JOHNSON, Abraham (d. 1676), of Hackney, Mdx.

There are many uncertainties about the life of Abraham Johnson, but what is known establishes a clear picture of the son of a Colchester saymaker who prospered as a London Fishmonger and who then returned to serve briefly as MP for his home town in 1659. He was born at Colchester in the parish of Holy Trinity.15PROB11/351/402. The family on his father’s side was local, as his paternal grandfather was from Halsted. That his maternal grandfather was originally from Flanders suggests that his mother’s family were among the many Huguenot weavers who settled in Colchester in the late sixteenth century.16Vis. Mdx. ed. Foster, 74. When William Johnson died in 1634 he left £400 to Abraham (who already had two sons of his own), although it was his younger brother, Peter, who inherited their father’s properties at Colchester. Henry Barrington* was one of the overseers of the will.17PROB11/166/214; Essex RO, D/DC/40/6.

Abraham had been apprenticed in 1620 to a London fishmonger, Peter Sadler, and admitted as a freeman of the Fishmongers’ Company before 1635, when he took on an apprentice of his own, also from Colchester.18GL, ‘London apprenticeship abstracts, 1442-1850’. In 1637 he was appointed as one of the six wardens of the Company’s yeomanry.19GL, MS 5570/3, pp. 297-367. It would be tempting to identify him as the man who was renting property in Pudding Lane from the Fishmongers in 1628 were it not that a basketmaker of the same name was living in that part of the City at about that time.20GL, MS 5570/2, pp. 670, 673; St George Botolph Lane par. reg. f. 69. It is just possible that he was the person who, together with Robert Ramsey and Bartholomew Cloyse, sought a patent from the Crown in 1629 for a new form of water pump.21CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 100.

Very little can be said about Johnson’s career as a London tradesman beyond the fact that he seems to have been a successful businessman and that he progressed steadily through the ranks of the Fishmongers’ Company. Nicholas Baker of Tunstall, Suffolk, was apprenticed to him for eight years in 1642.22GL, MS 5570/3, p. 578. Abraham junior – presumably the son baptised at St Mary Woolnoth in May 1633 – was admitted as a freeman of the company in 1653.23St Mary Woolnoth par. reg.; GL, MS 5570/4, p. 400. Johnson’s commercial interests probably took priority over any political involvement during the 1640s. The only evidence for any commitment by him to either side was the £50 which he lent towards the Fishmongers’ share in the £100,000 loan raised by the London livery companies for Parliament in 1642.24GL, MS 5570/3, pp. 617, 939; MS 5570/4, p. 89. Later he was on friendly terms with one of the City’s leading royalist supporters – John Robinson† stood surety for him when he was appointed as the Company’s renter warden in 1652.25GL, MS 5570/4, p. 340. The Abraham Johnson who helped capture three Dutch ships laden with silver in 1652 was probably someone else.26HMC Laing, i. 276-7; CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 28, 96; 1654, pp. 241-2; 1655, pp. 228, 241, 293, 294, 360, 361, 370, 372, 379; 1656-7, pp. 93-4, 214, 267; 1660-1, p. 480.

By 1651, by which time he was a member of the local vestry, Johnson had settled in Hackney.27Simpson, Hackney Church, 105. When he died quarter of a century later his main residence would be at Clapton, a village located within that parish.28PROB11/351/402. He also took the opportunity to re-establish his links with Colchester. He spent £3,340 in 1653 buying some lands at Mile End on the outskirts of the town from his nephew, James Abrathat, the properties being ones which had once belonged to John Sayer*.29Essex RO, D/DJ 20/2-3. This toehold within the town helps explain his election to Parliament in 1659. That election was not straightforward. Under a new charter dating from 1656, the Colchester corporation had been left in the hands of the faction headed by his father’s old friend, Henry Barrington, which strongly supported the protectorate and the parliamentary franchise had been confined to the members of the corporation. The return of Johnson and John Shaw* was an attempt by the freemen to challenge this. The adjudication by the Commons on 22 March 1659 on the resulting double return ruled that Johnson and Shaw, as opposed to John Maidstone* and Abraham Barrington, should be seated.30Burton’s Diary, iii. 65, iv. 223-4; CJ vii. 617b-618a. What Johnson did in Parliament once he had been allowed to take his seat, or indeed whether he took his seat at all during the remaining four weeks which this Parliament had to run, remains obscure.

The only event of note during the remainder of Johnson’s life seems to have been his election in 1664 to the office of prime warden, the highest office in the hierarchy of the Fishmongers’ Company.31GL, MS 5570/4, p. 1150; MS 5570/5, pp. 14, 29. He was lucky that he stepped down from this position in June 1666, a matter of months before the Great Fire plunged the company’s affairs into crisis. He lived on for another decade. According to the register of St Mary Woolnoth, ‘Abraham Johnson, esquire’ died at his ‘mansion at Hackney’ on 23 June 1676 and was buried in the middle aisle of St Mary’s on 3 July.32St Mary Woolnoth par. reg. His will, drafted in 1674, expressed his hopes ‘to inherit among the elect the joys and fruition of eternal life’. He also specified that the cost of his funeral should not exceed £300. The bulk of his estate was left in the first instance to his wife and then to their grandson, Edward, their sons having already died. He left loving cups of silver and gilt plate decorated with his arms to the corporation of Colchester and the Fishmongers’ Company.33PROB11/351/402. The Colchester cup survives.34E.A. Blaxill, The Borough Regalia (Colchester, 1950), 13-14; VCH Essex, ix. 279. Edward, the grandson, is known to have reached maturity.35Essex RO, D/DJ 20/3. Johnson was almost certainly the only member of the family ever to sit in Parliament.