Smith, Erasmus

Erasmus Smith (1611–1691), merchant and educational philanthropist, was born at Husbands Bosworth in Leicester, England, where he was baptized on 8 April. Admitted to the Grocers Company in London in 1635, his business was trade with Turkey, but he became involved in the supply of provisions to the Commonwealth armies in Ireland and Scotland in the early 1650s. His interest in Irish land began in 1643 when his father, Sir Roger, assigned to him the benefit of a 300-pound investment under the Adventurers' Act and the Sea Ordnance, which raised money for the suppression of the Irish rebellion on the security of land that would be forfeited as a result of it. After the war ended in 1653, Smith's speculative purchases of adventurers' shares at a discount raised his nominal investment to 2,995 pounds, for which he received 10,404 acres in Armagh, Down, and Tipperary. Subsequent acquisitions in the 1650s and thereafter extended his holdings to some 45,000 acres spread over nine counties.

In June 1655, Smith announced his intention to set up schools on his estates so that children could be raised "in the Fear of God and good literature and to speak the English tongue" (Barnard 1975 [2000], p. 191). In 1657 he vested 3,000 acres in trustees charged with establishing five schools and with providing for suitable students to receive scholarships to Trinity College, Dublin. The scheme was not implemented before the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but in 1667 a modified proposal was authorized by letters patent that envisaged free grammar schools at Drogheda, Galway, and Tipperary, added an apprenticeship scheme, and required the trustees to pay 100 pounds each year to Christ's Hospital (the charity or "Bluecoat" school for orphans in London). Two years later, on Smith's petition, a royal charter confirmed the lands and the trust and appointed thirty-two governors, including the archbishops of Dublin and Armagh. Smith, whose original arrangements had favored nonconformist ministers as trustees and required the use of the Presbyterian 1646 Westminster catechism, had trimmed his sails.

Little else is known of Smith's life. He was briefly a London alderman in 1657 but withdrew after three weeks; he played an active part in the Adventurers' Committee in the late 1650s, when he visited Ireland; and he was elected to the Irish parliament for Ardee in 1665 but never attended. His trust prospered, and in 1723 an act of Parliament empowered it to use its considerable surplus income to found additional schools and to endow professorships and fellowships in Trinity College, Dublin.

SEE ALSO Education: 1500 to 1690; Restoration Ireland

Bibliography

Barnard, Toby C. Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660. 1975. Reprint, 2000.

Bottigheimer, Karl S. English Money and Irish Land: The "Adventurers" in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. 1971.

Ronan, Myles V. The Erasmus Smith Endowment. 1937.

Aidan Clarke