their hands the worse for you. They will keep it till they can make better conditions with you. There is no doubt as to Mr. Noell’s money. He has it ready’.97CJ vii. 638b; Burton’s Diary, iv. 420-1. Two days before Parliament was dissolved and the protectorate overthrown (20 Apr.), Noell was ordered to pay in a further £12,000 arrears on another of his farms.98CJ vii. 643b.

Although Noell regretted the fall of the protectorate (with good reason), he was willing to lend money to help sustain the diplomatic affairs of the regime that replaced it, the restored Rump.99Bodl. Rawl. C.179, pp. 57, 110, 126, 137, 138. Nevertheless, his credit, political as well as financial, dried up during the second half of 1659, with the restored Rump bringing in legislation to sequester the estates of any farmer of customs and excise who was deemed to have detained or otherwise withheld state revenue in their hands.100Add. 11411, ff. 83v-84v, 87v-89; TSP vii. 708, 734; A. and O. ii. 1342-3; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 250-1. By late January 1660, he had been discharged from two of his revenue farms, for which he claimed damages in excess of £30,000.101CJ vii. 827a; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 411. In June 1660, he was ordered by the crown to pay £15,000 for the arrears on his farms of the excise of salt and duties on coal.102PC2/54, ff. 38, 43-44v. But despite this ‘fine’ and the fact that his alleged damages were never made good, his fortunes seem to have revived under the restored monarchy, to which he acted as a creditor and mercantile-colonial adviser.103CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 502; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 251. He was restored to, or continued in, several of his revenue farms during the early 1660s and also appointed co-farmer of customs and imported excise of Ireland and of the excise on beer and ale and licensing alehouses in that kingdom, where he had acquired estates in Wexford, and in County Tipperary, King’s County and Queen’s County.104E134/14&15Chas2/Hil3; E134/15Chas2/East17; PROB11/318, ff. 98v-99v; Bodl. Carte 32, ff. 10-11, 33; Carte 42, ff. 198, 714; Carte 145, f. 235; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 308-9; CTB i. 73, 444, 687; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 75. He had claimed in 1658 to have ‘transplanted much of my interest and affaires and relations into Ireland’.105Henry Cromwell Corresp. 367. It was doubtless to protect his investments there that he became a member of the Irish Parliament in 1661, representing Wexford.106Bodl. Carte 42, f. 714; Carte 144, f. 56v. Samuel Pepys† expressed surprise in 1662 when so prominent an old Cromwellian as Noell was knighted, but conceded that he was ‘a very useful man’.107Pepys Diary, iii. 190. In 1663, Noell became a member of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, purchasing three shares in the company for £1,200; and the following year, he contracted with the crown for managing trade to the Red Sea.108LMA, CLA/002/02/01/0500; CSP Col. 1661-8, p. 121; CSP Dom. 1664-5, p. 124. But the main focus of his mercantile interests remained the West Indies, and with Povey and other colonial adventurers he lobbied the crown for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company and a council ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’.109Eg. 2395, ff. 107-12, 270-2; Add. 22920, f. 22.

With his far-flung mercantile empire apparently prospering – if perhaps over-extended and certainly debt-laden – Noell died on 29 September 1665 and was buried the next day in St Olave Jewry.110Pepys Diary, vi. 245; St Olave Jewry par. reg. According to Pepys, he had succumbed to the plague, and his widow – who followed him to the grave just a few days later – had died from grief. In his will, Noell charged his estate with legacies in excess of £1,100 and annuities of £300 a year. Prominent among his legatees were London merchants – notably, Povey and Alderman John Bence* – Barbadian planters and sea-captains. His estate included a ‘mansion house’ in St Botolph Bishopsgate, the moiety of a plantation on Barbados (complete with ‘Christian servants’ and ‘negroes’), lands in Staffordshire, a substantial estate in Ireland and shares in various ships.111PROB11/318, ff. 98v-100.

Noell’s untimely demise, along with that of his wife, left his affairs in considerable disarray. Pepys recorded that ‘nobody can make anything of his estate, whether he be dead worth anything or no, he having dealt in so many things, public and private, as nobody can understand whereabouts his estate is – which is the fate of these great dealers at everything’.112Pepys Diary, vi. 257-8. Although Noell had ordered his executor to sell large parts of his estate in order to pay his debts, these sales were apparently insufficient to satisfy his army of creditors.113PROB11/318, ff. 98-99v. An inventory of his personal estate taken some time after his death estimated that his goods and debts owed to him amounted to £14,429 (one of these debts was for £1,747 ‘on accompt of a contract for negroes’).114LMA, CLA/002/01/002, f. 156v; CLA/002/02/01/0500. However, his own debts were inventoried at the staggering sum of £30,106, leaving his five orphaned children with an uncertain future and his executor the target of many ‘vexatious suits’ at law – some of which continued into the late 1680s.115C5/58/68; C5/63/44-5; C5/530/28, 36; C5/531/56; C6/36/77; C7/57/91; C8/197/111; C8/198/106; C10/153/123; C10/202/18; C10/214/85; C10/277/61; C10/473/13; LMA, CLA/002/01/002, f. 156v; CLA/002/02/01/0651; HMC 8th Rep. i. 151; CSP Dom. 1666-7, p. 421; 1671, p. 236; 1671-2, pp. 68-9. Noell’s principal creditor was the crown, to whom he owed large sums as a farmer or receiver of public money.116LMA, CLA/002/02/01/0500.

Despite the bitter legacy left by his death, Noell’s life and career must be accounted among the most extraordinary and successful of the period. Something of his ability, and political survivability, is captured in Povey’s description of him as

so clear, so free and understands so perfectly what he ought to do, that he never espouses any interest – no, not of his own most particular friend – nor of his own profit or advantage ... but with great wisdom and caution; and particularly avoids parties and factions and the disobliging of man. So that, although there be not a worthier friend alive, yet is he not to be relied upon for the carrying anything out by force and eager opposition which doth not first convince his own reason and bears in its forehead equity, expedience and public good.117Add. 11411, f. 59v.

Noell was the first and last of his line to enter Parliament.