Sir Francis Baring(1740–1810)

Francis Baring was born at Larkbeer on the outskirts of Exeter on the eighteenth of April 1740, son of Johann Baring, a Lutheran wool merchant of Bremen who had emigrated to Devon in 1717 and anglicised the family name. The father built a substantial cloth-export business out of the Exe quayside; the son was raised in counting-houses on both sides of the Channel and apprenticed at sixteen to a London merchant. By twenty-two he had decided that the family's future lay in the City, and in 1762, with his elder brother John, he set up the firm of John and Francis Baring & Co at a small office in Mincing Lane.

The firm in its first decade was a merchant house in the orthodox eighteenth-century sense, financing the West India and East India trades through bills of exchange and short-term credit. Through the 1770s and 1780s Francis enlarged it steadily, took a directorship of the East India Company in 1779 and the chairmanship in 1792, was elected member of Parliament for Grampound and then for Calne, and was created a baronet in 1793 for his service in negotiating the loan that funded the British war effort against revolutionary France. By the turn of the century Baring Brothers was, by general agreement of the City, the leading merchant house in London.

The defining work of his career came in the Napoleonic wars. From 1798 onward Baring Brothers organised, syndicated and placed on the London market the great sovereign loans that funded the British alliance system against Napoleon: subsidies to Austria, Prussia and Russia, war loans to Portugal and Sweden, and through 1803 to 1804 the negotiation of the Louisiana Purchase, by which Baring Brothers financed Napoleon's sale of the Louisiana Territory to the United States, the largest single sovereign-to-sovereign land transaction in history. The bank advanced the United States the eleven and a quarter million dollars due to France and held the American bonds on its own book.

He retired from active management in 1804 and handed the firm to his second son Alexander Baring, later 1st Baron Ashburton, who carried on the European sovereign-loan business through the Congress of Vienna and the post-war reconstruction. The Duc de Richelieu, French ambassador to the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, is said to have named the six great powers of Europe as England, France, Russia, Austria, Prussia and Baring Brothers. The line was the City's verdict on what Francis Baring had built. He died at Lee, Kent, on the twelfth of September 1810, in his seventy-first year.

The bank he founded continued in unbroken family management for one hundred and ninety-five years, financed the railways of Argentina, the docks of Buenos Aires, the bonds of the Russian Empire and the Suez Canal, and produced through the Baring family the Earls of Northbrook, Cromer, Howick of Glendale and Revelstoke, the Viceroy of India and the Consul-General of Egypt. The Baring Foundation, the great family philanthropy, was set up in 1969. The Baring name in modern British finance, and in the historiography of the long nineteenth century, carries the weight of the firm Francis founded at Mincing Lane in 1762.