The Mansion House was paid for in an unusual way: the City authorities, all
Church of England men, found a way to tax those of other Christian denominations, particularly the
Rational Dissenters. A
Unitarian named
Samuel Sharpe, banker by day and amateur Egyptologist by night, wrote about it in the 1830s, striking a blow against the
Test and Corporate Acts. The article was republished in 1872. Sharpe argues that the Mansion House "remains as a monument of the unjust manner in which Dissenters were treated in the last century" (i.e. the 18th, in contrast to his own 19th, century).
William Edward Hartpole Lecky in his
History of England during the Eighteenth Century (1878) describes the funding of the construction of the Mansion House as "a very scandalous form of persecution". There are over one hundred
livery companies, the senior members of which form a special electorate known as
Common Hall. In 1748 the
City of London Corporation devised a
Catch-22 situation to raise money, passing a by-law levying a heavy fine on any man who refused to stand for election, or who, once elected to office, refused to serve. In order to serve as a
Sheriff of the City of London, the individual had to have "taken
the sacrament according to the
Anglican rite" within the past year. This was exactly what
English Dissenters could not, in conscience, do: "It would appear almost incredible, if the facts were not widely attested, that under these circumstances the City of London systematically elected wealthy Dissenters to the office in order that they should be objected to and fined, and that in this manner it extorted no less than £15,000. The electors appointed these Dissenters with a clear knowledge that they would not serve, and with the sole purpose of extorting money. One of those whom they selected was blind; another was bedridden." Some tried to appeal, but the process was immensely risky and costly, with the City holding all the cards. Eventually a man named Evans began a challenge which lasted ten years; in 1767, the House of Lords, drawing on the
Toleration Act 1688, agreed with
Lord Mansfield and ruled to curtail the City's abuse of power. In order to avoid
civil disabilities such as this financially ruinous persecution, some Dissenters were known to take Communion in their
parish church once a year; in the phraseology of the time, "
occasional conformity" (see
Occasional Conformity Act 1711).
Thomas Abney rose to be Lord Mayor in this fashion. The American author
Mark Twain recounts the story in ''
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' (1889): It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion House. A person who had not taken the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London. Thus Dissenters were ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise, hit upon this neat device: they passed a by-law imposing a fine of £400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of £600 upon any person who, after being elected sheriff, refused to serve. Then they went to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected £15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in the earth. ==Architecture==