Last October, I began a Northern Bridge funded placement as part of my PhD at Newcastle University cataloguing and researching the second American letter book documenting the trade of Ralph Carr (1711-1806), an eighteenth-century Newcastle merchant. After completing the catalogue, I came across a collection of letters within the broader Carr-Ellison papers containing the letters of Sir John Dick, a life-long friend of Carr’s who benefitted from the latter’s generous patronage during his early years and went on to pursue a mercantile and diplomatic career. I spent the remainder of my placement cataloguing Dick’s letters and was fascinated by its contents.
Sir John Dick was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1721, baptised on 2nd February at the parish of All Saints, the son of Andrew Dick and Janet Durham who had married at the parish on the same date in 1716. Andrew Dick (1676-c.1744) was a hostman in Newcastle, being apprenticed to John Blackett on the 18th November 1700 and admitted as a member to the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1708. The Newcastle Hostmen were a powerful group who controlled the monopoly of the coal trade from the Tyne through a charter granted to the Company in 1600 by Elizabeth I and their dominance continued until the mid-eighteenth century. Although Dick’s younger brother, Durham Dick, was also admitted a member of the Company in 1737, John followed a mercantile path through the patronage of Ralph Carr (1711-1806).
The Dicks and the Carrs potentially met through the involvement of both Andrew Dick and Ralph Carr in the coal trade and their mutual connections through powerful North-East families. Carr was also admitted as a member to the Company of Hostmen in 1739, but had been a member of the Merchant Adventurers – another powerful guild in Newcastle controlling the shipping trade from its port – since his indenture to Matthew Bowes in 1728, being admitted a full member a decade later. Carr provided young John with an education and was involved in sending him abroad sometime around 1740, where Dick did some business for Carr at Dunkirk and then entered into trade from Holland.
At Rotterdam, Dick was tasked by the English Board of Trade with the transportation of Protestant settlers to Nova Scotia to counter the French Catholic population and establish the new colony under General Edward Cornwallis (1713-1776), the newly appointed Governor of Nova Scotia. Shortly afterwards in 1754, Dick was appointed to the position of Consul at Leghorn (Livorno) in Italy, which was reported in the English national press. Livorno was a free port and Dick was tasked with huge responsibilities overseeing trade and navigating conflict between different nations. Beyond his diplomatic duties, he traded in art and antiquities, acting as agent for Thomas Anson of Shugborough, champion of the Greek revival movement and collector of sculptures. Amongst the various items Dick sent to Anson were a pair of Corsican goats, which Dick stated were called “Miufri” and thought they would be considered “somewhat curious in England”. The goats were possibly obtained through Dick’s correspondent, Pasquale Paoli (1725-1807), the Corsican patriot and leader. James Boswell (biographer of Samuel Johnson) described the animals in his Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to that Island (1768) which is dedicated to Paoli; Boswell was a friend of Dick’s and acknowledges the contributions of his friend in the preface to the work. Dick’s prestige in the art-world is highlighted by his inclusion in Johan Zoffany’s The Tribuna of Uffuzi, commissioned by Queen Charlotte.
As well as dealing in art, antiquities and other curiosities, Dick was trusted by his network of aristocratic friends and correspondents to carry out their business and supply them with information from his many contacts. George Nassau Clavering-Cowper and Sir Horace Mann each wrote to Dick on several occasions for assistance regarding a missing package of diamond earrings worth £1000 (roughly £150,000 in today’s money) purchased for Cowper’s wife. Several of Dick’s correspondents asked to loan money, sometimes large sums, including Paoli who requested Dick loan him £1500 in 1783. Dick even supplied his friend Prince William Henry (younger brother of George III) with news of the French Revolution as it was rapidly unfolding in the 1790s. Dick was rewarded for his diplomatic efforts by other royalty, receiving the Russian Order of St Anne from Catherine the Great some time around 1770 for his conduct in assisting her fleet during the Russo-Turkish War (1768-1774). Catherine expressed her approval of Dick in a letter addressed to George III (written in French), a copy of which is contained in the collection of Dick’s letters.
Catherine’s gratitude to Dick may have expanded beyond just diplomatic duties, however, when he was accused of participating in a conspiracy to kidnap and arrest Princess Tarakanova, a pretender to the Russian empire. Tarakanova (known by many other names) emerged in Paris in 1770s under the name of Princess Vladimir, claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Empress Elizabeth, upon whose death Catherine’s husband, Peter III, took the reign (Peter was ousted by Catherine just six months later). Catherine appointed one of her military officers, Count Alexei Orlov – who had assisted her in overthrowing Peter – to capture and arrest the pretender from Livorno. Orlov seduced the pretender princess to board his ship on the pretence of a marriage proposal, and once aboard Tarakanova was swiftly arrested and sent back to St. Petersburg where she died imprisoned in 1775. That Orlov played a key role in assisting Catherine is undoubted, but accusations arose by contemporaries that Dick – who at this time was stationed in Livorno and was a friend of Orlov’s – assisted in the capture of the Princess.
Two publications in the 1790’s – Giuseppe Gorani’s Mémoires Secrets et Critiques des Cours […] d’Italie (1793) and Jean-Henri Castéra’s La Vie de Catherine II (1797) – accused Dick and his wife, Ann Bragg of Somerset, of entertaining Tarakanova whilst she was with Orlov and helping with the arrest. Dick denounced any active participation in the scheme, as recalled in the Historical and Posthumous Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall by Henry B. Wheatley (1884). Wraxall (1751-1831) recounts a dinner party of 1799 in which he asked Dick about the accusations put forth by Castèra, and produces a long speech by Dick in which he explained the circumstances and denied any knowledge of the situation. Although Wraxall accepts Dick’s explanation, he highlights how unusual it was for Dick to not put forth any of his own accounts disproving the charges against him at the time.
In all events, Dick’s consulship ended shortly after in 1776 when he resigned his post and returned to England. He did not rest up, however, and took up the post of Comptroller of Army Accounts in 1781 just months after the death of his wife. In 1768 Dick enhanced his own status by claiming a dormant baronetcy from his great-great-grandfather, Sir William Dick of Braid, upon the supposition he was the sole male heir of this lineage. Dick’s grandfather Andrew, of West Newton in Cumberland, came from a long Scottish lineage being the son of Louis Dick (also of West Newton) who was the fifth son of Sir William Dick, the personal banker to James VI and said to be the richest man in Scotland. William received his knighthood from Charles I after loaning him £20,000 but met his decline during the Civil War when he was arrested by Oliver Cromwell and died imprisoned and penniless. Dick was granted the baronetcy by Thomas Brodie of Edinburgh with a seal of his heraldry which survives in the collection.
Dick died at his London home on the 2nd December 1804. His large legacy and value was widely known. As well as owning 350-acre estate in Surrey at Mount Clare House in Roehampton, now a Grade I listed building, he left behind large sums of cash, with one newspaper reporting his worth as £160,000 upon his death. Dick had no close relatives left after his death – with his wife and siblings predeceasing him and being childless – and so divided his estate amongst four executors: Ralph Carr, the son of his early benefactor and friend; John Cleathing, the son of his secretary; his physician Dr. Vaughan, and his apothecary, William Simons. Carr junior wrote to his father on the 3rd December to inform him that Dick had died after being confined to his bed for thirteen months, and to outline Dick’s legacy. Carr’s letter stated he alone had been appointed the sole beneficiary of the will until just a few months before Dick’s death, when Dick decided (perhaps under the influence of some other friends) to add extra people as executors. Despite dividing his assets four ways, Carr advised his father that many would be left unhappy at Dick’s decision, writing “I fear this will may be considered as capricious & will give very little satisfaction in the world; perhaps there never was an instance where more persons will be disappointed & irritated” [ZCE/F/1/1/2/120]. Dick’s recognition of his old Newcastle friend Ralph Carr and his lifelong friendship of the whole family has found his collection of letters deposited in the family’s archive, and now being catalogued and available will surely lead to some interesting investigations of his life and influence as a prominent diplomat and aristocrat.
References
https://www.britannica.com/place/Livorno-Italy “Livorno” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 12 August 2010.
Staffordshire Record Office. “Bundle of correspondence from Sir John Dick (British consul at Leghorn) and others”. D615/PA/2.
Andrew Baker, Thomas Anson and the Greek Revival. ttps://andrewbakercomposer.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/shugbook1-211.pdf
James Boswell, An Account of Corsica: The Journal of a Tour to that Island (London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1768).
Giuseppe Gorani, Mémoires secrets et critiques des cours, des gouvernemens, et des moeurs des principaux états de L’Italie (1794)
Jean-Henri Castéra, La Vie de Catherine II, Impératrice de Russie (1797)
