Michael Godfrey


Michael Godfrey was an English merchant and financier, who was one of the founders and the first deputy governor of the Bank of England.
Godfrey was the eldest son of Michael Godfrey, merchant, of London, and Woodford, Essex, and his wife, Anne Mary Chamberlain. He was the nephew of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey a magistrate who was murdered in 1678 after receiving Titus Oates’s depositions concerning the Popish plot and foreman of the grand jury who found a true bill against Edward Fitzharris for high treason.
Michael Godfrey and his brother Peter were merchants, and their father predicted that their speculations would speedily ‘bring into hotchpott’ the whole of their ample fortunes. Godfrey supported William Paterson in the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694. He was rewarded by being elected the first deputy-governor of the bank. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet entitled, 'A Short Account of the Bank of England'. On 15 August 1694 Godfrey was chosen one of fifteen persons to prepare bylaws for the new bank. At a general court held on 16 May 1695, at which Peter Godfrey was elected a director, the bank resolved to establish a branch at Antwerp, in order to coin money to pay the troops in Flanders. Deputy-governors Sir James Houblon, Sir William Scawen, and Michael Godfrey were therefore appointed to go thither ‘to methodise the same, his majesty and the elector of Bavaria having agreed theretoo’. On their arrival at Namur, then besieged by William, the king invited them to dinner in his tent. They went out of curiosity into the trenches, where a cannon-ball from the works of the besieged killed Godfrey as he stood near the king on 17 July 1695.
'Being an eminent merchant,' writes Luttrell, 'he is much lamented; this news has abated the actions of the bank 2l. per cent.'. He was unmarried and was buried near his father in the church of St. Swithin, Walbrook, where his mother erected a tablet to his memory.

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