P_10433_3127 – Charles Herries

D.O.B: 1745 D.O.D: 1819

Charles Herries, London merchant and banker (c. 1745-1819), co-owner with his partners James Drummond (q.v.) and Joseph Nailer (q.v., given as ‘James Naylor’) of a slaving voyage by the ship London from London to the Gold Coast and St Vincent in 1792. Herries and Nailer were bankrupt in 1798. Charles Herries was the father of the MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer John Charles Herries (1778-1855), whose History of Parliament entry says of Charles Herries’ bankruptcy: ‘The disaster robbed John Charles, who was educated mostly in France and Germany, of a potentially handsome inheritance; but on the death in 1819 of his father, ‘my dearest friend and companion’, who was buried in Westminster Abbey and left personal estate sworn under £6,000, he wrote that it had “operated to increase … [his] happiness … by terminating at the age of 54 all the painful cares and solicitudes of a mercantile career, which though externally splendid, had in reality been attended with more of disappointment than success”.’