COPPING, Jeremiah (Jeremy) (1616-87), of Sion College, St Alphege London Wall, London.

The Coppings were well-established residents of Orford and may have been related to the various Coppyns who had sat for Dunwich during the previous century. The 1659 MP, baptized as ‘Jeremy’ at Orford in January 1616, was the son of Richard Copping, while his mother was probably the Alice Copping who died in 1633.9Orford par. reg., ff. 38v, 139v. Richard seems to have been the son of the former mayor of the town, John Copping, a mercer, who, when he died in 1605, had been survived by his wife, Elizabeth, and two sons, Richard and Francis, who were then still minors.10Suff. RO (Ipswich), IC/AA1/41/19; Orford par. reg., f. 125; PROB11/178/266. The MP’s father was sometimes referred to as Richard Copping junior to distinguish him from Richard Copping (d. 1635), who served as mayor of Orford three times and who was probably his uncle.11Suff. RO (Ipswich), IC/AA1/71/90; EE5/2/2, ff. 89-92v, 124v-127, 145-147.

In 1614 Richard Copping junior was appointed the mayor of Orford.12Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE5/2/2, ff. 127v-129v. By then he was already married and had two sons, Richard and John, and a daughter, Elizabeth. Both John and Elizabeth died in infancy and the last son, born in 1617 a year after the future MP, was also given the name John.13Orford par. reg., ff. 36v, 37v, 39, 131v; PROB11/178/266. By the early 1630s Richard Copping had moved to Ipswich.14GL, MS 05576, f. 110. When he died in 1638, his bequests to Jeremiah as his second surviving son were relatively modest – a meadow at Farnham, close to Aldeburgh, a share in a ship, the Concord, and some plate. His properties and business interests in Orford were instead left to the youngest son, John. Richard appointed his ‘loving friend’, the Ipswich attorney, William Cage*, as his executor.15PROB11/178/266.

That Jeremiah did not inherit their father’s business interests in Orford was presumably because he was already aiming to follow his own career in London. Six years earlier he had been apprenticed to a London fishmonger, Roger Hughes. On completing that apprenticeship in 1642, he was admitted as a freeman of the Fishmongers’ Company.16GL, MS 05576, f. 110, 177v. When Hughes, who lived in Moorfields, died that same year, Copping witnessed his will.17St Pancras Soper Lane, London par. reg.; PROB11/188/371. At some point over the next two years, Copping was able to lend £200 to another London fishmonger, George Hughes, doubtless a relative of his former master.18C6/138/128. He also evidently owned a share in the Goodwill of Ipswich – probably the same share which their father had bequeathed to his brother John.19PROB11/178/266. That Jeremiah and his fellow owners had cause to petition Parliament in November 1644. The Commons referred that petition to the Committee of Both Kingdoms.20CJ iii. 708a.

By 1648 Copping was living as a sub-tenant in rooms in Sion College, where his rent was £2 a year.21LMA, MS 33458, pp. 96, 102, 112, 114, 117, 127, 132, 144, 150; MS 33445/001, p. 140. He was not formally attached to the college, which operated as an association for London clergymen, but was instead one of a number of private individuals who took advantage of the growing practice of the college and its fellows to lease out parts of their buildings for profit. Not everyone was happy with this. Soon after Copping had moved in there were complaints that, as a mere ‘tradesman’, he was the wrong sort of tenant.22E.H. Pearce, Sion College and Library (Cambridge, 1913), 95. Equally, he may not necessarily have shared the strong association of the college fellows with the London Presbyterians.

At some point Copping entered the service of Thomas Withring*. Withring had held the patent to operate the foreign postal service during the 1630s, but had been dismissed from his position as deputy postmaster in 1640 and then struggled to rebuild his business. His foreign letters office still existed in some form in the later 1640s and Copping was employed to manage its finances. He also looked after Withring’s private finances, receiving a stipend of £20.23C5/375/32. It may well be that Withring turned to him after he fell ill in late 1649. It was later alleged that shortly before Withring’ death in September 1651, the pair fell out and that Copping faced imminent dismissal.24C5/375/32. Withring appointed his two executors, Sir David Watkins and William Ellys*, to hold this business in trust for his young son, who also died soon afterwards. Between 1653 and 1658 Copping and Watkins (and later his widow) sued and countersued each other in upper bench and chancery over how much Copping still owed to Watkins as the profits from the brief period he had continued to manage this operation on Watkins’ behalf.25C5/375/32; C5/30/129; C5/399/77; C5/33/22-3.

In June 1653 the government granted to John Manley* the right to operate the post office for two years. Several days later, the council of state heard a petition from Copping, Richard Bostock and Thomas Harper asking to be continued in their existing positions.26CSP Dom. 1653-4, p. 4. Bostock was certainly an official in the foreign letters office and had probably been so since the days of Withring.27CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 72; 1652-3, p. 110. Plausibly, all three continued in those positions, first under Manley and later under John Thurloe*. Copping combined that role with other business interests. In 1653 he lent £350 to a former royalist, Anthony Browne, mortgaged against part of Browne’s country seat at South Weald in Essex, in return for an annuity of £50 a year.28GL, MS 07286, ff. 3-10. Moreover, in 1656 he invested £275 in Sir William Davenant’s new opera company, which planned to construct a theatre close to the Charterhouse and only a short walk from Sion College.29L. Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge, Mass. 1928), 139-40.

Copping’s evident success in London helps explain why the freemen of his home town chose to elect him as one of their two Members for the 1659 Parliament. But there was a more specific reason in play. Continuing family tradition, in 1653 his younger brother, John, had been appointed one of the town’s 12 chief burgesses. Promotion to be a portman followed on 27 September 1658 and he was immediately elected as mayor. He was thus in office to oversee the election of his brother four months later.30Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE5/2/2, ff. 214, 223v-225; EE5/8/6-7; C219/48: Orford election indenture, 14 Jan. 1659. John would serve three further terms as mayor before his death in 1681.31Suff. RO (Ipswich), EE5/2/3, ff. 4-7v, 14v-16, 22v-24; Orford par. reg., f. 151; IC/AA1/111/39. Nothing is known of what contribution, if any, Jeremiah made to the proceedings of the 1659 Parliament.

Following the Restoration Copping was continued in – or was re-appointed to – his position in the foreign letters office.32Wilson Hyde, The Post in Grant and Farm, 259. During this period he was said to be close to Isaac Dorislaus junior, who was employed by him as a clerk on an unofficial basis, to such an extent that questions were asked in 1667 as to whether this created a security risk, since Isaac Dorislaus senior had been a commonwealth diplomat before his assassination in 1649.33SP29/209, f. 156; P. Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State (Cambridge, 1956), 25-6; A. Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1994), 80-1. Copping had ceased to work for the Post Office by 1677.34Add. 18958, ff. 10v-12. In the meantime, he still acted as an occasional money lender. In 1666 Lionel Copley* mortgaged one of his properties, Stanshall at Tickhill, Yorkshire, to Copping in return for a loan of £725.35GL, MS 07286, f. 15. In the aftermath of the Great Fire, Copping seems also to have redeveloped the house in Abchurch Lane which had formerly been the location of the foreign letters office.36GL, MS 07286, ff. 18-19. This was not for his own use, as he continued to live in Sion College. In 1676 he donated £10 towards the rebuilding of those parts of the college which had been damaged in the Great Fire and in 1678 he was given permission to enclose part of the college’s gardens.37LMA, MS 33445/001, pp. 331, 341, 350, 373; MS 33458, p. 228.

Copping died in early 1687. He had never married, so in his will, drawn up on 8 January 1687, he left a significant proportion of his wealth to the Fishmongers’ Company. That bequest consisted of the money owed to him by Lionell Copley’s son (£1,800) and from the annuity from Browne. His wish was that the Fishmongers should use those funds to assist nine or ten almsmen. The rest of his wealth was then divided between various members of his family.38PROB11/389/12. The executor was the landlord of his house at Sion College, Thomas Flatman, who may well have been the miniature painter and poet of that name.39Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Flatman’. But Flatman refused to serve, so Copping’s nieces, Elizabeth Holbrooke and Dorothy Miles, the daughters of his late brother, John, were appointed instead.40PROB11/389/12. Copping’s book collection was sold at public auction in March 1687.41A Cat. of the Libraries of Mr. Jer. Copping [1687]. The bequests in Copping’s will included lands at Marlesford in Suffolk, which had originally been inherited from their father by Copping’s elder brother, Richard.42PROB11/178/266; PROB11/389/12. The Holbrookes and the Mileses brought a case in Chancery to forestall attempts by Richard’s daughter, Elizabeth Stevenson, to claim them. Stevenson responded that she had previously surrendered her claim to them only because Jeremiah Copping had bullied her into doing so.43C7/151/34. Ralph Holbrooke, husband of Elizabeth Holbrooke, subsequently erected an inscription over the gateway to the graveyard of St Alphege London Wall recording that Copping had been buried nearby.44J.P. Malcolm, Londinium Redivivum (1802-7), i. 39.

In a coda to Copping’s bequests, in 1836 a court case was brought against the Fishmongers’ Company by the attorney-general alleging that it had never properly invested the money from Copping and that they had only used the money to fund their existing almshouses. The master of the Rolls ruled that there was sufficient doubt over the matter that the company should make new investments equivalent to the sums bequeathed by Copping.45City of London Livery Companies Commission (1884), iv. 228-9.