he left to his children, and after their death to be sold for the benefit of his nephew in Holland. The account-book of his executors is preserved in the British Museum (Addit. MS. 16174). His collection of pictures was sold by auction, after an attempt failed to dispose of them by lottery, to pay his numerous debts and legacies. His prints and drawings were also sold in 1687, the sale occupying forty days, and producing 26,000l. He married a beautiful Englishwoman, whose name has not been ascertained, but who had been his mistress, and borne him two children, a boy and a girl, before the marriage. His children were under age at his death. His daughter, Anne, subsequently married a Mr. Frowd, and died in her first childbed; and the son, John Lely, after being a source of great anxiety to his guardians, was married to a daughter of Sir John Knatchbull, bart. Lely's grandson, John Lely, was also a painter, but of small merit.
Lely frequently painted his own portrait, which shows him to have been a handsome man. A portrait group of himself and his family, with musical instruments, is in the Methuen collection.
There are some fine drawings by Lely in the print room at the British Museum; for one of Edmund Waller see ‘The Hobby Horse,’ January 1892.
[Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, ed. Wornum; Vertue's MSS. (Brit. Mus. Add. MSS. 23068–76); Woltmann and Woermann's Geschichte der Malerei; Sandrart's Teutsche Akademie; Kramm's Levens en Werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche Kunstschilders, &c.; Le Neve's Pedigrees of Knights; J. T. Smith's Streets of London, i. 262; Roger North's Lives of the Norths; Jessopp's Autobiography of Hon. Roger North; Law's Hampton Court, ii. 246; information from (Sir) George Scharf, and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot; authorities quoted in the text.]
LEMAN, Sir JOHN (1544–1632), lord mayor of London, born at Saxlingham, Norfolk, in 1544, was younger son of John Leman, of Gillingham in Norfolk and Beccles in Suffolk, and Mary, daughter of John Alston of Pevenham, Bedfordshire. The family were descended from John de la Mans, who fled to England from the Netherlands, and died about 1485. Leman carried on business in Thames Street, near Botolph Lane, and was a member of the Fishmongers' Company, of which he served the office of prime warden in 1616. He was elected alderman of Portsoken ward on 15 Aug. 1605 (City Records, Rep. xxvii. f. 64), and served the offices of sheriff in 1606 and of lord mayor in 1616–17. He was ‘removed’ from Portsoken ward, apparently to Langbourn, which he represented in the year of his mayoralty (ib. Rep. xxxii. f. 355). By his prerogative as lord mayor he again removed, on 8 Oct. 1617, from Langbourn to Cornhill, which he represented until his death (ib. Rep. xxxiii. f. 173 b, xlvi. f. 190). Upon his inauguration as lord mayor, the Fishmongers' Company provided a pageant of unusual magnificence. It was composed by Anthony Munday, the city poet, and was entitled ‘Chrysanaleia, the Golden Fishing; or Honour of Fishmongers …,’ London, 1616. The original coloured drawings for the devices are still preserved at Fishmongers' Hall, and were reproduced for the company in facsimile, with a reprint of the pageant and historical notes, by Mr. J. Gough Nichols, F.S.A., in 1859.
In February 1616–17 Leman, while mayor, was very ill. ‘The French ambassador and his company last night,’ John Chamberlain wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, 22 Feb., had a ‘great supper at the Lord Mayor's, who, poor man! had been at death's door these six or seven weeks’ (Nichols, Progresses of James I, iii. 246). Leman was knighted on 9 March following (Metcalfe, Book of Knights, p. 169), and later in the year sumptuously entertained at his house near Billingsgate several lords and other members of the privy council while the king was in Scotland. To him while lord mayor John Vicars dedicated his translation of Francis Herring's poem on the Gunpowder plot, ‘Mischief's Mysterie,’ 1617.
Leman was possessed in 1606 of the manor of Brampton in Suffolk and the advowson of the church; he also bought the manor of Warboys in Huntingdonshire of Sir Oliver Cromwell (cf. Fuller, Worthies of England, 1811, i. 474). He died 26 March 1632, at the advanced age of eighty-eight, and was buried in St. Michael's Church, Crooked Lane, where a rich monument was erected to his memory in what was then called the Fishmongers' Aisle (Stow, Survey, bk. ii. p. 187). The church was pulled down in 1831. Leman was unmarried and was the first bachelor lord mayor since 1491. Suckling erroneously gives him a wife, whom he calls Margaret Collen. Leman was succeeded in his Suffolk estates by a son of his elder brother, William Leman, portreeve of Beccles in 1590, M.P. for Hertford, and treasurer-at-war to the parliament, with whose descendants the manor of Brampton still remains (Suckling, History of Suffolk, ii. 184–5).
By his will, dated 8 July (codicil 17 Dec.) 1631, and proved in the P. C. C. 28 March 1632, Awdley, 30, Leman devised his messuage and garden in Ballygate Street in
