The Cazeneuve Family Part III
It is not known why John and Esther moved to Chatham. Unlike Canterbury, Chatham did not have a Huguenot community in the late seventeenth century.
A new European war, the War of the Spanish Succession, broke out in 1701. John possibly saw opportunities in Chatham, with the expanding royal dockyard.
John was buried at St Mary's Chatham on 23 November 1740. His age at death is not known. As he was married in 1696, it is likely that he was around seventy.
Going by his will and the entry in the burial register, he had by this time settled on the spelling Cazeneuve.
In his will, made in 1735, John Cazeneuve describes himself as a distiller. The will shows that he was a man of property.
He had money invested in the South Sea Company; each of his four grandchildren was to receive £80 paid out of his South Sea annuities on reaching the age of twenty-one.
One of the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht at the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 was that British ships and merchants would be allowed to trade directly with Spanish colonies in South America. The South Sea Company was established as a means for people to invest in this trade. In return for a monopoly of the South Sea trade, the Company agreed to take on a share of Britain's national debt.
There was a rush to invest, so that the price of South Sea stock became massively overvalued. From £125 a share in January 1720 the price rose to a peak of £1,050 in the summer. Meanwhile, the expected trade boom with South America was not happening, but the Company was taking on more and more of the National Debt. Then the bubble burst and by December 1720 the price had fallen to £124.
Following the crash, Parliament legislated to restructure the South Sea Company's finances. From June 1723, investors' holdings were split so that they held half in stock and half in annuities, payment of which were the responsibiity of the government, not the Company.
It is pointed out that someone who invested before the price of South Sea stock began to rise would ultimately have made a profit. Those who invested when the price had risen would have lost money. It is not known at what point John Cazeneuve invested.
John Cazeneuve was also a substantial property owner. He owned 'five Messuages or Tenements also premises with their appurtenances scituate and being near the Workhouse in Chatham'.
'The workhouse' does not of course refer to the post-1834 Union Workhouse, which was in Magpie Hall Road.
An Act of Parliament of 1723, known as Knatchbull's Act, after the Kent M.P. Sir Edward Knatchbull, 4th baronet, gave parishes powers to use parish funds to acquire premises to be used as workhouses.
The parish of Chatham built a workhouse in 1725, 'on a Piece of Ground purchased for that purpose, opposite to some Alms-houses, which now serve for a kind of Infirmary to the Workhouse'.
The Kent historian Edward Hasted wrote 'at the east end of the town [Chatham] is the parish workhouse, built in 1725, on a large and extensive plan'.
The east end of the town would place the workhouse, and therefore John Cazeneuve's property, somewhere near where Luton Arches now are.
The workhouse was said to be opposite some almshouses. The only amshouses in Chatham noted by Hasted were Sir John Hawkins' Hospital, which is at the west end of Chatham. No reference has been discovered to the Hospital being used as an infirmary to the workhouse.
It has not so far been possible to discover the precise location of the workhouse and thus John Cazeneuve's messuages or tenements. Further research might reveal more.
John Cazeneuve also had property in Brompton, an area on the borders of Chatham and Gillingham which was newly developing in the eighteenth century, providing housing for Dockyard personnel. Hasted wrote in 1798 that Brompton then consisted of 'about four hundred houses, most of which have been erected within the memory of persons now living'.
The streets were laid out on a grid pattern and filled with two or three storey terraced houses which opened directly onto the street.
John left a 'Front Messuage or Tenement and Back Messuage or Tenement with Wash House Ground alley way Well and premises scituate lying and being in West Court Street at Brompton in the parish of Chatham'.
Nothing remains of Westcourt Street as it was in John Cazeneuve's time.
John Cazeneuve also left two adjoining 'messuages or tenements' with wash house ground and premises at Prospect Street in Brompton 'which I lately built'.
According to Medway Council's Conservation Area Appraisal, all houses in Prospect Street (also known as Prospect Row) were built between 1685 and 1759. Construction is thought to have begin at the north end and proceeded south.
The narrowness of the street, street furniture and the number of parked cars make it difficult to capture good images of Prospect Street. It is not known which were John Cazeneuve's houses, but nos. 5 and 6, the two cream houses second and third from the left, below, look as if they might have been built together:
As do nos. 10 and 11:
It is interesting to consider that John Cazeneuve was a developer in Brompton fifty or more years before Jacob Cazeneuve Troy began to develop Troy Town.
Next: The Cazeneuve Family Part IV
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