Samuel Hoare Jr

Samuel Hoare Jr (9 August 1751 – 14 July 1825) was a wealthy British Quaker banker and abolitionist born in Stoke Newington, then to the north of London in the county of Middlesex.

His only surviving brother Jonathan, merchant of Throgmorton Street and partner in Gurnell, Hoare & Co, built Paradise House (now Clissold House and open to the public), a mansion in what became Clissold Park, across Stoke Newington Church Street from the family home in Paradise Row.

The widower moved his family back to Stoke Newington, in the same street as his father, so that his sisters, particularly Grizell, could help with raising the children.

Later his illness drove him to take the family to Bath, where a medical man advised him that the New River, running so close to Stoke Newington Church Street and Clissold Park, might be harming his health.

In 1790, they moved to higher ground, to Heath House, a prominent mansion in Hampstead, at the crest of the hill about four miles north of the City.

[3] According to Edward Walford (1878): The poet Joanna Baillie wrote of her visits there: In 1794, the Hoares became friends with Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and through her met Joseph Priestley.

They knew Amelia Alderson, later Mrs Opie, Mary Knowles, the intimate of Samuel Johnson, and William Savery, a Philadelphia minister.

His son Samuel (1783–1847) learned banking in Lombard Street from 1803, and in 1806 he married Louisa Gurney (1784–1836) of Earlham Hall near Norwich.

With perfect confidence in her principles, and a persuasion that she would make my brother happy, he was pleased with her being, like my mother, a Norfolk woman, and interested himself much in procuring for them an house at Hampstead that they might be established near him.

The historian Peter Brock notes that Hoare was not wholly convinced by Quaker pacifism and quotes him as saying that he "looked upon [war] in the present state of society as a necessary evil" and that it "is the duty of a man to defend his country".