Sir Charles William Fremantle KCB JP FRSA (12 August 1834 – 8 October 1914) was a British governmental official who served 26 years as deputy master of the Royal Mint.

As the chancellor of the exchequer was ex officio master of the Royal Mint beginning in 1870, Fremantle was its executive head for almost a quarter century.

Disraeli's appointment of Fremantle as deputy master of the Royal Mint excited some controversy but was supported by his political rival William Gladstone.

Graham died in September 1869, and the Treasury decided the mastership should go to the chancellor of the day, with the deputy master the administrative head of the Royal Mint.

[1] When Disraeli became prime minister in early 1868, Fremantle was one of his private secretaries, along with Montague Corry,[4] keeping that position until appointed deputy master of the Royal Mint in December of that year.

Disraeli felt that the Mint had been run by its master, the chemist Thomas Graham, with little energy or administrative skill, and would benefit from an infusion of new blood.

The long-time senior clerk, Robert Mushet, desired the position, with the support of Graham and the former master, Sir John Herschel, and the appointment was questioned in parliament.

According to the numismatic historians, G. P. Dyer and P. P. Gaspar, in The New History of the Royal Mint, "with the great men thus in agreement, the House was content to let the matter rest.

[6] According to Sir John Craig in his history of the Royal Mint, "Graham's general administration caused some unease" and Fremantle was appointed "to pull the place together".

[8] With a vacancy in the mastership, reform could be considered more readily, and Fremantle worked with Charles Rivers Wilson, a former colleague at the Treasury, on a report, submitted on 6 November.

They recommended that the Royal Mint consolidate to a smaller site, either at its current premises at Tower Hill or somewhere closer to the City of London.

[19] So long as removal of the Royal Mint was a possibility, according to Craig, Fremantle "grumbled in vain through twelve years' search for a new site".

[20] Negotiations for the government to acquire land at Whitefriars from the corporation of London began in 1878 but three years of discussions produced no result, and a committee of the House of Commons decided upon a reconstruction at Tower Hill.

Fremantle was opposed because this would require a complete shutdown of coinage, but agreed once it appeared that the Bank of England had an abnormally large stock of gold coins, bronze coinage could be contracted from Ralph Heaton & Sons of Birmingham, and a stock of silver coins could be built up before the commencement of work on 1 February 1882.

[24] Fremantle, described by Dyer and Gaspar as a "gentleman of cultivated taste",[25] sought to improve the appearance of Britain's coinage, generally through the re-issuance of classic designs.

Fremantle, though, had praise for Pistrucci's "beautiful design of St George", which was expanded to the crown, double sovereign, and five pound piece.

[32] The new coins, which bore Boehm's portrait of Victoria and were engraved by Wyon, were released in June 1887, and were widely mocked for the small crown depicted on the Queen's head, which looked like it might fall off.

[33] In a letter to Robert Hunt, Deputy Master of the Sydney Mint, Fremantle stated, "without a great & skilled Engraver we shall never have a really fine head on our coinage".

On 1 January 1894, Fremantle wrote to the Treasury to request that de Saulles be given permanent status on the ground that his work on the Old Head coins had been praised both by experts and the public.

[7] The London correspondent of The Yorkshire Herald wondered at Fremantle's retirement, given he was sixty and in good health, and was the boss in a position described as "none too arduous".

The Charity Organisation Review deemed him one of the "Fathers of our movement" and that his talents and activity "entitle Sir Charles Fremantle to an honoured place among those who have served the good cause".

The Daily Telegraph recorded that since his retirement from the Mint, "Sir Charles had been for the last twenty years a well-known and popular personality in the City, having been identified with various important undertakings".

"It was the achievement of Fremantle, who by his breadth of vision promoted the work of Roberts-Austen to place the Mint for a quarter of a century within the circle of the world's great scientific institutions.

His diligence, fidelity, and remarkable capacity have, throughout a period of more than forty years, commanded the confidence and respect of all the Heads of Departments in which he served.

"[59] A later deputy master, Thomas Henry Elliott, wrote of Fremantle after his death in 1914, that the experience gained from his visits to the foreign mints in 1870 and 1884 "enabled Sir Charles to carry out various reforms in the different departments of the Mint which were of the greatest value, and his arrangements in all their general principles have stood the test of time and made the task of his successors a comparatively easy one".