ABSTRACT

Early in the month of May 1813, a young silk weaver named Samuel Wilson was made free of the Weavers' Company by servitude, and on the same day he paid to the Company his Livery and Steward fines (£25) and was admitted a freeman of the City of London. Twenty years later he was elected a Sheriff of London and Middlesex, and in 1838, in the second year of the young Queen's reign, he became Lord Mayor of London-the only Lord Mayor from the Weavers' Company ever to be elected. l

Samuel Wilson was born in 1792, the son of John Wilson, a weaver of Wood Street, London (who hailed originally from Stenson in Derbyshire), and Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of James Wyght, a London merchant. On 4 February 1806 Samuel was apprenticed for seven years to Richard Lea of Old Jewry, a prominent, prosperous citizen and weaver, who was elected to the Court of Assistants of the Weavers' Company in 1786, served as Renter Bailiff in 1790-1 and became Upper Bailiff in 1791-2. Richard Lea served also as a City Alderman from 1803 to 1808.2 As soon as he was 'out of his time', Samuel Wilson, following the traditional romantic pattern, married his master's daughter, Jemima Lea, in 1813, when she was 'sweet and twenty'. Two years later she bore him a son, whom they named Cornelius Lea, and who, in due time, grew up to be a worthy successor to his father.3