Richard Muilman Trench Chiswell

Richard Muilman Trench was a merchant banker and antiquary was born at London as the only son of a naturalized Dutch merchant, and his wife, Mary Chiswell (1713–1785). Educated at Newcome's school, Hackney, he distinguished himself in April 1749 by drawing his sword to separate two quarrelling aldermen at a lord mayor's feast. After spending seventeen months in Amsterdam with Muilman and Soonen, leading merchant bankers, he was apprenticed from 1750 to 1756 to his father and his uncle Henry Muilman (1700–1772), a South Sea Company director who was Danish consul in London between 1756 and 1764.

In 1757 Muilman entered into a partnership with his father and uncle, who were both governors of the Merchant Seamen's Corporation and who later became Russia Company consuls. Based at 46 Old Broad Street, he and his father focused on Anglo-Dutch business until he established the extremely successful Muilman and Berens Company (1772–88) with John Berens, who was naturalized in 1762. His marriage to daughter Mary Jurin (c.1732–1807) on 27 May 1756 brought him a dowry of £10,000; their only child, Mary, later became the wife of Sir Francis Vincent, British resident in Venice. Peter Muilman gave Richard the Spains Hall estate at Great Yeldham in Essex, where he was appointed a justice of the peace in 1762.

On the death of Richard Chiswell, his mother's brother, in July 1772, Muilman acquired Debden Hall, near Saffron Walden, Essex, and a fortune of £120,000, and assumed the names and arms of Trench Chiswell by sign manual in December 1773. Henceforth he was known as Richard Muilman Trench Chiswell. A life governor of the Smallpox and Inoculation hospitals in London (1768), trustee of Sir John Morden's College at Blackheath for retired merchants (1772 and 1790–96), and Essex sheriff (1776), Chiswell served on the Chelmer Canal committee in 1773 and was a trustee of the Lee navigation project in 1776–7. Unsuccessful in contesting Haslemere at the general election in 1761, he became heavily involved during 1780 in Chelmsford's Wyvillite committee meetings for parliamentary reform. With the assistance of a Mr Richmond, he landscaped the grounds at Debden Hall, creating gardens, a menagerie, and a large lake, possibly setting up an early Coalbrookdale iron bridge in 1795. As a member of the Society of Arts since 1759, he won three of its gold medals for planting thousands of elms and Lombardy poplars in his grounds between 1776 and 1778, and corresponded with the naturalist Gilbert White about his elms in December 1791. In 1786 he paid two-thirds of the cost of re-roofing Debden church and erecting a wooden spire. He also donated an elaborate Coade stone font, which was made by Richard Holland and which incorporated figures from Sir Joshua Reynolds's window in New College chapel, Oxford. Its design was shown to George III at Buckingham Palace.

Inheriting £350,000 on his father's death in 1790, Chiswell claimed to have been a semi-millionaire when elected MP for Aldborough, Yorkshire, that year, on the interest of Henry, second duke of Newcastle. As an investor in East India stock for the wife of Warren Hastings, he seconded a motion in 1792 to reveal the cost of her husband's trial, participated in a committee during 1793 to expedite proceedings against him and, in 1795, presented his petition to the king. He, Lord Sheffield, and Sir John Sinclair were appointed commissioners for advancing exchequer bills by way of relief in 1793. A justice of the peace for Middlesex in 1791, he owned a house at Portland Place, Marylebone, Middlesex.

It was not, as has been thought, Chiswell or his father, but the young Revd Henry Bate, later Dudley, who wrote the anonymous New and Complete History of Essex, edited and published by Peter Muilman in 1770 in six volumes. Chiswell, elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1791, acquired his father's excellent and comprehensive library, largely formed for studying the county histories of England and Wales, together with some valuable book collections of other family members. Nevertheless, it is clear from his correspondence with Richard Gough in 1783 and his letter to William Herbert about some ‘fine Caxtons’, accidentally burnt at his Amsterdam house during 1779, that he had built up his own library over the years. The full extent of his, and his father's, antiquarian studies may be gauged by the catalogues of sales of his books in May and June 1836 and in July 1847, which give prices and buyers' names. Of particular interest is the reserved portion of Chiswell's library, auctioned by Samuel Leigh Sotheby & Co. (1–3 July 1847). These books, beautifully preserved, sumptuously bound, and described as a ‘perfect museum of pictorial objects’ and a tribute to Chiswell's ‘own refined taste’, contained many original coloured drawings and prints, outstanding among which were the four volumes of Thomas Pennant's Tour in Wales.

An observant and critical traveller, Chiswell compiled concise but noteworthy journals of three tours he made between 1794 and 1796 to Derbyshire, the Lake District and Scotland, to Wales, and to Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, visiting towns, country houses, and manufacturers. Highlights included his stay with Thomas Pennant, with whom he corresponded in 1794 and 1797, at Downing, Flintshire, and a meeting with Robert Raikes, the promoter of Sunday schools, at Gloucester, as well as visits to Bedford Abbey and the Peak caverns. The final entry, made in September 1796 on his return to Debden Hall, which he engaged Henry Holland to rebuild in 1795, records the ‘alarming state’ of his affairs. This presumably resulted from his overextended East India scrip ventures and a chain of unsuccessful speculations on West India estates. He and his business partner Henry Nantes subscribed £30,000 to a loyalty loan in 1797, but Chiswell, in a fit of depression, shot himself on 3 February 1797 at Debden Hall. Muilman & Co. went bankrupt and claims amounting to £457,510 were eventually proved against it.