from his rule never to raise a man of
business to the Peerage, by converting Robert Smith into Baron
Carrington. His successor abandoned the patronymic Smith for his
title-name; and the present-day representative of John Smith, the
Nottingham draper is Charles Robert Wynn Carrington, first Earl
Carrington, P.C., G.C.M.G., and joint Hereditary Lord Chamberlain of
England.

When William Capel left the humble paternal roof at Stoke Nayland, in
Suffolk, to see what fortune and a brave heart could do for him in
London, it certainly never occurred to him that his name would be handed
down through the centuries by a line of Earls, Viscounts, and Barons.
Fortune had indeed strange experiences in store for the Suffolk youth;
for, while she made a Knight and Lord Mayor of him, she consigned him on
a life sentence to the Tower for resisting the extortions of the
mercenary Henry VII. Sir William's son won his knightly spurs on French
battlefields, wedded a daughter of the ancient house of Roos of Belvoir,
and became the ancester of the Barons Capel, Viscounts Malden, and Earls
of Essex.

The Earls of Radnor owe their rank and wealth to the enterprise which
led young Laurence des Bouveries from his native Flanders to a
commercial life at Canterbury in the days of Queen Bess. From this
humble Flemish apprentice sprang a line of Turkey merchants, each of
whom in turn added his contribution to the family dignities and riches,
until Sir Jacob, the third Baronet, blossomed into a double-barrelled
peer as Lord Longford and Viscount Folkestone. Not the least, by any
means, of the descendants of Laurence des Bouveries was Canon Pusey,
the great theologian, who was grandson of the first Lord Folkestone.

Lord Harewood springs from a stock of merchants who accumulated great
wealth in the eighteenth century; and Lord Jersey owes much of his
riches to Francis Child, the industrious apprentice who, in Stuart days,
married the daughter of his master, William Wheeler, the goldsmith, who
lived one door west of Temple Bar.

Other peers who count London apprentices among their ancestors are Lord
Aveland and Viscount Downe, both descendants of Gilbert Heathcote, whose
commercial success was crowned by the Lord Mayoralty in 1711; the
Marquis of Bath, a descendant of Lord Mayor Heyward, whose sixteen
children are all portrayed in his monument in St Alphege Church, London
Wall; and also of Richard Gresham, mercer, who waxed rich from the
spoils of