The Enduring Simond Legacy part 2: Business dealings, 1713-1763
- Rachel Lang
- Aug 6
- 11 min read
Updated: Aug 9
Around 1708, during a period of significant financial hardship for his father, Peter Simond junior began an apprenticeship in Amsterdam with a merchant house, Fizeaux & Co.[1] Apprentices typically started in clerical roles in their mid-teens to learn the basics of bookkeeping, correspondence and business operations. The earliest known records of Simond post-apprenticeship are from 1713 when he managed stock investments on behalf of Madame C. G. de la Mothe in London.[2] Simond’s beginnings in business feature two elements he retained throughout his life: an emphasis on family connections and a focus on French (and particularly Huguenot émigré) networks.
Peter Simond already had close relatives in London. His paternal aunt Marthe and her husband Jean Francois Naizon had a son Pierre baptised in the French Protestant Church in Soho Square in 1691. His uncle David had a daughter Constance baptised in Soho Square the following year. David Simond’s wife Marthe Ytier stood as godmother to Pierre Naizon, and Jean Francois Naizon as godfather to Constance Simond.[3] Both Naizon and David Simond were soldiers. Naizon was naturalized in 1699 and David in 1714. Peter Simond junior, “son of Peter Simond, by Anna his wife, born at the Cape of Good Hope”, was naturalized in 1717.[4]
Simond’s mother and all four siblings followed him to London. Younger sister Marie-Elisabeth married Samuel Coqutsaute, a native of Nérac in south-western France; they had three children baptised in Southampton 1719-1721 and a further eight baptised in London 1722-1732. Simond’s mother Anne de Bérault stood as godmother to her grandson David in Southampton in 1719 and eldest sister Catherine as godmother to her niece Marie Anne in the same place in 1720.[5] Simond’s only brother Jacques Cléopas had joined him as a business partner by 1720 and was naturalized in 1729/30.[6] The youngest sibling, Lidie, was in London when she wrote her will in 1758, bequeathing everything to her sister Catherine and “thanking her for the care and trouble she has often had with me... she always had a great kindness for me...”[7] It is likely that Simond’s mother Anne de Bérault was the Anne Simond buried in the grounds of All Saints Church, Hammersmith in 1732. His uncle David had died the previous year (naming Peter Simond as executor of his will) and was buried in the same churchyard.[8]
The Huguenot connections of Simond’s early business activities are clear (though the details of his activities are not). His earliest known client, Madame de la Mothe, was the widow of Claudius Groteste de la Mothe, minister of the French Protestant Church of the Savoy who died in London in 1713. Simond continued to act on behalf of Madame de la Mothe throughout the 1720s while she was in the process of extricating her large fortune which was at risk of confiscation in France.[9] His first business partner Jean-Etienne (Anglicised to John Stephen) Bénézet was, like Simond, the son of a refugee from Nîmes. The Bénézets were connected through marriage with the Fizeau family. It’s probably no coincidence that the first elder of Pierre Simond senior’s congregation in Drakenstein had the surname Bénézet. Peter Simond’s younger brother Jacques Cleopas (James) joined as a junior partner. Simond, Bénézet and Simond opened an account at the Bank of England on 16 June 1720.[10]
Simond and Bénézet’s early business ventures appear to have focused on stock-jobbing – speculative, short-term trading seen as marginal or even morally dubious within respectable mercantile society.[11] Managing other people’s money was a useful entry point for able men with little capital of their own while the partnership’s profits accumulated. Legal proceedings in the Court of Chancery indicate Simond made long visits to Holland and France in the late 1710s and early 1720s. Simond, Bénézet and Simond had “considerable dealings in the Dutch linen trade” as well as investing in stocks in Amsterdam for a quick profit. Simond’s first legal proceedings related to a quarrel with his former employer, John Fizeaux. “… Not in any way suspecting the fairness and integrity of the said John Fizeaux,” Simond found himself £1,500 out of pocket when Fizeaux refused to honour some bills of exchange. This was an uncharacteristic disagreement, and perhaps an early lesson for Simond.[12]
At the time of his marriage in 1724/5, Simond assessed his own worth at £4,000 with an additional £700 in household goods, linen and silver plate. His wife Susanne Groteste de la Buffière, the daughter of a landed family from Orléans and niece of Madame de la Mothe, brought with her a dowry of £2,850.[13] Simond’s marriage was a significant marker of social as well as financial advancement, and his mercantile status elicited some wry but not overly unkind comments from his wife’s landed relations.[14] Three children were born to Simond and Susanne during the first four years of their marriage, but the second, Marianna died at the age of two in 1728/9 and the third, Pierre François, died just over a year later. A possible fourth child, James, son of Peter and Susannah Simmonds, was buried on 14 January 1729/30, a month before Pierre François. Their remaining daughter Susanna Louisa was joined by another, Louisa Marianna in 1734.[15]
Simond took on an apprentice in 1726, a sign his merchant house had become securely established. The apprentice’s name was Peter De Coone, son of a gentleman from Southampton, suggesting continuing connection with the Huguenot community there. Peter’s father paid Simond £350 for the privilege. Another apprentice, Barrow Smith, was taken on in 1737 for a fee of £500.[16]
Bénézet emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1731 and shortly afterwards became a Quaker.[17] The timing of Bénézet’s move appears to coincide with a shift in Simond’s activities to focus on trading on his own account with the North American colonies. He built up connections with the Swiss Huguenot community in South Carolina and in the mid-1730s became the agent for the new colony of Georgia, supplying the colonists with, among other things, Irish beef and butter. He was also contracted to transport across the Atlantic Lutherans fleeing persecution in Salzburg, an echo of his parents’ exile in Cape Colony. A long letter Simond wrote in 1734 to Henry Newman, one of the trustees of the Georgia colony, provides a glimpse of Simond’s high standards and hands-on approach. Simond wrote that the Salzburgers had complained about the conditions on board his ship The Prince of Wales and in response he described to Newman the precise specifications of his ship, its layout, the nature of the accommodation and toilet facilities, the provisions made for the storage of passengers’ belongings and the financial implications of the journey. A stickler for detail, he was affronted by the Salzburgers’ implied insults.[18]
Simond owned another ship too, named the Simond.[19] From the mid-1730s to the 1750s he was shipping goods worth many thousands of pounds per journey and became an increasingly important supplier to the British Navy. His involvement in the trade in tobacco from the Chesapeake to Britain is not clear but he was certainly an active agent in the resale of tobacco to France, providing banking services to Etienne de Silhouette among others.[20] His involvement in the West India trade at this time is also obscure. Business records held by the successor firm Thomson Hankey have not been preserved prior to 1780 but family lore relates that Simond’s ancestors were trading in the French colony of St Dominigue from the 1660s and that Simond himself had a licence to trade there in the 1720s.[21] He also invested in land in South Carolina and Georgia, owning town lots in Georgetown, a tract of 12,350 acres in Granville County and land in the newly established Purrysburg, a precursor to his later purchases of plantations in Grenada.[22]
Simond and Bénézet served as the London agents for La Henriade, an epic poem published by French Enlightenment writer Voltaire in 1728. This was a departure from their usual business dealings and was likely to have been undertaken out of friendship rather than for profit. At the time, Simond resided above his business premises on Nicholas Lane, and it is likely that Voltaire stayed with him during his visit to London in the spring of that year. Simond may also have been Voltaire’s primary source of information on the Huguenot community in Cape Colony, which is described in Voltaire’s Siecle de Louis XIV.[23] Nearly a decade later, Lord Egremont recounted a dinner spent with Simond and three companions: “We were very cheerful, and many stories passed concerning the Counts of Langallerie and Bonneval and Mons. Voltaire, the French poet.” Simond revealed that he had lent Voltaire £300. Voltaire, with his characteristic wit, tried to evade repayment, offering instead to repay double the amount upon his death.[24]
Simond is recorded as travelling to Paris in the mid-1720s and Georgia in 1739 but in later years ran his business primarily from London.[25] In 1755 he moved to new premises, paying £80 per annum for “a leasehold messuage in Austin Fryers, with the Warehouses, Coach Houses, Stables and Appurtenances.”[26] He does not appear to have traded in enslaved people in North America but in 1734 he was one of a group of merchants who signed a petition deploring the “exorbitant Duty of ten pounds per Head [which] is imposed and continued on Negroes imported into the said Province [of South Carolina] by Your Majestys British Subjects to the great Damage of the Manufactures and Trade of this Kingdom”[27] On their return voyages his ships will have been stocked with produce grown using enslaved labour. Simond’s brother and business partner Jacques Cléopas died in 1751 leaving Simmond as his residuary legatee (after bequeathing £3,000 to his sisters and annuities to the value of £130 per annum).[28] Whatever the personal implications, this inheritance must have increased Simond’s own wealth.
With financial success came social advancement. Eldest daughter Susanna Louisa married John, 11th Baron St John of Bletso in 1755, and younger daughter Louisa Marianne married Sir John Trevelyan, 4th baronet in 1757. In 1758 Simond became a Member of Council of the Royal Society. A coat of arms was granted to him in 1760 and he was appointed secretary to his Masonic Lodge in 1774.[29] Lacking the volatility of his father, Simond was a safe pair of hands. He was trustee to the marriage settlement of his wealthy cousin Peter Naizon in 1739 and executor of Naizon’s will in 1750. At least two rich and prominent Huguenots named him as their executor: Gerard Van Neck in 1750 and Peter Dutens in 1761. Van Neck expected a lot of his two executors; he left over £100,000 in monetary bequests to more than 75 people (including £500 to Simond) and the contents of his will were pored over by readers of newspapers throughout the country.[30]
Simond took on a new apprentice in April 1758, John Hankey, the sixteen-year-old son of Sir Thomas Hankey, an eminent London banker.[31] That such a wealthy and well-connected man should entrust to Simond the training of his son speaks to Simond’s reputation for competence and honesty as well as to the prominence of his trading firm. It also marks a second shift in Simond’s business activities, toward the British Caribbean, Grenada in particular, and the lucrative sugar trade. Hankey became Simond’s junior partner in 1764, presumably committing capital to the partnership and allowing for its further expansion at a critical time for investment opportunities in the Caribbean. His family connections will have been useful too; the Hankeys were bankers to British Caribbean plantation owners.[32]
Over the next fifteen years, Simond and Hankey embarked on an audacious series of business ventures that would see them purchasing several hundred enslaved people and holding mortgages on several thousand more.
[1] Norma Perry, ‘Voltaire’s view of England’, Journal of European Studies, vii (1977), 77-94, 87.
[2] Winifred Turner and Israel Antoine Aufrère, The Aufrère Papers: Calendar and Selections, vol. 2 (1940), 18, 20, 21.
[3] Ancestry.com, England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1936 (database online) – Jean Francois’s surname given as Nezon, and Marthe and David’s surname as Simon. Jean Francois was usually known as Francis. See also the will of Francis Naizon, late Major of the Queen’s Own Royal Regiment of Horse, PROB 11/682/10. For more on Francis Naizon and David Simond, see Maurice Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 361-62.
[4] William A. Shaw, Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603-1700 (1911), 267; William A. Shaw, Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1701-1800 (1923), 118, 122.
[5] Ancestry.com. England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1936 (database online) - Caucutsaute appears with various spellings: Coqutsaute, Coqutfauts and others.
[6] William A. Shaw, Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1701-1800 (1923), 134.
[7] Will of Lydia Fregier née Simond, 1758, PROB-11-839-517.
[8] Ancestry.com, London, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1538-1812 (database online); will of David Simond, a native of Dauphiné and now an inhabitant of Hammersmith, PROB 11/651/105.
[9] Turner and Aufrère, vol. 3 (1940), 63, 76, 77, 78; David C. A. Agnew, Extract from Protestant Exiles from France, Chiefly in the Reign of Louis XIV, or the Huguenot Refugees and Their Descendants in Great Britain and Ireland, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (1886), 239-42; Vivienne Larminie, “La Mothe, Claude Groteste de (1647-1713), Reformed Minister and Religious Controversialist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online edition, 2004); will of Claudius Groteste de la Mothe, 1713, PROB 11/536/77.
[10] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 356, 364; Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake, vol. 1 (1973), p. 541.
[11] Perry, ‘Voltaire’s view of England’ p. 89.
[12] Simond v. Tiseau, TNA C11/1797/9; Halsey v. Simond, TNA C11/2284/30 – both list Jacques (James) Simond as a junior partner in 1720.
[13] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 384-85, fn. 172; Ancestry.com, England & Wales, Non-Conformist and Non-Parochial Registers, 1567-1936 (database online).
[14] Turner and Aufrère, vol. 3 (1940).
[15] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape p. 367.
[16] Findmypast.co.uk, Britain, Country Apprentices 1710-1808 (database online).
[17] Anthony Bénézet, the son of Jean Francois Bénézet, became a prominent abolitionist. See, for example, his publications A Caution to Great Britain and Her Colonies, in a Short Representation of the Calamitous State of the Enslaved Negroes in the British Dominions (1767) and Some Historical Account of Guinea, with an Inquiry into the Rise and Progress of the Slave-Trade (1772).
[18] George Fenwick Jones (ed.), Henry Newman’s Salzburger Letterbooks (1966), 502-505.
[19] Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, vol. 1 (1904), 128, 288-9; vol. 5 (1906), 198.
[20] Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake, vol. 1 (1973), 538-543.
[21] Jacob Price, France and the Chesapeake, vol. 2 (1973), 1018-1019; Michael Hughes, ‘Thomson, Hankey & Co. Ltd: three hundred years’ trade with the West Indies’ (1983).
[22] Kathryn Roe Coker, “Absentees as Loyalists in Revolutionary War South Carolina”, The South Carolina Historical Magazine, 96, no. 2 (April 1995): 119-134 – information on Simond on 128-129; for sales of town lots see Brent Holcomb (ed.), South Carolina Deed Extracts (1993), 68, 110.
[23] Perry, ‘Voltaire’s view of England’ pp. 85-87.
[24] Perceval, John, Earl, Diary of the First Earl of Egmont (Viscount Percival) vol. 2 (1923) pp. 401-403.
[25] Turner and Aufrère, vol. 3 (1940), 63, 76, 77, 78; Ancestry.com, U.S. and Canada, Passenger and Immigration Lists Index, 1500s-1900s [database online].
[26] London Gazette, Issue 9530, p. 5 (18 November 1755).
[27] Elizabeth Donnan (ed.), Documents illustrative of the history of the slave trade to America, vol. 4 (1935), p. 284.
[28] Will of Jacques Cleopas Simond, PROB 11/802/377.
[29] Boucher, French Speakers at the Cape pp. 367-8; The London Magazine, or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 27 (December 1758), p. 648 (December 1758); Anonymous, Jachin and Boaz; or, an authentic key to the door of free-masonry (1797), p. 57.
[30] Will of Gerard Van Neck, merchant of London, PROB 11/782/94; The London Magazine, or Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, vol. 19 (September 1750), pp. 471-476 (and many other publications). For more on the Van Necks see Jacob Davis, France and the Chesapeake vol. 1, 541-543.
[31] Ancestry.com, UK, Register of Duties Paid for Apprentices’ Indentures, 1710-1811 (database online).
[32] For more on the Hankey family see 'Sir Thomas Hankey', Legacies of British Slavery database, http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146667269 [accessed 16th September 2024]; 'Sir Joseph Hankey', Legacies of British Slavery database, http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146665623 [accessed 16th September 2024]; 'Thomas Hankey I of Fetcham Park', Legacies of British Slavery database, http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146649541 [accessed 16th September 2024].
© 2025 Rachel Lang. All rights reserved.
Comments