Sir Robert Clayton (1629–1707) and Two John Drydens, 1673–1680

The wealthy scrivener, banker, Royal African Company investor, and whig politician Sir Robert Clayton (1629-1707) appears as ‘extorting Ishban’ in lines 280-297 of John Dryden and Nahum Tate’s anonymously published The Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel (1682). Clayton, who served as Lord Mayor of London in 1679-80 and played a significant role in the Exclusion Crisis, was a natural target for Tate and Dryden, who portrayed him as usurious and socially ambitious, both fanatical in his politics and avid for a peerage. The precise division of authorship of the Second Part is still unresolved, although most accounts follow its publisher Jacob Tonson in firmly attributing the authorship of lines 310-509 to Dryden. Most critics therefore assume that Dryden himself did not write the section satirizing Clayton. Clayton’s customer ledger books, now dispersed between The London Archives (formerly the London Metropolitan Archives) and Surrey History Centre and Archives, reveal a more direct, but hitherto unnoticed, connection between the banker and the poet: Dryden and his wife Elizabeth held accounts with Clayton and his partner John Morris (c.1625-1683) between 1673 and 1680