Remembered by his godson, John Aubrey, as ‘the most popular magistrate’ in Bristol, whose house boasted ‘the stateliest dining room in the city’, Whitson was born into an obscure family in the Forest of Dean, where he perhaps acquired his interest in falconry.
This marriage undoubtedly laid the foundations of Whitson’s fortune. At the very least it allowed him, rather belatedly, to take up the freedom of Bristol in March 1585. It was not long before Whitson, whom Aubrey described as ‘an early riser’ and a man who liked to transact all his business before noon, became one of the city’s leading merchants, trading mainly to France, Spain and the Mediterranean, but also to Ireland, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Danzig and Newfoundland. He primarily exported lead (perhaps in association with the Italian merchant Philip Corsini), leather and cloth, in return for wine, currants, alum and oil;
Early in his career Whitson incurred the displeasure of Bristol’s city fathers: in 1586 and 1587 he was fined a total of £44 for breaching the city’s ordinances. However, he soon became a member of the ruling oligarchy himself, and in May 1598 he was asked to consider which of the city’s ordinances should be repealed.
Whitson was himself returned to Parliament for Bristol in November 1605 following the appointment of George Snygge as baron of the Exchequer. On 10 Feb. 1606 he was added to the committee to consider the incorporation of the Spanish Company, a body he no longer viewed favourably, for shortly before taking his seat he had helped Bristol secede from membership and revive its own Society of Merchant Venturers. He was subsequently added to committees to consider restrictions on travel abroad (19 May), a bill for the relief of artisan skinners (2 May) and the management of an intended conference on the export of beer (16 May). Along with his fellow Member, Thomas James, he took part in the debate of 11 Apr. 1606 on the imposition on currants, but his words went unrecorded.
In the interval between the second and third sessions, Whitson was required to deliver Bristol’s refusal to a demand for £800 from the Exchequer, which sum related to the cost of incorporating the Spanish Company.
During the third session, for which he received £32 in expenses, Whitson considered a bill against unlicensed alehouses, and on 13 Dec. he secured the appointment of further committeemen.
In September 1609, following the death of his first wife, Whitson married Magdalen Hynde, the beautiful widow of a London Salter. Her previous husband had left her an estate worth just £60, a sum which Whitson claimed covered only her removal costs from London to Bristol. Her father, however, promised to bequeath Whitson £500 at his death as a belated dowry.
Whitson was named to four legislative committees during the fourth session, two for the payment of debts (20 Feb. and 27 June 1610), and one each for the Minehead harbour (23 Feb.) and New River bills (20 June). He was also among those ordered to search port books to ascertain the impact of impositions on trade (16 June).
In September 1611 Whitson and two other Bristol merchants obtained an 11-year grant of the farm of the duties on wines imported from Spain and the Mediterranean collected at various western ports, including Bristol. Though they initially agreed to pay an annual rent of £1,400 to John Mayle, the London scrivener to whom the farm of these duties had been deputed by Sir John Swinarton*, Whitson and his colleagues evidently miscalculated the amount of profit arising from the farm, as they soon persuaded Mayle to reduce their rent by £50.
Returned once more to Parliament for Bristol in 1614, Whitson’s principal concern was with impositions. Speaking on 18 Apr. he averred that if he had 40 hearts they would all be for the bill against impositions. He was worried that, like Martha, whose preoccupation with domestic chores contrasted with the attention paid by her sister Mary to Jesus’s words, the House was overly concerned with bills of grace, whereas the bill against impositions was ‘the chief thing to be regarded’, for everyone was affected by impositions. Though his choice of scriptural simile apparently provoked laughter, Whitson declared himself ‘ready to weep’. Like many Members, he regarded impositions as illegal, and though he conceded that Edward III had once obtained a temporary grant of them on wool, he pointed out that Edward would not have made such a request ‘if by law he might have done it’. However, unlike most Members, Whitson accepted that the king would not surrender impositions without compensation. Indeed, on 3 June, he proposed that a committee be established to consider how to approach James about buying them out.
Impositions were not Whitson’s sole concern during the Parliament. In the debate on the French Company on 3 May, he compared the latter’s patent to ‘the Court of Rome, that would have no sheep come there without his fleece’, by which he meant that those who were unprepared to pay for their admittance were denied entry to the Company.
In December 1614 Whitson and four other leading Bristol Merchant Venturers were licensed to export 1,000 calfskins yearly for 40 years at preferential rates.
Following the death of his second wife in September 1615, Whitson married Rachel Aubrey, the widow of a Herefordshire gentleman, who evidently brought with her a handsome dowry. Elected to Parliament for a third time in 1620, Whitson and his colleague John Guy took up lodgings at the Three Cups in Bread Street, an inn already familiar to Whitson from a previous visit to London and situated near the Bread Street residence of his London agent, the Salter Ellis Crispe, whom Whitson had known for roughly 40 years.
Like most outport merchants, Whitson advocated free trade, but only when it suited him. Speaking on 8 Mar., he opposed a measure designed to prohibit the import of corn, urging that its passage was not in the interests of free trade, but two days later he opposed a bill intended to suppress a patent which hindered free trade in Welsh butter as he had apparently obtained a share in the patent himself.
As an occasional moneylender, Whitson naturally opposed the usury bill, which sought to impose an eight per cent ceiling on interest rates, arguing that ‘none can judge of eight per cent’ (7 May).
In the supply committee (15 Feb.) Whitson supported a vote of two subsidies.
During the summer recess Whitson returned to Bristol, where he was visited by one Richard Croshawe, who had obtained from John Mayle a half share in the farm of the duties on sweet wines collected in the western ports. Croshawe persuaded Whitson to pay him part of the rent owed to Mayle, but the latter had not agreed to this arrangement and subsequently refused to allow Whitson the £262 10s. paid to Croshawe on his accounts. Mayle also threatened to confiscate a bond for £3,000 entered into earlier by Whitson as a guarantee of payment of his rent. Unwilling to pay Croshawe an additional £687 10s. without Mayle’s written authorization, Whitson subsequently found himself prosecuted in the Exchequer by Croshawe, whom he described as his ‘mighty adversary’. The suit, which Whitson complained was ‘long, tedious and chargeable’, was only brought to a conclusion in February 1625, when the court ruled in Croshawe’s favour but ordered Mayle to surrender Whitson’s bond.
Whitson was replaced by John Barker in the 1624 Parliament, but was re-elected to serve Bristol in 1625. During the Westminster sitting he agreed with the proposal for a general fast made on 21 June, and two days later, in committee, he again brought forward his scheme ‘whereby the king may be righted upon recusants’, whom he said were ‘exceedingly under-valued’.
It was apparently later in 1626 that Whitson, ‘long since cloyed with the tedious vanities of this life’, wrote The Aged Christian’s Final Farewell to the World, first published in 1829. Condemning as ‘the idols of earthly minds’ the amassing of ‘riches, wealth and large endowments’, he also had nothing but bitter memories of his Commons career:
I have been a representative Member in many parliaments, where I daily learned new lessons of the world’s vanity, and augmented my grief together with my experience. More expressly at a late meeting, when both the honourable Houses were unexpectedly, unfortunately, and very suddenly dissolved; much time being spent, and nothing done, to the world’s wonder, and to the exceeding grief and discontent of all true-hearted subjects.
Hoping that God would ‘grant me a quiet and peaceable passage’ rather than a slow death from disease or ‘any violent casualty’, his prayers were seemingly answered on 7 Nov. when he escaped fatal injury at the hands of a disgruntled litigant, who stabbed him through the nose and lip.
During the summer of 1627 Whitson was directed to assist Sir John Drake* compile accounts concerning the collection of prize tenths for submission to the duke of Buckingham’s commissioners and to help supply two naval warships at Bristol with ironwork and other materials on behalf of the Ordnance Office.
By the terms of his will, drawn up in March 1627, Whitson provided for his third wife Rachel, whom he appointed as his executrix, but having no surviving children he left much of his estate to charity, according to a settlement made in 1622. The fact that all three of his own children had been girls, and that one of them had died in childbirth, appears to have strongly influenced the nature of two of his bequests. In the first case he left £90 p.a., assigned from the revenues of the Somerset manor of Burnett, which he had acquired in 1599 from a relative of his first wife’s first husband, to provide a home for 40 poor girls, who were to be taught to read English and sew by a female tutor at what became the Red Maids School. In the other he bequeathed £20 p.a., to be distributed equally among 20 poor women of Bristol ‘lying in childbed’. Among the remainder of his bequests, Whitson ordered that £500 was to be lent to five young freemen of Bristol, ‘being mere merchants’, and 20 poor Bristol tradesmen. He also arranged for two annual sermons to be delivered in St. Nicholas, one of them on the anniversary of the attempt on his life. Of the residue of his estate, which he estimated would amount to £3,000, two-thirds was to be employed by Bristol’s corporation as they, his widow and overseers should think fit. The remaining third was to be divided between his sisters and their children.
At his death Whitson held property in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Worcestershire, as well as Bristol. An inventory taken on 1 June 1629 at his house in Bristol found that, besides books, some of which were in Latin and one in Spanish, his estate was worth more than £5,400, not counting £3,000 in ‘debts desperate’ but including £505 ‘in adventures at sea’, £1,123 ‘in debts due by bills and books for iron’ and £800 in cash.