The Owners of Brandenburgh House. Sir Nicholas Crispe

      Brandenburgh House in Hammersmith, which eventually became Elizabeth Craven's home, dated back to Stuart times. The house was built in c.1625-6 for Sir Nicholas Crispe (1598-1666), a local merchant whose family money came from the brick-making trade. This business flourished because the area West of London was rapidly expanding during this period. Throughout his career he was a stout royalist, which brought him some gains and some severe losses.

Sir Nicholas Crisp, Bt., line engraving by Robert Hartley Cromek, published 1 May 1795 by T. Cadell & W. Davies, after an unknown artist. NPG D13876 

      Crispe's house was in an elegant fashionable, Dutch style and built solely of bricks, with no timber structure. This was an innovation in its time. It overlooked the river, less for the purpose of a pretty view than that of transporting heavy goods by water.
      In 1628 Crispe purchased most of the shares of the Guinea Company, which traded on the West Coast of Africa. He paid less than ₤800 for them and invested in building trading forts on the Gold Coast (what is now Ghana). Expeditions were made up the Gambia River to collect gold, but they were unprofitable and the company lost ₤5,600. So the company switched to dealing in redwood from Sierra Leone.
      In 1631 a new charter was granted to the "Company of Merchants Trading to Guinea". Crispe was one of six merchants who bought this monopoly from Charles I. Their principal trade was in gold. In addition ships were sent east to Benin to trade for cloth which was brought back and sold for gold. It is estimated that Crispe and the Merchants Trading to Guinea made a profit of over ₤500,000 from gold collected from 1632 to 1644.
      Crispe was a very versatile businessman, and also had a factory in Hammersmith producing glass beads for English settlers in America to trade with the natives. And he was full of schemes, for example one for building a wet dock at Hammersmith.
      In 1629 he was elected M.P. for Winchelsea and in 1640 he became a customs farmer i.e. collecting taxes for the King and keeping a percentage. In 1641 he was knighted, doubtless in exchange for cash. It was by such means that Charles I managed to rule for eleven years without calling Parliament. When it was finally called in 1641, Crispe was expelled as an MP for being a monopolist and fined for collecting duties on merchandise without permission from Parliament.

Bronze bust of Charles I by Nicholas Le Sueur 
placed by Crispe in St Paul's Church at Hammersmith.

      When the Civil War broke out, Crispe was grateful and loyal to the monarch who had enabled him to do so well. He stumped up large sums of money for the Royalist cause. In 1643 he raised a regiment for Charles I; in 1644 he was commissioned to equip a squadron of fifteen warships, to fight on the king's side. The Roundheads responded with wrath and the remainder of his property was sequestrated by Parliament in 1645. Under Cromwell, Crispe actually fled for a while to France,and his house in Hammersmith was plundered by the troops of General Fairfax.

Crispe's coat of arms.

      After the Restoration in 1660 Crispe returned and was able to reclaim his property. In 1663 he became one of the directors of the new African Company, which dealt in many things including arms and sometimes slaves. That was not untypical of this era of plunder and piracy. In 1665, shortly before his death, he was created a Baronet by the grateful Charles II.

      In St. Paul's church in Hammersmith, a stained glass window displays Crispe's coat of arms as his memorial. Crispe paid for a bronze bust of Charles I to be put there, and at his death his heart was laid to rest in an urn beneath it. The rest of his body was buried in St. Mildred's, Bread Street, where his monument complains that he had lost 'out of purse about a Hundred Thousand pounds' by his pioneering efforts in the Guinea trade." 

To find out more about Elizabeth Craven, her writings and the people she knew, read

https://vernonpress.com/book/334

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Dictionary of National Biography: Index and Epitome. S. Lee, 1906.
 L&M Companion
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol6/pp529-548
"http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/council_services/Educati...

https://greenwichindustrialhistory.blogspot.com/2018/01/copperas-manufacture-was-important.html
 [https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/3796/]
https://knowyourlondon.wordpress.com/2017/07/05/brandenburgh-house-fulham/