Charles Louis William Merlin (1821 – 23 August 1896) was a British banker, diplomat and antiquities trader. He is known for his role in procuring objects, particularly Graeco-Roman antiquities, for the British Museum.
Born to a family of French aristocrats settled in London, Merlin joined the British consular service in Piraeus, the port of Athens, in 1836. He remained stationed in Greece for the next five decades, where he also worked for the British-owned Ionian Bank and rose to the rank of consul-general in 1886. From the early 1860s until his return to Britain in 1887, he corresponded closely with Charles Newton, the British Museum's Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities, who used Merlin as an intermediary to circumvent Greek laws against the export of ancient artefacts.
Merlin's sales to the British Museum totalled around 460 objects. These included the Aineta aryballos, whose export in 1864 launched a minor scandal in Greece, and casts of some of the Parthenon marbles still remaining . He has been termed "among the most prolific, if not the most important, direct providers of antiquities" to the British Museum in the nineteenth century.
Early life
Charles Louis William Merlin was born in 1821. His parents, both French, were Augusta and François-Nicolas Merlin. François-Nicolas Merlin was a relative of the French aristocrat Philippe-Antoine Merlin de Douai, a prominent supporter of the French Revolution. The Merlin family emigrated to London at some point after the revolution; the archaeological historian Yannis Galanakis has suggested that the Merlin family may have emigrated to England following the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814. Charles Merlin may have studied at Dulwich College, a public school in South London.
Career
In 1836, Merlin took a job as a clerk and administrator for the British consulate based in the Piraeus district of Athens. Britain maintained an envoy extraordinary at Athens for diplomatic functions, making the role of the Piraeus consulate, in Merlin's own words, "strictly a commercial one". Merlin spent most of his life in Athens: The historians Lucia Patrizio Gunning and Despina Vlami describe him as a "Levantine", a term which referred to British consuls felt to have taken on local culture through long service in the Eastern Mediterranean.
In 1846, he was appointed as British Vice-Consul to Greece, an unpaid position, and also became an agent for the Ionian Bank, a British overseas bank based in the Ionian islands which was largely responsible for funding, through loans, the islands' public finances throughout the 1840s and 1850s. He was a partner in the merchant house run by John Green, a relative of Merlin's father-in-law, in Patras. In 1865, he became the manager of the Ionian Bank's branch in Athens, and in 1868 was promoted to be Britain's consul in Piraeus, having previously filled the role in an acting capacity during 1859 and 1864. This was his first diplomatic post which paid a salary; he was given £350 a year, plus £100 for expenses, of which £85 were spent on the wages of a clerk. By comparison with other British consuls in the Aegean, this was a relatively low salary – higher only than that paid to the consul at Missolonghi, who earned £200 per annum, and far less than the consul at Constantinople, who earned £1,600 – reflecting the comparatively minor responsibilities of the post. On his promotion, he was forbidden from engaging in business outside his work for the Ionian Bank, but the combined income of his consular post and position with the bank – which paid him around £600 per annum and additionally covered the rent, heating and lighting of his house – made him comfortably off in Athenian society. The consul's duties included commercial and bureaucratic responsibilities, as well as hearing complaints from and resolving disputes among British subjects and merchant sailors.
From the 1850s, Merlin took a greater role in diplomatic work, participating in commissions concerning the Epirus Revolt of 1854 and the Thessaly Revolt of 1878, both of which concerned insurrections by Greeks living within the Ottoman Empire, and in those investigating the murders of British citizens in Greece. After King Otto was forced into exile by a popular uprising in 1862, he gained widespread respect for his assistance of many Greeks caught in the ensuing chaos, as well as for procuring credit from the Ionian Bank for the Greek government and protecting the Bank of Greece.