He was the second son of John Payne (died 1746), a London haberdasher andEast India Company director, and his wife Lydia Durrant; his paternal grandfather John Payne (died 1706) was fromCottesbrooke, Nottinghamshire. His father left him £1000 in Bank of England stock, with £1000 in East India Company stock and property.[2]
Edward Payne was the brother of John Payne, who went into partnership withAbel Smith (1717–1788) ofSmith's Bank in 1758, forming Smith & Payne.[3] Edward was part-owner of anEast Indiaman, theShaftesbury, and John was a director of the East India Company.[4][5]
On John Payne's death in 1764, Edward Payne went into partnership with John's son Rene (or René).[6] They were merchants in London.[7] The firm was based in theLothbury area, i.e. the parish ofSt Margaret Lothbury.[8] The street address was King's Arms Yard, inColeman Street Ward.
In 1774 Edward & Rene Payne imported tobacco fromVirginia's Upper James Naval District.[5] A 1775 letter from Neil Jamieson, aloyalist inNorfolk, Virginia to Edward & Rene Payne was intercepted byGeorge Washington and passed to theContinental Congress.[9][10] Edward Payne was one of a group ofCity of London figures who testified to theHouse of Lords in February 1777 on commercial losses caused by theAmerican Revolutionary War, with the America merchant Thomas Wooldridge, West Indies merchant Beeston Long I, Abraham Hake of Lloyd's, the slave traderJohn Shoolbred and others.[11] Ordered to the House at his Colman Street business address, he was referred to in theParliamentary Register as ofCornhill, another London ward.[12][13]
During the 1780s, Payne chaired the London Committee of Merchants trading to North America.[14] In 1789George Smith (1765–1836) bought into Edward & Rene Payne, with a 20% holding.[8] In December 1789, the lifting of anOrder in Council restricting corn imports from the USA was notified by a public announcement to Payne.[15]
In the wake ofRobert Smith's efforts to grow the London private bank Smith & Payne, it hit financial difficulties in 1776–7. Edward Payne assisted by having the Bank of England take on some of the bank's discounted bills, a deprecated move;[23] theOxford Dictionary of National Biography speaks of "extraordinary re-discount facilities".[24] Payne was never formally connected to the London or Nottingham branches of Smith's Bank, while acting as a consultant. He shared about 50% of their profits, by arrangement with his brother John and then his nephew Rene.[25]
Payne became one of a group of trustees set up to resolve the potential insolvency of debtors ofGeorge Peters, a Bank of England director.[29] The debtors were Israel Wilkes (1722–1805), brother ofJohn Wilkes, and his brother-in-law John de Ponthieu (1732–1773), brother ofHenry de Ponthieu, proprietors ofGrenada estates run by enslaved people.[30][31] Payne had done business with John de Ponthieu.[32] Among the other trustees wasJohn Julius Angerstein ofLloyd's of London.[33]
The events leading up to the formation of the trust began when Edward and Rene Payne tried to collect debts from the Larnac brothers of Martinique. The Larnacs declaredbankruptcy.[34] Edward Payne and Josias de Ponthieu, assyndics, approached theEarl of Shelburne as First Lord of Trade for legal help in Paris against the Larnacs.[35]
In 1768 Peters asked Angerstein for help; who involved Payne and John Wilkinson. The trustees mortgaged the Grenada estates in 1771, toDaniel Giles (75%) and the London merchant Daniel Richard (25%, died 1793).[36][37]
Payne married Frances (died 1821).[38] Of their children:
Frances, the eldest daughter, married in 1784 the Rev. George Pickard, rector ofBloxworth.[39] He was the son of Jocelyn Pickard and his wife Henrietta Trenchard, daughter ofGeorge Trenchard MP.[40]
Eliza married in 1786 Captain Robert Adair (1760–1844) of Ballymena.[41][42]
John George Payne married in 1781 Catherine Garrick, daughter of George Garrick and niece ofDavid Garrick.[43][44] For a period of a few years in the 1780s he was a partner in Smith, Payne & Smiths, the family bank.[45]
The Edward Payne mentioned in the leading chancery case Lord Carrington v Payne of 1800, concerning the will of Rene Payne, was the brother of Rene who died in 1830, aged 84.[46][47][48]
George François Grand, the Huguenot first husband ofCatherine Grand and author ofNarrative of the Life of a Gentleman Long Resident in India, was apprenticed around 1765 toRobert Jones. He claimed kinship to the Paynes, calling "aunt" the widow of Edward's brother John Payne. Dissatisfied both with the apprenticeship and Jones's subsequent offer of a cadetEast India Company position atBencoolen, he had his aunt intervene, and sailed for Bengal at the beginning of 1766.[49][50] In June he metRobert Clive in Calcutta, who spoke highly of John Payne, but did not give him a commission.[51] He was in England when Jones died in 1774, dashing some hopes he had of preferment. Edward Payne arranged for him to have a writership.[52]
Payne made provision in his will for his wife, his son John George, his daughter called Elizabeth Adair, and his son-in-law George Pickford.[7] He left £100 to the poor of Ealing.[53] This bequest was later expanded by gifts from Sir Charles Morgan, and then byFrederick Augustus Wetherall.[54] The lease of the manor ofSutton Valence (Town Sutton), left to him by his father, he passed on to his heirs.[55]
Rene Payne died in 1799.[56] After the death of the original partners, the firm Edward and Rene Payne & Co. continued under the same name.[57]
Burke in 1894 identified the residence of Frances Payne's father Edward as Ealing House.[59] In 1813 it was called "a large and gloomy residence", and was untenanted.[60]
Lysons in vol. II (1795) ofThe Environs of London stated that Payne owned the house, and gave the two previous owners asJohn Huske and William Adair.[61] When vol. IV of that work appeared in 1796, there was a correction to the Ealing section of vol. II, including the comments "Hickes-on-the-Heath, now called Elm-Grove, has been sold by Mr. Barnard toLord Kinnaird. Ealing-house is now the property of theEarl of Galloway."[62] In vol. III of the second edition (1811), the owner is given as Colonel Douglas.[63]
Gillian Darley's biography ofSir John Soane places these houses as "opposite neighbours" ofPitzhanger Manor, which Soane had renovated as his own residence in Ealing from around 1800: the neighbours were "Edward Payne and Lord Kinnard at, respectively, Ealing House andEaling Grove".[64] If Ealing House had by then been sold out of the Payne family, the reference to Edward Payne is anachronistic.
^abSterne, Laurence (2014).The Miscellaneous Writings and Sterne's Subscribers, an Identification List. University Press of Florida. p. 480.ISBN978-0-8130-4947-2.
^Longman, Charles James (1889).Longman's Magazine. Longmans, Green and Company. pp. 595–602.
^Twist, A. R. (2002)."A Subscription Society 1: Ships and Philanthropy"(PDF).Widening circles in finance, philanthropy and the arts. A study of the life of John Julius Angerstein 1735-1823 (Thesis). Universiteit van Amsterdam. p. 28.
