Hoare, Edward (d. 1690), Cromwellian soldier and settler, was the third of the seven sons of William Hore (b. 1602), of Edmonton in Middlesex and London, and Elizabeth Gilpin (d. 1681), the daughter of Rev. John Gilpin. His only sister, Catherine, married another soldier, Captain Edward Wight (d. 1713), who settled in Limerick, where he was mayor in 1694 and 1711. Edward, who reached the rank of major, travelled to Ireland in 1649 with his younger brother Abraham (who died unmarried in 1670) in the regiment of Colonel John Hewson (d. 1662), and the brothers were later jointly granted lands at Dunmanway, Co. Cork. Edward married Mary Woodcock (d. 1690), the only daughter and heir of Captain John Woodcock (d. 1656), and his wife, Mary (née Bennet; d. a. 1670), of Kilrogane, Co. Kilkenny. They had at least two daughters and three sons; two of the sons became merchants and bankers, their families developing extensive trading connections and a network of marriage alliances.
Their eldest son was Edward Hoare (d. 1709), of Dunkettle and Factory Hill, Cork, who served as sheriff of Cork in 1684 and mayor in 1686. He is said to have been a wine merchant and to have begun banking with his brother Joseph about 1675. He certainly had extensive shipping interests, and was agent in Cork to the victualling commissioners of the navy from at least 1693. The ships were supplied at Kinsale, where Hoare set up baking and slaughtering ventures and a very large brewery. A friend of Sir Robert Southwell (qv), he purchased large estates in counties Cork, Limerick, and Kerry. As political instability grew in 1688, he took refuge with relatives in Edmonton and suffered confiscation at the hands of the Jacobite authorities. After the victory of King William (qv) he returned to Ireland and acquired forfeited estates of Jacobites by grant and purchase. In 1676 he married Sarah (d. 1715), the eldest daughter and coheir of Colonel Richard Burnell of Dublin; they had five sons and two daughters.
The eldest of these sons was Edward Hoare (c.1678–1765), who was a business partner of his father, sheriff of Cork in 1708 and mayor in 1710, and MP for Cork city (1710–27). He married first, in 1703, Grace (d. 1709), a daughter of the Dublin banker Benjamin Burton (qv), with whom he had three sons and a daughter. In partnership with Thomas Hall he ran a sailcloth factory at Dunkettle between about 1718 and 1725. He was one of the members of the Irish Linen Board, as first constituted in 1711, from which he received substantial grants in 1722–7. Later he and his eldest son, Edward (1704–1740), who was his partner in a large merchant shipping expedition, suffered heavy losses when their uninsured fleet was lost. His third son, Sir Joseph Hoare (1707–1801), barrister and politician, MP for Askeaton, Co. Limerick (1761–1800), was among the minority in the commons supporting the electoral reform bill of 1797; he also opposed the act of union.
The second son of the first Edward Hoare (d. 1690), Richard (c.1679–1725), attended TCD and the King's Inns. He practised at the bar in Dublin and married as his first wife in 1708 Elizabeth, another daughter of Benjamin Burton; he died of a gunshot wound received in a robbery attempt on his person in Dublin. Robert Hoare (d. 1764), the fourth son, was, among other offices held, town clerk of Cork, and purchased Factory Hill after his eldest brother's business failure. A fifth son, John Hoare (b. 1687), founded an unsuccessful ironworks in Co. Kerry.
Joseph Hoare (d. 1729) was the second son of Edward Hoare (d. 1709) and was resident at Woodhill, Co. Cork, and at Hoare's Lane in Cork city. A prominent merchant and banker in partnership with his brother Edward, he acquired extensive property and was agent and receiver to Alan Brodrick, Viscount Midleton (qv). Married four times, he was probably already ‘convinced’ of the truth of the Society of Friends at the time of his first marriage in 1692 to Rachel Rogers (d. 1700), a Friend whose sister Elizabeth was married to the prominent Cork quaker merchant Joseph Pike (qv); of their children, one son and one daughter survived infancy. The son, Joseph (1695–1740), married in 1720 (as his second wife) his cousin Margaret Pike, the daughter of Joseph Pike. These marriages reflected a business association between the two families, particularly in banking. The third marriage of Joseph Hoare senior in 1713 was to Margaret, the daughter of a Lancashire merchant, Edward Satterthwaite, and his wife, Agnes. Margaret Hoare (d. 1718) travelled around Ireland in 1716 as a quaker minister: ‘she had an excellent gift in the ministry, which was as well doctrinal, as sweetly comfortable and edifying; and she travelled frequently on this account, both in England and in Ireland’ (Wight, 281). Her exemplary dying testimony is recorded in quaker memorials.
Joseph and Margaret's surviving son, Samuel Hoare (1716–96), moved to London, where he married in 1744 Grizell Gurnell, the daughter of Jonathan Gurnell, of Ealing in Middlesex, a quaker merchant with Irish connections; Samuel was engaged in extensive continental trade with his father-in-law. One of his sons, also Samuel (1751–1825), became a banker in London and married Sarah Gurney, a member of an important quaker banking family in London. Contrary to some accounts, however, the Cork Hoares were not (according to Tenison and Wagner) related to the famous London banking family of Hoares.