The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  ‘Although they that live at London may ... go to Garraway’s Coffee House and see what prices the actions* bear of most companies trading in joint stocks, yet for those whose occasions permit not there to see [sic], they may be satisfied once a week how it is [by reading the Collection].’

  Houghton’s stated aim was ‘that trade may be better understood and the whole Kingdom made as one trading city’. He explained how investors should set about managing their new portfolios.

  ‘The monied man goes among the Brokers (which are chiefly upon the Exchange, and at Jonathan’s Coffee House, sometimes at Garraway’s ... ) and asks how stocks go? And upon information, bids the broker buy or sell so many shares of such and such stocks if he can, at such and such prices. Then he tries what he can do among those that have stocks, or power to sell them, and if he can, makes a bargain.’12

  It was as well the novice had Houghton to help for, as on the Dam, the air in Jonathan’s was a haze of impenetrable jargon. Putting, Houghton explained, was buying an option to sell at a fixed price on a certain date. Calling was an option to buy. He printed sample forms of option contract and share transfer for those eager to try their luck. Alongside the East India Company and Royal African share prices, meanwhile, Houghton began to list speculative projects: German Balls, Blue Paper,* and a name which investors in Nicholas Barbon’s property developments might have treated with some caution, Water Barbon. Diving Halley (‘The Governor and Company for Raising Wrecks in England’) fetched £20 a share.

  Not everyone was tempted. Dudley North was, in his brother’s opinion, ‘an exquisite judge of adventures’, but as excitement mounted over the new investments he developed a loathing for all share ‘opportunities’. His brother-in-law pestered him to invest in a mining company, ‘which was held forth to be wonderful gainful and nothing wanting to enter and take possession but a little stock ... But is it so rich a thing as your Lordship says? said Sir Dudley. Ay, [by] God, is it, said my Lord, and will certainly yield [100] per cent immediately, and afterwards not to be computed!’13 Dudley showed him the door. Not many were so cautious, however, as news spread of the vast returns being offered by promoters. The Companies were a closed shop; land was hard to prise from the grasp of traditional landowners. Exchange Alley, by contrast, had suddenly opened a passage to wealth from which none were excluded. London’s first stock-market boom was under way. Hundreds were drawn to Exchange Alley, ‘of all ranks and professions and of both sexes ... being allured with the hopes of gaining vast riches by this means’.14 Promoters offered riches to men (and women) of all ranks – not just riches, indeed, but immediate wealth, fortune without effort, for like the Dutch tulip fever sixty years earlier the stock-market could produce money at a speed and in quantities beyond the capacity of any landed estate or merchant ship. By 1695 more than 150 joint stock companies had been formed, 85 per cent of them since the Revolution. Copper mines in the Americas, water companies, companies to raise wrecks and manufacture textiles – all promised fabulous returns, and they continued to multiply, ‘projects upon projects ... engine upon engine’,15 until they even became the subject of jokes on stage – a character in Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers was besieged by Exchange Alley stockjobbers trying to sell shares in a new kind of mousetrap (‘There is no family in England will be without ‘em!’16). Did anyone believe in Charles Colmans’ ‘certain powder, which being put into fair water, beer, ale or wine, doth immediately turn the same into very good black writing ink?’ No matter, it still attracted investors.

  ‘Merely on the shadow of expectation [Daniel Defoe wrote] they have formed companies, chose committees, appointed officers, shares and books, raised great stocks and cried up an empty notion to that degree that people have been betrayed to part with their money for shares in a New-Nothing.’17

  The stock-market boom showed how dramatic and far-reaching were the possibilities of risk culture. It was not the only sign, however, that risk was being conceived in a new way. The 1690s also saw a rapid expansion in insurance. Nicholas Barbon had begun a fire insurance business after the Great Fire. After the Revolution such projects multiplied. Defoe wrote an essay on the projecting boom and included in it ideas for accident insurance, healthcare, even pensions. In 1692 Edward Lloyd moved his coffee house to Abchurch Lane, on the far side of Lombard Street from Exchange Alley, where it soon became a gathering place for dealers in marine insurance. To enthusiasts like Defoe, insurance was more than a new business. It offered a breakthrough in mankind’s relationship with the future:

  ‘All the disasters in the world might be prevented by it, and mankind be secured from all the miseries, indigences and distresses that happen in the world. All the contingencies of life might be fenced against by this method (as fire is already) as thieves, floods by land, storms by sea, losses of all sorts ... by making it up to the survivor.’18

  One type of insurance considered by Defoe even challenged the greatest risk of all – death. In most countries, life insurance was strictly banned (Defoe thought that sensible in Italy, where ‘stabbing and poisoning is so much in vogue’). The first English life insurance company, however, was founded in 1696. It would be followed over the next twenty-five years by no fewer than sixty others.

  If death itself could be tamed by risk theory, then the possibilities of risque were far-reaching indeed. Speculation showed how it could transform wealth, insurance, how it could smooth the vagaries of fate. But risk, once familiar, became addictive. It became a filter through which all the world’s chances could be observed and calculated. Wherever they looked, people saw alternative outcomes, eventualities governed not by God but by raw chance. And they speculated on them. Nothing so well illustrates the growing popularity of risk as the craze for gambling which continued to overtake London in the 1690s as it had conquered Paris before. If the emblematic figure of England’s last revolution had been the Puritan in his long black coat, the Revolution of 1688 raised a new standard-bearer in his place. He was that incorrigible hunter of probabilities, that baiter of chance, the gambler.

  Delarivier Manley was the daughter of the governor of Landguard Fort. Her upbringing was highly respectable. She was sent to learn French with a Huguenot refugee; there was even talk of her joining Mary of Modena’s household. Delarivier’s father died in March 1687, however, and the Revolution ended any chance of a place at court. She found herself under the protection of her cousin, John Manley, a Bath lawyer who had done well in the Revolution. Men had always found Delarivier attractive. John Manley talked her into his bed by claiming his wife had died; he even went through a marriage ceremony with her. His wife was very much alive, however, and Delarivier found herself pregnant with an illegitimate child at the age of fourteen. She spent the next three years hidden in London with a baby to look after, and nothing to live off but John Manley’s handouts.

  London, however, was a city where possibility always lurked around the corner. It arrived for Delarivier in the form of a fashionable carriage drawing up in the street outside her hideaway. From it stepped one of Charles II’s old mistresses, the Countess of Castlemaine, who immediately caught sight of the pretty face in the window above. As it happened, Lady Castlemaine had a taste for pretty companions, and Delarivier was summoned. For the next few months she would not leave her patron’s side. ‘The truth is,’ Delarivier wrote afterwards, ‘Lady Castlemaine was always superstitious at play. She won whilst Delarivier was there, and would not have her removed from the place she was in, thinking she brought her good luck.’19 Lady Castlemaine was a gambler, and Delarivier became her mascot.

  William of Orange gambled on his first Twelfth Night in London. He went to the Chapel Royal, made offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh – received by Henry Compton – and then proceeded to the office of the Groom Porter, traditional overseer of the King’s gambling, where he lost a hundred guineas, ‘as’, Roger Morrice reported, ‘is customary’.20 That was the point – the Prince’s Twelfth Night ceremony was ritual, not plea
sure, and belonged to the traditional world of chance, of gambling at religious festivals and the solemn drawing of lot. William, no rake, was merely upholding ancient tradition.

  Something quite different was taking place at the tables to which Lady Castlemaine introduced her new protégée. They went most often to the house of another of Charles’s old mistresses, Hortense Mancini. A niece of the great Cardinal Mazarin, Mancini was a flamboyant bisexual who had fled a disastrous marriage to come to England, and since Charles’s death her house at Chelsea had become a gathering-place for London’s most fashionable and most disreputable set, aging roués and bright young things who went there to admire the most modern surroundings, and eat the most modern food, ‘whatever delicacy is brought from France, and whatever is curious from the Indies’.21 Since the Revolution ended Mancini’s pension, guests were expected to leave tokens of appreciation under their plates, but they were not put off.* For at Hortense Mancini’s table the gamesters were more daring and the stakes higher than anywhere else in London.

  An old friend discovered Delarivier there, in the fictionalised memoir Delarivier wrote later, The Adventures of Rivella. ‘I shook my head in beholding her in such company ... The diversions of the house she was in were dangerous restoratives. Her wit and gaiety of temper returned, but not her innocence.’ Vast sums changed hands at tables such as these. Risque had turned Versailles into a gambling den; now it was having the same effect on fashionable London. In ‘basset’, gamblers bet on cards turned up by a banker; ‘hazard’ was an early form of crap dice. All night long Delarivier watched her patron at play. Only at dawn would they wearily climb back into the carriage, for Lady Castlemaine ‘seldom [had] the power of returning home from play before morning, unless upon a very ill run when she chanced to lose her money sooner than ordinary’.22

  ‘An enchanting witchery ... an itching disease’ – that was how Charles Cotton, whose Compleat Gamester was the first English book on the subject, described gambling when the craze first crossed the Channel in the 1670s.

  ‘Always in extremes, always in a storm, this minute the gamester’s countenance is so serene and calm that one would think nothing could disturb it, and the next minute so stormy and tempestuous that it threatens destruction to itself and others, and, as he is transported with joy when he wins, so, losing, is he tossed upon the billows of a high swelling passion, till he hath lost sight of both sense and reason.’23

  Leaving his home in Covent Garden, Roger North found himself walking past rows of gambling clubs; at night, touts stood outside them to tempt in the unwary. When dinner was over, ordinaries – restaurants – cleared their tables for cards and dice. The town threw itself into the new craze. Gambling was another way of engaging with risk. Professional gamblers had already become famous in the decades after the Restoration. Colonel Panton made enough in one night to buy land between Leicester Square and Soho and develop it as Panton Street. He was that rare creature, the gambler who stopped while he was ahead. Another professional, Richard Bourchier, sank at one point to working as footman to the Duke of Buckingham. With twenty pounds left on earth he bought a noose to hang himself and staked what was left on a last bet. His luck miraculously changed, and as he left the table he courteously handed the noose to the loser. From then on he went from strength to strength, at one point winning £500 at hazard from his former employer.

  The war offered numerous possibilities for gamblers. In the summer of 1691, vast sums were wagered on whether or not William, campaigning in Flanders, would be in time to raise the siege of Mons. The sponsors of such projects in the Irish and European campaigns ran them as sophisticated business operations.

  ‘Offices were erected on purpose which managed it to a strange degree and with great advantage, so that as has been computed, there was not less waged on one side and other upon the second siege of Limerick than two hundred thousand pound.’24

  Syndicates even prepared chains of post horses to bring news of each town’s fall. In 1692 the siege of Namur was said to be doing better business, for a time, than anything else on the Exchange.

  On at least one occasion a ‘messenger’ galloped into the City to announce a town’s fall so that his employer could collect before the hoax was discovered. Gambling brought much dishonesty in its train. It unleashed a whole new underworld on the town – Huffs, Hectors, Setters, Gilts, Pads, Biters, Divers, Lifters, Filers, Budgies, Droppers, Cross-biters – whose tricks came out late at night, ‘when the company grows thin, and your eyes dim with watching’. Dice were weighted with mercury or studded with a hog’s bristle (expensive at eight shillings, but ‘sold in many places about the town’), to leave the innocent gulping as wages or watches disappeared into the sharper’s pockets. On most nights gambling ended in violence, with swords drawn, and ‘box and candlesticks thrown at one another’s head, tables overthrown and all the house ... in such a garboyl that it is the perfect type of hell’.

  Indeed, there was no mistaking the disruptive potential of risk. The London writer Tom Brown described a visit to a gambling house where winners and losers mingled around the tables.

  ‘One that had played away even his shirt and cravat, and all his clothes but his breeches, stood shivering in a corner of the room, and another was comforting him, saying, ‘Damn you, Jack, who ever thought to see thee in a state of innocence? Cheer up, nakedness is the best recipe in the world against a fever.’ And then fell a ranting, as if hell had broken loose that very moment.’25

  ‘There are but few casts at dice betwixt a rich man ... and a beggar’,26 Charles Cotton had warned. There was a clear challenge to traditional society in all of this. At Hortense Mancini’s basset table Delarivier met a former kitchenmaid who learned to gamble in France and returned to London as a professional, calling herself Madame Beauclair and speaking ‘with the monstrous affectation of calling herself a Frenchwoman, her dialect being ... nothing but a sort of broken English’.27 Gambling redistributed wealth at random, turning heirs into paupers, bringing nobodies into the company of the great. White’s Club, founded in 1698, would become ‘the bane of half the English nobility’.28

  One young squire inherited a fortune, lost it all at faro and was later found working as a coachman. The roll-call of noblemen killed in gamblers’ duels would soon begin to lengthen, and to them could be added another toll on the traditional aristocracy. Dartmouth’s brother, Colonel Legge, had escorted the Duke of Monmouth to London after his rebellion, but in 1694 his gambling debts overwhelmed him and he took his own life. Such stories would soon become all too common.

  Indeed, dangers for traditional society could be found in every aspect of risk culture. The wealth which poured from Exchange Alley was neither assigned by birth nor earned as a reward for hard work. A yield of 10,000 per cent or even 100 per cent (should any of the new projects achieve such results) not only made the rich richer; it was enough to take a poor man’s mite and magic it into a fortune. This alchemy was performed by risk, pure and simple – risk which few aristocrats understood, conjured up in a dirty City alley which they never penetrated. Risk had the power to transform societies by a redistribution of wealth more rapid than any available before.

  On another level, however, the threat which risk culture posed to traditional ideas went still deeper. For risk offered mankind a different relationship with the future. The futures market, stocks, gambling and insurance all had one thing in common: they were ways of colonising a space which had never been available to men before. It was hard not to conclude that the future’s previous landlord, God, would be diminished by the change.

  The Even/Odd table, an early roulette wheel, was almost like one of the Moderns’ intricate machines of brass and levers – a machine to measure risk. Probability theory had been developed by Modern mathematicians, and there was a strong correspondence between risk culture and the innovations of science. Indeed, the Moderns showed boundless enthusiasm for voyages into the future (if not for gambling itself). Edmond Halley calculated ac
tuarial figures for the Prussian city of Breslau (although detailed actuarial insurance was still some way off). Insurance societies attracted celebrity mathematicians like John Harris as directors and shareholders. Initiates to the world of chance could even attend Harris’s lectures on mathematics at the Marine Coffee House.

  In other ways, too, the new practices of science supported probability. Houghton’s Collection listed corn prices and bank stock, while Lloyd’s News was soon being published from Edward Lloyd’s coffee house with information on sailings, cargoes and wrecks. Information was vital to any venture in risk, as the speculators in Jonathan’s knew. Accurate statistics gathered by scientific method provided at least some support as men stumbled into the dark realm of the future, and the 1690s would see growing enthusiasm for them.

  The most striking example of such projects, a statistical analysis of the English population, was carried out by the surveyor/herald who had laid out Soho, helped at the coronation of James II and assisted in William and Mary’s proclamation – Gregory King. King’s notes would not be published in his lifetime. He made them available to the economic writer Charles Davenant, but was dissatisfied with the results, thinking (so his biographer believed) that Davenant ‘peruse[d] and ... garble[d] his political conclusions’, and published them in ‘mutilated extracts’.29 Population statistics had been an enthusiasm of a previous generation of mathematicians, among them John Graunt and William Petty. King’s work, however, was by far the most serious attempt yet to pin down the numbers and ranks of English men and women. Like John Ray categorising plant species, the herald divided the English into 23 categories, from aristocrats (160 extended families with an average income of £70 per head) to lawyers (70,000 of them, including their wives, children and servants), with quarter of a million artisans, and 1.3 million ‘cottagers and paupers’. He distinguished shopkeepers from artisans, naval officers from army men, and to each group ascribed yearly incomes per family and per head, and average annual expenditure. Altogether he added up the English population to 5.3 million, of which 45 per cent were children and 10 per cent servants, while just under 10 per cent lived in London. King’s overall totals were slight underestimates in the view of modern statisticians, but the significant breakthough was his attempt to be both comprehensive and precise. That great mystery, the English people, had finally been netted by mathematics.