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Hester Pinney was the eighth of ten children and youngest daughter of a well known Presbyterian minister and preacher. In 1662 John Pinney was ejected from his living and took up lace trading with his wife Jane, a business that the whole family became involved in. The family lived in Broadwinter, Dorset and later purchased a farm nearby, but John spent much of his time preaching in Dublin from where he wrote copious instructional letters to his children. Hester’s whole family, but particularly her father and two younger brothers Nathanial and Azariah, played a key and often controlling role throughout her life. This male influence was particularly marked because Hester remained unmarried for a long time. It was not until the death of her father and brother Nathanial that she gained any real independence, despite her acquisition of great wealth. As was the case for many, if not most businesses in the early modern period however, it was family, friends and connections that set Hester on her way to becoming one of the most strikingly successful businesswomen and financial investors of her time. Yet despite her wealth, Hester never had a permanent home of her own – instead she had at least 34 different addresses during the 58 years that she lived in London and usually lodged in taverns, or with professional people or customers. She owned very few clothes and rarely needed more than one trunk to move her belongings, although her accounts suggest that she was fond of a tipple. She was renowned for her reliability, persistence, hard work and plain – occasionally rude – manner of speaking.

Lace making flourished in the West Country and there was huge consumer demand for lace trimmings and ruffles on fashionable clothing throughout England. The family’s lace was sold in Bath, Bristol and London, and also exported to the West Indian colonies. Four years after two of her sisters went to London to open a lace shop in the Royal Exchange, Hester left home to join them in 1682. The New Exchange (just rebuilt after the fire of 1666) was full of small stalls like the one that Hester and her sisters used as a shop, but it was so small they had to store their stock elsewhere and also traded by making house calls. Hester built up a considerable client base – facilitated by her frequent changes of residence and her family’s connection with the Presbyterian Earl of Warrington’s family, the Booths, with whom she was later intimately involved. Her lack of education meant that, unlike her brothers, Hester could neither write nor figure accounts very well, but her persuasive negotiating skills seem to have more than made up for this. The 1680s were politically and economically unstable times, however. Hester struggled to make ends meet as her father was unable to help the sisters financially, one of whom had made a very bad marriage which resulted in large losses. Yet when Hester’s brother Azariah, was arrested and sentenced to death for his part in the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, she used all her contacts to raise £65 to pay for his sentence to be commuted to transportation. Azariah was shipped to Nevis in the West Indies where he later built up a plantation and exchanged lace for sugar with his family. On the marriage of her second sister, and much to her fathers’ disapproval, Hester began to run the business alone. Against her father’s religious principles and the social values of the day she both lived and did business in the male dominated spaces of taverns and coffee houses. She refused to obey paternal injunctions to return home, but to pacify her family she moved to live with an attorney. During her thirties, Hester combined, lace selling with repairing and specialist laundering, but despite her hard work most of her profits seem to have benefitted her family more than herself. Her father was anxious that she should not marry badly as her sisters had done, but also expected that his youngest daughter would return home to look after him in his old age which would have necessitated her remaining single. Her brother Nathanial, was less against a match but only if it were very financially advantageous. In the event, although Hester had a number of suitors, there seems to have been only one she really loved. He was George Booth, whose family and elevated social position meant that marriage between them was seen as impossible, even though her affections were eagerly returned.

At some point when she was retailing in the New Exchange, Hester began dealing in stocks and shares, most of which was carried out in the nearby coffee houses of Garraways and Jonathans, which she frequented. Hester was thus involved at the birth of the modern financial system and mixing with many of the major players of the future. The financial revolution of the 1690s saw the launch of joint-stock companies, the opening of the bank of England and the beginning of insurance to raise long term credit, particularly for a desperately government in need of more war time funding. Hester had begun, like many single women and windows with money to spare, by making loans, mortgages and deals for country relatives. She effectively became the family banker and investor. Hester was a famously successful debt collector and a belligerent litigator; but as she became more experienced and the financial markets became more sophisticated she began investing in public companies with safer returns. She bought bonds in the major merchant trading companies, including the South Sea Company and the Company of Merchants of Great Britain. She was not unique in this as women formed an important minority of all stockholders were women. In 1717 George Booth appointed her his paid secretary and representative, and made her his sole executrix. This was a generous and significant recognition of her talents: male members of Hester’s family had done this work for the Booths before, but for a gentleman of his standing to employ a woman as his financial advisor was almost unheard of. The position secured Hester even more prestigious clients and contacts and her income soared to £1,100 per annum. Even Nathanial had to admit, reluctantly, that his sister had superior financial skills and borrowed money from her. The infamous bursting of the South Sea Bubble provides ample evidence of Hester’s financial astuteness. She had bought Lottery tickets in 1719, which were converted like many others, to South Sea Stock. The stock rose dramatically in June then burst in September, but whereas Nathanial lost £20,000 he told his sister that ‘Every Weekes news Paprs [sic] acquaints me with the thousands you have happily added to your Fortune which still increases.’

Hester and George Booth, had begun an affair a few years after George had realised that his marriage to another woman was not working. On his wife’s death they finally came to live together in his Picadilly town house in 1724, but this was only possible because Hester’s father and brother had also both died and she was now in her sixties. Their relationship was openly recognised by other family members at last, but Booth died just two years later, leaving Hester the Manor of Monken Hadley (a wealthy parish north of London) to Hester in his will. As an old woman Hester spent more time managing her lands and bought more. She remained ever mindful of the well being of her family however. Young Pinney nephews and nieces came to live with her in London and she often paid for their education. In 1737 she passed Monken Hadley on to her brother Azariah’s son, even though the family’s West Indian plantation had made them a fortune. Her contribution to her family’s social ascent from poor ministers to landowning status was much larger than is usually recognised and, when she died one historian has claimed that her estate far exceeded that of most provincial businessmen of the time. Despite her lack of education and being subject to family patriarchal control for most of her life she had proved herself a shrewd businesswoman and an enormously skilled investor in the newly emerging financial markets. Unusually for a woman at that time, she had also enjoyed extremely wide social interactions with all levels of society in public and private locations, public recognition of her financial abilities, and (largely) independent control of her own wealth.