THE BAKINGS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1971, 14 November 1889, Page 32

THE BAKINGS.

The rumour to the effect that the Princess Victoria, or May as she is called, of Teck, is to be married to the Hon. Jobn Baring, son and heir of Edward Charles Baring, now known as Lord ltevelstoke, naturally draws attention to that great financial house. Towards the end of last century, when George 111 was king there were only six bankers in London who had the reputation of being possessed of extraordinary wealth, or were what is now termed millionaires. These six bankers were Thomas Coutts, feir Francis Baring, Joseph Denison, Henry Hope, Lewis Tessier, and Peter Thellusson. Thomas Coutts began life with a capital under a thousand, and died worth nearly a million of money. The career of Sir Francis J3aring was still more successful. The Barings came from Germany; the immediate ancestor of the family was Herr Francis Baring, pastor of the Lutheran Church at Bremen, who came over to this country in the latter part of his life. His son John Baring established himself as a cloth manufacturer at Larkbeer in Devonshire, and by the exercise of industry acquired a considerable fortune. He left four sons, two of whom, John and Franpis, panic to London and set up in business as importers of wools and dye-stuffs, acting also as agents to the Larkbeer cloth factory. : The elder brother, John," afterwards withdrew fr.om business arid retired to'B^eter, wK&e-

upon Francis, then sole, head of the firm, wound up .his old affairs and began devoting himself to banking transactions. He speculated largely in Government loans, and soon became the friend and financial adviser of the Premier, Lord Shelburne, who used 1 to style him " the Prince of Merchants." She]burne's successor, William Pitt, thought 'it necessary to gain the goodwill of the influential banker by the gift of a baronetcy, and on the 29th May 1793 Mr Baring became Sir Francis Baring. The founder of the great banking house (born April 18, 1740, died September 12, 1810) left behind him a fortune estimated at £2,000,000 sterling, and in his own person was without comparison the most successful accumulator of wealth of the eighteenth centnry. Sir Francis Baring, by his marriage with a niece of the then Arshbishop of Canterbury, left five sons, the three eldest of whom— Thomas, Alexander, and Henry— became partners in the banking establishment. Sir Thomas withdrew from business soon after the death of his father, thinking it unbecoming in a baronet to be a banker; and Mr Henry Baring likewise retired not long after for a very different reason. Henry Baring was passionately addicted to gambling, which he carried on at a high rate at the Palais Eoyal, Paris, and other famous " hells " of the time, where his nightly appearance with mountains of gold and bank notes before him was the wonder of all beholders. He was by no means an unlucky disciple of' rouge et noir, for he several times broke the " Entreprise Generate dcs Jeux," carrying off sums which would have been princely fortunes to any bnt the.. Barings. Notwithstanding this luck, his presence at the Continental gaming tables was naturally considered a scandal at the London banking house of Baring Brothers, and after some negotiations Henry Baring was induced to withdraw from the firm. There now remained as head of the establishment, Alexander Baring, born October 1774, and brought up in the house of Messrs Hope. When the Messrs Hope returned to England in consequence of the occupation of Holland by the troops of revolutionary France, Alexander Baring left the establishment and went to the United States, where he married the eldest daughter of Mr William Binghatn, then considered the richest man in America, and who brought him a fortune of 900,000d01. Mr Alexander Baring had no sooner become head of the house than he entered on a series of monetary operations on a gigantic scale and of European importance. The greatest of these, one of the greatest ever undertaken by a single banker, was that he freed France from the incubus of an occupation of Russian, Prussian, and Austrian armies of 50,000 men each by the loan of £1,100,000 at 5 per cent. This momentous transaction occasioned the saying of the witty French Premier, the Due de Richelieu, "There are six Great Powers in EuropeEngland, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia, and Baring Brothers." Alexander Baring, " Alexander the Great," died at Longleat in 1848, having been elevated to the peerage under the title of Lord Ashburton in 1835. He left four sons, the eldest of whom, William Bingham (who died in 1864), succeeded him in. the family honours, while the second, Francis (born in 1800), took for a while the nominal direction of the firm. In this capacity he engaged in some remarkable transactions. He purchased, among other things, the whole of the territory surrounding the lake Tezcuco, on the island of which stands the City of Mexico, and thus made himself, in a sense, master of the capital of a great country. The other members of the firm of Baring and Co. were, however, startled by the gigantic nature of the purchase, and after great efforts succeeded in getting rid of the supposed Frankenstein. Had they kept their purchase who knows but that the " notables " who sat in electoral conolave in July 1863, might have chosen a member of the House of Baring instead of the House of Hapsburg to be Emperor of Mexico I Mr Francis Baring .became by the death of his brother Lord Ashburton, and married a daughter of the Due de Bassano. There are now three peerages in the Baring family — Ashburton, Northbrook, and Revelstoke. The Hon. John Baring, to whom the Princess May is supposed to have promised her hand in marriage, is 26 years of age.