Sampson Lloyd (iron manufacturer)

Sampson Lloyd (1664–1724) was an iron manufacturer in Birmingham, then a small town in the county of Warwickshire, England, and was the founder of the Lloyd family of Birmingham, iron-founders and bankers, which went on to found Lloyds Bank, today one of the largest banks in the United Kingdom.

He was the younger son of Charles Lloyd (1637–1698) of Dolobran in Montgomeryshire (now Powys), where the Lloyd family had been established gentry for many centuries. Sampson's mother was his father's first wife Elizabeth Lort (1633–1685), daughter of Sampson Lort (died before 1670) of East Moor in Pembrokeshire, one of the three sons of Henry Lort of Stackpole Court in Pembrokeshire, Sheriff of Pembrokeshire in 1619, of whom the eldest was Sir Roger Lort, 1st Baronet (died 1664), created a baronet in 1662.

Sampson was born in 1664 "at Anne Eccleston's in Welshpool", the rented house where his parents had been held for the previous two years under house arrest, having been transferred from the Welshpool jail, and where they would remain for the next eight years, having as Quakers refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to King Charles II (1660–1685) as required by the Quaker Act of 1662, the swearing of oaths being forbidden by the Quaker religion.

He adhered to the Quaker faith which had been adopted by his father and aged 34 in the year 1698, the year of his father's death, leaving his elder brother Charles Lloyd (1662–1747), who had inherited Dolobran, he deserted the "uncharitableness of his native Wales" and moved about 62 miles south-east of Dolobran to the town of Birmingham in Warwickshire (home of his brother-in-law John Pemberton), a town especially tolerant of Quakers and religious dissent. There he could escape the harassing and ruthless legal penalties of the Conventicles Act and Five Mile Act, for as Birmingham was not a borough, dissenting preachers were not barred from preaching there. He might have been tempted to follow thousands of other Welsh dissenters in emigrating to the new American colony of Pennsylvania, which course had been chosen by his uncle Thomas Lloyd (1640–1694) a quaker and preacher who assisted William Penn in the establishment of that colony, which he served as Deputy-Governor and President from 1684 to 1693.

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