Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fortrey, Samuel
FORTREY, SAMUEL (1622–1681), author of ‘England's Interest and Improvement, consisting in the increase of the Store and Trade of this Kingdom,’ Cambridge, 1663, is described on the title-page as ‘one of the gentlemen of his majesties most honourable privy chamber.’ He may be identified with Samuel Fortrey of Richmond and Byall Fen, Isle of Ely, clerk of the deliveries of the ordnance in the Tower of London, and a bailiff in the corporation of the Great Level. This Samuel Fortrey, born 11 June 1622, was eldest son of Samuel Forterie, a merchant of Walbrooke Ward, London, who was grandson of John de la Forterye, a refugee from Lille, and owned a house at Kew, eventually bought by Queen Charlotte. Fortrey married, 23 Feb. 1647, Theodora Josceline, the child for whom Elizabeth Josceline [q. v.] wrote ‘The Mother's Legacie to her Unborn Childe.’ He died in Feb. 1681. His third son, James, groom of the bedchamber to James II, married Lady Bellasyse. ‘England's Interest and Improvement’ was reprinted in 1673, 1713, and 1744; in Sir Charles Whitworth's ‘Scarce Tracts on Trade and Commerce, serving as a supplement to Davenant's Works,’ 1778, and in the Political Economy Club's ‘Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce’ (ed. McCulloch), 1856. It is a weak and rambling tract, without definite aim. Its most specific advice is that immigration and enclosure should be encouraged, and that the king should set a good example by preferring fabrics of home manufacture. It was for many years frequently referred to by financial writers in consequence of a very circumstantial statement contained in it to the effect that the value of the English imports from France was 2,600,000l., and the value of the exports to France 1,000,000l., ‘by which it appears that our trade with France is at least sixteen hundred thousand pounds a year clear lost to this kingdom.’
[Extracts from Sir Henry St. George's Visitation of Cambridgeshire in the Genealogist, iii. 298; extracts from the same visitation in Nichols's Leicestershire, ii. *446; Visitation of London by Sir Henry St. George in 1634 (Harleian Soc. xv. 284); genealogical table in Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 5520, f. 125; Manning and Bray's Surrey, i. 447; Brit. Mus. and Bodleian Library Catalogues of Printed Books.]
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.129
N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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| 50 | i | 6-4 f.e. | Fortrey, Samuel: for and again in Whitworth's . . . . in 1856, read in Sir Charles Whitworth's 'Scarce Tracts on Trade and Commerce, Serving as a Supplement to Davenant's Works,' 1778, and in 1856 in the Political Economy Club's 'Select Collection of Early English Tracts on Commerce' (ed. McCulloch), |