Christopher Schutz
[1] William Humfrey (died 1579), who had been appointed Assay Master at the Royal Mint in 1561,[2] needed someone knowledgeable about calamine ore, used in the production of latten and brass, and paid Schutz' way to England.
[1] As a reward for his work at Tintern, Schutz was granted denization on 9 April 1568, but the extraction of calamine ore at Worle Hill proved prohibitively expensive for the production of brass, and on 28 May the Company of Mineral and Battery Works, a newly incorporated joint stock company in which both Humfrey and Schutz held shares together with many influential members of the English court and government, took over the operation of the furnace, and converted it to the production of iron wire.
[1] Schutz' expertise was made use of by the Company of Mineral and Battery Works over the next decade in the design of a steel furnace at Robertsbridge, Sussex, and smelters at Beauchief Abbey near Sheffield, Bristol, Nottingham, London and elsewhere.
In January 1577 Schutz assisted Giovanni Battista Agnello, a Venetian then living in London, in the assaying of a black stone which had been picked up lying loose on the surface of Hall's Island by Robert Garrard during Sir Martin Frobisher's first voyage to the Canadian Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.
[18][17] Schutz' tests were conducted in a small furnace in the garden of the London residence at Tower Hill of Sir William Wynter, the Queen's Master of the Naval Ordnance.
[27] In a report in 1581 Schutz' design for the Dartford furnace was blamed, but recent modern research has shown that the real problem was that the 1400 tonnes of ore brought back to England from Baffin Island were not gold-bearing.
[28] Hogarth concluded that since Schutz had attempted to buy all the ore himself, he was unlikely to have tampered with the tests, and the 'inescapable conclusion' is that the assay method was at fault, perhaps because of contamination from additives necessarily used in the process.
He appears to have survived the Frobisher debacle relatively unscathed, although investors, including a number of prominent courtiers,[32][33] lost £20,000, and the lawsuits which followed ruined one of the scheme's principal proponents, Michael Lok.
[1] Schutz is said to have been employed by King James of Scotland as Master of the Works for Ores from Cathay and the North West Parts, and to have been replaced in that position by Act of the Scottish Parliament in 1593 by Bevis Bulmer.
The relationship between Shutz and his executor was a long-standing one: on 14 June 1566 Barty had sent a letter from Sluys to Sir William Cecil, recommending Schutz, who was 'coming to England to establish battery and wire works'.
