The Enterprising Admiral

The hope of prize money was the chief inducement in the eighteenth century for the men of the Royal Navy to hazard their lives at sea. Yet until now the matter has largely been ignored by historians. This analysis of Vice Admiral Peter Warren's fortune, which largely derived from prize money, is the first study of its kind. Although Warren married into the well-to-do New York merchant family of the DeLanceys, his wealth began chiefly with the capture of French merchant ships and warships at Louisbourg in 1745 and in 1747 after the defeat of the French fleet off the coast of Spain. Warren invested in America, Ireland, and England. He bought land, loaned money, invested in the London stock market, and dabbled in trade. In America his land purchases and money lending activities were concentrated in New York and New England, with some interests in South Carolina. In Ireland his first concern was the recovery of his family's estate in County Meath and the purchases of other nearby properties. In England he concentrated his land purchases in Hampshire, while investing heavily in the government's wartime debt, the stock of the great trading and insurance companies, and in private mortgages and bonds. Of special interest is the international character of his investments, which adds a new dimension to the economic history of the Atlantic region. Of particular importance also is his rise in status, through wealth, from the declining Catholic gentry of Ireland into which he had been born, to become MP for the City of Westminster, which invariably returned men of the highest social standing. His wealth, after his early death in 1752, also enabled his daughters to marry into the nobility. The effects of the American Revolution and the 1798 Irish uprising hastened the repatriation of his assets to England, where his aristocratic heirs were content with a more modest return on Warren's capital which by then exceeded a quarter of a million pounds sterling.