Patrick Comerford
Close to the town centre of Stafford, Saint Mary’s Church, the courts, Victoria Park and the train station, Sir Martin Noell’s Almshouses form an impressive set of stone buildings on Earl Street. Their small scale contrasts with the large modern block of flats on the opposite corner and the even larger court building next door.
Behind the doors of the almshouses is a hidden chapel. But behind those walls too are stories of slavery and the slave trade, political intrigue and buying office and favour, pirates and debt, plague and death.
Sir Martin Noell (1614-1665) built the almshouses in 1660 for 12 poor residents of the town, and the 12 residents were also given a small pension and a coal allowance from Stafford Corporation.
Noell’s almshouses in Earl Street, also called ‘The College’ or ‘the Old Almshouses’, were built in a Tudor or Jacobean style on a U-plan with a central chapel. This is a group of single storey units with attics, with a central chapel, grouped around three sides of a quadrangle. They have a symmetrical six-window central range, with the chapel breaking forward under a shaped gable with short flanking embattled parapets.
The chapel has a pointed entrance with continuous mouldings in a square-headed architrave, flanking pilasters. A segmental pedimental feature over a drip has a raised panel supporting an architraved panel with the Noell arms, and flanking Doric columns on enriched plinths. The mediaeval stained-glass windows in the chapel are said to have come from the old chapel in Stafford Castle, and in the past the Sub-Rector of Saint Mary’s Collegiate Church held a weekly service there.
The substantial garden in front of the almshouses has shrubbery but no boundary wall, leaving a clear view of the 17th century stone building.
Noell had specific demands about the residents who should benefit from his almshouses. He wrote that one should house an ‘ancient, impoverished minister or some other unblamable Christian qualified with the ability to read and pray daily with the poor.’ Another of the 12 properties should be for ‘a matronly woman who should have an oversight of such as at any time fall sick.’
Noell also made provision for coal and an annual pension for the six poor men and six poor women who were residents. But due to his substantial financial losses before his death, funding for the almshouses and its 12 resident had to be sourced from other benefactors.
The almshouses remained in the hands of Noell’s family until 1691. They were then conveyed to the Mayor of Stafford and four burgesses as trustees, but no ‘alms-folk’ were appointed until 1701. They were later administered by the rectors of Saint Mary’s Collegiate Church and trustees.
The whole building was completely restored around 1866. During alterations in 1925, the front wall was lowered, the old stables and outhouses were demolished, and paving from Bank Passage was taken up and re-laid there. The almshouses were extended in 1960-1962, when the number of apartments was increased from 12 to 23. Today, Sir Martin Noell’s Almshouses are a Listed Grade II* building.
Sir Martin Noell (also spelt Noel), the younger son of Edward Noell, a mercer, was born in Stafford in 1614 and was baptised in Saint Mary’s Church on 11 March 1614, when his surname was spelt Nowell. He was MP for Stafford (1656-1659), a London alderman and a successful merchant, entrepreneur and financier who rose to prominence during the Parliamentarian era. He was also notorious for enriching himself through piracy, the slave trade and extracting taxes, and he played a prominent role in Cromwell’s colonial plans.
Noell climbed rapidly from provincial life in Stafford to dominate the transatlantic trade in sugar and other colonial merchandise. He used his brother’s business connections in London and his own marriage to the daughter of a wealthy City draper to enter that trade. While he never travelled far from his London countinghouse, by the late 1640s he was one of the merchant-planters on Barbados, the island at the centre of England’s sugar boom.
After Charles I was executed in 1649, Noell used his contacts to secure lucrative government contracts and to profit from a variety of customs and sales taxes. He collected taxes on salt while he was an investor in salt-production, profiting from both sides of the industry. Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard Cromwell described him as ‘the great salt-master of England’.
Noell’s friend and business partner Thomas Povey said Noell was ‘considerable everywhere … a person of the most spacious interest of any merchant or citizen’ in England’. With his vast financial resources, Noell made substantial loans to Cromwell’s government for its day-to-day running costs, and the Cromwellian regime may have depended on Noell for ready cash and credit more than on any other person. Noell also acted as private money-lender to Oliver Cromwell.
Noell and Povey were involved in shaping government policies on the Caribbean colonies, particularly Barbados. Noell played a leading role in organising and financing Cromwell’s ‘Western Design’ of 1655 against the Spanish colony of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and it is said Noell suggested the ‘Western Design’ to Cromwell.
However, the ‘Western Design’ was a fiasco, partly because profiteering by Noell and other contractors deprived the expedition of vital supplies and equipment. Driven out of Hispaniola with heavy losses, Cromwell’s troops took Jamaica instead.
But Noell, who owned a plantation in Barbados, managed to profit from the failed expedition and was further rewarded by Cromwell with a grant of 20,000 acres in Jamaica. These gave him a major stake in the English sugar industry and the slave trade that was part and parcel of it.
Noell’s plantation in Barbados had a large number of enslaved Africans working with the sugar-canes. He euphemistically referred to them as his ‘Christian servants’. However, after his re-election as MP for Stafford in 1659, the slaves and their conditions in Barbados brought Noell into conflict with other MPs in Richard Cromwell’s Parliament.
Noell was forced to defend himself against accusations in the Commons that he had violated English ‘liberties’ as a contractor by transporting royalist prisoners to indentured servitude on Barbados. The victims of his ‘most unchristian and barbarous usage’ alleged that they been ‘bought and sold … from one planter to another … as horses and beasts’.
Noell admitted transporting prisoners to the island, but denied he had sold them into slavery or that they had been treated harshly. He claimed the labour conditions for indentured servants on Barbados were better than those of the ‘common husbandman here’. The really hard work, the ‘grinding at the [sugar]-mills and attending at the furnaces or digging in the scorching island’ was mostly undertaken by African slaves, he protested.
Noell, who was joint Postmaster General from 1657 to 1659, survived the challenges in Parliament, and he continued to prosper after the fall of the protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The diarist Samue Pepys was surprised to hear that Noell had been knighted on 6 October 1662, but conceded that the Noell was still ‘a very useful man’.
A year later, in 1663, Noell invested heavily in England’s largest slave-trading venture, the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. He and Povey lobbied in the early 1660s for the establishment of a royal-sponsored West Indian company ‘for the better regulating and improving of foreign plantations’.
Noell was one of the first recorded victims of the Great Plague of London in 1665. Samuel Pepys wrote in his Diary in late September: ‘I hear for certain this night that Sir Martin Noell is this day dead of the plague in London, where he hath lain sick of it these eight days’. He was buried at Saint Olave, Old Jewry, on 30 September 1665.
Noell’s debts at his death in 1665 amounted to over £30,000 – over £5.75 million in spending power today – including £1,747 (over £335,000 today) he owed ‘on a contract’ for slaves. Debts led to a major lawsuit by his children that was not settled until 1682.
An inventory of his mansion in St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, indicates Noell’s taste for exotic objects. The contents of his ‘Green Chamber’ included two cabinets, one of ebony, the other an Indian cabinet set on a frame. Many of the most exotic objects were in ‘Yr Lady’s Chamber or Closet’ and included Spanish tables, ‘Jappan trunks’, five figures of wood, two ‘China jarrs’, a snake’s skin, East India flower pots, furniture decorated with ‘East India beasts and birds’, two pieces of corral and one ostrich egg.
Through his loans and dealing with the Cromwellian regime, Noell drew the state into what had previously been the private business of colonisation and trade in the Atlantic. This marked an important step in developing British bases in the Caribbean and Cromwell’s role in growing a global empire.
Despite founding and endowing the almshouses in Stafford, Noell’s most enduring legacy is his role in colonialism, slavery and the slave trade, a legacy that Britain continues to struggle to come to terms with today.
