Peter Paggen

From ship’s captain to City grandee

Paggen began his working life as a ship’s captain in the Chesapeake tobacco trade, and went on to become one of the more substantial London tobacco merchants of his generation. He was made free of the Brewers’ Company and served as a Sheriff of the City of London — and on his daughter Catherine’s marriage record he was himself described by occupation as “a brewer,” which suggests this was more than a nominal livery membership. Alongside his own tobacco business he acted as an informal, and later official, London agent for Maryland’s colonial assembly. Early in his career his firm was also involved in moving soldiers across the Atlantic during the Nine Years’ War (1688–97) — part of a wider trade in what Pettigrew calls “human cargoes,” a trade Paggen would return to on a much larger scale.

Into the slave trade

Like a number of London merchants, Paggen moved into slave trading once the supply of indentured white labour from England began to dry up during the Nine Years’ War; he and William Heysham made the switch together. Through the 1690s he and Isaac Milner had traded firearms into Maryland, and as the African trade opened up to independent (“separate”) traders after 1698, the two turned to selling guns to slave-trading vendors on the African coast — firearms being, as Pettigrew notes, a direct fuel for the intertribal conflict that supplied captives for the trade.

Lobbying against two monopolies

Paggen was a prominent campaigner against the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the African trade: in the summer of 1698 he appeared, with Benjamin Harrison Jr., John Gardner and Melitia Holder, before the House of Lords’ select committee examining it. He fought a very similar battle, at the same time, against the East India Company — part of the parliamentary opposition to it from 1696, alongside Gilbert Heathcote and John Cary, and a director of the rival East India trading concern set up by a syndicate of interlopers in 1698. Pettigrew reads this as opportunism rather than principle: Paggen later sat simultaneously as a director of both the East India Company and the Royal African Company, alongside Urban Hall, Sir William Withers, Samuel Shepherd, Sir James Bateman and Sir John Andrewes — a reminder of how fluid City commercial allegiances could be in this period.

He was also, at various points, a working part of the separate traders’ political leadership: during the Board of Trade’s 1708 inquiry into the slave trade, Paggen and his former apprentice Isaac Milner were among those who continued to lobby, and he later sat among a core group — with Richard Harris, Robert Heysham, Isaac Milner, Joseph Martin, Humphrey Morice and James Wayte — who shared the separate traders’ leadership; Paggen, Milner and Wayte were the group’s Chesapeake specialists.

Wandsworth Manor House

This is where the transcript needed the most checking, and where it turned out to be most useful to check.

— The Manor House on the summit of East Hill was built about 1670 for Peter Paggen, described as a “Low Country refugee”; it stood until it was demolished in 1890 (Victoria County History, Surrey, vol. 4, citing Surrey Archaeological Collections x, 98–101 and xv, 161, and Wandsworth Notes & Queries viii, 143).

— Paggen died in 1720, confirmed independently by both his tomb inscription and by genealogical record.

— His wife — confusingly also named Katherine/Catherine Paggen (1655–1724) — is commemorated on the same table tomb in the Huguenot Burial Ground as “the widow of Peter Paggen,” died 1724.

— Their daughter, also Catherine, married first William Hale MP (d. 1717), of King’s Walden, Hertfordshire, and then, on 5 June 1722, Humphry Morice as his second wife; she died in 1743.

A few other details from the transcript could not be corroborated at all against the sources checked here, and should be treated as Pettigrew’s own claims until verified against the book itself:

— That Humphry Morice himself lived at, or spent time at, Wandsworth Manor House between 1718 and 1732. The History of Parliament’s biography of Morice gives his residences as “The Grove, Chiswick” and Mincing Lane, London, with no mention of Wandsworth; other sources checked connect Wandsworth to Morice only via his father-in-law, never as anywhere Morice lived himself.

— The figures of 53 slave voyages and 11,443 enslaved people transported by Morice, or of ships named after his daughters — not found in any of the sources checked here. These may well be accurate (Pettigrew likely draws on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database), but they need checking against his own footnotes.

— A satirical letter to the Weekly Journal, said to mock Paggen’s hunting expeditions and his claim to piety — no independent trace of this anecdote turned up anywhere. Worth pulling the exact wording and date from the book.

The Paggen–Hale–Morice family

Isaac Milner of Whitehaven served a trading apprenticeship under Paggen before becoming a large-scale slave trader in his own right — from 1698 he oversaw twenty-four Guinea voyages with a combined cargo value of over £24,000. Humphrey Morice, later a major slave trader and Governor of the Bank of England, had long-standing trading connections to both Milner and Paggen before the three lobbied together at the Board of Trade and in Parliament; in February 1705 Morice wrote to his Jamaica contact Thomas Wood about starting a slave-trading operation with Milner’s help, and discussed the possibility of needing Paggen’s assistance too, obtainable via Milner.

Morice’s first marriage, in 1704, was to Judith Sandes, daughter of a London merchant. After her death in 1720 he married, on 5 June 1722, Catherine, daughter of Peter Paggen — by then already the widow of William Hale MP, who had died in 1717. On the question of a peerage: no source checked here gives William Hale, or anyone in the Hale family of King’s Walden, any title — he is consistently plain “William Hale” or “William Hale MP,” never “Lord Hale.” Morice was not a Hale by blood either; he simply became Catherine’s second husband after Hale’s death, and so stepfather to her son by that first marriage, Paggen Hale MP (c.1715–1755) — who later married his own step-sister Elizabeth, Morice’s daughter by his first marriage.