Sir Martin Bowes
(1500-1566)

Died aged c. 66

Sir Martin Bowes (1496/97 – 1566) was a very prominent and active civic dignitary of Tudor London whose career continued through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. Born into the citizenry of York, Bowes was apprenticed in London and made his career at the Royal Mint, as a master-worker and under-treasurer, and personally implemented the debasement of English currency which became a fiscal imperative in the later reign of Henry. Through a lifetime's association with the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, of which he was many times Upper Warden, he progressed to be a Sheriff of London in 1540-1541 and to be Lord Mayor of London for 1545–46, the last full term of mayoralty in Henry's reign. A survivor through the changes of national religious policy (and attendant persecutions), in the term of his mayoralty fell the second interrogation and condemnation of the Protestant Anne Askew, who was burnt at the stake for heresy in 1546. In 1547 and 1553, (during the reign of Edward VI), and later in 1554 and 1555 and again in 1559, he represented the City of London in Parliament. The Catholic queen Mary was dependent upon the stability, wealth and compliance of the City in its central role in the governance and commerce of the capital, while the City itself, desirous of reform, looked to its elders for guidance and opportunity through the dangerous alterations of policy. Bowes's flexibility in religious matters, his reforms of the London Hospitals and his continuing involvement with them, his various benefactions (not least to the Langbourne ward of which he was alderman for twenty years), and his long representation of his Company's interests, which he carried safely through to the Elizabethan era, characterize one of the great (if controversial) London city fathers of his age.

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