Few families have left as deep a mark on Whittington as the Websters. Across four generations, they combined sharp business instincts with a genuine devotion to the parish — endowing schools, filling St Bartholomew’s with silver and stained glass, and channelling City of London fortunes back into the education of Whittington’s poorest children. This is their story, pieced together from wills, parish records, and one extraordinary Victorian archive of 70,000 handwritten sheets.
Where It Began: Nicholas and Anne
The trail starts with Nicholas Webster, born in the early 1560s and married to Anne Woodward. Like much of the Webster line that followed, Nicholas was very likely a Clothworker — a member of one of the City of London’s Great Twelve Livery Companies, founded in 1528 to train apprentices and safeguard standards of the trade.
Nicholas and Anne raised six children: Dorothy (1584), Ann (1586), Godfrey (1588), Sarah (1590), Peter (1593), and John (1596). All three sons followed their father into clothmaking, and Peter would go on to train several of his own relatives in the trade — a pattern of family apprenticeship that would echo down the generations.
(A curious side-note: a Nicholas Webster served as Mayor of Chesterfield in 1611, and a Godfrey Webster held the same office in 1620–21. Whether either was “our” Nicholas or Godfrey is impossible to say for certain — at the time, any supported local citizen could serve as mayor, a system that lasted until the Local Government Act of 1933.)
Peter Webster: Merchant, Churchwarden, Founder of Schools
Of Nicholas’s children, Peter Webster is the family’s true architect of legacy. He married Anne Fusser at Hackington, Kent, on 16 October 1628, and together they had ten children — though heartbreakingly, several died in infancy: Mary (1630), Martha (1631–1633), Anne (1632–1633), Sarah (1632), John (1634, lived only months), Elizabeth (1638–1674), Rebeccah (1639, lived only months), Joseph (1642, lived only months), Joshua (1644), and James (1647–1660).
Peter left Whittington to build a life in the Parish of St Laurence Pountney, in what Londoners of the day simply called “the square mile.” He prospered — not just through cloth, but through land and property — and became a pillar of his new church community, serving repeatedly as Churchwarden and treasurer. He happened to hold the treasurer’s role in 1666, the year the Great Fire of London tore through the city and burned St Laurence’s to the ground. (Intriguingly, one witness account claimed a fire had been spotted in the church tower before the flames even reached that part of the city — the church itself was never rebuilt.) A trust fund was established in the fire’s aftermath, and Peter was named among its trustees.
Yet his heart never fully left Whittington. He kept a seat reserved for him on St Bartholomew’s seating plan and worshipped there whenever he visited. And it’s here that his generosity left its most lasting mark: Peter’s will funded the purchase of land specifically to establish schools in Whittington, along with a house and salary for a schoolmaster. The first schoolhouse is thought to have stood inside the churchyard’s boundary wall, at the south-west corner.
Peter died in 1677 and was buried in the churchyard of St Laurence Pountney — now, poignantly, enclosed within private property.
The Next Generation Gives Again
Peter’s son Joshua Webster — born in Pountney and married to Mary Farrer in 1667 at St Duke’s Place, London — continued the family’s charitable tradition. Joshua and Mary had four children: Mary (1668), Anne (1669), Joshua (1671), and Peter (1673). In 1696, Joshua bequeathed land, including Plumtree Farm, explicitly “for the educating of ten poor children of the Parish of Whittington.”
His son, Peter Webster the Younger of Croydon, went further still. In his will dated 4 April 1750, he left £600 in trust, invested in government securities, with the dividends paid out to six of the parish’s poorest people. (By 1755, this had matured into £600 of new South Sea annuities, held in the names of the Rector, Rev. Samuel Pegge, and the parish’s churchwardens and overseers.)
Peter the Younger’s generosity is still tangible today: he donated a flagon and paten, dated 1753, engraved with a dedication to God and the Church of Whittington, honouring himself as “the munificent Son & Grandson of a munificent Father & Grandfather — both great Benefactors to this Parish.” Remarkably, the family’s charitable spirit persists into the present: the Webster Whittington School Charities still awards small grants to Whittington school-leavers heading into further education.
Sir Godfrey Webster: Fortune, Knighthood, and a King’s Debt
The family’s most dazzling figure may be Sir Godfrey Webster, born around 1650. Apprenticed to his uncle Peter, he built his wealth remarkably early and rose to become Master of the Clothworkers’ Company in 1695, before being knighted in 1708.
We know an unusual amount about Godfrey thanks to Percival Boyd, a meticulous Victorian researcher who compiled “Inhabitants of London” — an astonishing 70,000-sheet handwritten index spanning the 16th to 18th centuries, updated as individuals married, had children, or left wills. Both Peter’s and Godfrey’s records survive in Boyd’s index, cross-referenced to each other: Peter’s will mentions a bequest to Godfrey, pointing to index number 18488 — Godfrey’s own entry, which confirms his parents were John Webster (1596–1664) and Margaret, matching the Whittington family tree precisely.
Godfrey purchased the Manor House at Nelmes and married Abigail Jorden in 1672. He also owned the Great James Tavern on Bishopsgate Street — a favourite haunt of the diarist Samuel Pepys, who mentions it in his own writings. Godfrey’s real fortune, though, came from importing hemp from Russia — a business substantial enough that he lobbied government ministers for naval protection for the sixteen ships and crews he employed in the trade.
His most striking claim to fame ties directly back to Whittington’s own moment in history: Godfrey was wealthy enough to loan money to William III in the wake of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. In gratitude, the King granted him lucrative contracts to supply clothing to the army and hemp to the navy.
Godfrey died in 1720. His will left £1,000 for the poor of Chesterfield, alongside a bequest to his sister Anne, wife of Samuel Phipps — a Chesterfield shoemaker recorded as trading on Shoemakers Row in the Shambles.
Thomas Webster and Battle Abbey
Godfrey’s eldest son, Thomas Webster, born in 1679, married Jane Cheeke, daughter of a prosperous soap-maker, and the couple had five children. Jane inherited considerable wealth from both her father and grandfather, Henry Whistler. Thomas used the family fortune to purchase Battle Place, then in poor repair, restoring it and renaming it Battle Abbey — the estate for which the Webster name is still remembered today. He also served as MP for Colchester. (Readers wanting the fuller Battle Abbey story can find it via the Google Arts & Culture exhibit on the Webster family.)
From Whittington clothworkers to a knight bankrolling a king, the Websters’ story is really one thread: wealth made in the City of London, quietly and repeatedly returned home to Whittington’s church, its poor, and its children — a legacy that, through the school charity, still gives today.