Sir William Cockayne (Cokayne) (1561 – 20 October 1626), London, England, was a seventeenth-century London merchant, alderman, and, in 1619, Lord Mayor. In 1614, while serving as alderman in the City of London and as governor of the Eastland Company of English merchants, Cockayne devised a plan to dye and dress English cloth, England's main export at the time, before shipping it abroad.

Cockayne convinced James I to grant him a monopoly on cloth exports as a part of this plan, and the plan was intended to increase the profits of English merchants, Cockayne in particular, while boosting royal customs duties through bypassing Dutch merchants. The Alderman Cockayne Plan proved a miserable failure as the Dutch refused to purchase finished cloth, and the English cloth trade was depressed for decades as a result.

He owned a country estate at Rushton in Northamptonshire. He married Mary Morris on 22 June 1596 in London and they had issue:

• Charles Cockayne, 1st Viscount Cullen
• Anne Cockayne (1604-)
• Martha Cockayne (1605-1641), who married Montagu Bertie, 2nd Earl of Lindsey.
• Jane Cockayne (1609-)
• Abigail Cockayne (1610-1687), who married John Carey, 2nd Earl of Dover.
• Mary Cockayne, who married Charles Howard, 2nd Earl of Nottingham.

See also

• Lord Mayor of London
• Eastland Company

References

• List of Lord Mayors of London
• Astrid Friis. Alderman Cockayne's Project and the Cloth Trade. London: Milford, 1927.
• J P Sommerville's 'The Rule of the Howards'
• Joel D. Benson. Changes and Expansion in the English Cloth Trade in the Seventeenth Century: Alderman Cockayne's Project. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen P, 2002.

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