Sir Francis Baring, 1st Baronet (18 April 1740 – 11 September 1810) was an English merchant banker, a member of the Baring family, later becoming the first of the Baring baronets. Early life He was born at Larkbeare House near Exeter, son of Johann Baring (1697–1748), a German cloth merchant who had settled in England, by his English wife Elizabeth Vowler (1702–1766), daughter of a prosperous Exeter dry goods wholesaler (at that time called a grocer). Baring's father emigrated from Bremen, Germany, in 1717 and settled at Exeter, where he became a leading wool manufacturer and textile merchant. His premature death in 1748 resulted in Francis, aged eight, being brought up and strongly influenced by his mother, Elizabeth. Her sound business head nearly doubled the family's worth by the time of her death in 1766. In the early 1750s, Francis was sent to London for education at Mr Fargue's French school at Hoxton and then at Mr Fuller's academy in Lothbury. Samuel Touchet, one of the leading Manchester and West Indian merchants in London, accepted him in 1755 for a seven-year apprenticeship, charging his mother £800. Upon his release on Christmas Day 1762, he joined his two surviving brothers in the interlocking partnerships of John and Francis Baring & Co. of London and John and Charles Baring & Co. of Exeter. Francis led the London concern and Charles the Exeter one, while John, a leading Exeter citizen and a Member of Parliament from 1776, was mainly a silent partner, although nominally senior partner of both firms. By 1807 the brothers had evolved the business into Baring Brothers & Co. Despite being partially deaf from an early age, Francis did very well and, by the mid-1790s, had the full confidence of the British Parliament. John and Francis Baring Company Initially, the London business comprised the accounts and goodwill transferred to it from an old family friend, Nathaniel Paice, a London merchant who was retiring, but also much business came from John and Charles Baring & Co. and other Exeter merchants who required a London agent. Agency services for overseas merchants and trading speculations were soon added. But the firm lost money in eight of its first fourteen years, as Francis Baring learned how to judge markets; having started out with £10,000 he reckoned that by 1777 his net worth stood at just £2,500. Notwithstanding these private reverses, the City of London