Erasmus Smith

Erasmus Smith (1611 – 1691) was an English merchant and a landowner with possessions in England and Ireland. Having acquired significant wealth through trade and land transactions, he became a philanthropist in the sphere of education, treading a path between idealism and self-interest during a period of political and religious turbulence. His true motivations remain unclear.

Smith's family owned manors in Leicestershire and held Protestant beliefs. He became a merchant, supplying provisions to the armies of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell – during Cromwell's suppression of rebellion in Ireland — and an alderman of the City of London. His financial and landowning status was greatly enhanced by benefiting from his father's subscription to the Adventurers' Act from which he gained extensive landholdings in Ireland as a reward, and from his own speculative practice of buying additional subscriptions from other investors.

During the period of Cromwell's rule and the subsequent Restoration, Smith manoeuvred to protect his position and to further his essentially Puritan religious stance, which he modified to suit the religious sensibilities of the new Royalist regime. He achieved this in part by creating an eponymous trust whereby some of his Irish property was used for the purpose of financing the education of children and provided scholarships for the most promising of those to continue their studies at Trinity College, Dublin. However, there have been claims that this trust was intended primarily to protect his interests in land, of which some was obtained by dubious interpretation of law.

Erasmus Smith was born in 1611 and baptised on 8 April of that year at Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire. He was the second son of Roger Smith and his second wife, Anna (née Goodman). The family had changed their name to Smith from Heriz (or Harris) when they inherited the manor of Edmondthorpe during the reign of Henry VII, and it was Erasmus's paternal grandfather, also called Erasmus, who had bought the manor of Husbands Bosworth in 1565.Henry "Silver-tongued" Smith, the Puritan preacher, was an uncle of Erasmus, and his maternal grandfather, Thomas Goodman, was a wealthy London merchant.

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