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Biography
Peter Gaussen (1723–1788) was Governor of the Bank of England from 1777 to 1779.
He was born Jean-Pierre Gaussen in Geneva, the son of Paul Gaussen, a French Huguenot, and moved to London in 1739.
He was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 1776 to 1777. He replaced Samuel Beachcroft as governor in 1777 (in doing so he became the first foreign-born governor of the Bank of England) and was succeeded in turn by Daniel Booth in 1779. Gaussen's tenure as Governor occurred during the Bengal bubble crash (1769–1784).
In 1755 he had married his second cousin Anna Bosanquet, the daughter of Samuel Bosanquet.Their third-born (but first surviving) son, Samuel Robert Gaussen (1759–1812) was MP for Warwick (1796–1802) and a collector of the works of prominent landscape painter Paul Sandby. Peter bought Brookmans Manor in Hertfordshire as a gift for Samuel in 1786.