He was a son of William Coetmor, and is associated with the property Hafod Lwyfog in Nant Gwynant near Beddgelert. In 1610 he donated a silver chalice and paten-cover to the church in Beddgelert.[1] Williams is said to have founded a chapel at Nanwhynen.[2]
Career
Williams was an apprentice of the London goldsmith and Mayor Richard Martin in 1584. Martin supplied silver plate to Queen Elizabeth. By November 1598, he was working at the Sign of the Cross Keys in Cheapside.[3]
Williams supplied the gilt plate given by King James to Adam Newton, the tutor of Prince Henry, in June 1605 when he married Katherine Puckering.[7]
Williams provided Anne of Denmark with a "fountain of silver gilt, well chased, containing one basin with two tops, one of them being three satyres or wild men, the other a woman with a sail or flag". The fountain had three taps or cocks decorated with mermaids. It was used at Somerset House. The wild men were heraldic supporters of the Danish royal arms.[8]
In September 1615, the Earl of Somerset sent plate to Williams to be exchanged and remade in expectation of the christening of his daughter Anne Carr. Somerset sent two Nuremberg basins and ewers as a pattern.[12]
He loaned £5000 to King James in 1621 on the security of ten jewels from the royal collection.[13]
Sources disagree about his family of children and grandchildren. A son, also John Williams (d. 1637) was a London goldsmith, who later settled at Minster Court, Thanet. Other children include Sir Edmund Williams (died 1644) of Marnhull (a royal manor formerly in the jointure lands of Catherine Parr), Dorset,[14] who married Mary Beaumont, and the royal physician Morris Williams.[15]
^John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, vol. 1 (London, 1828), pp. 600-7: See external links for documents at the Folger.
^John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, vol. 1 (London, 1828), p. 600.
^Arthur J. Collins, Jewels and Plate of Elizabeth I (London, 1955), pp. 140, 384.
^HMC Salisbury Hatfield, 18 (London, 1940), p. 305.
^Mary Anne Everett Green, Calendar State Papers Domestic James I, 1611-1618, p. 227, SP14/76 f.95 Latin.
^Calendar State Papers Domestic James I, 1611-1618, p. 380.
^A. R. Braunmuller, 'Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset', Linda Levy Peck, The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 236–37.
^Calendar State Papers Domestic James I, 1619-1623, pp. 293, 308.
^Colin J. Brett, Crown Revenues from Somerset and Dorset (Somerset Record Society, 2012), pp. 7, 38
^Daines Barrington, Miscellanies (London, 1781), p. 431: Samuel Rush Meyrick, Heraldic Visitations of Wales and Part of the Marches, vol. 2 (Llandovery, 1846), p. 439