Sir William Stone (died 1607) was a London mercer and alderman who sold fabrics to the British royal family.Sarah A. Bendall, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens: Gender and Work in the Royal Wardrobe and the Fashion Marketplace (Bloomsbury, 2026), p. 98.
Career He was a son of Reginald Stone, a London fishmonger. He was based at Cheapside but seems also to have owned a house at Leyton.Peter Edwards, Horses and the Aristocratic Lifestyle in Early Modern England (Boydell, 2018), 188.
He sent silks to Scotland worth £200 for the royal wedding in 1589.William K. Boyd and Henry W. Meikle, Calendar State Papers Scotland, 10 (Edinburgh, 1936), p. 162 no. 226.
He was knighted by King James I at Ruckholt, the house of Michael Hicks, on 16 June 1604.John Nichols, Progresses of James I, 1 (London, 1828), 439. Hicks's brother, Baptist Hicks, was a mercer trading like Stone.
In January 1605, Anne of Denmark's vice-chamberlain George Carew was given £6,108 from the treasury to pay her debt to Stone.Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar State Papers Domestic, 1603–1610, 189. In February 1607, Carew received another amount to pay the queen's debts to Stone and others.Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer (London, 1836), 55–57.Memoirs of George Heriot, pp. 224–225.
Stone supplied fabric used for masque costumes at court. With Thomas Henshawe, and the brewer Francis Snellinge, he petitioned the Earl of Salisbury for a debt of £300 for goods sold to the French ambassador, Christophe de Harlay, Count of Beaumont.HMC Salisbury Hatfield, 19 (London, 1965), 249.
Stone was Master of the Clothworkers' Company, and welcomed King James to Clothworkers' Hall on 12 June 1607.John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, 2 (London, 1828), 133–34. He was also a member of the Turkey Company. The Clothworkers' Company has his portrait, showing a carpet on a table.100 Objects: Clothworker's Company
John Chamberlain wrote that Stone died at his house in Leyton on 14 September 1607 of a fever, after drinking a quart of sack to toast King James' health. He was buried at St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street.Maurice Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624 (Rutgers UP, 1972), 101.
His wife was called Barbara. Arrangements were made to pay a royal debt of £1000 to her in 1608.Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar Stone Papers Domestic, 1603–1610, 449. His daughter Julian Stone married Nicholas Herrick, a London goldsmith, and was the mother of the poet Robert Herrick. Elizabeth Stone married Sir William Campion.R. A. Houston, Punishing the Dead: Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–1830 (Oxford, 2010), 126.
Richard Johnson dedicated his 1607 work The Pleasant Conceits of Old Hobson, The Merry Londoner (London, 1607) to Stone.
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