Arnold Lulls

Arnold Lulls Lulls, merchant and jeweller, was born in Antwerp, Spanish Netherlands. Members of the Lulls family had lived in England since the 1550s, but Arnold himself arrived some time between 1580 and 1584, when he became a member of the Dutch church, Austin Friars.

Although never recorded as a member of the Goldsmiths' Company, Lulls became rich through supplying jewellery to the royal court and to foreign ambassadors. By 1597 he was sufficiently well placed to petition the privy council on behalf of Peter and Hans Lulls (probably his brothers), the owners of a Dutch flyboat whose cargo had been seized by the earl of Cumberland. Four years later he survived apparently unscathed the suspicions of Matthew Greenesmith, secretary of state Robert Cecil's agent in Middleburg, that he had been engaged in illegal pearl trading through Emden. In the first decade of James's reign Lulls was paid thousands of pounds for pearls, diamonds, emeralds, gold buttons, and small jewels, provided in partnership with Sir John Spelman and Sir William Herricke, the king's jewellers. In June 1604 he received £260 for ‘a jewel AR set with diamonds’, presumably destined for the queen, and in February 1605 £700 for ‘A jewel R with thistles & a jewel like a lance’. A letter preserved in Lulls's design book (V&A, department of prints, MS 91, A.83), datable to 1612 and signed by George Calvert, then temporarily secretary of state, lists £3000 worth of jewels supplied by Herricke and Lulls for gifts at the new year last past, including a rope of pearls (£740) and ‘a great round pearle’ (£900) for the queen, and a chain of stones and a George (£800) for Prince Henry. The designs themselves are mostly of pendants, earrings, and brooches; notes in Dutch point to a partnership between Lulls and his brother Peter and to continuing links with Antwerp. However, he also looked westwards, becoming involved in Anglo-Dutch attempts to establish tobacco-growing colonies in the Caribbean. In partnership with John Abealls and Joos Croppenbury, and other English merchants, Lulls invested in a voyage to Grenada in 1609 and to Trinidad and the Orinoco in 1610. He ventured again for more tobacco from the Orinoco in 1611, and was also one of the many stockholders in the Virginia Company.

Lulls was naturalized on 7 May 1618, being variously described in returns of aliens that year as having lived in England for thirty and for thirty-eight years. The same year his son died. In his will dated 4 April 1618 and proved on 7 September, Arnold the younger revealed kinship and friendship connections spanning native, stranger, and foreign mercantile communities. Legatees included the son of his uncle Peter (a Hamburg merchant), his cousin Jane Vanlore (granddaughter of merchant stranger and Berkshire landowner Sir Peter Vanlore), a London draper, cooper, and mercer, and the poor of both the Dutch church and St Mary-at-Hill, Billingsgate. He left £500 to his sister Susanna, and £600 and a property in Lime Street between his stepsisters.

Late that year Sir Peter Vanlore and other members of the Dutch born mercantile community who had previously advanced significant loans to the king were accused of the illegal export of bullion. By 1619 his kinsmen Arnold and Jehan Lulls and Jacques de Beste had also been implicated and called before Star Chamber. Henry Rowland of London, goldsmith, testified on 3 March that between about 1598 and 1606 he had delivered a total of £65,000 in gold to Arnold Lulls and £50,000 to de Beste; these and sums delivered to others had, it was alleged, unaccountably disappeared. On 11 December 1619 Lulls was fined £8000; together with de Beste's fine of £7000 this was granted to Sir James Erskine the following month. It is not clear when, or to what extent, it was ever paid. After widespread protest, and in particular the intervention of the Dutch ambassador, Sir Noel de Caron, in 1620 the overall level of the merchant strangers' fines was reduced.

The episode bred considerable insecurity among the immigrants. It was thus perhaps in a bid to gain advantageous patronage that on 23 June 1621 Lulls promised a handsome dowry worth over £5350 in settlements attendant on the marriage of his daughter Susanna on 27 June to John Newdigate (1600–1642), a Warwickshire gentleman of very modest wealth but with valuable kinship connections. Guarantors of the settlements included Jehan Lulls and Jacques de Beste, but none of them proved able to honour in full their respective commitments, and Newdigate was unable to take possession of a house and shops at the corner of Thames Street and St Michael's Lane, London, supposedly conveyed to him. Financially disastrous as this was for the Newdigates, Lulls remained on good terms with his son-in-law throughout the 1620s. Integrated in a circle which included Newdigate's friend Gilbert Sheldon, in correspondence he supplied European and metropolitan news until at least 1629.

Thereafter little is known of Lulls. His second daughter married Andrew Blackwell, minister of Tilehurst, Berkshire, a living in the gift of Sir Peter Vanlore. As a ‘gentleman’ Lulls was party to a settlement made in December 1642 following Newdigate's death, but may have died before his daughter Susanna remarried in May 1646. At that time she reached an agreement with her future husband over the disposal of what seems to have been a significant inheritance, devolving on her as the only daughter of Lulls's first marriage. He was not mentioned at all in her will, drawn up in 1653, but jewels similar to those depicted in his design book were prominent among Susanna's bequests. The design book itself passed to the Blackwell family.