li\ .^^ «»'.,' '""'"'^ ^^'niliiiiiiJiiiiiliSi;!'?.?!;'.'' °* Enaland olin 3 1924 030 174 019 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030174019 mm masm ■^ 11 i mM liiiSliilllllil ISfeil '.^i^h.Ji. IIT CLOTH, 485 PAGES. PBICE 4s ed. A HANDY DICTIONARY OF COMMERCIAL INFORMATION. By EDWARD T. BLAKELY, F.S.S. (op the boarb of tbade.) This admirable Desk Compendium gives the most recent practical information concerning the articles current in commerce — their origin, place of produce, market Tarieties, and technical nomenclature synonyms in yarious languages, &e. It condenses fresh information from our Consular and otber Reports in a manner not to be found in any other work. THE .ECONOMIST. '• This book, is, as the preface informs vi^, * meant as a compendium of commercial information for all tlio^e who are preparing for a business life, as well as a iiseful remembrtncer for those who are engaged in it.' This intention it entirely fulfils. It is portable, in a clear type, and conveniently arrangeii. The descriptions of the various articles mentioned„go into as much detail as is consistent with a capital print, and a comparatively small size of volume. Technical dictionaries of this kind are very n-efal assistants in the office atod the cou lit) ng- house. The book concludes with a list of the moneys, weights, and measures of the principal countries in the world." BIRMINOHAM DAILY POST. " This is a little book that -^e can cordially recommend. It contains between two and three thousand articles, aj9 we roughly guess, varying in length from a single line to about two pases, givin? with clearness and conciseness what is- most worth knowing about .aa many article;) of commerce. Although intended primarily for those preparing for a business life, there are none to whom it will not be serviceable, as an auxiliary to books of every description from mere ephemerfd writings to works of imagination of the highest and moE=t durable kind. Mr. Blakely ia engat^ed in the Board of Trade, and has had exceptional opportunities of embodying the most lecent and authentic knowledge. It is scarcely possible to read a page anywhere without gaining some scrap of useful information, FORTUNATE MEN: HOW THEY MADE MONEY AND WON RENOWN. A Curious Collection of Rich. Men's Mottoes and Great Men's Watchwords ; their Financial Tests and Secrets; their Favourite Sayings and Guiding Rules in Business — with Droll and Pithy Remarks on the Conduct of Life, mostly taken down in their own Words. To which is added many New and Authentic Sayings of "Poor Richard," with sundry Pieces of Useful Advice to Persons entering the World, and Practical Hints for those desirous of improving their position in it. PRICE 3s. 6d. ; FREE BY POST 42 PENNY STAMPS. SQTJARE 8vo., PEICE 3s. Cd. WITH FRONTISPIECE BY HARRIET BENNETT, THE WWm m AND THE EIGHT 10; A STORY FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. BY THE AUTHOR OF "Chapters about Every-day Things," " Ten Steps in the Narrow Way," &c. Price Half-a-Crown (post free on receipt of Thirty-two Peun-y Stamps) THE PocM Dictionary of One Tliousand Ciiristian Names, WITH THEIR MEANINGS EXPLAINED AND ARRANGED IN FOUR DIFFHRENT WAYS FOR READY REFERENCE. I.—Masoclikb Names, with their Meanings attached. I 3.— Diotionart of Meanings— Masochne Namki 2.— Femikine Names, with iheir Meanings attached. | 4. — Dictiohart of Meaninss—Femisike Names. O- EVERY PARENT SHOULD CONSULT THIS DICTIONARY BEFORE DECIDING ON A CHILD'S NAME. JAMES HOGG, 22, EXETER STREET, STRAND, W.C. WILLIAM PATEESON, THE FOUNDER OF THE BANK OF ENGLAND. SEE PAGE 69. (From a, Pen and Ink Drawing in the British Museum), TALES BANK OF ENGLAND ANECDOTES OE LONDON BANKERS. JLLUSTBATED BY FOBTEAITS AND ENGSAVJNGS. "As you go through Hfe, stumbling and slipping, and staggering to your feet again, ruefully aware of your own wretched weakness, and praying with a contrite heart, let us trust, that you may not be led into temptation, have you not often loolied at other fellow- sinners, and speculated with an awful interest on their career ? " — (Fhilip.) 'What a dignity it gives to an old lady, that balance at the banker's ! " — (Vanity Fair.) " In this way does the world show its respect for that most respectable thing, prosperity. Who in this life get the smiles, and the acts of friendship, and the pleasing legacies? — the rich. And I do, for my part, heartily wish that someone would leave me a trifle — say twenty thov^nd pounds^being perfectly confident that someone else would leave me more, and that I should sink into my grave worth a plum at least." — (A Shabby Genteel Story.) W. M. Thackeray. LONDON: JAMES HOGG, 22, EXETER STEEET, STEAND, W.C. 1882. [All Eights Eeseeted.] CONTENTS. Portrait of William Paterson, the Founder of the Bank of England Frontisjnece. (From a Pen and Ink Drawing in the British Museum) Some Gossip about the Old City Grasshopper ... 5 (With Portraits of Sir Thomas Greskam and Sir Josiah Child, Bart. — Tlie Old and New Exchange) Mr. Ward's Picture of "The South Sea Bubble' (Engraved by W. L. Thomas) The Eomance of Banking (With Portrait of Thoinas Contts, Banker) The Eise and Wreck of the Goldsmids The South Sea Bubble and the Bank "The Smash-up of Strahans"... " The Foeman Worthy of Her — Gold " Child's Bank Muniment Eoom, on the Upper OF Temple Bar The Founder of the Bank Storming the Bank The Pattern Cashier ... The Curiosities of Bank Notes Bank Note Paper Sham Notes The Great Euns Writings on Bank-Notes The First Bank Forger The Imitator of the Watermark The Narrow Squeak ... Traitors in the Camp ... The Notabilia of Forgeries ... The King of Counterfeiters ... The Frauds of "Fauntleroy ... Portion 18 24 46 52 56 59 68 69 71 73 74 77 78 79 84 84 88 90 92 100 102 121 TALES OF THE Bank of England AND LONDON BANKERS. SOME GOSSIP ABOUT THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPER. The great golden Grasshopper, generally rather dingy through fog, still crowns the Eoyal Exchange. That London landmark, in spite of aU changes, must always be regarded, by right of its position and historic associations, as the chief temple of British commerce. Even in these days, when busi- ness habits are so altered, when nearly every great interest possesses its own special " exchange," we catch at the old centre a muttered echo of the din of other days. For here, as of yore, on foreign-bill days, assemble the money-changers of all nations to hold their market, and adjust the London rate, although no walk like the ancient " Pawn," with its hundred shops, surrounds them. If one were asked to name an example of mercantile glory, most likely that of the Eothschild family would be given, and we should accept it ; for hardly the Medici or even the Fuggers of Augsburg, counts and princes of the Empire of several branches, surpassed the rapid rise of the several houses of the Eothschilds to princely wealth, and all its attendant influence. The ultimate fortune of the Eothschilds has yet to be followed ; while that of the Medici, as merchants and as sovereign princes, has been traced to their extinction. 6 THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPEE. It is since the first year- of this century that the history of the Eothschilds dates, and in this country it is still new. If we wish to estimate the long and enduring value of commer- cial power, we may take another measure ; and instead of the brilliant rise of Eothschilds and Barings, we are able to follow it even for centuries, and see how its potency has enriched generation after generation, endowing new families with fortune and with honours, and laying the foundations of pohtical power. If we try to do this, so shall we find a strange foil for the bright page — the recital of families once of note and now extinct, without male or female to speak for them or bear their names ; and the full list of those who in bankruptcy and riot have dissipated the resources of the past, and jeopardised the possibility of retrieval. Such a name as Child, the banker, which claims from the reign of Elizabeth, will rather serve our turn ; but we may go further and beyond three centuries, and take the Gres- hams, and their representatives, the Martins. In the City the Grasshopper glitters aloft, and is reverentially regarded ; but how little is there at first thought, and yet how much by thinking of it, that remains to us of a time so clear in tradi- tion and so remote in time ! The East India Company, like a jewel dissolved in a royal cup, has lost its existence in the birth of an immense empire, having for its subjects one-fourth of the human race ; the Muscovy Company is a name ; the Levant Company not even that ; the Virginia Company loses its history in that of another empire of the English race. True, there are buildings and institutions, as there are others far older, which remained in Elizabeth's time, and remain now. The Eoyal Exchange and Gresham College, Gresham founded for us. Sir Thomas Gresham undoubtedly had this ensign of his, the Grasshopper, placed on the banking-house in Lombard Street, where it still holds place. How far back beyond him the title is to be traced is not known. Undoubtedly the banking history goes back beyond Sir Thomas Gresham, although it may not attach to 68, Lombard Street, but to some other house there or elsewhere. Sir Eichard Gresham, the father, held that office of the King's Exchanger for Henry VHI., to which Sir Thomas succeeded. There is, however, an earlier name, believed to have pre- ceded Gresham in the Grasshopper house, and that is Matthew 3r- :J%^.. .,A^ THE QUBBMS OWN MERCHANT. Sir Thomas Gresham ; Q-resham College ; The first Exchange ; The present Exchange. THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPER. 9 Shore, the goldsmith. In the ballad of " Jane Shore," she says — " In Lombard Street I once did dwell, As London yet can witness well, Where many gallants did beholde My beauty in a shop of golde." There the King, Edward IV., is fabled to have seen her, and for him she did penance on his death in 1483. Far back as this date is, it comes within reach of the Greshams ; but like many an ancient claim, full evidence for it is now wanting. The business of the Greshams, the King's Exchangers, was to arrange foreign loans for the service of the Exchequer in the great money-market of Antwerp, and elsewhere on the Continent. The Lombards had long since lost their potency in that street, as in those of other towns which still bear their name, and in which their business is still conducted, while the ensigns of the Lombards have passed to the pawnbrokers, and abroad a pawnshop is called a Lombard. It is one merit of Sir Thomas Gresham that he counselled Queen Elizabeth to liberate the country from dependence on the foreigner, and to create a money-market here, " not to use strangers, but her own subjects, that it might be seen what a prince of power she was." For three hundred years it has served to supply the requirements of the home govern- ment during the piling up of debts, which have sometimes reached the sum of eight hundred millions. Not only have we been made independent of the foreigner, but we have been enabled to lend to the foreigner, and at length to use also the money of the foreigner, and to become in this day the money-market of the world for buying, for selhng, for borrowing. Beyond this, England has been tratued to provide resources for public works, in which as yet we surpass the world. All this has no more been done by Sir Thomas Gresham, than is the oak-tree of a hundred years' growth made by the man who of forethought sows an acorn. It is worth, however, pausing to note how the well-advised policy of one man has borne fruit not only to the extent which he had fairly ex- pected, but far beyond. Indeed, such a fact is far more to the lasting honour of Gresham than his Exchange, in the corridors of which we walk ; for among the great feats of commerce must be reckoned such as those which endow the 10 THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPER. country with a new industry, like Dudley, Cort, Crewe, Neilson, Heath, Bessemer, Siemens, to name only those who have laboured in one branch, rather than to celebrate the case of those who have greatly enriched themselves. Gresham made it seen what a prince of power Elizabeth was when the Burses of Antwerp, the Hanse Towns of Venice, Genoa, and Florence were still in their pride. The money- market of London has outlived these, and gone far beyond their great successor at Amsterdam. So in our days, in this hght, it is " what a prince of power " is Queen Victoria ! Much of the influence of ambassadors and ministers abroad is due to the knowledge of this prerogative of the citizens of England. Even at this moment the financial credit of England is put in the balance against the sword of Eussia. The Grand Duke of Muscovy was earnest to marry Queen Elizabeth, but Gresham did not foresee that the expedients he had devised for increasing the might of England were to be brought to bear in resisting the vast empire of successive Czars. The story of the Grasshopper is a pretty one, only the rude hand of the antiquary sets it all aside by sternly proving that Gresham was no foundling, but born in wealth. There are plenty of tales left. How is it with this ? It is gravely related, in a work called Lawson's History of Banking, that the Spanish ambassador to the English Court having extolled the great riches of his King, the master of the Indies, and of the grandees of Spain, before Queen Elizabeth, Sir Thomas Gresham, who was present, told him that the Queen had subjects who at one meal expended not only as much as the daily revenues of the King, but also of all his grandees, and added, " This I will prove any day, and lay you a heavy wager on it." So Gresham outbragged the Spaniard in his own line. The ambassador, biding his time, came unawares to the mansion of Sir Thomas in Bishopsgate, and dined with him, when, finding only an ordinary meal, he said — " Well, sir, you have lost your stake." " Not at all," answered Sir Thomas ; " and this you shall presently see." He then pulled a box from his pocket, and taking out of it one of the largest and finest Eastern pearls, showed it to the ambassador. After which he ground it down, and drank THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPER. 11 the dust in a glass of wine, to the health of the Queen his mistress. " My lord ambassador," said Sir Thomas, " you know I have often refused fifteen thousand pounds for this pearl. Have I lost or won ? " " I yield the wager as lost," said the ambassador ; " and I do not think there are four subjects in the world that would do as much for their sovereign." Legend tracks the man. Here is one that would do for a medieval saint, and also from Lawson. It must be borne in mind that the street before the Grasshopper (that is, 68) was then used as the Burse for London, which is not unlikely. Gresham, trading to the East Indies, by which he is reputed to have made much money, at one time was disconcerted by the non-arrival of some ships, which, it is alleged, had caused him much embarrassment. While despondingly walking in Lombard Street, a sailor came up to him and presented a letter, which conveyed the joyful intelligence that two of the ships had arrived, and that the box the bearer would deliver contained some diamonds and pearls of great value as a sample of the riches the ships had brought home. Perhaps it was a large pearl out of this box, or out of the two ships, which figured in the other tale. After getting the good news on the Burse, Gresham could do no other than found at his own cost an Exchange, laying the first stone on June 7th, 1566 ; and on January 23rd, 1571, it was opened by Queen Elizabeth. The Queen's majesty, attended with her nobility, entered the Burse on the south side ; and after that she had viewed every part thereof, and seen a kind of industrial exhibition of all sorts of the finest wares in the City, she caused the same Burse, by a herald and trumpet, to be proclaimed " The Eoyal Exchange," and so to be called thenceforth and not otherwise ; and so it has been. The Grasshopper house had a doorway on the Change AUey side, as well as in Lombard Street ; and from the Change Alley door Gresham would wend his way to and fro. Besides the Exchange, Gresham founded the college bearing his name, and on which he bestowed his own residence ; but which, instead of being, as he intended, the University for London, which in our generation has been created, shows only a shadow of his great design. Gresham died in 1579, and was buried near his residence 12 THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPEE. in the church of St. Helen, Bishopsgate. Ending in legend, it is said the wealth of the man who gave such princely gifts to his fellow-citizens was found to consist chiefly of gold chains. What has not been filled with fact in this account has been pieced out with legend ; but the history of the Grasshopper afterwards is so bereft of record and tradition, that even the skill and research of the antiquarian of the house, Mr. John Biddulph Martin, has not been able to restore it. The Great Fire of London burnt bank ledgers and private books, and Mr. Martin, in his privately printed work, entitled the Grasshopper, was obliged to leave a long blank. This was partly supplied afterwards by the antiquary, Mr. F. S. Hilton Price, of the house of Child, and the author of the Marigold, named after their ensign, and of A Handbook of London Bankers. SIR JOSIAH CniLD, BAKT. Leaving Sir Thomas Gresham, we have a link in Smythe his apprentice ; for we find a Smythe afterwards figuring among the worthies of the Grasshopper. But when we come to history again, we find the house in the hands of areat goldsmiths and bankers, Charles Buncombe and Eichard Kent. To them the books of Childs bear witness in 1669 ■ and as a man must be supposed to have had a father, so' THE OLD CITY GRASSHOPPER. 13 must there have been a paternity for the leading firm before that date, and an old business, Avhich must have taken its years of growth. When we come to the first list of London bankers in the Little London Directory of 1677, two centuries ago, then we find these bankers recorded at the Grasshopper in Lombard Street. As Childs had their peerage, so have the Martins theirs in this Charles Buncombe, from whom Lord Faver- sham is descended, and whose name was best known in our days by the familiar " honest Tom Duncombe," the popular member for Finsbury. The reputation of Charles Duncombe was less brilliant than his wealth. High he stood in his business ; for when Charles 11. shamefully shut up the Exchequer, and stole the bullion of the London bankers deposited there, to the ruin of many firms, the Grasshopper escaped. Duncombe was banker to the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Marquis of Winchester, and, as recorded by Bishop Burnet in his History of His Own Time, the Earl communicated the coming event to Duncombe, who saved the money of his customers. In the chain of events it is supposed that the Marquis of Winchester likewise gave warning to Childs, with whom also he had an account. Evelyn, in 1696, complains of the fraud of the bankers and goldsmiths, who carried on the lucrative business of money- changers, or " shroff" as it is called in the East, plying to and fro with the depreciated currency, good gold being rarely at less than fifteen premium against common silver coin. Evelyn speaks in his diary of "Duncomb, not long since a mean goldsmith, having made a purchase of the late Duke of Buckingham's estate at neere £90,000, and reputed to have as much in cash." The second Duke of Buckingham was a Villiers, head of the house, which in the end furnished a husband for the heiress of the Childs, another intermingling of the web. One branch of Villiers, beggared, sold its estate to a banker, and another built up its fortune on the estate of a banker. Duncombe had so much money that he kept a large sum at Child's, as Mr. Price found out in the books ; for in 1696 it was drawn out, most hkely towards the purchase of Helmsley. Duncombe, engaged in pohtical life, became Secretary of the Treasury, and it was according to the manner of the time 14 THE OLD CITY GEASSHOPPER. that he should be accused of appropriating the funds of the Exchequer to his own use. Being a member of the Commons he was by that House committed to the Tower. He was expelled the House of Commons, and by a division of 138 to 103 his property was ordered to be confiscated. This being made a party question, he had the good fortune to obtain the intervention of the House of Lords ; but his case must have been a bad one, as he was only released by one vote, which belonged to the Duke of Bolton, the former Marquis of Winchester, who thus repaid Buncombe's old service. Buncombe held up his head ; and though members of Parliament disapproved of his fingering the funds of the Exchequer, the neighbouring shopkeepers condoned the offence, and as Sir Charles Buncombe he was Lord Mayor of London in 1709. The other house of Child also had its Lord Mayor ; so had the very old house — but still younger than that of Child — Hoares — of the Golden Bottle, displayed above their portal in Fleet Street. The founding of the Bank of England helped the Lombard Street bankers rather than lessened their business, and notwithstanding Buncombe's troubles the business was well conducted by the Mr. Eichard Smythe already referred to. He was Buncombe's partner, and a banker of great eminence in the reign of William and Mary. He lived at the Grass- hopper. He is said to have taken an active part in the restoration of the coinage in 1695-6, a matter which was looked upon as of national concern, and in which Sir Isaac Newton, then Master of the Mint, had so large a share, and on which he wrote valuable papers. Smythe's portrait still overlooks the bank-parlour, and represents him in a flowing wig and blue silk dress, standing under the colonnade of the Eoyal Exchange, built by his predecessor Gresham. This portrait conveys to every one the evidence of Lely's style, and was said to be by his pupil Huysman; but on cleaning in 1872, the inscription "J. Hargrave, 1760," appeared upon it. The probabiHty is that the original, by Lely or Huysman, was in 1760 removed by a member of the Smythe family, and this fine copy sub- stituted. Smythe, as said, was a presumed link with Gresham, and is with the present banking family. Andrew Stone, another THE OLD CITY GEASSnOPPEE. 15 apprentice and partner, married the daughter of Mr. Holbrooke. Smythe's sister, a great-granddaughter of this Stone, married John, the grandfather of the present partners, Eichard Biddulph Martin, John Biddulph Martin (the his- torians of banking), and W. A. K. Martin. By this marriage, the. Martins are connected with the other banking family of the Laboucheres, and its peer Lord Taunton, and with the Barings and their peers, Lord Northbrook and Lord Ash- burton. This Eichard Smythe it was who took as a clerk Thomas Martin. This Martin was a West-countryman, whose father William, grandfather Thomas, and great-grandfather William, who died in 1653, had been Mayors of Evesham, where their tombs are still to be seen. Thomas Martin became a partner on Smythe's death, and afterwards his brothers John and James Martin. The will of Andrew Stone affords one curious illustration ; for he leaves his share of his business to Thomas Martin on payment of £9000 among the widow, her mother, and Nicholas Torriano. We may therefore consider the goodwill of such a business as then worth from £20,000 to £30,000, a large sum for those days. His sons were George, Primate of Ireland ; Andrew, tutor to George HI. ; and a third, Eichard Stone. Besides the constitution of the English corn-market by Gresham, another financial reform is associq,ted with the Grasshopper, and that is that the clearing among London bankers was first and for a long time held there. This institution of the clearing by London bankers has had an enormous influence on the London market, for it has enabled an extraordinary facility and rapidity to be given to transac- tions and an enormous economy in the use of money. It is this feature of the London money-market, the small amount of actual money with which it is worked, which distinguishes the London money-market from others. It was in its beginning a very simple expedient : that bankers, instead of paying separately, should exchange the cheques they held against each other, and only pay once a day the balance in cash. This has since been greatly ex- tended and improved, and in 1810 the bankers were obliged to take a clearing-house for themselves in Lombard Street, and now they want a larger one. Upon the model of this 16 THE OLD CITY GBASSHOPPEB. banking institution the great railway clearing-house has been established here, and other like estabHshments in other countries. The tickets that pass over several lines, and the payment for which has to be divided among the companies in various proportions, is thus cleared. By this means not only is a passenger in this country enabled to take one ticket anywhere in these islands, but from London to St. Petersburg or Constantinople, or from New York to San Francisco. Thus one good principle receives various developments, and institutions dissimilar in form grow from a healthy root. The connection of the clearing-house is held to be recorded by an entry in the ledger for 1773 ; " Quarterly charge for use of clearing-room, 19s. 6d." Unluckily, in this grand series of books, still ranging from 1731 to this day, there is a very ugly entry in 1751; "For Brydges, for killing the buggs in the shop, £1 Is." The smaller animals nevertheless kept up the war and mastered the great bankers ; so that in 1794 they had to pull down the house, and for a time move into Change Alley beyond their back door. In that year the bank was rebuilt, and was held to be one of the best in the street, so that a coloured drawing of it is preserved in the Guildhall Library. A late extension is marked by the judicious skill of the Martins and their tender love for their ancestral house. If during the Great Fire of London the building had suffered, in the last centviry it sustained a very sensible loss. For centuries a gilded grasshopper had stood over the door- way. This is recorded by Pennant, who ominously wrote ; " Were it mine, this honourable memorial of so great a pre- decessor should certainly be placed in the most ostentious situation I could find." The Martins appear to have thought that the grasshopper had so long taken care of them that it was his business to do so, and not theirs to take care of the g]-asshopper. During the rebuilding the grasshopper mysteri- ously disappeared, and may still remain in the collection of some Marquis of Waterford of that day or of some grasping antiquary. Although supposed to be put safely away, yet when, on the new year of 1795, the new banking-house was opened, no grasshopper was there. Mr. Hilton Price relates that the same casualty befell the sign of the Crown of Messrs. Willis, when their house was THE OLD CITY GllASSHOPPER. 17 rebuilt, and the Golden Anchor, the sign of Snows and Strahans. The Martins, however, have still a Grasshopper in the bank, but he is no better than the one atop of the Eoyal Exchange. They seern to keep with equal reverence some old musque- toons or blunderbusses, which appear from the books to have been last put in repair, some say in 1767, or perhaps in the No-Popery riots of 1780, and which, if attempted to be used now, might prove fatal to the operators, except for the pro- vidential circumstance that, in all likehhood, there is no ammunition in any bank in Lombard Street. It may be added that in all probability there is no water in any of the buckets still kept in the street. We may note, what is not recounted by Mr. J. B. Martin or Mr. Price, that in 1780, a party of the Life-Guards bivouacked for a short time in Lombard Street, hghting fires in the roadway ; that soldiers were stationed at each cross- street, and that the Martins and their neighbours were not allowed to go out after dark, nor until sunrise. Two nights before was seen from the neighbouring roofs, and it may be from theirs, all the Roman Catholic chapels in London blazing, and the next night Newgate, and all the many prisons in the City and elsewhere in the metropolis. Some of the customers, as Henry VIII. and Queen Eliza- beth, have been already named ; and many old accounts of above a century are still on the books, as Gonville and Caius College, 1761 ; George Gosthng, 1763 ; Charrington, Moss, & Co., Thomas Boddington, Samuel Brandram, and Peter Floyer, 1770. There are, however, accounts of a century and a half old, as Lovibond, Pappilion, Colclough, WoUaston, Van ISTotten ; and of later date, J. Peter Burrell and J. Ful- lerton, 1742 ; Aislabie, 1748 ; Van Voorst and Boon, 1759. The Messrs. Barings, kinsmen to the partners, began business in 1762, and opened their account in 1764. Thus we briefly illustrate the antiquity, the ramifications, and the continuous moral working, which are consequent on some of our commercial estabhshments. MR. WARD'S PICTURE OE THE "SOUTH SEA BUBBLE." (now at the south KENSINGTON MUSEUM.) We all know everything about that absurd afiair : how our great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers, and all degrees of cousin-hood, went crazy together over a ridiculous notion that a certain set of directors in a back street in the City had hit upon an ingenious contrivance by which they could not only pay off the National Debt (it wasn't so large then as now, remember), but also make every one who would venture a few odd hundreds in the undertaking, "rich beyond the dreams of avarice," as Johnson, with more prescience, promised should befal the adventurers in Thrale's brewhouse. Very strange, certainly, it was that such visions should have been deemed reaUties — so strange that we might almost have persuaded ourselves that it was because the thing happened in those far-off dark ages, when steam was only employed for cooking potatoes — was it so employed then? — and electric telegraphs were unknown, were it not that we ourselves have expected almost as great results to flow from dabbling in railway shares as ever our ancestors anticipated from the purchase of South Sea stock. Had we not, too, our Eailway King, at whose frown mortals grew pale ; before whose throne sinner and saint, lawn sleeves and coat of serge, beauty and bravery, learning and wit, all did homage as willing and lowly as ever did prince and peer, and duchess and dairymaid, before the chairs of the haughty " South Sea Kings " of whom that simple- hearted senator complained in the House of Commons — " We have made these men monarchs, and lo ! they turn their backs on their benefactors ? " Perhaps, even now, if one were to arise with the genius of a Law or a Blunt — it may be with even the lesser genius of a Hudson — some new Mississippi scheme or South Sea Bubble might find its adherents and its victims ; for, as Sir Isaac Newton very philosophically said, when asked, in the midst of the turmoil, how high he thought the South Sea fever-heat would mount? "Madam, there is no calculating the madness of people." To calculate the motions and deter- mine the levity of the moon would to the author of the " Theory of Gravitation " have been an easy operation, but MK. WABD 3 PICTURE OP THE SOUTH SEA BLBBLE. c 2 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE. 21 who could undertake to calculate the phases or settle the limits of terrestrial lunacy? They say that "history repeats itself," and we have seen, the other day, how the French aristocracy have gone crazy about the Union Generate. In truth, it was a mad time that of the summer of 1720 ; and Ward has taken the mania at its highest. You recollect, do doubt, how that " Merry South Sea ballad," as it calls itself, of " the Grand Elixir, or the Philosopher's Stone Discovered," describes the scene : — " In London stands a famous pile, And near that pile an Alley, Where merry crowds for riches toil, And Wisdom stoops to Folly. * » » * Here stars and garters do appear, Among our lords the rabble ; To buy and sell, to see and hear. The Jews and Gentiles squabble. Our greatest ladies hither come And ply in chariots daily ; Oft pawn their jewels for a sum To venture in the Alley." And you recollect how, again. Dean Swift writing of all these " bold adventurers " who in thousands came to that "narrow sound, but deep as hell, Change Alley, dreadful name ! " relates that — " Meantime secure on Garr'way Cliffs, A savage race by shipwrecks fed, Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs. And strip the bodies of the dead." Well, we have here the scene of the picture. The South Sea Bubble stimulated alike the pencil and the pen of the satirist. Caricaturists as well as poets and poetasters, and preachers and politicians, found in it abundant materials for profitable occupation. It was upon the South Sea Bubble that Hogarth fleshed his maiden graver. He had, it is true, burlesqued the countenances of his neighbours and acquaintances, but his first public venture as a satirist was a rude engraving which was sold for a shilling — it would sell for something more now — of " The South Sea Bubble, an Allegory: W. Hogarth, inv. et. sculp. 1721." Hogarth was just three-and-twenty then : perchance he had made an unlucky venture in the stock, and in this way took his revenge. There is nothing much in the engraving, save — and the exception is a considerable one — the evidence of a keen eye for the salient points of a popular or fashionable 22 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE. folly. At any rate there is a wide distance between it and the " South Sea Bubble " before us. Mr. Ward, when he sent this picture to the Eoyal Academy, quoted the last four lines printed above from the " Grand Elixir," and no doubt looked farther into the litera- ture of the period. But he drew his inspiration primarily from a passage in Lord Mahon's history, where, describing the scene in Change Alley, he says (vol. ii. p. H) : — " The crowds were so great within doors that tables with clerks were set in the streets. In this motley throng were blended all ranks, all professions and all parties — Church- men and Dissenters, Whigs and Tories, country gentlemen and brokers. An eager strife of tongues prevailed in this second Babel; new reports, new subscriptions, new transfers, flew from mouth to mouth ; and the voices of ladies (for even many ladies had turned gamblers) rose loud and incessant, above the general din." The scene thus spiritedly described, Mr. Ward faithfully embodied. To all the characters mentioned by the historian, the painter has given a visible existence. And it is pleasant to note that the historian was fully sensible of the com- pliment paid to him by the painter. The picture was exhibited in 1847. In a volume of the history published subsequently, Lord Mahon has a passage in which, speaking of the exhibitions of the Eoyal Academy, he says, with evident reference to this picture : " There the historian may acknowledge his own descriptions far exceeded ; " and he adds to it a note expressive of his " warm appreciation of the genius and success with which one passage of this history ('A Scene in Change Alley in 1720') has been illustrated by Mr. E. M. Ward." (Vol. vi. p. 327.) More graceful testimony to the fidelity of his realisation of a remarkable scene, historical painter could not desire. It would be idle to weaken its effect by corroborative remarks, and for criticism this is neither the place nor the season. From this picture our artist has taken as his central figure the lady who occupies the most conspicuous position in the original. She is hardly one we can sympathize with, as we do with the Duchess of Leslie's picture. She is of high rank, we see that, by her superb air, by the chariot she has just quitted, by the tall footman who, with his gold-headed stick, struts at her heels. She is handsome. THE SOUTH SEA BXJBBLE. 23 perfectly well-bred, has a delicate hand, a placid coun- tenance. But there is something on that smooth face which tells that her past is not altogether a pleasant page to dwell on ; that her future is not likely to be. Has she gambled at basset before she came here to gamble in stock? She is a young widow, you sec ; her stately footman is in full mourning; she has not put off her " weeds," and the likeness of her husband hangs conspicuously on her breast. Before long, it may be — has not the painter suggested as much ? — it win. share the fate of the diamond-set miniature which another fair lady is pledging to the cunning Jew broker in his pawnshop, improvised there on the left for the benefit of unsuccessful speculators. But just now madam has her eyes directed furtively towards that gaudy fop in the laced coat beside her, not attracted assuredly by his person so much as by the news he is reading aloud from the prospectus in his hand, and expatiating upon with super- abundant gesticulation, of " A New Company, Capital Ont Million, for a Perpetual Motion." She ponders the chances of the scheme, and hesitates whether to risk a little on it, or all on the giant stock, which the placard just posted outside Garraway's tells has risen to a thousand premium. Between the two, she has neither eye nor ear for the miserable urchin who is begging importunately for a crumb from her store. The fop with his scheme has, however, a more absorbed auditor in the country squire, who has at this dangerous juncture brought his daughter to see London society, and has been drawn into the vortex. He is a certain victim. The daughter — a frank, unsuspecting rustic beauty— forms, with her wondering, innocent face, a charming contrast to the shrewder, worldly, and somewhat hlase London dame ;, and the contrast is the more marked as our artist has here brought them into immediate contact. The sweet sad face on the left of the town lady is, in the original, the companion of the care-stricken warrior who is descending the steps on the right of the picture. In an evil hour he has been tempted to embark his all — probably . to risk something more — in one of the many flimsy schemes lately set afloat — was it that promising one for "Making Deal boards out of Sawdust ? "^ and, as the bill on the door indicates, already the wreck is total. He turns away ,24 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE. overwhelmed with despair and remorse. His plans and prospects are all shattered ; but he has an angel at his side to whisper words of courage and comfort in this his deepest gloom, and we may surely trust that her honest hopeful affection will ere long find a way to his heart, and bring peace to his conscience. Look on that firm yet tender countenance and judge if it be not so. THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. If we look at banking on the practical side, it appears to be a very literal and prosaic business ; but there is such a thing as the poetry of wealth, a certain amount of imaginativeness and romance that clings to day-book and ledger, and an in- finite amount of adventure and incident such as must belong to all human interests, even when they possess the solidarity of banking. Indeed, as one reads the records of banking which are scattered about in various pubhcations — books, lives, evidence, Hansard, magazine literature — the impression of solidarity wears off; the changes and chances become apparent ; love, ambition, madness, rascality, intrigue, ad- venture, come out as conspicuously as in the cognate fields of war, law and politics. Modern fiction has been especially fond of dealing with bankers — we remember the ISTewcomes of Thackeray and the Sidonia of Lord Beaconsfield — but, as usual, real fife leaves fiction far behind, and authentic history transcends the legendary and fabulous. Then the business of banking extends through an immense gamut, using all the scales. Sometimes the bankers are the companions, in some cases almost the equals, and in others more than the equals, of princes ; and at the other end they are pawnbrokers and retailers. There is Fuggers entertain- ing Charles V., and burning all his bills as a more than royal present ; and there is Jemmy Wood, of Gloucester, dispensing cheese and small groceries across the bank counter. There are Baring and Goldsmid helping Pitt ; and the Eothschilds, of truly catholic mind, helping every one whose security is indisputable. Think of Nathan Eothschild hovering one day over the outskirts of the field of Waterloo, if that cele- THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. 25 brated banking legend be true, and a day or two after lean- ing in deep dejection against one of the pillars of the Eoyal Exchange, as if the English had lost the battle ! Then we have the two great banking heiresses of our time, the heiress of the house of Coutts and the heiress of the house of Jones, Loyd & Co. whose matrimonial fortunes have in their time excited such a keen interest in London society. Even the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has had her adventures at times. She has had her confabulations with Ministries and her conflicts with joint-stock companies. On a certain disastrous evening, unless some boxes of old one-pound notes had turned up, the venerated old lady must have breathed her last. One tradesman is able to found a bank because farmers, afraid of highwaymen, insist on leaving their ready money at his house. Another banker is enriched because deposits, never called for, are swept into his private coffers. Now and then an immense forgery is made upon a bank ; and once or twice a burglary upon a colossal scale is achieved, and a great deal of loot is taken away. One great banker, Henry Fauntleroy, is found guilty, on the evidence of his own handwriting, of having committed forgery to the extent of hundreds of thousands of pounds ; and a whole firm, Strahan, Paul and Bates, go off into penal servitude. A num- ber of tragic stories may be told of banks that have destroyed themselves by reckless speculations, and others that have been causelessly destroyed by insensate irrational " runs on the bank." One great banker, Samuel Eogers, is a poet and a very prince of conversationalists ; another, like George Grote, is a wonderful Greek scholar and a very prince of historians ; another, like Prescott, becomes a great authority in literature and history ; another, like Sir John Lubbock, is in the very highest ranks of statesmen and men of science. Moreover, it is a popular mistake that banks are limited to the hardest, driest, and most practical details. The liberahty of banks, and the delicacy with which that liberality has been dispensed, are proverbial ; and there are some banks ■that have actually failed owing to an excess of generosity to their customers. We believe that even this scanty collec- tion of instances, some of which we will presently expound, will suffice to prove that there is such a thing as the Eomance of Banking. "We have all of us heard that Lombard Street was so called 26 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. from the Longobards, who first brought banking into London " city of ships ; " meaning by these Longobards, the Itahan merchants of Venice, Genoa, Lucca and Florence.' It may, however, be safely assumed that the children of Israel anti- cipated even the Longobards in these transactions. We have heard it said that we have an example of banking in the time of St. Peter, who "lodged with one Simon a tanner." In the last volume published of Bampton Lectures, by the Eev. Mr. Hatch, we read : " The bishops and presbyters of early days kept hanks, practised medicine, wrought as silver- smiths, tended sheep, or sold their goods in open market. The chief existing enactments of early councils on the point are that bishops are not to huckster their goods from market to market, nor are they to use their position to buy cheaper and sell dearer than other people." Up to the present time many persons carry on their, banking in com- bination with other kinds of business. At the present moment one may go into Twinings' bank and buy very good tea across the counter. Many other banks besides Twinings have begun with tea dealing. The great business people this way have been goldsmiths, who speedily and naturally developed into bankers. Bank- notes arose from receipts for goods or money deposited with the goldsmiths, and eventually these notes circulated freely hke money from hand to hand. Banks, however, are om- nivorous of business. They purchase or come into possession of all sorts of properties. They become owners of railways ; they build docks, warehouses, and whole towns, canals, manufactories, mines, &c. For instance, the firm of the Barings bought up an immense territory surrounding the lake, on an island of which the city of Mexico is built. The firm thought it best to get rid of their purchase. The "West of England Bank, very much to their discomfiture, became largely interested in one of the Glamorganshire coal mines. The Thellusson property got into the Court of Chan- cery, whence it was very skilfully manipulated, and all its intended growth entirely stunted. It is said that the banker's wife died of a broken purse. Mr. Frederick Martin, in his Banking Sketches, mentions the case of the ' The word bcmk, it should he observed, is a German word ; Banck, signifying a heap, a common stock or fund. Lord Bacon, in his essay on Utiury, uses the word in the ahoTC sense. THE ROMANCE 0¥ BANKING. 27 famous Jemmy Wood, the miser, of Gloucester, as a parallel case of a great property dissipated through litigation. Mr. Martin, however, is not quite accurate. A considerable proportion of that property came into possession of Sir Matthew Wood, the father of the ex-Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, who closed his long and honoured career only the other day. Lord Hatherley has obligingly informed the present writer that his father was no relation at all to the " Jemmy Wood " of Gloucester ; he had a great respect for the illustrious alderman's character, and there was an entire similarity in their political opinions. In the recent Life of Lord Campbell we read : " My greatest fee, while at the bar, was for arguing the case before the Privy Council on the will of James Wood, of Gloucester — one thousand guineas, with very large refreshers. Since I left the bar, my client, who succeeded, has made me a present of a candelabrum worth as much. The stake for which we contended was above a million." A curious interest attaches to Jemmy Wood's bank. It was the oldest private bank in the country, and its site is now one of those joint-stock banks which are the marvel of modern times. A hundred years ago all the banks were private banks, except the Bank of England. Yet that acute thinker, Adam Smith, had declared his appreciation of such banks long before they were formed. " The constitution of stock-joint companies," he wrote in the Wealth of Nations, "renders them in general more tenacious of established rules than any private co-partnership. Such companies, there- fore, seem extremely fitted for this trade." For a long time, however, their number was extremely limited, and they could not be carried on within sixty-five miles of London. The site of Wood's famous bank is now occupied by the Gloucester branch of the National Provincial Bank of Eng- land. This is now one of the most famous banks in the country, and has a remarkable history belonging to it. Like many great undertakings, it did not prosper much at first. Several of the local banks of this great corporation did not prove remiinerative, and were given up. It will be remem- bered that this was also the case with some of the branches established by the Bank of England itself. The Bank of England established one of its first branches at Gloucester ; but it did not pay, and was given up. In course cf time 28 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. the National Provincial, second only to the London and Westminster, has made its way, and the land, so to speak, is covered by a network of its branches. The report of last year, now before us, gives enormous figures. The subscribed capital is twelve millions. The total assets are close upon thirty-three millions. The dividend distributed was nine- teen per cent., free of income-tax. A sort of special interest clings to the Gloucester branch that has taken the renowned place of Jemmy Wood's ; and we have reasons for knowing that the best traditions of banking are carried out by this great company, and that liberality and skill are combined with the severest fiscal principles. The most primitive kind of banking was carried on by this Jemmy Wood in Westgate Street, Gloucester. He kept a shop which, in some respects, was little better than a common chandler's shop ; but, as in the case of the modern " emporium," everything was sold, " from a mouse-trap to a carriage." He carried on his business as a banker at one end of the shop, and the whole establishment was managed by himself and two clerks or assistants. Many are the celebrated banks that have arisen from the most lowly beginnings. In primitive times the landlord of the inn often turned his bar into a kind of clearing-house for the convenience of his customers. The rise of a great banking- house in the north is identified with the history of Mr. Thomas Mottram, who kept a house-of-call on Cockpit Hill, Manchester, or rather it was his wife's bank. People used to call it, not Mr., but Mrs. Mottram's. Whenever customers came in they always went direct to the lady, who kept the keys and took charge of the moneys. Mottram, a small, quiet, easy-going man, always stood with his back to the fire, and his shoulders against the mantelpiece. He and his wife lived to drive down every morning to his own bank, in his own carriage, drawn by a pair of beautiful bays. There has been an interesting picture drawn of the interior of a very famous bank. "At no time, perhaps, did the famous old place present an aspect more thoroughly ingenerate, self- contained, and characteristic than in the depths of winter, when lighted up, as was the custom, even long after the general employment of gas, with its well-remembered huge dip candles, standing each in a sort of thin pyramid filled with sand." The history of the rise of the firm of Smith, THE EOMANCE OF BANKING. 29 Payne & Co. is very similar to that of the Mottrams. There was a draper in the midland counties who had a large con- nection among the neighbouring farmers. It was in the vicinity of Sherwood Forest, and there was at this time a great deal of alarm, not ill founded, on the subject of highwaymen. The farmers used to leave their cash with a draper, who, with a fine natural instinct, hit upon the first principles of finance — of buying with ready money, and of giving accommodation, on security, to those who wanted it. When he began to allow interest to his depositors money largely flowed in upon him, and Mr. Smith became a regular banker. He opened a second bank at Lincoln, and then a third at Hull, and, forming a connection with Mr. Payne, of London, established an immense business in that city. The Prime Minister made the head of the house a peer, and a wag, visiting his seat at High Wycombe, chalked on his door : "Bobby Smith lives here ; Billy Pitt made him a peer, And took the pen from behind his ear." Many are the stories of the adventures and perils of bankers in the old times. If their customers feared robbers, they might do the same with equal or greater reason. Here is the story of an attempt to rob a banker's clerk. We take it from Lawson's History of Banking : " At the latter end of the year 1825, and during the panic, a clerk was dispatched from a house in Lombard Street with £10,000 in notes, for the relief of a country banker in Norfolk. The clerk travelled by the mail-coach, with the notes done up in a blue bag. On leaving London he was pleased to find himself alone in the coach with such a valuable parcel. At Stratford two men, muflled in great- coats, got in, and immediately began making remarks aloud, and whispering to each other about the parcel. The clerk, who was beginning to get very nervous, began to whistle, and pretended to be very merry. " You seem very merry, but surely you can put your parcel on the seat ; it must be very valuable, or you would not hug it in the way you do." On his refusal to do this, their manner instantly changed ; and the clerk began to think they knew the contents of the parcel he was carrying, and meant to murder him and run off with it. He was confirmed in his suspicion when he 30 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. heard one of them say, " Not yet ; wait till we get out of Baintree." On arriving at that place he got out of the coach ; for he felt that he could go no further in such company, and insisted upon being shown to the house of the banker, who was in bed. Directly he saw him he threw the parcel at his feet, exclaiming, " Thank God it is safe ! " and immediately fainted. It was afterwards ascertained that the men, who were unknown in that part of the country, got out of the coach about three miles from Baintree, not stopping at a village or even a house. On alighting they swore dreadfully at the guard, and walked away. It was then about one o'clock in the morning." The well known story of " The Box of Spanish Juice " may also be given : " A Liverpool banker, who was in the habit of collecting defaced notes, used to send them up to London every fortnight in a box. He usually collected about £1000 a week, so that the box generally contained about £2000. This method of sending the notes to town was adopted to save postage ; also, to deceive any thieves who might be on the look-out for plunder, the banker wrote on it, in legible letters, " Spanish Juice." It was always directed to a chemist in Plough Court, Lom- bard Street, who regularly, every morning after its arrival, handed it over to the banker's clerk, who invariably called for it. But one Monday morning it arrived the same as usual, to all appearances, but, on being opened, was found to contain nothing but shavings. At some stage of its journey the box must have been opened, and the notes abstracted. On inquiry it was found that the box arrived safely at the inn, and was placed with other packages, which had come by the same conveyance, in a room ostensibly guarded by a watchman. It is supposed that, during the absence of this functionary, the thief or thieves committed the robbery. This was afterwards found to be true, although it was stated that the watchman had connived at it." Those, indeed, were fine old-fashioned days, which have altogether altered. There was then a nice distinction, now altogether obliterated, between the east and west of Temple Bar. The old-fashioned banker used to go to his office so punctually that you might set a town clock by him. When he dined at club or hostel he used to observe the manners of his customers, and if he thought them extravagant, he THE EOMANCE OF BANKING. 31 showed them httle mercy in "the shop" or the "sweating- room." He would stay in the office till the accounts were balanced ; and we have known of clerks being kept up for hours until the error of a penny could be rectified. Old Simeon, of Cambridge, gave a man £20 to detect the error of a penny in his accounts. The old-fashioned bankers were the men who kept up to the last the powder and pigtail, the top-boots and knee-breeches. The half-holiday was an in- stitution totally unknown. The country bankers sent up to town heavy parcels by Pickford's vans, a guard with a blunderbuss keeping watch over them. In those days of expensive postage it was a great object to send letters by private hands. A Manchester bank calculated that it saved the pay of two clerks by this system. If any of their cus- tomers were found to have booked places at the coach-offices it was soon arranged that they should take letters to town. Sir Eowland Hill's innovations have nowhere been more efficacious than in the province of banking. The banker in old times never concerned himself with literature. He would be regarded as going to professional perdition. He would be looked upon as the Cambridge candidate for honours who falls in love or betakes himself to poetry. When the news came to Lord Chief Justice EUenborough that a young banker named Eogers had just published a poem on " The Pleasures of Memory," he exclaimed, " If old Gozzy " — alluding to the respected head of the firm with whom he was banking — " ever so much as says a good thing, let alone writing, I will close my account with him the next morning ! " An absurd story is told of an old banker, of a single pintof porter being invariably placed at the bottom of his staircase for his laundress. In course of time the pint was exchanged for a pot. A customer forthwith remonstrated with him : " I must say, sir, that if you go on doubling your expenditure at that rate, it may be time for your customers to look after their balances." The legend goes that the banker meekly accepted the rebuke, and promised amend- ment. The character of banking has considerably altered since the old days. A great deal of the small banking has been absorbed by the savings-banks. The banks do not concern themselves with the personal histories of their cus- tomers as they did. It is to be said that, while the London 32 THE ROMANCE OP BANIONG. banks are mostly occupied with bills, the old genuine bank- ing business is chiefly carried on by the country banks. A large proportion of the customers systematically overdraw. One day a witness, being examined in a law court, stated that he had accounts at six or seven banks. " What is the use of banking at so many places?" asked the judge. "To overdraw, my lord," was the candid reply. In old days the overdrawing was only done on good security and for special reasons. Old Lefevre, the father of the famous Speaker, a principal partner in Curries & Co., noticed an overdrawing customer at the counter, and gave him a lecture. " Mr. Smith you and I must understand one another something better than we seem to do. I am afraid you don't know what banking is ; give me leave to tell you. It is my busi- ness to take care of your money ; but I find that you are always taking care of mine. Now that is not banking, Mr. Smith ; it must be the other way ; I'm the banker, not you. You understand me now, Mr. Smith, I'm sure you do." Where there are indisputable large properties money is always forthcoming. " Whether I have got five thousand pounds in my bank, or whether I owe them five thousand, I do not exactly know," said a large-estated friend one day ; " but I know, first, that, if I owe them the money, they will get good interest ; and next, I know that they know far more about my property than I do myself." A very instructive history might be written of the battles of banks. A whole volume might easily be devoted to the history of the Bank of England. Of that dreadful December of 1825, Mr. Harman said : " The timely issue of the one- pound notes worked wonders, and it was by great good luck that we had the means of doing it ; for it happened that an old box, containing a quantity of one-pound notes, had been overlooked, and they were forthcoming at the lucky moment. This, as far as my judgment goes, saved the country." The state of affairs is thus described by the Deputy-Governor of the Bank : " On Monday morning the storm began, and till Saturday night it raged with an in- tensity that it is impossible for me to describe ; on the Saturday night it had somewhat abated. The Bank had taken a fierce and deliberate resolution to make common cause with the country, as far as their humble efforts would go ; and on Saturday night it was my happiness, when I THE KOMANCE OF BANKING. 33 went up to the Cabinet, reeling with fatigue, to be able just to call out to my Lord Liverpool, and to the members of His Majesty's Government, then present, that all was well. Then, in the following week, things began to get a little more steady ; and by the 24th, what wi-th the one-pound notes that had gone out and other things, people began to be satisfied ; and then it was, for the first time in a fortnight, that those who had been busied in that terrible scene could recollect that they had families who had some claim on their attention." There are few banks which have not in their time weathered fierce storms, and not a few that have suc- cumbed to them. Even the great house of Jones, Loyd & Co. once suspended payment, but it was only for a single day. Very often "a banking-house has been shaken to its foundation by conspiracy, or some vile combination. The fall in the Agra & Masterman Bank, in 1866, is supposed to have been brought about by malice. There are many stories of a similar kind in banking literature. The history of panics would be a very curious one, and not reflect very much credit on panic-stricken communities. Sometimes bankers themselves have closed their doors in a fit of panic. Thus we read : " The complexion of the larger accounts, three or four of which were a great deal overdrawn, so alarmed Mr. Crewdson, that he insisted on winding up. Nothing availed, and he closed the doors. There was no failure for stoppage, no rumour of anything wrong ; the business was simply discontinued ; every demand was met ; every account dis- charged in full." Another remarkable incident of a similar kind was when the Consohdated Bank stopped in May 1866. The bank was at the time perfectly solvent. The Times said it was " one of the most extraordinary errors ever committed by men of business intrusted with the property of others." After six weeks' suspension the bank was reopened, every demand being met, with interest. One bank was lost' in a very curious way. Two of the directors went up to the bank of England, and took with them one hundred thousand pounds in securities in a carpet-bag. In some extraordinary way the valuable bag was lost. It was recovered, indeed, with the precious contents untouched ; but in the mean time an irreparable mischief had been done. It is curious to note how there are dim portents and pressages, the vaguest of vague rumours, the rising of a little cloud no c 34 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. larger than a man's hand, a slight rise in the price of corn, a slight fall in the value of securities, and then the genius of the astute financier comes to the front ; he steers safely amid the rocks and reefs ; he saves his own capital, and, if we may be excused the repetition of some absurd puns, like Pharaoh's daughter, he even finds a little profit by the rushes on the bank. In times of severe panic people have been known to refuse Bank of England notes and prefer local notes. In country districts of Scotland, the old one-pound notes were greatly preferred to sovereigns. It is said that when there was a run upon the Bank of England in 1765, the device was resorted to of paying the country people in shillings and six- pences. One acute Manchester firm painted all their premises profusely, and many dapper gentlemen were de- terred from approaching the counter. A story is told of Cunliffe Brook's bank. "When there was an impetuous and unreasoning rush for gold, Mr. Brook obtained a number of sacks of meal, opened them at the top, put a good thick layer of coin upon the contents, then placed them untied where the glittering coins would be manifest to all observers. One bank procured a number of people as confederates, to whom they paid gold; then slipped round again to a back door and refunded it, and thus the effect of a stage army was produced. At another bank, the chief cashier himself examined every note with the most searching scrutiny, holding it up to the light, testing the signature, and making believe that, on account of alarm as to forgery, there was need of the most scrupulous care. When he had completed his pretended examination, he handed the note to one of his subordinates very deliberately, with, in slow and measured terms, "You may pay it." Other plans were to pay the money very languidly, counting it twice over, so as to be sure the sum was right, and to give a sovereign short, so that the customer should complain, and the counting have to be done over again. At one of the banks peck measures inverted were placed in the windows facing the street, a pile of gold upon the top, after the manner of the fruit exposed to sale at street corners in the summer. At another the coin was heated in shovels over the fire in the parlour be- hind, and handed out as "new" at a temperature of 300" Eahr. The clerk in charge, accommodating his phraseology WIOMAS COUTTS, BAXKKl!. THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. 37 to the Qccasioiii cried out loudly every balf-houi:, "Now, Jim, do be gettin' on with them sovereigns ; folks is- waitin' for;, their money.", "Coming,, sir,, coming," was the ready jeply ; and the "folk" thought tlie power of production boundless. . It is always the simple-mjnded and the unin- formed who constitute on such occasions the chief portion of the throng, just as the people who go to extremes are the half-educated ones. The crowd were easily persuaded — the proof that all was right was burning their fingers.' , ; We < will now take a glance at the romantic personal histories belonging to so many of the banks. I do not know what bankers Disraeli meant by the Neuchatels. , I do not say that he ever intended us to know. He drew his .portraits, and would blur them at once with the deliberate -purpose. .of making them indistinct. In some respects the Neuohatels are like the Eothschilds, but in others like the Thellussons. He speaks of the jewels and treasures de- posited with the Neuchatels at the time of the French Kevolution, by alarmed proprietors and capitalists in other European States* "The Neuchatels thus had the .command for a quarter of a century, more or less, of adventitious imillions. . They were scrupulous and faithful stewards ; but they, were doubtless repaid for their vigilance, their anxiety, and-;often their risk, by the opportunities which these rare resources permitted them to enjoy." Disraeli showed the nation the kind of banking operation by which such people as the Neuchatels make their money. When he boi;ght for the country the shares in the Suez Canal the Eoths- childs ladvanced the necessary milhons ; and for this opera- tion,; which did not involve the slightest risk, they received more, than eighty thousand pounds. , The great statesman, at the same time, did a fine financial stroke for his country, worthy of any banker ; for Mr. Gladstone was able to state in thei House of Commons lately that those four millions were now worth double the money , to the country in the open piarket. , The firm of Jones, Loyd & Co- has a very, romantic history. This bank is now amalgamated with , the London and Westminster. , It may be said to have commenced in a jove affair betw'een a young Dissenting minister of Manchester and. the daughter of a leading member of his congrega- 1" Grindon's Manchester ^anJcsanct Bankers. (Manchester : Palmer & Howe, 1877.) 38 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. tion. Mr. James Loyd preached so eloquently in his Welsh chapel that Mary Jones fell in love with him. Her father was a great man at the Welsh chapel, being both banker and manufacturer. On one occasion he, or some other merchant, was so pleased with the young preacher, that he presented him with a five-pound note ; and the minister in thanking him, said he would be happy to pray for him on the same terms every Sunday morning. The young people fearing that the father's consent could not be secured, were secretly married. The father-in-law was reconciled to them ; but he thought that he could do a better thing for his new son-in-law than let him continue in the preaching business. Nonconformist ministers have a great advantage over the Anglican clergy, in that they may go into trade or business, or sit in Parliament if elected. Mr. Loyd became his father- in-law's partner, and went to London to open a metropohtan branch of the business. He proved to be the very man for a banker — eminently sagacious, clear-headed, and honour- able. The Manchester firm regularly drew on the London firm ; and for some years " Jones upon Jones " was a weU- known commercial phrase. For many years he was the head of the business, which was transferred in 1864 to the most wealthy bank in the country, the London and West- minster, that led the way in those joint-stock enterprises which Sir Eobert Peel declared formed one of the greatest discoveries of modern times. In 1844 Lewis Loyd had purchased Overstone Park, four miles north-east of North- ampton — a thousand or fifteen hundred acres — where he resided until 1858. He bequeathed three millions of money, the result of banking and of successful speculations in Government stock. He left an only son, Samuel Jones Loyd, who was, two years afterwards, made Lord Overstone. This nobleman is the greatest living authority upon the subject of banking. The study of his pubhcations and of his evi- dence before parhamentary committees is most interesting and instructive. " Since Kicardo," writes M'CuUoch, " no writer upon currency has combined the same wide range of theoretical and practical information as Lord Overstone, or has been so well able to detect plausible fallacies, and to elicit and illustrate true principles, however obscured by sophistry, prejudice, or interest." In the well-known work. Great Governing Families of England, by Messrs. Sanford THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. 39 and Hatton, the author writes : " The chief of the new com- mercial aristocracy is supposed to be Lord Overstone, one of the wealthiest subjects in the world, his fortune being esti- mated at five millions." An only son himself, he had an only daughter, married to Colonel Loyd-Lindsey. An interesting letter from the present Lord Overstone, written soon after his accession to the business, has found its way into print. He gave the clerks of his establishment a present of a thousand pounds. Very often the faithful servants of a bank have a kind of feudal loyalty to their chief. The bankers, indeed, have done good service in discrediting the miserable idea of their clerks being so many " hands." They have shown examples of that best kind of co-operation, where the chiefs and dependents work har- moniously together, often meeting in neighbourly fashion at the great man's house ; and the instances are not rare in which the faithful servant, who recalls Eliezer of Damascus, has been admitted as partner into some share of the business, which has largely prospered under his care. The house of Coutts & Co. has a very interesting history. A very great banking heiress is the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, whose recent marriage with Mr. Ashmead Coutts-Bartlett excited so much attention. The kindly and popular Baroness is — or was until recently — the head of the great banking firm of Coutts & Co., and was popularly supposed to draw a hundred thousand a year from the business. Mr. Coutts married, for his second wife. Miss Mellon, the actress, to whom he left his entire fortune — about a million of money. Mrs. Coutts, left a widow, married the Duke of St. Albans ; but, in her marriage settlement, this vast fortune was left entirely in her own power. She thought that she would best carry out the wishes of her husband, who had made the money, by bequeathing it to his favourite grand- daughter. Miss Angela Burdett, the daughter of the famous Sir Francis. An infinite amount of this money " has wandered Heaven-directed, to the poor." Child's Bank was once represented by a lady, who became Countess of "West- moreland, and afterwards by her daughter, who became Countess of Jersey. On certain state occasions Lady Jersey dined with the bank ofiicials, and took the head of the table. The history of Coutt's Bank shows how much may be done by a discriminating liberality. Old Coutts heard, one day 40 THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. at a dinner-p'arty, from the manager Of a city bank, that a nobleman had apphed to his house for the loan of thirty thousand pounds, and had been refused. At ten o'clock at night he started for the peer's house, and saw his steward. He explained his business, and said that if the nobleman would call upon him the next morning, he might have what- ever he wanted. On the next morning, when the noble lord called at the bank, Mr. Coutts handed him thirty notes of a thousand pounds each. "What security do you want ? " asked the peer. " I shall be satisfied with your note-of- hand," was the reply. This was given ; and the nobleman said, " I shallonly want for the present ten thousand pounds of the money ; so I will leave twenty thousand pounds with you, and open an account." Some time afterwards the nobleman sold an estate for two hundred tliousand pounds, which he deposited with Coutts's. Nor was this all. He told the anecdote to his friends, and also to George III. The King was so impressed with the story that he himself deposited a large sum with Mr. Coutts. The King withdrew his patronage, however, when Coutts supported Sir Francis Burdett in his contest for Middlesex with immense sums, and transferred his account to another banker, who failed ; and we cannot help thinking that in this instance his Majesty was served quite right. The Barings have been among the most famous of English bankers. They are of German stock. There is a kind of ecclesiastical flavour about them. Their English founder was a Bremen pastor, who settled in this country. His grandson married the niece of an English archbishop. One of his descendants became Bishop of Durham. The money was originally made in the rich profitable clothing business of the west of England. Going into the old-fashioned church of the pleasant Devonshire town of Ashburton one day, we were greatly interested by the Baring monuments. Ash- burton gave a title in the peerage to the chief of the house of Baring. It has been a rule in the house that when any one of them has got a title he goes out of the business. Sir Francis Baring, the first great banker, who, dying in 1810, left a fortune of two milhons, had three sons — Thomas, Alexander and Henry. Thomas, succeeding to the baronetcy gave up the business. Henry had rather a romantic repu- tation as a lucky gambler, who was frequently able to break THE EOMANCE OF BANKING. 41 the baiik of a gambling- table. He was the amazement of beholders, when he would sit down at a gambling-table at the Palais Eoyal — before such tables were happily abolished — with piles of gold and notes before him. The reputation of a successful gambler was hardly suited to the intense respectability of the firm, and Mr. Henry was induced to retire from the business. Alexander Baring, often known as " Alexander the Oreat," sustained and extended the fortunes of the house. He went to America ; and there the richest banker in England married the daughter of the richest citizen of the United States. One of his gigantic transactions possesses an historical importance. After .the conclusion of the great European war he paid down' a sum of £1,100,000, by which Prance was freed from the occupa- tion of Eussian, Austrian, and German armies. "There are six great Powers in Europe," said the Due de Eichelieu — "England, France, Eussia, Austria, Prussia, and Baring Brothers." In 1835 he was made Lord Ashburton. Two of his sons held the title, and each successively retired from the business. The head of the firm, Thomas Baring, became Chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Melbourne's ministry ; and another member. Lord Northbrook, has been Governor- General of India. The account of the fortunes of the Barclays' Bank is very interesting. They are descended from the famous and intrepid Quaker, whose Apology for his order is one of the most celebrated of our severer classics.. David Barclay, a linendraper in Cheapside, established his brother Eobert as a banker in Lombard Street. That house in Cheapside was a famous one in its day ; it was the house from the windows of which members of the Eoyal Pamily used, to watch the pro- cession on Lord Mayor's-day. This was the case with no fewer than six reigning sovereigns, from Charles II. to George HI. The son of the famous Quaker had received the three first Georges. There is a very pretty letter in ex- istence from a daughter of David Barclay, describing the reception of the Eoyal Pamily in the counting-house, which had been turned into a parlour. Another version of the Barclay connection with Eoyalty is, that the Eang went in state to the City on a Lord Mayor's-day, and one of the horses of the royal carriage became quite unmanageable in Cheapside, opposite the shop of Barclay the hnendraper. 42 THE ROMANCE OE BANKING. The worthy Quaker, perceiving this, descended into the street, and said, " Wilt thou alight, George and thy wife Charlotte, and come into [my house and view the Mayor's show ? " When the King left his house he said, " David, let me see thee at St. James's next Wednesday ; and bring thy son Eobert with thee." When David Barclay and his son Eobert approached the Eoyal presence, the King descended from his throne and gave his Quaker friend a hearty shake of the hand. The King asked David what he intended to do with his son, and said, " Let him come to me, and I will provide him with honourable and profitable employment." The Quaker. " I fear the air of the Court of your Majesty would not agree with my son." The King. " Well, David, well, you know best, you know best ; but you must not omit to let me see you occasionally at St. James's." The banking proved as honourable and profitable as any employment which the King could have given. It may be said that the Quakers seem a people of peculiar aptitude for banking. They support each other, and also win much public support. It is curious to observe how often bankers' business falls into chques. Some houses are especially in territorial interests ; others in trades ; others in Levan- tine business ; others in Ottoman and Egyptian interests ; and so on through all the cycles of all the countries. The firm of Thellusson was a very famous one. This was, we believe, the firm which Dickens had in mind, in the Telfson Bank, in his Tale of Two Cities. This bank had a very close connection with Paris. An immense number of the customers were French. Peter Thellusson had belonged to the Paris firm of Thellusson & Necker ; this Necker, first clerk and then a partner in the business, being the great financial minister whose wife was the first love of Edward Gibbon. He migrated to London, and established a bank, which grew up to vast proportions in connection with the Paris house. The will of Peter Thellusson is one of the most memorable of legal documents. After leaving modest fortunes to his wife and sons and daughters, he directed his property to accumulate until their descendants should become, under certain conditions, the most opulent of pri- vate individuals. Failing such descendants, the money was to go to pay off the National Debt. It' is only fair to THE ROMANCE OF BANKING. 43 say that we have heard of an explanation which would go a considerable way towards giving a different version of Thellusson's character and bequest. Many of his customers were emigres, or unfortunate nobles who had perished by the guillotine in Paris. Great obscurity hung over the fate of many, and it was uncertain how far they or their represen- tives might turn up to claim deposits. Thellusson's desire was that there should be abundant funds to satisfy every such claim to the utmost. On the other hand, it may be argued that it was simply the design of the old banker to make the ultimate possessor of his bequest the richest man in the world. He was to have inherited at least twenty miUions. The annual income, however, was pretty generally divided among the lawyers ; and an Act of Parliament has rendered any such accumulations very nearly impossible. The field of history and anecdote opened up by banking involves the subject of cheques, a favourite topic with John Stuart Mill, which alone needs a paper. Sometimes a cheque may be presented which would more than exhaust the avail- able cash in the bank, which a judicious manager would of course desire to keep as low as possible. We have known, for instance, of a cheque being given for nearly half a million of money. A cheque, however large, and however unex- pected, causes no embarrassment to a good house that is prepared against all contingencies. What the banker does is simply to write a cheque of his own upon the Bank of England. We will at this point advert to one or two prin- ciples which underlie the whole system of banking in our days. Indeed it may be said that all the principles of banking lie pretty well in a nutshell. A few axioms and postulates determine the whole science. Notes are not money ; they are only the representatives of value. Indeed we may say paradoxically that even money is not money ; gold is the representative of labour. The bank-note simply represents gold. It is simply the representative of a representative. Gold itself is only a commodity, like corn, wine, or wool, or any other commodity. All the disasters of banking have been caused by losing sight of this simple economical law. The business of a banker is the most profitable, and in some ways the easiest of businesses. He is the only business man who lives on the profits, not of his own business, but of 44 THE ROMANCE OF NANKING. the business of other people. He is the guardian not of; his own money, but of the money of other people. There are ' a number of people who delight • in making heavy: deposits with their bankers. They like the idea of a heavy. floa,ting balance. People might be mentioned who like to have a hundred thousand pounds at their bankers'. The; banker knows that only a certain amount is necessary for his pur- poses, and he trades upon the balance. His whole system is a trade upon balances. So it comes to pass that the'whole successful conduct of a bank depends much more upon moral power than upon intellectual ability. In the long- run, good principle everywhere • surpasses mere abilityj and this is especially the case in banking. Honour is the very breath of its life. The history of financing sufiiciently shows what. rocks ahead there are in finance. There is no doubt but liberality is the great rock ahead of many bankers. Every banker receives applications for assistance, which, from a business point of view, are entirely unacceptable. No banker ought to allow kindly personal feeling to get the better of his' judg- ment. He is not only deahng with his own profits, but he is also the trustee of the money of other people. He should have nothing to da with "bulls," "bears," and "lame ducks." He should set his face against every speculation whicb does not partake of the nature of an investment. He must learn that most difficult of all arts, the art of saying " No ! " It has been said, indeed, that the golden rules of banking' are reducible to three: first, to say "Eo," when you ought to say it ; second, never to change your mind when you have once said " No ; " third, never to throw good money after bad. Yet even among bankers there are as remarkable instances of reckless speculation as among their customers. A few great banks have fallen victims to the predominant influence of some daring speculator, who has persuaded the proprietors to stake the credit of their house on some visionary scheme. Many extraordinary advances in enter- prise and social improvement have been made through; the hberality of bankers ; but in some instances they were before their time, and in others they were altogether unfor- tunate. We may mention one instance which has its place in railway history. Eavenscroft, the banker, advanced enormous sums on a scheme for running steam carriages on THE KOMANCE OF BANKING. 4& ordinary turnpike-roads. A hundred thousand pounds was spent in developing this idea ; but it all came to nothing. The experiments were made at midnight to avoid observa- tion ; but they carried consternation and dismay into the neighbourhood. On one occasion an engine dashed through a hedge into a turnip field, where it lay for several months, for no one claimed it during that time. The road engine attained a speed of eighteen miles an hour ; but the noise was voted a nuisance, and in addition to their heavy losses the promoters were subject to constant threats of prosecu- tion. Both the scheme and the bank that supported the scheme utterly collapsed. In an old history of banking we met with a list of schemes that in their day had received financial support. They were often of the most extravagant and insensate kind. They seemed to exhaust the possi- bihties of human error in practical, or rather, impracticable matters. These, however, after all, are only excrescences in the immense body of sound business of that people whose merchants are princes, and their trafiickers the honourable of the earth, and that writes on the pediment of the greatest Exchange in the world, " The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." The system of banking is a tree of enormous growth, which has implanted its fibres throughout the country ; and if it were possible that it could be uprooted — a process which is simply unthinkable — it would mvolve the ruin of the nation, or rather of the family of nations. It was acutely said by a French writer that if Napoleon I. had ruined England he would have ruined France as well. If bank-notes and cheques did not circulate we should require perhaps a hundred miJlions more gold than there is in the country ; and at the same time the convertibihty of the bank-note is the very hinge on which the prosperity of the country revolves. It is customary for outsiders to look upon our fiscal system as the very essence of dry exactitude and mechanical power. So far from that, it is trembhngly ahve to every breath that blows, and reflects, as if in a mirror, every phase of the natural weal or woe. It is the barometer that exactly registers the condition of the country. It is the edifice, which, though it rears its towers so high, is built npon the airy Hehcate structure of pubhc credit. It is the subtle expansive interest which extends to every counter 46 THE EOMANCE OF BANKING. and every home, and is concerne'd with every commercial transaction betvfeen men. It abounds on every side with the deepest human interests, developing and expanding in- dividual character, eliciting the greatest qualities of the human intellect and spirit, and exhibiting in its course as much of historical life and movement as the wearying chronicle of battles, sieges, and treaties that fills the pages of the historians. THE RISE AND WRECK OF THE GOLDSMIDS. Whoever shall write a profoundly studied treatise on the axiom that there should be no sentiment in business, must give no scanty attention to the thwarting by the stock-jobber of Pitt's financial .measures, or indeed of any government money movements in the great wars under the Hanoverian dynasty in England. Patriotism for not one instant ever diverted them from the course which benefited the specula- tion. It is true many of them, though British-born, were as much cosmopolitan as their foreign compeers, being long since outlaws from society for nefarious pursuits. The meanness of their principles was even more despicable when contrasted with the intelligent plans of Hope, JSTeckar, and Thellusson. A disciple of these schools, Walter Boyd, of the famous house of Boyd, Ker & Co., of Paris, was driven thence by the Great Eevolution to London, where it appeared he was destined to be the seedUng of grander financial ideas. The last of the nabobs, Mr. Paul Benfield, returned simul- taneously home, and founded a banking house with his rupees and Boyd's North Scottish wit and training in Amsterdam and Switzerland. As long as they had to deal with the real circulation of bona-fide currency, it was fair saihng ; but the Stock Ex- change destructives drew the fattest prey from troubled water. The atmosphere was thick with corruption. The Public Accountants, when too noble by nature as well as by rank, to profit by State secrets, were misled by their agents, or deceived by their bosom friends. Whatever was done by Boyd and Benfield, as the Government loan contractors, they lost, and their opponents gained, even at times cent, per cent. THE EISE AST) WRECK OF THE GOLDSMIDS. 47 The ominous motto was " the cream to the craft ; " and the bankers were threatened with poisoning by the sour milk thrown on their hands time and again. In his extremity — for in five years miUions had gone from the profit to the loss account— Boyd sought to found a Landed Interest Bank, with the help of the acres of Sir "William Poulteney, the richest landlord in England. But all was vain : the house went down, and but for Government aid, thanks to his personal friends, Boyd might have left his family beggars. His successors bore such ever-honoured names as Eobarts, Curtis, Smith, Payne, and the hke ; but one and all suc- cumbed to the Stock Exchange warfare, or withdrew crippled. There was left the firm of Esdaile, Hamet & Esdaile, whose fluctuating fortune was unable to override the continual transmission of specie by " the guinea boats " to the mainland, and the disastrous effect of the French Eepublican victories and the rise of Napoleon. By the fourth payment or so, the loan was falling at 7 per cent, discount. Novices in finances could not have " succeeded " worse. There stepped to the front then, like twin Hercules to relieve the unlucky Atlas, an unknown firm of brothers, the Goldsmids. They took the burden at 2 per cent, over the market price, prevented the Esdailes' ruin, and drew all eyes on themselves by bulling it up to par, and then to a premium. Who are these Goldsmids ? was the cry. They were Dutch Jews. Their story was romantic as a tale of Oriental fiction. In 1765, the founder of the house in England had come over from Holland, and in the Jewish quarter began business as Aaron Goldsmid & Son (afterwards Goldsmid & Eliason). He had a numerous family, the four boys going into mone- tary businesses. One we find bullion broker to the Bank, a most important branch for which the Jewish connec- tions abroad made their race invaluable, and partner with the evergreen Mocattas ; he married into the rich Keyser family. The daughters also wedded splendidly, diamond merchants seeming to be their preference. Abraham set up as a bill-broker, then an entirely new business, in which he was the pioneer of Old Gurney, and took his brother Benjamin into the office. Bigotry's leaden hand held the civic mace at whiles, and, as Jews, its permission for them thus to go into trade cost £500 ! 48 THE EISE AND WRECK OP THE GOLDSMIDS. Abraham had returned from a visit to a wealthy uncle iu Amsterdam, on whom great expectations were built; the worthy old gentleman must have seen through the manoeuvre, for he snubbed him at the time, though he left the brothers £15,000 a-piece on his death. With this windfall they extended their already growing trade. But the future king of finance was not to be exempt from the universal malady. He fell in love, deeply, desperately, and, horror of horrors, with a Christian maid of Limehouse. The antiquated, but generally efficacious, method of dis- sentient parents was promptly brought into play. The young man was sent to make the continental tour. Mean- while a man was hired to marry the lamb in the path, and Benjamin was betrothed to Miss Solomon, reputed the richest marriageable Jewess in Great Britain. Suddenly his father died. The family tradition is singularly clear and precise as to the circumstances surrounding the fatahty. His greatest crony was a Baal Shem, a wizard, who made him executor of his will and confided to him a packet of sealed papers, not to be opened till a certain date, up to which time the Goldsmid family would be prosperous beyond a dream. There was every reason to put faith in the seer's promise, as he was known to be learned in cabalistic lore, possessed an ever-burning candle, which travelled about at his command, and when he pawned his trinkets (an odd trick on the part of a holder of the philosopher's stone), could send them home unknown out of the pawnbroker's safe before the prosaic presentation of the duplicate and dues. Daring the consequences, Aaron Goldsmid broke the mystic seals, and perceived a page of hiero- glyphics, from the blasting efiects of which he took to his dying bed. The worst disasters incurred were not to fall yet, however. For when Benjamin came home, and. fulfilled the engage- ment made by the parents on both sides, it was the summer of his life. His father died in 1781. Less than ten years after, he and his brother, the bill-broker, were fairly known. In 1792, year of events pre-eminent, the Goldsmids were kings. They jostled the great bankers, Coutts, Grote, Curtis, Dorrien, in rivalry for the Loans. When noted houses were crushed by the 1795 disasters, their loss was a paltry £50. THE RISE AND WRECK OF THE GOLDSMIDS. 49 The old wizard's presage was at first verified by their luck in lotteries^ in one year they won two sweepstakes, that is, chose the thousand in which the first and the last numbers would be drawn. (The revelations of the doings of such lottery-keepers as " Jew " King, however, make one incredulous about the inexpugnable faith of any of them, State or private.) In 1797, the second month, Benjamin and Eliason went to Hamburg on a desperate hunt of gold for the Bank. The previous year had alarmed it by the coming in of the £5's for small tax payments. In January, '97, consols were at 54. Not only was the old cry of ""Wolf" raised, but the news circulated that the French had landed in Wales. It was " the Invasion by Boney," so long re- iterated. Then only was Pitt informed of the straits of the Bank. He ordered gold to be purchased at any price. Hence the Groldsmids' voyage. But it was too late, the drain had gone too far ; " Stoppage " was written over the door. ~ It was time for financiers of honesty and exalted gifts to take the wheel on the other side from where Pitt stood. The Goldsmids had no doubt experimented in the Govern- ment loans under fictitious names, for their management of the one they took over from the Esdailes betrays no timorous steersmanship ; on the contrary, as stated, it went up to par and beyond. They had a substantial assistant in the chief cashier of the Bank, Abraham Newland, and the Barings co-operated with them outside (openly in the £14,000,000 loan). Their old bill-broking knowledge enabled them to a(3cept for investment direct in the funds approved notes of bankers' customers at a low discount^ which, with consols at a marvellously good figure, was profitable to the first holders. Newland ^smoothed the channel for this paper to pass through ■ the Bank, which, of course, gave the Goldsmids more room for the Government bills. > Wot a ^guinea lay idle under their rule. Soon they were borrowing £30,000,000 a year, with the Exchequer, Navy and other bonds funded at 5 per cent., saving immense sums to the country in commissions -and taxes, £3,000,000 of the latter being blotted out thus for ever. The market would rise all round when a loan was announced, to the amazem.ent, E 50 THE RISE AND WRECK OF THE GOLDSMIDS. not to say the horror, of old stock-jobbers who remem- bered the days when Lord North took a month to scrape in money at exorbitant rates. Not half a day need elapse before the Government's demand for half a million was fully satisfied. It was Carnot plus Colbert, and the Goldsmids might say that Nelson would never have won a victory, and "Wellington died in India but a colonel, had they not attended to the finances and killed the old system which charged cartridges with brickdust powder, and supplied soldiers with swords that bent like pewter. But this general prosperity was the petty manipulators' ruin. The Goldsmids went on 'Change themselves, depart- ing from the dignified habits of their predecessors, who did the work by delegates. A league to their disadvantage was formed, in which their own kindred are accredited with a share. They took the great £14,000,000 loan as the battle-horse. It was the mode then to let what was popularly termed "the King's money" accumulate to the year's end. The league gathered all they could of Exchequer and India Bonds and beared the market. There was a fall of Omnium to 18 per cent, dis- count. That rate which they had raised from the 40's to above 70 wavered downwards among the upper 50's. The real money holders innocently aided the combination by acting on their fright. A bulHonist pamphlet depressed the funds, to co-operate Avith the theories of which stock was oflfered at 20 per cent, under the true market price if paid in gold — that is, a clear 30 per cent, under the ruling price of negotiable paper. The Barings were themselves affected, as co-partners. No individual fortune could stand the pressure of a daily loss of £100,000. The East India Company notified that they expected half a million in cash, and Goldsmids' friends were equally as cruel. A little before this death-blow no mansions in the land were more enviable ; the brothers were not bigotted, and the Eoyal family were frequent visitors to the new house of Benjamin at Eoehampton, where the banquets in cele- bration of the victories of Aboukir and Trafalgar were me- morable ; there was a Nelson's chair where the monarch of finance sat at the head of the magnificent table, and the view from the broad window was charming beyond words to paint, over many an acre which the once humble Jew of THE RISE AND WRECK OF THE GOLDSMIDS. 51 Capel Court might easily have owned. It was as his friend that the king presented him to his congeners, and it was as his friend that he gave him a pardon for a Jew condemned for forgery, though it had been an ahnost inflexible rule of the Crown never to forgive a similar offender, whatever his race or rank. But the ill wind increased to a gale, and was not to be diverted, even by that wizard of their house who had saved the Duke Street Synagogue from conflagration by writing a spell on the doorpost. That thaumaturgist's ban on the opening of the seal was bearing fruit. Benjamin grew petulant and threatened his known enemies on 'Change. An ox knocked him down in Lombard Street, another ill omen interpreted reversely. The Goldsmids failed. Benjamin went home on the 10th of April, 1808, despair- ing, and it was found in the morning that he had been tempted by the dangling of the rope over his head in bed by which he could lift himself and turn his bulky frame, to hang himself. The funds fell 11 per cent., after having gone up to 3 per cent, premium in one of the intermediate fluctuations, the most violent on record to that date. » The league had cleared £2,000,000 by their proceedings. Then came out, mingled with outcries against his exultant antagonists, the laments of his dependents. He had planned the Naval Orphan Asylum, originated a Jews' school, for his people had not been very charitable to one another before 1800, and given £1,000 a-year indiscriminately. The mourn- ing was as genuine as widely diffused. His brother Abraham never recovered from the shock of the double loss. He saved half-a-million from the ruin, with which he lived a morose hfe, tortured with the gout, distrust of his surrounders, and dulness of brain. He strolled out on a September dawn, 1810, in his beau- tiful gardens at Morden, tried to sever his windpipe and failing, shot himself under the Palestine cedars. He was buried in unhallowed ground, from the horror of his faith for the shedder of human blood. The wizard's menace was realised. i: 2 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BANK. "In the days of the Guelphic Georges, When the dream had come again Of a treasure land, where a daring hand Had only to glean and gain ; And all that in past times our fathers had told Of the gorgeous climes and the Southern seas of gold, Was now outdone ! " In 1688 stock-jobbery just raised its head. In 1711-12, Harley, Earl of Oxford, ravenous for means to prop up public credit, depressed by the dismissal of a Liberal ministry, and insufficient to defray the army, navy, and other floating debts, selected the South Sea Company for his bolster. It is clear that it never arrived at real business, its few ships having dabbled a little in whale-fishing and in rivalry with Spain in the slave trade, but were soon shut out from her ports and denied the whole Spanish Main. If the Company had been whole-hearted, it would have soon found a Sir Henry Morgan to take the Don by the beard and burst the blockade. Howbeit, there it was, a handle to be seized by the greedy ministry, and the courtiers who , had seen the fortunes turned over the water during Law's Mississippi Scheme, jumped at an English parallel. The South Sea Company oJfTered to lend the Government £10,000,000 at 6 per cent, on the security of certain duties made permanent, and their South Sea trade to be a mono- poly. In May, 1717, the Bank of England competed with it for the Government loan, but the Company had bribed many an influential legislator with embryo bonds^a per- fectly cheg.p payment, since, if the Bank had won they would have been worthless. The biU in the favour of the younger corporation was two months in, progress through the Lower House. A few' far-sighted or, alas, unbribed meiiibers who preferred gold to S.S. stock, played Cassandra's part ; but their leader, Walpole, was mocked at. He might, however, like Kossuth, when similarly derided, have rejoined, "But, remember, Cassandra was right ! " My Lords ran the bill out in three days, and on the same that it passed,; them the Eoyal assent was given. In the meanwhile every invention and wile had been scattered to pufi" up the stock : it had attained 400; it settled at 330, but dropped to 310 when ■THK SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BANK. 53 the king's sign-manual was affixed, and was 290 next day, the public desire seeming already exhausted. But now all the Crown ministers and officials who had been rewarded with stock were interested in forcing the plant. No fable was too preposterous to be circulated, and none too much so to be disbelieved. The fever was contagious, and increased with the summer weather. All the world turned stock-jobber, and the Sun was the Company's office, formerly the Excise, at the north-east end of Threadneedle Street, (burnt in 1826). On April the 12th the multitude, which had brought securities without even asking the terms of ^purchase, sub- scribed double the million demanded. And when the general court declared the Midsummer dividend to be 10 per cent., those who had held back besought a million-and-a-half instead of a million at 400 per cent. One must keep in mind that all were not headlong fools, but comprised " those sly long-heads " who profit by national frenzies. As time bargains were the rule, the active calculator and the well-informed drove a lavishly well-paid trade. The mere " shaving " of notes was a fortune to what corresponded with the Overend, Gurney & Co. of 1720, for by the 29th May (when S. S. stock stood at 500 rising), two-thirds of the Government annuities had been changed into its stock. When at 400, Bank stock had been 260 only^, though East India Company's was 445. One four days' leap left the new comet high and dry at 890 ! and the Star of India was echpsed. Then the throng which made Lombard Street and Cornhill impassable, and choked up 'Change Alley, " the gulf where thousands fell " Hke a new Thermopylae, groped ravenously at any other fragments of the feast which all could not enjoy. " Projectors, usurers, with others, all unfold In fortune's lottery some prize for gold." The swarm of hare-brain-hatched fancies defy enumera- tion, and thirsted to put only three hundred million pounds in activity. Several of the ameliorating ideas, though common- place at present, were supported then in spite of their startling novelty. A tapestry company would have furnished the dustman's four-pair back with a dado by Thornhill or Verrio ; a dining company had the contemporary Buckmaster in the chair, and promised the pair wedding on £30 a year hashed 64 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BANK. venison and cup-custards ; there was a helmet for submarine promenades, which Jules Verne's hero might have worn ; and a Eoyal Academy for teaching everything in sixteen daily lessons, from alchemy to trimming a poodle like a lion. A main-chance sort of fellow, masked, sat behind a table in a Poultry nook and pocketed some hundreds in £2 deposits ou £100 shares for " an Undertaking of which the Nature must not be Divulged." In 1881, an American speculator actually repeated this impudent feat ; and his critics, forgetting, or ignorant of its precedent, blame his dupes as unrivalled in their folly. An exhibition of the Englishman who was not in a scheme would have profited like that of Caliban in an Elizabethan inn-yard ; but there was no such man. The Prince of Wales was governor of some association by which he added £40,000 to his purse. The South Sea Company, whose unforeseen fortune was an amazement to its progenitors, had the arrogance to resent these jackals, and, what was more dangerous, to warp authority into suppressing them, and so turned them all into enemies who aimed at the one devouring maw ; or rather, they became boys kicked by the laced footman of some upstart's gilded coach, who finally upset it by thrusting sticks between the spokes. Already, when a forger was being hunted for, who had procured money on a warrant to sell stock, the mob had hooted the officer — " His paper was as good as theirs," said they. In the second week in June a Eoyal proclamation had dissolved the outside speculations. But at the same time the Company found the water shoaling, and the directors bought in to induce a rise. The books closed on the 22nd June, at 750, therefore. The king's going over to Hanover with his suite, deprived London of the courtiers, who sold to have cash for German gaming-tables. A fall to 640 set the prudent in re-action '; 600 was seen ; but the bulls revived courage and elevated the figure to an even thousand ! " It was magnificent, but it was " — Gave aux vaincus ! It was bruited that the chairman. Sir John Blount, and others high in the books, had disposed of their shares. There were frowns from the rich and curses from those who feared soon to be poor. The directors had their coach THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BAKK. 55 windows opened by lace-ruflBed hands, and men who were not in the habit of lifting their voices in the streets, bade them "beware of the wooden cravat and Tyburn tree," which they, better than we, interpreted immediately as a reference to the pillory and gibbet. Eiots were feared if the military escorted such depre- dators ; the king was asked home ; Walpole was besought to tempt thQ Bank to intervene ; the alarm had mounted to the statesmen, at a quicker rate than the S.S.S. was falling ; runs on bankers began, and many put the sea betwixt them and their creditors — they had been speculating with their customers' deposits ; a run on the Bank was stopped by a holiday (Sept. 29th) happening at the nick. S.S. Stock was then 135. The Monarch of the Main was roaring like the sucking dove at the general court, held in the same month in Merchant Tailors' Hall. The directors could not depart from the conventions which exacted their thanking one another for — no one knows what ! but the concourse which blocked up Cheapside required gold, and not soft solder; and down faded the stock to 150, when all was over. In the meantime, the once haughty compeer had been sueing the Bank for relief at any price. It was a question of saving necks now, for purses were doomed long ago. In response to an irresistible growl of vox populi, directors and officers of the bankrupt Company were secured, with such books as the treasurer, not a good Knight, had not carried away to Holland. Those who were in Parliament were expelled and arrested, and their property sealed from being dealt with. Mr. Secretary Craggs was accused in the House of being as guilty as any of the directors, and, fired by his grief at the loss of a favourite son, for whom he had amassed the millions, challenged the whole three hundred ; he apologised immediately for having appealed to the duello in even a Pickwickian sense. The king had hastened back. He found a secret com- ^ mittee sitting on papers seized right and left, and examining the writers of them, both dexterous and sinister. Burning was the scornful anger of the discoverers, who had not been reckoned worth bringing into the stupendous fraud, at the amount of the bribes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Aislabie, the Earl of Sunderland, the Duchess of Kendal, 56 THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BANK. which latter had connived at Treasurel- Knight's Dutch voyage,- and the lesser conspirators. Considering that nearly all- of them had spent their quick gains in- purchases within the kingdom^ the decrees against them and their estates — (Mr. Craggs- died so suddenly that "laudanum" was whispered, and only his "dead hand" could be opened to any pur-pose) partook rather of vengeance than justice. But they were greeted with one undiluted cheer of joy, and bonfires lit up a double hedge, ten heads deep, of grinning faces, as Aislabie was carted to the Tower for a long imprisonment. Sir John Blount's fortune of £200,000 was flattened to £5,000, and so with the others, tUl the cyphering cit., who had foolishly boasted of his horse in the halcyon days drinking potable gold, came to bread and water, and that of his begging. Sunderland was acquitted by his peers, to the general rage. The heads of the Company had made thirteen-and-a-half million pounds. With the restitutions and the Bank circu- lating six millions South Sea Stock, a relief of 33 per cent, being obtained, the holders were saved from absolute ruin. The " South Sea Annuities " are a species of fossil which are now and again disinterred in old books of the banks. Gay, the poet, had failed to sell his £20,000 in stock when commanding a profit, and was left grave at the crash. But Dr. EadchfFe was more philosophical when he pleasantly shook his burnt fingers, and said, " Sir, it is but going up another 5,000 pair of stairs ! " " THE SMASH-UP OF STRAHANS." Two centuries of Snowy fame trampled under for the sake of £100,000 ! And in the green memory of taany a mer- chant whose youth had viewed Henry Pauntleroy in the Old BaUey dock, there was to stand within the spikes another Pharisee. The scene of this astonishing fraud of 1855 was " the bank a little west of Temple Bar j" originated in 1643. It was then a pawnbroker's and whitesmith's, where a Maister Snow amassed a fortune by the close union of a gold-plate dealer's. " A hundred per cent, for fashion's sake " was their mildest toaxim. ' "the smash- up of strahans." 57 Under the commonwealtli it was something more like a money-changer's. In 1679 it fell under the lion's claw, when the Second Charles robbed the bankers all in one swoop. Snow and Company suspended, like their compeers, till they were refunded to a certain degree. This was the occasion of the variance of Holt and Somers. The latter had granted that the bankers had a right to compensation for the seized securities, but " that there was no remedy." Upon which the noble legal Leo roared : "No remedy ? If they had lost one they have lost the other ; but an Englishman could lose neither but by his own default, and this is not such a case." Lord Somers was overruled. In 1'720 Gay penned this tribute to Thomas Snow, which a Venetian banker would have had decorate his house front in Delia Eobbia ware : — " Oh, thou, whose penetrating -wisdom found The South Sea rocks and shelves where thousands drowned ; When credit sank and commerce grasping lay, Thou stoodest,jior sent one bill unpaid away ! " In 1830 it was known as Snow, Paul & Co., but a few years later the senior Snow retired. It became Strahan, Paul & Bates, Sir John Dean Paul succeeding his dead father, also a titled man : Strahan was in fact the last of the Snows, who had sacrificed his name in order to inherit a vast property, in 1849. " Change of name, change of luck." In 47-8, the house had been shaken like so many others, and the fortune was welcome, more so even than its enemies suspected, perchance. The great failure of Gandell, deeply indebted to the house, undermined it. Early in 1854, all the City knew that " Saint Paul " was running on the rocks. It is but truth to admit that excessive benevolence, when the gifts are advertised, and the secretaries of charitable associations are expressly, though privately, enjoined by the donor to acknowledge the offering immediately, is a suspicious action in the eyes of monied men. Sir John Dean Paul's face was as famihar among clericals as a bishop's, and his name was a standing line in religious newspapers. In the spring and summer months, a certain circle knew that he had lost £5,000 in an unaccountable sale and buying in of Danish bonds. In June the Prebendary of 58 " THE SMASH-UP OF STRAHANS." Kocliester Cathedral, the Eev. Dr. Griffiths, came to town, having been persistently warned against his devout friend as a devourer of widows" mites as well as of elders' dollars. He had banked there over twenty years, and, no doubt, expected to have met with an indignant reception. On the contrary, the faces of Strahan and Bates fell when he requested to see his securities amounting, to some £20,000. Except £5,000 worth of Danish bonds, and they not cor- responding number for number with those originally pur- chased at his order, nothing could be shown him. The avowal was made that his property had been turned into money by them to carry the house through difficulties, and that other customers had been no more fortunate. He left them, pitying them personally, but determined to make a public example of the three. On their side, they lost no time to act on legal warning, which, had it saved them, would only have redoubled popular indignation. At a meeting of their creditors, they laid open their stand- ing debts, nearly £700,000 ; as usual in very large totals, not forgetting the odd " 19s. 3d." which always illustrates the gnat and camel parable in commercial frauds. There were good debts in the neighbourhood of £20,000. But there was undeniably more than £100,000 gone where the figures go when " rubbit off the slate :" stolen in old- fashioned English. A musty Georgian Act relieved a debtor of criminal consequence if the facts of his malver- sation of trust were drawn from him at the meeting of creditors before a prosecution. Unhappily for their plans the triple-headed firm volunteered their revelation. The non-financial public were still further piqued against them all by the intelligence that Strahan, Paul & Bates were but the names between the lines of Holford & Co., army and navy agents, whose dragging down with the big houses launched misery upon numberless families of the country's defenders. If by any legal jugglery they had been spared, they durst not have crossed a London street without an escort. The notorious trial came on at the Central Criminal Court during two days at the end of October, 1855. The Danish bond theft from Dr. Griffiths was chosen for the charge ; all three partners appeared, though each might have escaped. Bates was at Halford's when taken into custody ; Strahan "the smash-up ov stkahans." 59 was at a friend's house ; Sir John Dean Paul was found in his beautiful house near Eeigate. The police-officers, with that foolish lenity to great criminals which too often appears on the records, allowed him to sleep in his residence overnight. When they caught the train in the morning, it was such sharp work that the guard, innocently enough, since the great banker was not handcuffed like a low poacher, thrust back the detectives on the point of entering the carriage where he was seated, and the train went to town with him free as a sparrow. The telegraphing to the terminus was useless, as no one at the gates ever knows " the party wanted " on such critical occa- sions. It was Saturda3^ On the following Thursday, after having had plenty of time to destroy incriminatory docu- ments and arrange about private property and investments under pseudonyms, the accused surrendered himself. lie had " never had the intention to keep away ! " One and all were sentenced to fourteen years' penal servi- tude. "THE FOEMAN WORTHY OF HER-GOLD." "No man feols so acutely for himself, and so little for others as the constant dealer in money." — Colbert Junior. The parents of the founder of the world-famous house of Eothschild were humble German Jews. They died when their boy, Meyer Anselm, had not reached his teens. He had been given a little schooling and looked forward to becoming a schoolmaster when he was thrown solitary on the world. It was the year 1754. The French Eepubhcan theories of the " Eights of Man " to be free and equal were merely in seed, and the local and state restrictions banned the Jews into cultivating detested trades. The boy Meyer wandered from fair to fair, barefooted, ragged, shouldering a bag for his miserable articles of traffic. Young as he was, he displayed an aptitude for the old coin-collecting pursuit — very needful in Germany, sub-divided by petty principahties, each with its miniature mint. A Hanoverian money-dealer remarked his keenness, and took him into his counting-house, proving a hard 60 "the rOEMAN WORTHY OF HER — GOLD." master, but training him so thoroughly, that, before lie attained his majority, he started as a money-changer in that capital on his own account. After three years, he returned to his native city, Frankfort, where he opened a shop in the Jewry, designated by a red shield {Rothschild, in German), which sign became the aegis of his family. He dealt in coins, jewellery, and clothes of the French nobles fljong from the wrath of their uprisen bondmen (it was 1780 — '5). His course was not unique, for everybody on the borders of the seething cauldron bought of the bewildered fugitives. His lord, William I. of Hesse-Cassel, a selfish, haughty, avaricious ruler, whose love of gain was only surpassed by that for his order, turned his palace into a hotel so as to fleece them, and sold his army to England for suppressing the revolution of her American colonists. This ingenious prince exerted himself to remain neutral in the Napoleonic campaigns, but the Consul and Emperor was clearly informed, and aimed at him straight after Jena, 1806. The oppressor, who had amassed millions of dollars by extortions, grain and forage dealings, and the aforesaid trade in grenadiers, was forced to flee, and visited London and Denmark, the better to be out of the eagle's talons. Unable to carry away his treasure, he confided it to Meyer Anselm, whom he had already employed in minor matters. The story goes that the Eepublican column, whose pioneers had the most artful tests at hand for ferreting out buried hoards, did unearth the crock of' gold of the Jew himself, some £5,000, which was confiscated for his obstinacy as respected the Hesse-Cassel trust of £50,000. But, as the money-dealer had easily and rapidly transmitted the larger amount to his son Nathan in London, he might so easily have included his own in the draughts that it is more reasonable to believe the Liberators of Mankind only ex- tracted a sort of tax. The outcome of the Elector William's sojourn in Denmark was a State loan of a million, which he obtained for himself and his coadjutor, Rothschild. Thereafter, all through the contest with Napoleon, this heap of gold, continually aug- mented by old Anselm and his five sons, played its ponderous part. It equipped the 14,000 Black Brunswickers sworn to " Death or Vengeance ! " nourished the Tugendhund (the aristocratic Elector little foresaw an age when the Nihilists would form a murderous league against crowned heads) ; fur- 61 thered Castlereagh in his filling Saxony with a million fight- ing men, and fostered innumerable enemies to the Emperor of France. Uninterested in the politics of the Gentiles, in 1802, it is said the Kothschilds offered to refund their monetary support Avith 5 per cent., but their business aid was too valuable. The Elector had not withdrawn it at Anselm's death in 1811. He could not return to his throne until 1813, after the battle of Hainan. The ex-coin-collector remained rough and illiterate, an astonishing medley of the conventional low pedlar and the statesman ; he was mean and exacting towards his clerks, yet charitable to all creeds alike. He remained true to his faith, and certainlyhe was capable of the action ascribed to him of summoning his son Nathan — who was reported to be weakening at the knees under London social influence — to a re-union with his brothers over their grandparents' gra.ve, to swear eternal fidelity to the one God of their fathers.. He had brought up five sons and as many> daughters, and seen his fortune become colossal ; a prince had been his partner, now his were kings, and no war could break out on the Conti- nent without the Eothschilds willed it. On his death-bed he warned his heirs — for he enjoined them to keep the capital whole— to act in unison, and share alike — to beware of Eussia and Eepublicanism, and believe in Prussia and British faith. His widow never left: the simple old house, and up to her death the children met there to spend the Jewish New Years. The five sons settled in five centres of civilisation : the power nominally in the hands of the eldest, Anselm, at Erankfort, but really in those of the leading mind, Nathan, at London, though he was the third-born. The others, Solomon^ Charles, and James, were located respectively at Vienna, Naples, and Paris. . > As chief controller of their four millions, it is with the Enghsh Eothschild that we have to do. Nathan Meyer was born in 1777. His department — in which he was conspicuous for his industry^ — was the disposal of English goods, : constantly introduced to the Continent, notwithstanding embargoes and blockadeSi It is to be borne in mind that England retained the mastery of the seas, and many of the Napoleonic sealing-up of ports were but paper doors. 62 "the FOBMAN worthy of her — GOLD." One day, Nathan offended their chief supplyer by being too inquisitive about the origin of certain samples : the great man, in his testiness or prudence, refused to deal any further with him. This incident led the way to results of world- wide importance. The numerous family had already found a lack of elbowroom, and the brothers gladly saw their brother — spite of an ignorance of any tongue but his own and the German- Jewish, that jaw-dislocating amalgam — depart for England. He noticed how much cheaper the goods they had been in the habit of bupng became as he approached the factory-filled North country. At Manchester he fixed his head-quarters, and soon, by selling the raw material and the dye-stuffs — in both of which branches Jews were peculiarly masters, by their hold on the wool-growing countries and the Levantine trade — and by buying prints, he grasped the three profits, and could undersell in the home market itself ; his family therefore almost monopolised the Frankfort trade. Nathan's frequent trips to London led to his choosing an office there. Then (1800) came the turning-point which lifted the line out of ordinary circles, and caused them to eclipse the Laras, Gideons, and Goldsmids, as wielders of the financial sceptre. His father sent him on the £50,000 of the Hesse-Cassel charge ; and from that a connection with the Government was founded and maintained. Not only was " the greatest moneyed country of Europe " in financial exhaustion, but all the powers outside of Albion were floating by the imposition of debts upon posterity. The house could have no warmer high-class " tout," to put it roughly, than the Hessian Elector ; in every court he sounded the eulogy of his financial and commercial coun- cillors, and the Danish Loan was but a precursor of helps as remunerative to Austria, Prussia, Naples, and Germanic princes. Nathan's most profitable stroke, to attain two profits — always his aim— was to buy an immense quantity of gold from the East India Company, and after selling it to the Government, make it plain that he alone could safely and swiftly fill the coffers of Wellington in the Peninsula with it. It actually went through France, whose army it was destined to crush ! — the operator always priding himself on this as his " best business." "the FOEMAN worthy of her — GOLD." 63 In 1811-12, when his father died, Nathan was then at his zenith, and reckoned premier of " the three Eothschilds," the monarchs of the family. In the following year they handled all the funds of the Anti-Bonapartist Coalition. In 1815 Nathan went to Paris, and his father's patron introduced him to the Allied Sover- eigns, for whom he had, in one shape or another, raised fifty millions, a sum doubled by 1826, when the Eothschilds were the general Government bankers of Europe. The Allies' war-tribute amounted to seven hundred millions, to be paid in five years, for, one half of which no items were ever presented. Out of this latter. His Serene Highness of Hesse-Cassel and his associates were reimbursed at an un- mentioned percentage. At the banquet was recalled Nathan's declaration in 1813, that, "if England fell, the Eothschilds would be proud to be buried in her ruins ! " This is a widely diverse spirit from the shrewd observation of Gideon when the Jacobites threatened an overturning of the Guelphic Georges and he continued to buy stock : " If the Stuarts come in, they must pay over; if not, the present Government will ! " Again, to make the double profit, Nathan and his brethren furnished the advances to pay the war fine, and thus cleared additional margin. The outlay of the house was always ample for speedy and special information. Nathan had a whole day's exclusive news of Napoleon's escape from Elba. (This being in view of an English naval guard, induced Michaud to see the Eoths- childs' hand in it, as a mere device to impose a heavier indemnity on France, by granting the Imperial Eagle a renewed flight !) His couriers often outstripped the Crown messengers all through the great wars. The Jews tradi- tionally elevate Nathan into a hero, who had gone through the battle of Waterloo on a splendid charger by the side of " The Duke." But, in plain earnest, the ride with the early tidings of the retreat of the Imperialists, with Blucher in revengeful chase, was performed by the Eothschilds' special courier. He paid a long sum for a daring coaster, who crossed the Channel in an awful storm, and galloped from Dover, in time to let his employer operate on 'Change that afternoon, and the whole day of the 20th June. The master of finance proceeded to his regular pillar. 64 " THE FOEMAN WORTHY^ OF HEE — GOLD." to stand more morose^ sullen, and stupid-looking than ever, not a twitching muscle in that resolute, inscrutable, im- perturbable face. One account, indeed, says he gave out personally that the English had lost ; but this can hardly be well founded, since speculation would have acted rather in the contrary to his sayings, and preferred to go by the movements of his brokers, kinsmen, and agents, known and suspected. AH was gloom whilst he made his play. The fluctuation of funds was the greatest known, that of a hundred per cent. If he ventured all his six millions without reserve — which such sole intelligence fully justified^the profit must have been gigantic. It is not likely that Cohen, wlio had but reluctantly given his daughter's hand to the secretive capitalist, whose heavy features prefigured no king among Croesuses, regretted the match then. Nathan pensioned the "Waterloo messenger— how richly no published facts record, but it is known , that he rewarded a clerk for less important information with £5000. It is recorded that he, turned four millions into his strong chest in one certain day. JSTo marvel that his influence was omnipotent, and he could do as he pleased Avith the rate of quotations. His plan was simple as noonday, and anyone may practise it as surely who has the golden balls to play with. Being the solitary possessor, undoubtedly, of a secret piece of news, positively calculated to make the English funds rise, he would instruct his acknowledged broker to sell a tolerably large amount of stock. The word would flash about thati New- court was seUing largely, and there would be a fall. At this dechne, he would buy the choicest stock to a large figure ; the next day he would repeat the same tactics,' and, of course, buy in at a still lower rate. When the news would arrive in the usual course, he would sell at the rising figure, with even a moderate per- centage ; he had thus made. £100,000 a-day. The same course in the potato trade would result similarly ; and there is no more genius in one than the other. But these were the common operations in warlike times. , ■.,... Undoing, the long-followed ' and : patriotic, line of conduct inaugurated by Gresham, that is, fiiiding: the money to carry on the Government in the realm, and leaving others to "the FOEMAN WOKTHY of her — GOLD." 65 induce foreigners to invest in English undertakings, the Eothschilds coined money as the agents for foreign bor- rowers in Great Britain. They insisted upon all dividends being paid in sterling in London, and would not help Spain in her embarrassed condition. But this anti-national policy was the foundation for Peel's famous diatribe, which designated the family a curse to European liberty, for propping up German despots, and aiding false, fickle Austria. He added that the house had no feeling but for money and kindred, a point which only weighs with those who desire sentiment to bias business. Nathan remained punctilious in details, as in the days at Manchester, which he is thought to have quitted from some miserable wrangle with a fellow Jew. His knowledge of the bill trade was so perfect, though more papers passed through the hands of his dozen clerks than through any twenty houses in London (Sanderson and Overend & Gurney's excepted), that he never hesitated in the fixing of a rate for the most unusual exchange. His mental arithmetic was as wondrous as his memory ; for, being too illiterate to make notes, he had to carry his transactions, gigantic or infinitesimal, in his head until he left the 'Change for his office, where he dictated to his secretary. Dr. Margoliouth narrates hoAv another Hebrew, by pro tending to fall asleep from drink in his house, obtained hints for a successful speculation from a, conversation he heard, but it runs counter to all the character of the shrewd, reserved Eothschdd to believe that he would unbosom him- self with a possible eaves-dropper in the same room. Mr. Grant tells a tale more circumstantially of how an unnamed Englishman outwitted "Mr. Nathan," who had sent his principal banker and brother-in-law, Abraham Monte- fiore, to negotiate with Mr. Blank for a loan of £1^ million at 4^ per cent. The security was Consols at 84, transferred to the lender for the advance. By thus putting that amount out of the market, he hoped to raise the price. The special condition was that if that price should go down to 74, Mr. Blank might claim the amount at 70. Immediately he sold out the transferred stock as weU as aU he had standing in his name for himself and cfients, and recommended his friends to sell out likewise. Some ten millions " beared " the market till no one dared breathe. The 74 point was reached, and' 66 " THE FOEAIAN WORTHY OF HEE — GOLD." Mr. Blank claimed the fulfilment of the bond. Eothschild com- promised, at the loss. Thereupon the rival bought in at the low price, advised his friends to imitate him, and tossed the quotations so high that they even touched 86 ! He and his compeers gained half a million. Whatever the cause, the house was very quiet in the Irish famine year, and the commercial crisis of 1848 of Eevolu- tionary fame. Though the contractors' bills were handled by them, their failures found them unprepared, and the quantity of Consols the house could not or would not carry, when they had to redeem their obligations, bore the market down to an immense depth. Between Nathan and the Bank there was never any love lost. He had not co-operated with them in the government loans like the Goldsmids, and his disrespect, if we must not say contempt, for the Board of Directors was evinced, when in the panic of '47, which cut him sorely, he answered bluntly ; " Put Old John Overend (the bUl-broker) in the chair, and he'll manage better than you all ! " Once upon a time the bank refused him the special privi- lege of accepting his paper in bulk. He despatched an army of clerks from his own office, and those of his brother- in-law and allies, with Bank of England notes, which they gravely presented one by one. But, however business-like all this was, as the line of Hebrew heads perfectly hedged off the British pubhc, there was much" murmuring in the Tellers' Hall, which only ceased when the legion withdrew, their note-books still unemptied and their stock of cash-bags still unfilled. Mr. Baron Eothschild had been expressly desired to step round to the parlour and call off his investing force. On another occasion, though a Bank loan of a million in bul- lion had been made to Nathan on the particular proviso that it should be repaid in gold, he presented himself with their own notes. At the remonstrance, he returned with a faint smile ; "If you insist, I suppose I can get you gold — at your cashier's ! " In 1834, he had laid down as the way to be happy, to give all one's mind to business, and one business only. He recked little of title, and never used that of baron which Austria accorded the family. His children were less democratic. He carried his love of business into his religion, being so superstitious as to devote a certain proportion "the FOEMAN worthy of her — GOLD." 67 of any venture to the altar in event of its. success. He believed in luck like an antique Eoman, and would have nothing to do with what he accused as unlucky men. In afiairs, too, he was without feeling, letting his wife (she had £20,000 a year to herself and should hardly have gambled on 'Change) and his brother-in-law be proclaimed defaulters when the Neapolitan loan of 1823 wrecked the deluded and misinformed. He would take his walks abroad absolutely penniless, so that his companion would have to pay for any chance purchase. Bianconi would tell a pleasant story of having hailed a cab simultaneously with him, and so forming his acquaintance, which denotes that he was not always career- ing around in a grand gUded coach as. many provincials believed. He never studied or read, preferring his office books to any other. He was charitable, as charity goes among millionaires, such almsgiving being laudable in proportion to the state of the exchequer at the time ; but, perhaps, the merchants and bankers who suffered by his powerful com- binations were never very grateful for any aid which he migkt proffer them in aftertime. He and Sir Moses Montefiore were connected by marry- ing one another's sisters, and that name was more often linked with charitable enterprise. • Nathan was wont to say that however great the boldness and caution requisite for piling up a great fortune, ten times more wit was required to defend it. He was pestered with schemes and so harassed by threatening letters that he was at times a monomaniac on the subject. There is a laughable story of the period when the Carbonari were a tangible terror, of his having suspected two be-whiskered visitors of being the executors of a fatal sentence, and hurled a ledger at the spokesman who was fumbling under his Talma for a letter of introduction. The circumstances attending the death of Baron Nathan deepen the shadow ever mantling the common, fate of man- kind. He had gone to Frankfort in the summer of 1836 to witness the wedding of his son Lionel to his cousin. Baron James' daughter. There he was taken ill, and . died so speedily that the sad young couple came 'to England as the escort of .his remains. - -.■■■< f2 68 THE FOEMAN WORTHY OF HER — GOLD. The news had preceded them at London ; for a Brighton hedge-popper had shot a carrier-pigeon bearing the words in French under his wing : "He is dead ! " All Lombard street justly applied the advice to the great farmer-general of the present century, and the funds drooped as a flag is lowered to salute the illustrious dead. Setting aside his millions, he had left nothing for posterity to rejoice at. The Eussian and the Turkish loan (£5,000,000 on French and English securities) and the Suez Canal purchase have been the most conspicuous matters effected by the Eothschilds since their ancestor's decease, in our country. At the same time, their wealth remains preponderating and will continue so as long as the family motto is adhered to : Concordia, Integritas, Industria. child's bank muniment boom, on the upper portion of TEMPIE BAB. THE FOUNDER OF THE BANK. The origin of banks can be traced back to any country where two or more possessors of property placed it together and appointed one of their number custodian of the safe deposits. It was the Itahan mediaeval institution, perfected by the Venetians, which served as models until the Dutch, irredeemably lost as vassals of the Spanish if they did not throw off their harness, mortgaged all their posterity for ever for a war loan. It was this Dutch contrivance which under their countryman. King William HI, was introduced to England. Before the Ee volution of 1688, it had been a prosperous and paradise-like land, with taxes so light that the National Debt was but £700,000. Under the Protectorate, the con- fidence in the government persuaded the wealthier merchants and gold-dealers to consider the forming of a bank. The Restoration the more completely extinguished the idea, as the character of kings barred out the probability of success or even uninterrupted trial under their sceptre. Charles II.'s ministers had distinctly and gratefully acknowledged that no government was possible if the bankers had not paid off the Cromwelhan soldiers who would not lay down their arms with arrears unsettled. Yet in 1672, money being requisite to fight Holland, where the banished Stuart had spent a bitter exile, he seized all the money deposited with the govern- ment for pure safe-keeping. He offered one payment of 6 per cent. only. Eestitution was partially made in a peculiarly Merry Monarch vein ; but the breach of faith was irreparable, the ghost of a national bank had been laid. The government of the Prince of Orange sadly wanted confidence in his sohdity of attachment to his new country to be spread, and William fretted under the same need of money to war against France. His creature Michael Godfrey, and favourite Bishop, Burnet, assisted by William Paterson, a brother Scot, drew up a national bank conception which met the royal sanction. Burnet had studied the Dutch bank system in working on the spot. Paterson knew a httle of everything. He was a Dugald Dalgetty, as much of an arithmetician as Cassio, with a spice of the devil in Fernando Cortez. Like all needy wits, he could toss millions about with a confidence of 70 THE FOUNDER OF THE BANK. catching them which he would not have shown in haggling, with a crown in his pocket for a new sword-tag. Montague (afterwards Lord Halifax), appreciated Paterson's ardent spirit and fervent imagination. Besides, anything but direct taxation which would also procure immediate funds, was acceptable beforehand. Burnet patronised the Dumfries man because he had been originally trained for the church. The king and cabinet being eager, Parliament was most dexterously kneaded, for the leaven of land holders were hostile. By tacking the Bank Act to the tail of one concerning a raising of supplies, the mighty germ of an institution, apparently indisseverable from the crown and constitution, was smuggled through the legislative body. The royal signature was affixed 27th July, 1694. In return for the privileges £1,200,000 was lent at 8 per cent. The programme was thus couched : — It will rescue the government from extortioners, raise fund value, lower interest, revive public credit, extend the circulation, improve com- merce, facilitate the annual supplies, and connect the people with its rulers. On the other hand, able voices, and many, accused it as a monopoly which would engross all the money, tempt it out of trade, enable brokers and the like to prey, encourage frauds and commercial gambhng, corrupt national morals, and be used for arbitrary purposes of the worst description. The Bank received leave to discount with bills to bearer, their emission not to surpass the amount loaned to the State. 4 per cent, was the charge for management ; and the highest charge for business loans 6 per cent. ; but the bait not captivating, it was altered to 4|-, and then, for regular customers, to 3 per cent. ; next, there was a general 3 per cent., and, finally 4 per cent, a year on any metallic deposit, lead, iron, etc. not excepted. Sir John Houblon was appointed first Governor, Michael Godfrey, the Deputy, and Paterson, a Director, although the regulation of his devising prohibits Scotchmen from the dignity. The oath of allegiance was worded "to support the body politic of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England and the liberties and privileges of such." On looking at the chest, no broader or more deep than a seaman's locker, which sufficed for the first deposits^ and the ledger which recorded their movements, and then at the fire- IHE FOUNDER OF THE BANK. 71 proof vault and the three or four hundred account-books filled every week by the army of clerks, amazement seizes the beholder. The fledghng's nest was Grocers' Hall, Poultry, 1694-1732, when there was a difference anent the renewal of the lease. In a hujT, the Bank removed to part of the present edifice, 1734. The east and west wings were added, 1766-86. Soane altered and extended. The whole structure covers four acres. The provincial branches number twelve or more. The management is formed of a Governor,- Deputy-Governor, and 24 Directors, of which number 8 yearly retire. Their qualifications are £2,000 stock; that of the Governor, £4,000, and of his Deputy, £3,000. STORMING THE BANK. In the first rank of that countless column which can be made of English Eccentrics, must be placed Lord George Gordon. In 1780, he was the captain of a "No Popery" agitation, and he died an apostate to the Jews ! When he was in the unconverted state of mind, he had the misfortune, though his cracked brain was unconscious of that, to call up spirits which he could not lay. They came up in June of the year indicated from the deeps and dark dens of the capital, and even from the rustic suburbs, as Dickens has described. They massed themselves under banners of the Protestant Association, a sesquipedalian title few of them could spell, to march from St. George's Fields, escorting Lord George and a marnmoth petition against the Eoman Catholic Eelief Bill, to the Houses of Parliament. Clustered thereabout, the mob revelled in that horse-play, unless ass-play is a fitter cap —scarcely differing from age to age since that in which their forefathers baited Aristides. They pelted the members with oyster-shells and decayed vegetables after pulling them out of their coaches, besieged the doors four hours, and the Guards were compelled to clear a passage through the howling, sweltering, arm-and- club-waving knot of demons. From that afternoon to the 9th inst., one week, they ravaged the town, destroying SavUle House, Lord Mansfield's 72 STORMING THE BANK. residence, the prisons where their friends had long been incarcerated and their comrades after the outbreak. On the climax of the sack and pillage, whichever way one turned, the sky was reddened with the blaze of a noted house in conflagration. K the Python had been under control and directed subtly in its crushings of coU, nothing could have resisted. For- tunately, its marches were in pure chance, save the attack on Newgate to liberate their brothers. Not one raised the cry "To the Bank" till too late for it to be found unguarded. The Mayor shrank from his duty, but Wilkes headed parties, and arrested ringleaders with his own hands. The citizens formed a volunteer defence corps, which supported the Guards at the Bank. Nevertheless, the carnage was cruel around its walls. Again and agaiu the assailants were driven back by Colonel Holroyd and Lord Sheffield with the mOitia, but the conflict remained indecisive. Lord George Gordon came to the portals himself and ofiered to do his utmost to quell the passions he had applied the torch unto, but no one trusted him ; and, indeed, his harangue was listened to in a different manner from that of these wretches before they were hoarse with seven days' bellowing, lame with seven days' man-hunting, and fevered with seven nights' tmrest. He was shouted down and hurled back on his dis-associates, in the final charge. So many fell at that spot that both citizen and rapscalhon were ashamed to reveal their losses, and, dragging the dead and senseless to the river, launched them on a voyage to the Essex marshes. Early in the morning as light appeared, the tradespeople were busy plastering up the dents of bullets and whitewashing the reddened walls. It had required 11,000 troops to suppress the riot, but, as all know, until man has the physical endurance to resist a week's furious exertion, no mob wiU be more than a nine days' wonder, unless it be reinforced from without the town or is allowed repose. In November, 1830, the Bank made preparation for a siege. In the Chartist scare, 1848, the six hundred clerks rein- forced the military watch, and paced the roof and corridors, firearms in hand. The copings were added by Cockerel! after this event, and happily have been of no utility except as perches for sparrows and the Guildhall pigeons. THE PATTERN CASHIER. A LIFE behind the desk at the Bank ! Such was the record of Abraham Newland, whose name for many years was synonomous with a bank-note, and who was looked upon by the common people as a personification of money itself. Newland was a Southwark man, being born of a thriving baker there in 1730. While in his teens he entered the Bank service. Having quite a SwiveUerian penchant for the flute, he indulged a little ia dissipation, but then renounced " cards and dice and rattletraps and all such kind of fun," and he rapidly sobered down before he was of age. Each day he became more and more methodical ; from nine to three he seemed chained, like Marley, to the cash day-book, and the clock might have been regulated by his movements. In the first month of 1775 he had risen to the post of chief cashier, which he was to occupy two-and-thirty years, with hardly a holiday, and all of those few spent " within call " of Cheapside. Once only he was ill for a week or two, on the occasion of the trial of his nephew and adopted son, Eobert Astlett, whose case is elsewhere described. He lived on the premises, with a cottage at Highbury, where he sometimes spent the night in pleasant weather, turning up punctually by the Islington coach. He was also secretary to the National Debt Eeduction Commission, a title which, in those war times, would have drawn a smile from a bronze statue. It was under Newland's reign that the unexampled forger, Charles Price, had his long run. In 1807, after half a century under the same roof, he retired from ofiice, a model cashier, not a spot, not an erasure in his pile of books. He accepted a thousand-guinea service of plate, but declined an annuity, for he was passing rich. Of every Government loan a portion was reserved for the Bank Cashier's ofiice {as much as £100,000 at times), and the ofiicials worked, in concert with the contractors, to profit by the premiums. Newland was a particular friend of the Groldsmid Brothers, whose fabulously fortunate lives we depict in another place, and " stood in " with them. Close and sharp, he was more than a match for the legacy-hunters who circled round the childless bachelor in his retirement at Highbury, and there is a droll story recorded of his reply to one of the brood who had presented 74 THE PATTERN CASHIER. him with a ham : " A bribe of pork to ' a Jew ' — it won't do ! " Once he gave £200 to the Government in a moment of financial distress ; but, on the other hand, when prevailed upon to be generous to a city church in difficulties, he imposed the common interest rate on his loan. It was at the acme of his humdrum days that Dibdin wrote the whimsical verse including the lines : " There ne'er was a name So lauded by fame Through air, land, ocean, and through laud, As one that is -vrrote On every hank-note ; And you all must know Abraham Newland ! Oh, Abraham Newland ! notified Abraham Newland ! I haye heard people say ' sham Abraham," you may, But you must not sham Abraham Newland ! " His own epitaph is neither stronger nor less tame than this jingle, and runs : "Beneath this stone old Abraham lies ; Nobody laughs, and nobody cries : Where he's gone and how he fares — No one knows, and no one cares." On the contrary, he was very much inquired for during his brief illness ; and when he died, November 21st, 1807, without pain, the old city merchants and his colleagues on 'Change and in the Bank sincerely deplored him. Just before he passed away he was reading the paper, and smiled to the doctor, saying, " I mean to carry the last bank-rate to the other world." There was a general suspension of business along the road from Highbury, and in the city, as his funeral cortege came under the walls where he had set the best examples, headed by two bank porters, in full paraphernalia. They, as well as the higher ofiicials, were remembered handsomely in his will. He was succeeded by Henry Hase, his executor, to whom he left over a thousand pounds, the Goldsmids receiving the same sum between them for mourning rings. THE CURIOSITIES OF BANK NOTES. The early notes issued by the Bank were quite of the nature of those letters of credit, the "circulars," with which the exigencies of Continental and Transatlantic tours have made us familiar. Issued as certificates of a certain amount of THE CUitlOSITIES OF BANK NOTES. 75 ready money or bullion having been paid in, the holder could draw at his pleasure the whole or any amount at will, the withdrawals being endorsed or the bill cancelled and kept as the case might be. In 1715, the owner of a £100 note, after having been paid £90, extracted the red ink endorsement, and presenting it again obtained £25 further instead of the true balance. The offender was condemned to death for the felonious alteration, but it raised a novel point, and he -was pardoned. In 1881, the Lord Chief Justice decided that alteration of the numbers on a note is not a "material particular," so that the receiver for a valuable consideration may recover the amount at the Bank. So his predecessors on the bench of a century and a half distant may be pardoned hesitating to sacrifice a life for a stroke of the sponge. For a long while the smallest note was a £20, and this great amount, together with the notes being not generally accepted, indeed sometimes not at par, threw difficulties in the way of dishonest possessors. In the same year as the first forgery, 1758, Lord Mansfield decided that as long as a holder could prove an innocent acquisition, even though one owner had been robbed, the Bank must pay, and people took its obligations much less hesitatingly. In 1793, £5's were issued ; in 1797, £l's and £2's met the trade demand when specie was scarce. One of these smaller notes was advertised as having been stolen from Marr's house by the butcher, whom De Quincey has put on a pedestal above the herd of no less vulgar criminals. In 1843, some miser's hoard was brought to the Bank, being 1,400 of the same, luckier than the heirs to the famous Pereyra and Thellusson cases, there were no such losses on this mass as to reduce the amount. Small notes reigned during the French and American wars until 1817. In 1845, a £50 bill of 1753 was presented, and a £20 of 1762 had been previously paid. The loss to the unwise proprietor in his not investing his money to better purpose may be illustrated by a quite recent American decision in favour of an English holder of an Indiana Bond of 1836, for 1,000 dollars, the accumulated interest in its 45 years' life being 4,563 dollars, more than 4^ times the original value. Sydney Smith, who lost so heavily by American investments in similar paper, would have been comforted by this judgment. In 1821, the small 76 THE CURIOSITIES OF BANK NOTES. notes ceased, and the yellow smile of gold was an everyday sight. In 1837, the largest note was for £1,000. But there are legends of notes to enormous amounts. A story of 1740 runs that a director lost one for £30,000, which was carried by a draught of another description into an inaccessible nook of the chimney. He obtained the cash from the Bank, without, apparently, any indemnity con- dition ; for when the note turned up, having been found by a mason who was pulling the mansion to pieces, the heirs would not reimburse the Bank for the second payment which was inevitable. The own brother to this note was to be seen in the early year of this century, framed as a parlour ornament in the Portland Street dwelling of an eccentric character. A postbill for £40,000 was found in the Bible of a noble- man's departed grandmother, by the accident of his festive company disputing on a scriptural text — perhaps, " seek and ye shall find " — when a turning over of the leaves disclosed the secreted valuable. There is a tale of a London miser of 1800-20, who, on an alarm of fire being raised by thieves in order to see what was his greatest treasure without which he would not naturally flee, came forth with only a shabby Bible under his arm. The mob let him pass disappointed, but one of the league, keener witted, stole the book and dis- covered it was hollowed out to enclose bank notes. Misers, as a rule, prefer solid cash, though Cooke, the Islington miser, was long a feature of the Bank where he went daily to pay in his rents. A humorous tradition of 1837 asserts that a plain- looking butcher stumped up to the cashier one day to borrow £5,000 upon one of two £25,000 notes printed that year. Some remark was made on his folly in losing interest by locking up money in this form, when he blandly retorted : " Lor ! be that so, measter ! whoy, oi so loikes the look o' that un that oi have another a' whoam!" The anecdote would be complete if the man of Smithfield were credited with the pair of £100,000 issued the same year. American inquisitives of the N. P. Willis genus were eager to see the million note in the possession of the banker-poet Eogers. It was one of four apportioned by public rumour thus : to the English Eothschild, one, the banker Coutts, one, the Bank one, as proof, and the last as stated. The THE CUKIOSmES OF BANK NOTES. 77 plate was destroyed, which makes one suppose they were specimens of engraving and not tokens of value. The Eoyal family are said to have several for a large amount (though the Queen privately banks at Coutts's), and "Perdita" Kobinson's heirs were given a 200,000 pounder on no better authority. It was reckoned that the notes outstanding in the century preceding 1S32 yielded over a million in profit. BANK NOTE PAPER. As every body knows, the paper of the bank note is sui generis ; and one would recognize it in the dark. This is the chief security, and it saves, whatever the cost of its fine manufacture, that immense expense which a government incur that indulges in the luxury of artistic engravings of portraits and pictures. The early notes were easily imitated, and more than one forger invented means of impressing their fac-similes with the complicated devices of the watermark, which was fondly trusted to be only possible by the pressure of wires in the frame which catches up the pulp for each sheet. The per- fection of machinery in the after stages has removed this obstacle by makiilg the process too costly, and villainy pays the tribute by confining its cunning fingers to alterations on the face of the notes. Once in 1866, a superior workman in the bank paper mill, where the Messrs. Portal have been hereditary makers since 1720, was bribed to steal the sheets. He spirited away a goodly quantity, on which the counter- feiter printed £5's, £10's, and £50's, all the more easily as he had been in that business all his life. A change had been made in the manufacture ten years before, and this theft may have led to some other modifications. From the thinness arose the apt slang title of " flimsy," but it is not fragility. When doubled and sized a sheet will sustain a fifty-pouncl weight. Visitors to the room where were stored the paid notes for ten years before being burnt, were allowed to feel the insignificance in size and weight of bundles containing millions in nominal value, but which could be easily pocketed. In King's College Museum 78 BANK NOTE: PAPER. are the ashes of two millions of notes ; a mere mass of mineral dust resembling iron ore ; those of forty millions turned the scales at only twelve ounces. SHAM NOTES. As in most civilised countries rejoicing in that paper medium which Cobbett tersely denounced as " rags," the imitation of bank notes is prohibited and severely punish- able, however innocent may be the intent. Just as in the last century the debtors in the Fleet Prison printed notes on " the Bank of the Fleet," and later jokers got up drafts on " the Bank of Elegance," both of which were employed, particularly when intermixed with genuine notes, to deceive the public, so there is a class stUl ignorant enough to be fleeced by gross deceptions. The law is always put in motion, therefore, whether the ape be clad in fustian or satin. (There have been satin bank notes for advertising purposes.) The one issued by Harrison for Mr. Byron's pantomime at Her Majesty's, on which the Harlequin and Clown could hardly have been mistaken for Britannia or the Governor of the Bank, was as rigorously suppressed as the clever group of genuine notes, drawn as if fallen at random one upon another, shown for a day, at the Floral Hall Workman's Exhibition. In 1862, a worthy London merchant was amazed at finding he had run his head almost into the halter for vending some plates into the porcelain of which had been burnt, to gratify the eyes of some Sir Midas, capital prints of which our " tenners " were the originals. We have found no trace, however, of prosecutions of the once well-known publisher, Jones of Piccadilly, who printed a batch of comic and satirical notes in 1818. Two of these, being aimed at the Bank and " the Great Defaulter," we quote, though with all due terror to the august old Madame of Thread- needle Street, in a harmless form, we hope. " Stamp : a guinea (a scarce British coin). I promise to pay to the Eight Honourable William Pittachin or bearer, twopence on the dissolution of his English Paper Manufactory and the circulation of specie only. For self. Silvertouch and Lovegold, Brass Hatepaper. Entered, George Pennypiece." SHAM NOTES. 79 a I promise to pay Messrs. Fudge, Swindle and Nocash, Bankers, or bearer, twopence, when every Bank shall have been abolished, and when sterling gold and silver only shall again be the circulating medium of Old England. For Clodhopper, Bumpkin & Co., Zekel Hardbrass. Entered, Eoger Eustic." THE GREAT RUNS. " The multitude's capricious pranks Are said to represent tiie seas, Which break the ianhers and the banlis, Resist them howsoe'er they please." In the youth of the bank, it must be acknowledged that it was much distrusted, and but slowly conquered popularity. It was seriously threatened in 1696, when the Government, its only friend, and its amity depending on the readiness to advance cash, was short of money and credit. If one fell, the other must have been buried inextricably in the wreck. The Government debt " tallies " were at 40 per cent, discount, and the banks could not raise it. During the menaces of the Stuarts, old and young Pretenders 1 700 — '50, runs on the Bank dot the decades. When there was news in 1708 of the French numerously reinforcing an in- vading army from the north, that perennial spring of English troubles, the proprietors of the monopoly answered a call of 20 per cent, on their shares, and the Government doubled the 3 per cent, rate on sealed bills. Wealthy peers came forward, particularly the North of England dukes, whose land would .not have furnished them with more than Harold allowed William, had the invader succeeded. • At Queen Anne's death, business men were made to remember the event by a short sharp run on the Bank, of which the stock fell 10 per cent, from 126. In '15, under the first George, the outbreak of the Eebellion only fortified the institution in its loyalty, for which it was rewarded by an extension of privilege, and this held it up to the malevolence of the Jacobites, many of whose number were wealthy London merchants and bankers. In '45, the demand at the counter for cash, reduced the payers to the expedient of telling out sixpences so as to gain time. In 1849, when Charles Edward entered the bowels of 80 THE GREAT BUNS. the land as deeply as Derby, down dropped the funds to 49, at that time the brother Scot, Mansfield, deemed it prudent to characterise the " rebel traitors from over the Tweed," of a previous manifesto, as " the northern army." These were not the legal words of wisdom which would inspire attentive awe for the "patriarch judge," as he hved to be styled by a panegyrist. Small notes were slowly fumbled over, and hirelings drew money in the stead of the legitimate claimants, and came in by inner doors after having left their cash within in order to resume the same sham actions. The black days were to come during the war with Eepubhcan France, when the bare-footed brigands over-ran Europe, and defeated the mercenaries whom Great Britain fed, clothed, and led. In 1792, the Bank had resisted storm after storm, whUe three hundred of the four hundred banks, then in vigour in town and country, were shaken, and one hundred crushed to rise no more. The enemy of Dubarry Choiseul furnished secret agents with drafts with which to make a week's run, but they were bafiled rather with subterfuges than by honouring the demands straightforwardly. This was also repeated at the dictation of Claviere, who got up a run by means of good notes, with which excellent imitations were to be com- mingled. The Government of Great Britian had previously issued assignats, forged on paper made at the Durham MUls, to injure the Eepublican finances. It was " tit for tat." Payne's " Decline and Fall of theBritish System of Finance," was on the eve of realisation. In four years, up to 1797, the National Debt had doubled ; guineas to pay foreign service and soldiers sold at twenty- seven shillings, at retail twenty-eight ! Tradesmen demanded tokens for change. £5 notes commanded but £3 in gold coin. In 1797, it was the last pinch of a vice. The loans and advances to the Crown were so enormous, that the suspension of payment was inevitable, in accordance with the doctrine of " our country first," which counselled the retension of valuables from passing to either enemy or neutral. The Bank had passed its Centenary, and occupied a very different position to that of its fiftieth year. No one was guUed by the parade of " state reasons," when scarce a million in cash backed up the enormous note issue. THE GEEAT RUNS. 81 The four thousand leading city men agreed to support it, and a hurried Parhamentary Act regularised the abnormal state of things. "By Order" — magical phrase in England, which surpasses in talismanic force the " In the King's Name" of despotic eras — no one could claim specie for a note over £1 in value. The advances to the Treasury, say £150,000 at the outbreak of the American Kebellion, had swollen to £8,000,000 since the war with France. All payments once made in bank notes were pronounced irrecoverable. The new £l's and £2's circulated most gratifyingly, a slight pro- portion only coming in for cash exchange. The bill had limited the suspension to a year, but the continuance of warfare, and eventually the rupture of the peace of Amiens, smothered the hope of the buUionists. The prospect of end- less battle frightened the public ; coin was hoarded, and the notes which had been " current the City round" depreciated 7s. in the pound. Monsieur Barbe had added some crocodile tears to those which he fancied he saw descend from Sorrow's self at the fall of the scourge upon a grand nation unpossessed of " French firmness to resist disaster ! " What would he have said if aware that Mr. Pitt, probably after reading up Charles II.'s example, had calmly requested the Bank to- hand over £5,000,000 out of the unclaimed dividends ? (The eminent forger, Charles Price, had also thought that lock- bound money a sort of No Man's Cash.) The directors had honourably refused, and found the Premier a supply on another Tiddler's ground. " The beautiful simplicity " of Lord Stowell's. Three per Cents, rank beneath that of " the Great Commoner." In 1816, the difference between gold and paper had disappeared by the natural course of trade finding its own level, though it was not till three years later that Peel's Eesumption Bill authoritatively settled affairs. As gold at that nick cost over £4, and the notes required a margin of 3s. per ounce to the detriment of the Bank, its directors necessarily but vainly opposed it. They spited the petty traders and annoyed the forgers who had estabhshed regular printing works by calling in all notes under the £5. In 1825 fell one of those crises which financial students declare to form cycles. They had cruelly abstained from calculating the advent of this one, for the year opened with society thriving beyond parallel. So ran the royal speech, G 82 THE GREAT RUNS. but the hour was long distant when royal speeches were listened to. There was a gold mining company mania which one is afraid to dwell upon lest history would seem repeating herself ! The notorious Real del Monte was at £1400 pre- mium. In the dark months, the squeaking of the country mice began to be echoed by the town rats. The money spinner had changed for the worse. He was no longer content with his father's thin beer, Suffolk cheese and single "thundering joint" on Sunday, but feasted like LucuUus. The gaming was a fearful sign of the times ; a score of E. 0. tables were counted in fearless swing from Temple Bar to Pall Mall. No n^arvel that the low-lived Crockford accumulated some £50,000 in a couple of years. There were imabashed adventurers, like " Jew " King, who flaunted the remark of George III. that, " any man in this realm is fit for any place he can get," and qualified them- selves for their desired altitude by engaging clerks of arraigns to inform them early of informations against them ; " Newgate oracles " to talk them out of the dock, and the " West-end Thais " to reveal cabinet and financial secrets. It was " this dirty crowd of little men " which elbowed out the merchant princes, and founded banks, with notes en- graved in superlative taste, and with their paper incom- parably more delicate in texture than even bank notes. When confidence contracted, such notes sold at fifteen shillings in the pound. The better class agreed to bolster up one another, but in October the whole chain was being borne upon, not a link here or there. A run on the Norwich bank was only checked by a good supply of Bank of England notes. The police defended Tellford's at Plymouth from a frantic mob ; Wentworth of York broke, with £200,000 notes in circulation, never to go on again. Of course the bankers triumphantly levelled their stained fingers at the model houses which were as hollow as theirs. On the 23rd November the bank had to move with caution. There was no " let-up." Forty or fifty banks out of town were connected with Pole, Thornton, & Co., which had made £40,000 a-year profit these eleven years past, and was now willing to pay seventy-two per cent, to get out of the agency. Sir Peter Pole was a near relation of the Bank governor, but how could he help when his vaults had been drained of eight millions of gold. Turning to the Grovernment was mockery, THE GREAT EUNS. 83 for Husldsson accused it of having brought on the panic by excessive note issue, and drily recommended the porters to nail up the placard, " We cannot pay cash ! " Houses equal to the Bank were quaking, and to them what assistance was possible was alone grudgingly tendered. On the 12th December, the day of the Pole failure, the 'Change was a tempest-tossed sea. The funds fluctuated violently. Important firms with thousands of undeniable but unrealisable securities were ruined. Fourteen "West-end banks suspended for a space, when they could less agitatedly proceed. Country banks grew desperate, and adopted des- picable measures, showing coin in the windows, breaking the lines of carriage customers with hired carts, posting up excuses of their trusty messenger being on the return from town with ample specie, etc. But it was httle heed the city gave the outlyers now. The proudest business men danced attendance at the Bank in lieu of their clerks, waiting hour after hour, thirsty and hungered after sleepless nights, for the decision on their paper. Lombard Street was packed, and no tale but those untoward was beheved. The shopkeepers along Snow Hill and Fleet Street courageously carded their windows with intimations to accept bank-notes for goods to any amount, and the string of carriages, unable to carry their unnamed occupants in the jam to Cheapside, emptied them out to the enterprising tradesmen's benefit. One shop sold £2,000 worth in a day. On the 17th December the Bank specie was but a full million. On Saturday night the till and treasure-chamber were similarly cleared out. The officials were exhausted, their wits nearly gone, and only one was cool, enough to think and remember a box of unused £1 notes, which had been printed as a reserve when they were current. The lucky find was unburied, and the contents opened and served out. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said that the country had been within forty-eight hours of barter. In just such a time, money in plenty but not available, the great Credit Mobilier grounded. Such a crisis has not arisen again. In 1832 four poUticians took advantage of the great un- popularity of the Victor of Waterloo by subscribing £20 a= head, having a myriad- of small bills printed and posted on the second Sunday in May thus worded: "To stop the G 2 84 THE GEEAT BUNS. Duke, go for gold ! " An Oxford Street tradesman was their executive, and admirably he did the work. The next day the Bank was besieged, and £1,500,000 demanded in coin. Before 1847 affairs were again so promising that it excited merely passing mention that a Bristol milhonaire had died ; his probate duty reaching the maximum £15,750. Yet, two years later there gathered such distress that the Bank must have stopped payment if the Government had not sustained it at the critical moment. Since then panics have been but the billows which roll up to the wall of the tower and burst harmlessly at its base. WRITINGS ON BANK-NOTES. The craze which some vain persons have for chalking their names on pyramids has not let the bank-note escape their caligraphic and pictorial skill. Messages of nonsensical re- port have been carried on the " Leaf like Sybil's scattering to and fro, Our fates and fortunes as the winds shall blow ; Pregnant with thousand thoughts that 'scape imseen, And silent sells a king, or sings a queen. One has often read a scripture text or a scrap of comic song. Cobbett exhaled his hatred of paper money on the back of " legal tinder," to jest with Paddy ; and verses of Burns have been preserved, written in 1780 — an endorse- ment which, for the wonder, enhanced the value of the face ; it commences : " Woe worth thy power, thou cursed leaf ! ******** For lack of thee I leave this much loved shore, Never perhaps to greet old Scotland more ! " THE FIRST BANK FORGER. Among the early '50's of the 18th century, there was a younger brother of a well-known attorney of Stafford, who caused his family deep distress by prolonging the dissolute conduct which had led to his removal from Pembroke Hall, Oxford, into his life's outset. Though started in the wholesale linen-drapery business, on a scale THE FIRST BANK rORGER. 85 extensive enough to enable him to have a London oflfice, to the envy of his Staffordshire fellow traders, Eichard William Vaughan speedily failed, and with such spotted books to show that his certificate of bankruptcy was again and again withheld. Coolly received by his mother and brother, when he went home with stories which always mantled a demand for money, he was driven back to town, where he fell into cloudy ways. In order to live he became a clerk to a wealthy gentleman in legal practice in the centre for that pursuit, Lincoln's Inn Pields. On some of " the thousand paths that slope the way to crime" Vaughan had learnt the value of hypocrisy. Not only was he an indefatigable clerk, but his winning bearing made his employer a friend. From sharing his conversation in leisure moments, the clerk rose to be the associate at the meals — ^^no far step, as still the custom prevailed, more common in Paris of to-day than now we meet it, of the house of business not being separable from that of dwelling. Vaughan pleased the daughter of Mr. Bliss, and though an heiress on whom even a young judge in perspective had bent a solicitous eye, the clerk became a favourite theme. Unfortunately she had imbibed so much of the paternal attention to the main chance as to expect her imposing dower to be counterbalanced in some degree. The bankrupt, the spendthrift collegian, the coffee-house lounger, suddenly found himself con- fronted with the necessity to verify his reiterated boasts that his improved conduct had restored him to the olden corner in the family opinion. He roundly asserted that at last the" bankruptcy certificate would be handed him on application, and that then his mother would start him anew in business with a thousand pounds. Half that he would settle on his wife. The papa clinched what was quite a bargain by fixing the day of the nuptials for the Easter Tuesday that year of grace, 1758. Since it looked unseemly for the rich young lady to take her father's clerk's hand too fresh, from the quill and ink- dish, he asked a month's leave, ostensibly to secure the maternal gift, and clear himself of his first business blot. He had assured her that he would not be idle those four weeks. Indeed, having already thought out his course, a perfectly original one, he had called on two engravers 86 TH3E FIRST BANK FORGER. (one a Corbould, another a Fourdrinier, names, singularly- enough, identified with engraving and paper making to this day) and had the line " I promise to pay," and a Britannia figure cut by the former, who saw in them merely a common requirement on billheads ; and a more suspicious "For the Governor and Company of the Bank of England," which line Vaughan, with the easy readiness of an apparently honourable gentleman of twenty-five summers, explained to M. Fourdrinier, a French refugee not altogether conversant with London mercantile matters, formed merely a " direction." It was the direction of the gibbet. Corbould had blundered in placing the phrase " I promise to pay," and had executed another ; which fixed the affair on his mind. And Fourdrinier was made to remember his work by the novel insistance of Mr. Vaughan bringing paper for the printing, so folded up that only the blank for that particular line of his work would fall on it, keeping each sheet in his own hands, and infinitely delighted when the master left him alone with the press-boy to work off the bulk of the impression. As there had never been an attempt to copy bank-notes previously, the prosecution allowed the defence of this engraver that, spite of Vaughan's unwonted behaviour, he had not reaUy doubted his honest intentions. Supplied with half a -hundred of what he meant to have taken for £20 notes, he returned to his be- trothed. She was assured that what was afterwards known facetiously as " whitewashing " was speedily to render the reformed scapegoat snowy as a lamb, and as for the material proof of affection and restored" confidence, what did she " think of that ? " He spread before the eyes of his Bliss a dozen of his notes. The heiress was not so blinded by love or so inexperienced in money matters as to be content with a glance. The impossible high numbers he had penned in, and the absence of watermark did not strike her, but she remarked the thickness of the paper. Vaughan promptly answered that banknote paper differed. He made a packet of the dozen notes, sealed it up, and, by anticipation of the modern trickster, left it in her hands to " show his confidence " in his beloved. He obliged her to swear to keep the strange love-token secret. So far he had succeeded fairly enough. THE MEST BANK FORGER. 87 Had he rested there he might have regained the parcel in- tact after the wedding, toasted his bread next morning, and even laughed with her over the jest. Unhappily, whether his duping her with so slight an objection raised, had in- spired him with a belief in the excellence of his concoction, or his need of money for wedding preparations was too keen, he ventured to pass one of the notes, and then a second upon the acceptor of the first. The clumsy fabrication was chal- lenged at the next hand, and Vaughan received warning. FuU of alarm he hurried to his aflB.anced. His manner, that of a man in the shadow of the scafifold, was disliked by " the rich attorney's ugly daughter," dubious all along of the unmercenary aim of every suitor, and especially of this pro- digal who had fed on her father's husk, at his entrance under his rooftree. Miss Bliss refused to give up the parcel. She rose to high words, Vaughan to blows — but they did not fall, thanks to the father's intervention. "What bauble was the mad boy clamouring for ? " sternly demanded grizzle-wig. The cowed wretch muttered that three hundred pounds were no trifle. A broken man with three hundred pounds ! " Ay " — one he dragging forth another and another of the brood — " he had put back more than that, but it was unwise to show it until he was clear of the court. The lawyer shook his head over the packet — a little thicker than the genuine — it seemed better in the family than in the power of " a haggard fellow who looked like proposing a flight." Mr. Bliss opposed the urgent plea, and put him ofi" to next day. " You will be cooler then, Eichard ; but now this looks like a falHng off." The next day Vaughan was arrested. He thrust one note between his teeth, whence it was extracted by force. A foolishly superfluous attempt at destroying evidence, when there were a dozen more in his pockets and a score at his lodgings. Lord Mansfield was his judge at the Old Bailey, where he was tried on the 7th April, 1758, spend- ing what was to be his wedding day, in the " condemned hold." He was hanged four days later at the Tyburn of that day, the terrible ancient punishment for forgery, ear-cropping and nose-slitting, having been but twenty years obsolete. THE IMITATOR OF THE WATERMARK. In the year 1771, a man named Mattheson, whose father had been a well-esteemed servant for piety and fidelity in the house of Lord Justice-Clerk Minto, chafed at the pettiness of his employment as watchmaker on Gretna Green. As the craft then required skill in engraving, and a general know- ledge of what his contemporaries termed " ingenious things," his attention turned upon making money, literally. He executed some forged banknotes upon the Darlington Bank — so evidently the work of a 'prentice hand that they were immediately stopped ; and, the source being traced, he ab- sconded to Edinburgh. Driven into hiding, lest his relations should meet him, for his impudence armoured him against mere dread of justice, he employed his dark, silent hours in much improved imitations, which aped the appearance of Bank of Scotland promises-to-pay. Emboldened by the ease with which they passed the scrutiny of his keen-eyed fellow Scots, he manufactured enough from the plate ere he melted it up, to furnish a fund for his journey to London and living there, and started by the coach. At every stage he cashed the fictitious paper and, waxing bolder the less he found him- self challenged, excited the suspicion and disapprobation of his fellow passengers, particularly of one — a Presbyterian minister. Li February he took lodgings in the Strand, and procuring patterns with his ill-gotten gains, engraved and printed excellent imitations of Bank of England notes. Be- coming reckless with impunity, he brought the proceeds of his uttering to Threadneedle-street in order to obtain genuine notes of higher and higher values, as his ambition reared and his field widened. His swaggering mien called for attention in something more than in admiring ways, and, in his vanity to show that excellence of vision which a watchmaker should possess as birthright, he one day must needs launch his opinion, though from a distance, about the goodness of a guinea, one amid 7,000 which a government officer was pay- ing a cashier. A brief examination pointed out a remarkable coincidence between his buying of large notes for small ones, and the appearance of forgeries of their respective denomi- nations in the Strand shops. On the occasion of one of these being stopped when he was near, a sub-cashier, only half in jest, remarked, " Oh, ho ! here is another of those flams THE IMITATOK OK THE WATEKMAKK. 89 which our friend Maxwell (his nom de faussaire) mak's well." He took a little precaution so far as to avoid the bank itself, but, having given too much custom along the Strand and Fleet Street, he ventured into the City. One of the clerks who knew of an order being given to detain Mr. Maxwell on suspicion, happened to see him, and came running in to in- form his chief of the proximity of " his friend." The cashier darted out, spied the Northerner on Cornhill, and, taking his arm with some tale of his having received a wigging from the Directors for overpaying him a trifle on the last occasion, drew him within the doors. On being asked his origin and intentions, he satirically described himself as a citizen of the world, who did not know how he had come into it, and still less how he would go out of it. Upon so eminently unsatis- factory an answer to that grave functionary, the Bank solici- tor, the officer took him before Sir John Fielding at the Public office. Bow Street. This office was established as far back as 1738, for the magistrates to meet and gratuitously try cases occurring in the county. The corruptibility of these " rotation " justices was a common cry, and the current Momus would troll under their coach windows to the air of " London ladies " even more scathing lines than these we print :~ " Now, would ye the powers of justice preyent? He too has this palpable failing ; A requisite softens him into consent ; The guinea is always prevailing ! " Sir John had broken with traditions. " The thief makers " who were not appalled by the fate of Jonathan "Wild incurred his frown, and his half-dozen " runners " were not recruited from tlieir ranks or those of the criminal classes. Sir John was blind and wore a bandage over the eyes like the typical justice, but his sagacity, his sharpened hearing which exactly weighed the tones of prisoners' answers, and his singular abilities, maintained him properly in the chair. In a few hours after his examination of Mattheson Maxwell, Sir John learnt his lodgings, and from that clue discovered not merely how he had come to the capital, but the whereabouts of his stage coach companions. This route, dotted with places where his forgeries had been uttered, was sufficiently compromising ; and, perfectly aware that his chances of 90 THE IMITATOR OF THE WATERMARK. escape through the meshes of the law were nil, he tried in the night to escape by a window. The next morning a Darlington paper was shown which detailed his first essays in crime, and furnished his description and a mad boast to a neighbour that " a bank-note was no work ! he could make one a-day ! " Thereupon he turned pale, burst into tears and proclaimed a readiness to confess all. This avowal before the magistrate ruined him, for the Bank failed in its prosecution. Their own witnesses among paper makers denied the possibility of the watermark being other than genuine. When in the condemned hold, he induced his former fellow traveller, the divine, to offer the Bank full revelation on the means by which he had so perfectly done his work and especially those " impressing " the watermark, whatever the experts had asserted as to the impossibility. There being no accomplices with whom he could have leagued the dangerous secret, the bargain for his life was rejected, and Mattheson suffered at Newgate. THE NARROW SQUEAK. At the close of the 18th century, the handful of honourable members of the Stock Exchange were shouldered aside by daring and unscrupulous speculators, whose capital was the outcome of lottery and other swindles, forgeries of all manner of securities, embezzlements connived at by holders of public offices, and the barefaced betrayal of state secrets to the hostile foreigner. Suddenly there appeared evidence of a mysterious operator, whose exploits daily increased in magnitude. The spies which each broker was obliged to keep in pay, soon discovered that the new-comer had so much money that three bankers were insufficient to hold the funds, but stUl he remained an enigma. His prescience, his proven knowledge long in advance of the Government's arrangements with its contractors and the Bank, his familiarity with the minutest throbs of the Discount office in that insti- tution, " the very nerve of the money market," startled those " in the cold." They redoubled their researches, and finally a choice few unearthed the foe. The formidable foe was one Robert Astlett, the adopted THE NARROW SQUEAK. 91 son (some said the real one, but lie was simply a nephew) of Mr. Abraham ISTewland, the highly esteemed cashier of the Bank. He was his deputy, and under his care fell the Exchequer Bills, lying there until a certain amount collected, when he turned them over to the Directors. Calculating that his uncle's profession and salary together would not account for the capital which he swayed, the sharks would speculate with him, snapping their jaws when they won, and repudiating the transaction when the contrary was the event, and defying him to publish their default with- out revealing his name and confidential position. He sub- mitted, and then the new thought struck them that his backers were non est, and that in plain simplicity he abstracted securities of his masters. While he went on robbing to fill their purse, they held back the denunciation which would have lost him his place. But other stockjobbers, who were unable to enter this swim of gold fish, cherished enmity against the gigantic independent. Neither for nor against, but buying and selling on certainty, Astlett bade fair to obtain the leading position on 'Change. The resolution to run him " horse, foot, and dragoons " was formed in a private committee, and every scrap of paper he deposited for security, and every step his agents took were scrutinised. At last, early in 1803, his chief rival on 'Change, a Mr. Bish, whose nest-egg was due to lottery frauds, and who had often been his well-paid broker in several operations, joyfully recognised among some securities deposited with him certain Exchequer Bills which he had himself paid into the Bank. There they were supposed to be cancelled or in some way withheld from re-issue. Without a word of warning to the man who had in no small measure enriched him, he com- municated with the Bank Directors. The first glance at the books of Astlett showed interlineations, and it was speedily found that he had taken the utmost advantage of the blind trust which was his by handing over bundles of bills which were accepted as being to the amount he called out. Over £300,000 had been converted to his own use, which, sup- plemented by his instant acquaintance with all financial move- ments, must have made him upwards of a million power on 'Change. In fact, nothing but the inability to engage agents without betraying his person, had curbed his play. When arrested, which was done immediately, he sent a friend to 92 THE NARROW SQUEAK. clear out his available cash in Lombard-street, and it was close upon £20,000. He did not therefore seek the help of his uncle, who never recovered from the blow of the disgrace. " One of the house " dishonest, and under his wing, too ! It was barely- credible. Astlett engaged Erskine, " the victor in British eloquence " at the bar, and bore his trial with the more equanimity that the Bank prosecution blundered by charging him with felo- nious embezzlement of valuables. On the contrary, the three Exchequer Bills mentioned in the indictment had been signed by an unauthorised official, for whom a special Act had been passed in order to furnish him with retrospective indemnity after Astlett's committal. He was acquitted necessarily, and though detained for a civil prosecution, breathed through a windpipe secure from the halter. At the next sessions he w^s found guilty for a lesser offence, but here again points of law were raised for a dozen judges to wrangle over, and he was finally sentenced to imprisonment. He remained in New- gate, in that tolerably endurable position in those corrupt times which so rich a criminal could make, for many years. The Bank recovered nearly £100,000 in securities held by his brokers. The loss of £325,000 was but a year's profit, say half the annual gains of the eighty other bankers in London. There was no alteration in the dividend, though a bonus was out of the question. TRAITORS IN THE CAMP. Peoudhon, the socialist, whom no one would have suspected of such a scintillation of poetry, styles the Bank " the Queen of Trade and Industry." It is to be regretted, but her Golden Majesty of Threadneedle Street has many " chevaliers of industry " in her train. As the grocer's boy soon sickens of plums and sugar from the daily contact, one imagines the Bank clerk as insensible to the gold he shovels about as the Monaco table- keeper. In the long annals, though, there are blots. Besides those whose monstrous deceptions entitle them to a chapter apart, there should be cited the offender of 1766, TRAITORS IN THE CAMP. 93 William Guest. He was the son of a Worcester clergyman, and of such stainless antecedents that he became easily a clerk, and rose to be a teller. For three years he had served in that capacity, when his suspicious juggling with the gold drew a watch upon him. He was seen to pick out mint new guineas, and on his lodgings being searched implements for filing gold out of the milling grooves, and bags of the dust were found. He had already cleared £100 by stealing sixpenny-worth of metal from each piece, taking home full-weight specimens, and returning them for inter- mixture with others which he served out in the day. He was drawn to Tyburn on a sledge, as a state criminal, and there executed. In 1789 a detestable hypocrite abused his position and a friend's confidence in such a barefaced way as to palm off upon him an acceptance for £450, which he signed under the impression that it was a receipt for £50 of stock he wished to buy. Though he was in the transfer department, and acquainted with all the means to avoid detection, he was swiftly discovered, and tried. On conviction, he kept up his saintly mien, and assured his hearers that, as he had " taken care of his soul, what was done with his body little mattered." In 1810 London and the provinces fell a prey to a prince of swindlers, one Eobert Eoberts, the illegitimate son of an illustrious house, who personated, among other characters, the Earl of Northumberland. Like experienced villains, he readily profited by all the catspaws he could entangle, and, by a decoy who passed as his wife, he lured young men to the gaming table, and insidiously directed them to the founts whence they could replenish their pockets. He ruined numberless youths, and never scrupled, to save his limbs from fetter, to inform against them, to bear witness, to hang them, and take " the blood-money." In the same year he had warped two clerks in the Bank dividend-warrant department, Armitage and Thomas. They prepared the papers to draw out the unclaimed money of deceased stockholders, and Eoberts witnessed them. By their betrayal the latter evaded justice, while the young men lost their fives. It must be admitted, though, that Eoberts, apprehended in the first place for the crime, had not turned evidence until re-arrested after an escape due to 94 TRAITORS IN THE CAMP. bribery. He and a fellow captive had obtained duplicate keys to half-a-dozen gates in the House of Correction with so Httle difficulty that the affair led to the dismissal of the head-gaoler's son and subordinates. Eoberts hid himself in a tavern under the disguise of a country lawyer, but was ulti- mately unearthed, with the fatal consequences to his dupes narrated. Shortly afterwards he and his wife threw their snares about a handsome, conceited bank clerk, named Whitehead. Introducing him to the stock-jobbers, who let him win at the commencement, he launched into extravagancies, opened a large house, where he set his sister at the head of the table, and revelled notoriously. When taken to task by: the directors, he promptly resigned, and went openly on 'Change, where his reception as an independent gentleman of limited means was very different from that the rogues had accorded an employe who had " an uncle in the Bank," who could help them to dip into the bank coffers. He forged some " Old Navy Fives " to procure funds, but, something of a coincidence, Eobarts, Curtis and Co. examined the paper too closely, and he was taken into custody. The verdict at the Old Bailey went against him. In mercy to his sister, the news was kept from her, and she was removed to fresh lodgings, where the tolling of St. Sepulchre's bell, when he was marched out of the debtor's door to the scaffold, should not enlighten her. She was in her twentieth year. The truth turned; her brain. Then she became a city curiosity, clad in crapes, which earned her the popular nickname of " the Black Nun." Miss; Sarah Whitehead would hang around the portals, waiting for her brother, after having been forbidden entrance to the halls of business. The Bank saw to it that she never came to want, and. various city men contributed to her support. She once attacked Baron Nathan Eothschild for "the thousands he had robbed her of." The sullen millionaire smiled grimly for a rarity, and bought her off with a bit of silver " on account." There was a neighbouring chop-house where she went daily for lulich; and there curiosity-mongers would offer a glass of wine to chat with her on her one theme of interest, and see her accept the compliment with old-time courtesy. She died suddenly, at about her sixtieth year. THE "BLACK NUn" AND THE "WHITE LADY." 95 Her latter days were divided with a rival for similar honours, in a " White Lady," who haunted the Bank pre- cincts and doorway, waiting for her lover, who was employed therein — so she deluded herself. It is, perhaps, not a sub- ject to be facetious upon, but the meeting of these two tragedy queens of humble life has points of drollery akin to that imagined by Champfleury, when he contemplated the encounter, in the Middle Ages, of a brace of the impostors who personated " the "Wandering Jew." In 1808, humanitarian doctrines, which had long been laughed at, were Listened to with effect. Not unfre- quently, witnesses and prosecutors would abscond, spite of heavy bail, rather than cause the death of a fellow being for crime of which mere lucre was the object. A person of the reverse complexion would seem to be a Mr. Bish, of the Stock Exchange, whom we have seen, in the case of Astlett, bring a person under the gibbet. Eive years subsequejitly, recognising three Exchequer Bills among the securities given him with which to pur- chase stock for the Bank cashier, Swainston, he acquainted his employers with the circumstances. Confronted with them, Swainston, unaware of the information, granted that no such bills once paid in could get out again, and when those he had appropriated were shown him he laid the blame on some mythical friend on whose behalf he was acting. This time Mr. Bish was not foiled ; the embezzler was punished to the uttermost. The same fatal name yet again rises in connection with a trial which excited the deepest commotion in society. The son of a bank director, and himself an M.P., Benjamin Walsh, had not met with Bish's success in lottery speculations. But he had laid a better trap for a single pigeon, and defrauded Sir Thomas Plomer of over £20,000, of which that worthy . knight saw but a few pounds again. He was convicted, but family influence strained every nerve, not forgetting that of " war," and his life was spared. He was made a bankrupt, though the creditors ihad the judgment for their return, and the House of Commons expelled him. An unfaithful servant of a less degree next pitted his dexterity against the bank detectives. Foss was a copper- plate printer who left the bank under the guise of going into a private business. ■ But, unknown to his partner, he taught 96 TRAITORS IN THE CAMP. himself engraving, and found out a means of imitating the watermark. Thus grounded, he printed an edition, but two of his accomphces were caught in the passing, and both turning King's evidence, he was found guilty and executed in November, 1813. Within ten years an impudent theft cast a cloud over the bank clerks, now an important body. One of their number, Wilham Turner, ordered to send £4,795 Navy Three per Cents, to Sir Kobert Peel, credited him with £14,795 and by open- ing an account to himself under an imagined name, obtained the £10,000 in fifteen notes. To conceal his proceeding, he abstracted a leaf from the transfer-book, and altered all the numbers following in order, to prevent the omission being quickly perceived. An accident set an investigator on the scent, and the warrant for his detention was issued. There still being doubt about a gentleman of his respectability, the pohce officer in plain clothes allowed him a measured liberty till his examination by the directors next day should make a certainty of their surmises. Turner, spending the night in a locked-up room of a coffee-house, tried to escape by the bedclothes twisted as a rope. But, under the rule of Sir Eobert Peel, shoddy and siz- ing had crept into our Enghsh manufacture of textile fabrics, and sheet and counterpane tore in twain. The fugitive fell from the third storey, and was a fitter candidate for St. Bartho- lomew's than Newgate. It was not for months that he was tried, and then he entered the dock on crutches. This pitiable spectacle had an impression on the jury, for though twelve of the notes were traced to him. Turner was ac- quitted. It is true that his counsel cleverly annulled the principal witness, who hesitated to kiss the Bible as a divine revelation. The cripple went to Italy to spend what illicit harvest the lawyers had not cut into, but returned unfit for honest labour. The detectives let him know when he crept into the bank on mere pretext that he was closely watched, and he had to renounce any hope of essaying a second stroke. He died a ragged vagrant in a slum. The year 1844 was marked in red letter by the daring and successful exploit of William Burgess, together with a detective's chase under the Extradition Act, which surpasses the invention of Gaboriau. Burgess, a clerk in the power- niAITORS IN THE CAMP. 97 of attorney department, had fixed his aim on stock standing in the name of a custom-house official, named Oxenford. Though the latter wore a face familiar among Burgess's colleagues, he relied on accident aiding him, and induced a worthless character, horse-coper, and associate of sport- ing men, to personate him. This Mr. Elder co-operated with him in every way, and was only unequal to him in nerve. Mr. Elder came to the desk, went through all the forms, and wrote the name of Oxenford, in which he had probably been well drilled, for it was always understood at Aldridge's that he could not write his own " X," and received the stock. Burgess had arranged with a broker for its conversion into money, but as a first check : his bankers, Lubbock and Co., being short of gold, handed over £8,000 in eight notes. Elder boldly returned to the Bank, pulled out the sacks he had ready in a carpet bag, and had them filled with gold. A second check : they were too heavy for him to lift. Burgess had forgotten to warn him of that. However desirous to avoid observation, he was forced to have the escort of a couple of the porters to his carriage, a hired one, where no doubt he breathed freely for the first time that hour. On the journey to the livery stables, he distributed the gold partly about him so as to carry the bag unaided into a cab, which bore him to the rendezvous. It was the public house at the top of St. Martin's Lane, kept by the ex-pugilistic champion, Ben Gaunt. Burgess, who had the day to himself from having timed the operation with a holiday he had obtained, was there eagerly waiting. The pair caught the Liverpool mail train, and were soon on board the steamship Britannia on the way to Halifax and Boston. They were clean ofi", but cunning Mr. Burgess's start was shortened by a broker whom he had sounded on the subject of selling the £8,200 Oxenford stock. This person whom he had ignored in favour of a less curious agent, stepped round to the Bank to see why Burgess had not come to him on the previous Saturday. Distrust sprang up. The first glance at the books displayed the disappearance of the Oxenford property. The comparison of signatures showed, too, how little they agreed. It was a cheat without an atom of finesse, and yet had drawn the spoil with as much sureness as far more ingenious attacks known to the Bank solicitor. H 98 TRAITOES IN THE CAMP. Ugly tales about how Burgess spent the nights now fluttered upon that gentleman thickly. Among the loose associates of the white-chokered clerk by day and diamond- pin-throated Haymarket reveller by night, none had a blacker recommendation than Joseph Elder, who was also missing. The Mansion House ofiicers, Forrester Brothers, were summoned into council, and the clauses were pointed out in that treaty in which Lord Ashburton had not forgotten that he was a Baring, and bounden to protect the trading community. If the rogues were grasped before they could make minis meat of their pieces, the Bank might not have so painful a settlement with Mr. Oxenford after all. One of the Forresters and an attache of the plundered establishment, whose ability to recognise his peccant fellow-clerk entitled him to an American excursion, raced down to the best steamship sailing from the Mersey. On the third day of September, the gold Had been taken ; on the Tuesday after the discovery was made ; and within the fortnight the ocean chase was begun. At Halifax, the pursuers found that the fugitives had gone on to Boston. That was their error, for a push to Montreal and into the States by Detroit might have ruined the scent. They were tracked to New York, and then through a tour during which they had daringly ventured into Canada. They had no fear, and after the first excitement of pleasuring, came back to Boston " to settle down." They put £7,000 in a bank. Elder, who called himself their uncle, realised his dream by keeping a public-house, Americanice, an inn, but. Burgess who had not hesitated to brag of his late responsible position in the chief banking-house of the world, plunged into gay company, introduced the latest fashion of D'Orsay, of burning raisins in genuine champagne, and drove out daily behind a " spanking span of trotters " to superintend an " English basement " mansion which he was having erected in Charlestown — the Clapham of the capital of the Granite State. Into this fools' paradise burst Mr. Andrew Forrester and his identifying adjunct. Elder was arrested in prison, and, having the wine sour in his mouth, as a Frenchman would say, at the prospect of a return to England, hung himself in his P. E. bandannas, faithful to the colours of Ben Gaunt to the last. TRAITORS IN THE CAMP. 99 His captain was a less easily demoralised knave. He was staying for the moment at the hotel of Nahant — the pre- decessor of Newport as an Atlantic Brighton-cum-Margate- plus-Scarborough watering-place. He espied the pohce and recognised his former associate. Breaking off a reminiscence of the opera-pit, or more likely, the rat-pit, Burgess ran through the hotel and escaped by the backway, just as he was, without overcoat or hat. He reached a friend's safely and sent him there for his money and valise, but the police stopped that move, though the man would not betray their rendezvous. Not finding the friend return, the Englishman started along the coast to find a boat or some refuge. He was hotly pursued, through quick sands and deep water and over the rocks ; but maintained his lead. Arriving at the row boat he sought, he valiantly put forth into the open seas. He was tossed about till evening, when he thoroughly despaired, and, racked with hunger and thirst, though not with remorse, flung away the oars, so as- to be the plaything of his fate. He was driven on a rock where there was a lighthouse ; for a day and a night, he lived upon edible sea- weed and rock-oysters, but then allowed the keeper to see him. That individual went over to the mainland, learnt the condition of his visitor, and sold him to the police for a few dollars. Burgess was secured by Forrester, and, ever retaining an imperturbable demeanour, was eventually transported for life from the Old Bailey dock. With considerable delicacy, the Bank allowed only the principals to produce the evidence, and so spared his confreres being brought face to face with the man who had stood at their elbows on duty. Nearly all the money was recovered, the American bank turning over its deposit, and the petty cash on the prisoner and his associate making up the balance. Since then, so numerous and severe are the precautions to maintain the thousand servitors of The Old Lady without a a black sheep, that the world would be startled to hear of any repetition of the misdeeds recorded. Up to 1848, she was rather grand-motherly in her attentions, not only calling her boys in before 11 p.m., but issuing private instructions as to hirsute appendages ; although ten years afterwards, Mr. Sala accredits them with the most luxuriant whiskers in the City! In 1850, the junior clerks were given a library and II 2 100 TKAITOES IN TUB CAMP. reading-room for their recreation after three ; the pay of the establishment then amounting to £130,000 a year. The Eifle Association Company they form comprises about a hundred eificients ; the motto was facetiously proposed for it of " The Eeady, aye, the Eeady ! " The employes are liberally pensioned, and on the whole, the contented mind which is always admired in England, will not elsewhere find such an elysium as on the four acres of the Bank. It must be granted that Abraham Newland, after fifty years in harness, said : " I would not go back for £2,000 a day ! " but that was in other times ; others would rather echo the sentiment of the pensioned porter who, gently expiring in a pretty suburban cottage, sighed " Oh, that I could sleep my last on the Bank step ! " THE NOTABILIA OF FORGERIES. TROM the moment that Bank of England notes were of such a value as to be useful in purchases of general trade, if they had not been singled out for copying, like the forging of other securities which circulated in special worlds, one's mar- vel Avould be great. Though the house in Grocers' Hall did not cash forgeries without demur, like the Bank of Austria, a good imitation of the bald paper, which apparently relied too much on the protective fear of the death penalty, would pass from hand to hand for a period. In 1780, Aylesbury was the seat of a manufactory, whence the fairs around the metropolis were plentifully supplied, and each person who escaped being " bit " by THE NOTABILIA OP FORGERIES. 101 transferring the dubious note to a less wary customer, strengthened the popular delusion that there could be no conviction without possession. A few years later " forgery and impersonation (to obtain transfers of Bank stock) were very common," says a monthly periodical. Capital punishment to a brutalised people, of which the masses were hardened to the cudgel on land, the bamboo in the army, and the cat in the navy, was no detriment. The notes, too, remained single, executable to defy suspicion by any faithful draughtsman who could trace a fine line with a camel's hair pencil, and when repro- duced by an engraver by trade, puzzling the clerks on the staff itself, especially when the model was generally kept in hand till the counterfeit had been realised upon. In 1808, Birmingham notes were a matter of every-day trade in nefarious circles, selling at six shillings in the pound and printed in large editions. In the following year, when Cobbett hurled invectives at the Prime Minister as no better than a thief for seeking to obtain coin for debts contracted in depreciated paper, no shopkeeper took a note without " furbishing his spectacles." In 1819, a committee considered the prevalence of forgery, and pronounced one hundred and eighty remedies to be useless. Thirty thousand notes had been stopped the preceding year, and some two hundred and fifty persons prosecuted at a cost of as much as the notes pretended to represent, say £35,000. It was appalling. A return to the employment of precious stones as a currency was seriously recommended! as if the projector had Brazil at his back. With the cessation of the small notes and the mitigation of the law's severity, the Newgate list diminished. The heyday of the fabricator was over. In 1843, the galvano-photographic process was applied to imitating a £100 note which was current, so it was alarmingly rumoured, till the genuine ones came in and the duplica- tion was perceived. In 1862, the photo-lithographic press frightened the United States Banks into having a non-pho- tographable coloured ink invented, but the Bank jogged on in the same path. Nevertheless, slight improvements were constantly tried and adopted, principally by Bank attaches, and there was a change in the ink, the mode of 102 THE NOTABILIA OF FOKGERIES. impression to relief from that of plates in intaglio, and the signatures were printed instead of written. The human hand, though forming 2,000 daily, had been distanced by the diurnal demand. As nothing but first class work, the executants of which are above dishonourable temptations, and materials which require a costly plant are now absolutely compelled, forgery is rarely attempted. Alterations of stolen notes, principally to raise the real value, ingenious patchwork, is the sole aim in our age. The " Old Patch " of the last decades of the nineteenth century sharpens his talent in the boundless field of cheque- filling and circulating. THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. Tnto that queer burial-place of fashions which is called Monmouth Street, there came from Wales in 1720, a runaway tailor's apprentice, who, the further to prevent a recognition, dropped the " Ap " before his name, and styled himself plain Price. A daughter and two sons were born to him in his frippery shop, with the diverse fortunes of the girl turning out well, and the sons growing up into irredeemable rascals. The elder, Thomas, married a Haymarket orange-girl, and left home under the parental ban. In his early years, though sharp enough to be no discredit to that nest of roguery, he was always outwitted at school and in business by his brother Charles ; who, besides inherit- ing his father's talent for "palaver," became a veritable imp. He twisted his features and limbs like an actor, wore any of the old suits with befitting bearing and gestures, to the dehght of the audience of neighbours' children, and con- verted to his own use any money obtained for sales over the price set by his father. Though the latter, after saving £100, had cleverly secured the hand of a servant girl with thrice that sum for his wife, he was miserly and let the boy Charles go out as a parish 'prentice. In this capacity, he worked so indifferently, that his various THE ICING OF. COUNTERFKITERS. 103 employers seemed quite at a loss what to do with him, and he was on his father's hands until sixteen. One day, having sold some gold lace to a perambulating old clo' man, whilst attired in a conspicuous coat of his brother's,- Charles had the alarm of the Jew coming to sell the same to his own father, but also — the blame falling on " the young master in the blue coat " — the delight, to his villanous mind, of horsing the innocent Thomas whilst the clothyard stick was applied to him. Petty as was the inci- dent, it made him two unforgiving enemies ; the Jew for having his reception of stolen goods laid bare, and the brother for his undue punishment. He heard from them at a critical moment afterwards. Thomas, the unoffending, having been banished, confirmed his sire's opinion, by running away with a cart-load of goods entrusted to him for selling at country fairs. And Charles,' forging his father's name on a" £20 draft, cashed by a neighbour, was begged off the gallows by his mother. Apprenticed rigidly to a West-end gentlemen's provider, he was so recklessly thievish as to steal a showy costume from his father's, and appear in it before his master, from whom he ordered some costly silk goods for an imaginary "Honourable Mr. Bolingbroke." ISTeedless to say, he himself, in his resumed character of shop boy, bore the parcel to a, St. Giles's receiver, and returned with some paltry ' excuse. On the discovery both master and father repudiated him with perfect concord. With all the world before him where to choose, he pitched upon Yeovil, where he entered, as the humblest clerk, tne office of a brewer of small beer for the navy. During a year, he laboured so intelligently and faultlessly, that the absence of a character originally ruled as nothing with tlie maltster, who generously offered the young man of twenty- five not only a partnership but his daughter's hand. In the course of a journey on business to Portsmouth, Charles Price, had unfortunately come in contact with his brother. The worthy Thomas, afraid to return to town, had associated himself with the Jew before mentioned in the popular pursuit of buying prize tickets, with an occasional diversion into the " preparing " seamen's wills and powers of attorney. Perceiving that Jacob was thriving, Esau demanded hush-money. 104 THE KING OF COUNTERFEITEKS. With the arrogance of a scoundrel who had successfully- worn a twelvemonth's mark as an honest man, Charles swore he would never acknowledge such a scamp. Hard as this speech was, however, he was too fearful of a denunciation to refuse his brother hospitality when the latter came to the Yeovil brewery, unabashed, for money, and, for the only time in his life, as he afterwards bewailed, Charles got drunk while tasting the beers, to his ultimate undoing. The brewer saw the hang-dog reel out, and naturally putting a question as to this call on his prospective successor, was answered as soberly as the young man could utter, " A Portsmouth publican come over to sample our brews." But the strong resemblance between the brothers, and the surprise at seeing the Puritan in his cups, opened the master's eyes. Besides, there were few Portsmouth publicans not on his life-long visiting-list. Without any warning to Charles, he went there for enquiries about this party whom his clerk would not credit. He traced him to an old clothes shop. The hooked-nosed tenant said Thomas was but the shopman, " who had never left the counter except to see his brother in a Yeovil brewery." The Jew added, with an oriental memory, tenacious of verbal injuries, that the latter, who had once called him " a lying smouch " (a particularly poignant epithet) was not fit for an alliance with the daughter of the noble house of Grain, Mash and Co. Thus enlightened, the brewer went home and rescinded his offer, and refused to allow Charles to remain even as a clerk unless he found security for £30,000. Although perfectly ignorant from what cloud the thunder- bolt had burst his summer bubble, the young cheat was cool, and, asking a week's absence, pledged himself to return from London with a £100,000 guarantee. Unable to catch a glimpse of his Dulcinea, he departed. But he sooned turned off the London road, and capped his ill-luck by going for a roof to his brother's. There he was informed how and why his foothold in honesty had been plucked away, and brother and Jew uniting, Charles quitted Portsmouth covered with kicks and curses. Much as he dreaded London he vaguely hoped something from his father. But on arrival, in November, 1750, he learnt that "the THE KING OF COUNTEEFEITEKS. 105 commissioner of the board" had died on the 13th, and inaugurated the opening of Westminster Bridge, four days following, by being borne over it for Surrey-side interment. He had cut off both his sons with a shilling, and upon the prodigal applying to the heiress, his sister, for the coin, he was bluntly told by her husband, a man not to be talked over, that he must expect no penny besides. Nevertheless, the man was more liberal in other than money- matters, and obtained his kinsman a scribbler's desk in a Broad street office, of which the merchant, being a foreigner, would not have a familiarity with Monmouth street scandal. Tor nearly one year again, Charles trod the straight path, but temptation arising, he made some false entries to cover a purloining of half a thousand pounds, and crossed the North Sea. In early life he had received a few lessons in French from a Soho Switzerlander, and Paris would, no doubt, have been his Mecca. Unfortunately for that wish and his next victims, the wind wafted him to Holland. His cash running low, and the want of a recommendation barring all the gates in Amsterdan, where the mercantile houses were ruled by wary forces, his prospects were foggy. In his ruminations, he read news of the death of his last master. He chose the house of his principal Dutch corres- pondent, wrote for himself a letter of introduction " under the dead hand," which he had already practised so success- fully, and presented himself on the heels of the returning messenger with the cordial response at his hostel, as the " Mr. Johnson," of a fine family, who was inquiring after a Welsh uncle who had sailed, in 1730, for the Spice Islands, and of whom he expected a fortune. Whilst awaiting the arrival of the ship with his million, he condescended to accept dinners, then loans, and even a clerk- ship. Playing his old cards of industry, patience, and busi- ness aptitude, he again won upon his superior to the extent of having offered him a share of the house, and a share of the old merchant's heart, his daughter. Charles Price must have been acquainted with the Machia- vellian adage, " As well be wholly honest as half serve the devil." It seemed impossible for him to be the former branch of the proposition, and he secretly preferred £500 which he cajoled the girl to steal for him to the £50,000 he might have enjoyed without cavil. 106 THE KING OE COUNTERFEITEES. He had fascinated her — " she loved, believed, and was undone." And he fled to England with the cash, leaving behind him a broken-hearted father mourning over the miserable unmarried girl dying in child-bed. Never departing from his principle to swindle. Price showed the ship-master a forged note purporting to be drawn by his late master on the Bank of England, and promising a revel for his kindness on the voyage, made an appointment to meet him in the City next day after landing. Making " his vice more vicious by effrontery," he was at that hour promenading the coffee-houses, rigged out as a beau, wearing a nosegay of the hue and size and in the place that would pass it ofi' for a star, and a purple crossbelt which might similarly gull as the ribbon of an order. But though he was sharp, he was no match for " the needles " of St. James's, and soon was reduced, becoming their hanger-on. Alarmed at the consequences of a fraudulent pretence to sell places under Government, he insinuated him- self into the service of Sir Erancis Blake Delaval, and Avith him started on a tour of Europe which trained his glib tongue in a smattering of languages. He had replaced a valet named Lyes, but Sir Erancis lost nothing by the embodiment of falsehood that succeeded. Price came home perfected in "the arts by which gay villains rise and reach the heights which honest men despise.'' He acted the principal part in a trick by which his master, assisted by Foote, the first wit of the town and an unrivalled actor in a line of his own, married a heiress. It was impossible to keep the accomplice by his person and Delaval paid off his ingenious man. It was the year 1755. Price advertised from a Charing Cross coffee-house for a partner without business knowledge, but with £500 to £1,000, by which a fortune would be speedily realised. London being but a small ring then, Samuel Eoote's letter of inquiries was among the replies. Sure that Delaval's influence would bear him out there, Price had merely to find the base of this potentiality of for- tune ; and that was a brewery, the business of which he was a master. By sheer impudence, he got into his hands an assignment of the deeds of a Southwark brewhouse, and presented himself, thanks to his late master, to the celebrated comedian. And, what is more, and it speaks volumes for his craftiness, he beguiled Ijotli of tliem to become his partners. THE KING or COUNTEEFEITEES. 107 He had the skill to turn out a good article, and, as Foote wittily remarked, soon " his beer was in everybody's mouth, while his hand was never out of his pocket." Price, who had assumed the name of Bond (that of the Bow Street clerk which was remembered in connection Avith an old " raw "), with a wink at Sir Francis, who well knew why he donned the cloak, put by £500 a year out of that trade which his books showed to be unprofitable. Delaval, though his companions treated him as a noodle, prudently shook off the fetters of a business with quick sales and slow returns, but the actor testily declared himself " too old to be schooled," and stood a second year of disaster. In the meantime, Price alias Bond, had worked in every way the advantages which the double keys, Foote and Sir Francis, had given him to the world of fashion and the green-room. The humourist's beer was often tasted by such notabilities as Lord Delaval, Sir Philip Francis, Murphy the dramatist, the Duke of York, Lord Mexborough, and the chief actors, none of them suspecting what inward laughter reigned in that fair, deep-eyed, sharp-nosed man so quiet in their midst. When the end of the tether was reached, Price abruptly disappeared. It cost Foote, to whom all the creditors Avere kind, a third £500 to clear himself, not even having the brewery in his favour, for the complete knave had mort- gaged it so that neither he nor the original proprietor could claim it. Sir Francis Delaval still remained the friend of Foote. Indeed, when he died suddenly the supposed unfeeling satirist shut himself up for three days in mourning, and it was more from habit than from absolute truth that he observed, hearing that Delaval's head was to be dissected : " He has been my companion since early days, but I never found anything in it ! " He may have been reminded of Price when he personated Mr. Aprice, or even when he likened the rubicund Lord Kellie to Monmouth Street in a blaze. In any case Price, with his wonderful inveteracy in squeezing the last drop out of an orange, reminded him of his existence a little later. Proclaimed as an absconding bankrupt, Mr. Price found that disguise alone would not protect him, and a change of scene not being to his taste, he shifted into a corner of the 108 THE KING OF COUNTEEFEITERS. town, where so opposite a transition could not be expected. He " played the impostor's part and called on heaven, an atheist in his heart," as his recent boon companion Arthur Murphy worded it in his Juvenal. Price laboured and preached through three-quarters of 1756 as a Methodist, winning the affections of an old maiden lady of Chelsea, whom he escorted weekly to the New Tabernacle in Tottenham Court Eoad, all to the tune of £3,000, which he deluded her into imagining he distributed in charity. Set up with this money, he courted both a young heiress and her aunt, married the former and inextricably entangled the other. The offended parents, playing into his hands, closed all channels of communication with the disobedient child, whom Price took care not to acquaint with the simultaneous removal of her relation. This latter was an intelligent, elegant, beautiful woman, above the average in height, a qualification for the part he trained her to play as the Lovely Irish Giantess of 1757, in apartments by St. James' Square. This project not meeting with the lucrative result they anticipated, Price supplemented it with a very pretty scheme of advertising for matrimonial candidates of both sexes, underscoring the line " if their morals and situations are approved ! " as " if this saint without but hypocrite within " were a stickler as to morality. At the first flush he simply bagged the fees. But a gull appearing in the person of a boy of twenty, with golden feathers, who fell in love with the Hibernian Colossus, Price dressed up as a reverend-looking old gentle- man, and, in the character of the bashful lady's uncle, squeezed fifty guineas from the suitor. The young fellow, unlike other dupes in that age when it was more fatal to be ridiculous than criminal, " squealed," as the appropriate cant expression is spelt, and that so loudly that Dame Justice overheard it, and presently the hue-and-cry clamoured for Charles Price, " a person of evil name and fame and dis- honest connections." (From this, or a similar adventure, Poote took the idea for one of his little pieces.) To prevent too severe a chase. Price bribed Mr. Wigmore's lawyer with half the spoil, and as his bill upon him was over £20, he gained next to nothing by the prosecution. THE KING OF COUNTEEFEITEES. 109 Poor little Mrs. Price, the baby-wife, bringing up her children on £500 a year, dwelt unaware of who was her bad bargain's " dishonest connection." Having lodged both aunt and niece in quietude, Price betook himself to a small beerhouse, where he worked as clerk. He seems to have had a certain spasmodic love for toil, after all, to justify his saying that " Trade is like a fine lady, not to be approached unless you can fall in love with it.." His industry drew the attention of a good-hearted felloAV who, having the intention to start in the same business later on, was practically learning one branch by superintending the cooperage. In sedate and lonely walks in the outskirts, where Price trusted not to meet acquaintances, he unfolded the golden panorama to which the man of the world had hitherto fallen a victim, and which rapidly dazzled the cooper. They started a brewery, from which Price, in three years, obtained £2,000, although so cleverly, that Mr. W. never blamed him for aught in their misfortune. Price had even gone so acutely to work as to write letters of caution against himself, so worded, however, as to end in parading his fidehty. Though ostensibly a bankrupt with his partner, he laid by a competency for his double life as a retired citizen with his wife, and as a dashing gallant with her relation. At the end of 1762 he found friends to start him anew in the brewery line. His former associate, W., gave his landlord so strong a character that the latter, a West Indian captain, listened credulously to a plan to supply Jamaica with British beer, and advanced £2,000, which the insatiable Price swal- lowed up. In return for the kindness of "W., which Captain Wise might stigmatise under quite another name. Price pro- posed a hop speculation : it looked genuine, for he had con- tracted to receive the produce ; but W.'s brother, who was a Borough factor, differed from him in simplicity, and Price retired disgusted at the precautions hedging the fund he coveted. To counterbalance this failure, the arch de- luder soon managed to reduce a maltster to ruin by deluding him out of £3,000. Having placed this haul in his mistress's safe keeping. Price became bankrupt again. Here he avenged himself on Foote, 110 THE KING or COUNTERFEITERS. who had replied with a witticism to his feeler for a second partnership in a Popular Bakery : " As you brewed, you may bake ; I am never going to let you bake me as you brewed." He maintained that Foote was still his partner, and ought to pay a bond for £200. The actor cited his loss by him. Price boldly declared that he had often lent the comedian, advances on his farces, and that when they broke they had run away to Paris together. With a tragic air, he rent the bond in twain. Foote, piqued at the attempt to rival him in repartee, abused him as " a horrible and determined liar, who would have split him like that paper," which he had sold, against all honour, to his bankers. Thus baffled. Price accused the alderman of unfairness, in fear of the caricaturist seizing him as a fruitful character, and dragging him into the Haymarket Theatre. But he was made a bankrupt alone. There was nothing for it but a good-bye to his family and a scamper on the Continent. Luck beamed on him at Ostend, where he persuaded a couple of distillers with a few hundreds that there were thousands making gin in London without the knowledge of the Excise. The trio were on the eve of embarkation when the police apprehended them, and caged them in iron and stone half-a year before the nature of their offence was explained. They had infringed a law prohibiting the emigration of skilled artificers. Mr. Price, whose six months' silence had not rusted his tongue, hastened to show that, in exporting superior observers to England, they would return laden with seed to fructify in the Netherlands. At the end of three months, the authorities having discovered that their fellow- countrymen had paid £300, hinted to their would-be abductor that restitution might unbar his dungeon door. He stoutly averred to their intermediary that he could only own to £50, which he was eager to hand him. Immediately after that meagre fine he was sent from the state, without inquiry into the fate of those he had spoiled and led into jeopardy. But he was haunted by the secrets of manufacture of which he had pumped the Mynheers of the Geneva Scheme, and, venturing to London, put up the necessary worms behind the plant of a small brewery, and carried on a THE KING or COUNTERFEITERS. Ill profitable trade till the Excise men scented it. He fled to Copenhagen to avoid the execution of a warrant of arrest, and witnessed there a Court intrigue by which, much as he grumbled then at the exile, he was to profit exceedingly. In his wanderings he spent all his money, and was driven back to London. Forced to keep in hiding, he could repeat none of his ancient schemes among well-to-do people ; and, being in beggary in sordid Westminster lodgings, he had to copy the dodge of Abon Hassan, with the help of Aunt Poultney, to defraud the ever kind Mr. W. of a few guineas with which to drag on several weeks. He found to his cost, " no toU, no curse, no slavery like dissembling." He passed the end of 1773, in the Marshalsea, where a wretched creditor, utterly unaware of the respect due his Predatorial Majesty the King of Counterfeiters, mewed him up for a petty £4 10s. Shortly after the new year, the unappreciative Jacobin cancelled the affair by his decease, and the rascal emerged. It was a change from the pan to the fire, for early in April, an Excise Officer who had seen him on the look-out for a fresh dupe, got the old warrant renewed for his little exercise with gin apparatus, and lodged him in that old horrible Newgate where the debtor alone was worse kept than the felon. A few weeks set him sighing for his dear, clean, sweet cell at Ostend, and he wrote to the inexhaus- tible W. for keep. That tireless Samaritan alleviated his state, for a penniless man was the football of the mercenary turnkeys, and exerted himself to get him transferred to the Marshalsea, where he felt himself " at home " by comparison. In brooding, a ray of hope flashed on him : he recalled all he had heard in Denmark about the Queen Dowager's in- trigue to destroy Queen Matilda, who was sister of George II, and wrote, very badly, a pamphlet in vindication of the latter. With his usual absence of shame, he had no hesi- tation in sending it to Eoote, with an earnest appeal, and the actor brought it before the royal eyes by Lord Lyttleton's hand. It was the first on that subject. Without delay release came and an acquittance of the £1,000 due to the Excise exchequer. After a paltry shearing of embarrassed tradesmen whose secrets he told to their enemies, or from whom he exacted black mail, he borrowed £500 from a widow who was aware 112 THE KING or COUNTERFEITERS. that the wife he had wedded at fourteen, was coming into £3,000 when of age. He promised her so rich a reward that, when she claimed it and repayment, he denounced her as a usurer and recovered treble the loan. Directly after, he fingered the long-looked-for plum from his wife's trustees, her father having died without forgiving her. Even here he begrudged spending one penny more than was absolutely unavoidable. Attired as a clergyman, he made the round of his creditors and, scanning the bills through green spectacles, he haggled over each item, and settled them at an advantageous discount for " his vastly rascally nephew." The year 1778 had come, with the increase of war taxes ; only the rogues seemed to thrive. The notion of honesty was openly laughed at, and there was applause for each inventor of a new mode of stealing. The mass of the people fretful at the fortune of their brothers in the army and navy, often grossly enriched by plunder of towns and capture of prizes, begged, borrowed or stole the money for lottery tickets, for which they would not have paid the same price if destined for bread. Lotteries had been introduced into England at the end of the 16th century. In various forms they had risen in each reign. Enormous diamonds had been chief prizes, bridges had been built, terraces of houses disposed of, museums offered — all by lotteries. Price, whose brain was precise in calculations, figured out £25,000 as the share of a promoter in an imitation of a State lottery. Sponged of his debts and misdemeanour, he posted his own name on the doors of a King-street house where he com- menced a lottery in 1778. Needless to say such a man had no intention of paying any prize except to confederates. By some blunder, a division of the £2,000 prize fell to an " outsider," a man named Titmouse who had a lion's daring. He bearded Mr. Price in his den and called him a scoundrel. " Sir," said the hardened defrauder, " I have been called that a thousand times without the least impression." Titmouse appealed to the Bow Street magistrate, who despatched his trusty myrmidon, Clarke by name. That worthy, who knew his man, showed him a handbill which he said was one of a thousand which would be distributed THE KING OF COUNTEKFEIl'ERS. 113 at his door daily. Startled at the threat, for no one less wished a history of his early career published, he paid Mr. Titmouse " under protest," a phrase which would have charmed Ancient Pistol. Then he wrote to Sir John Fielding, Clarke's principal, that Titmouse had threatened to mob him and fire Jiis house. As it fell that Fielding's maid servant had also won a prize in the prize lottery and payment had been refused her, this shot missed its mark. Then he carried himself away with his cash-box. The same night the mob promised by Titmouse smashed the windows and made a bqpfire of the furniture. This proceeding led to letters of offices to lottery dealers insisting on a paid guarantee against damages for the future. While counting his gains by the bonfire light, Mr. Piice concluded to attempt a second coup. Accordingly, he took a shop next year in Butch er's-row, where the outer cloister wall of the New Law Courts now runs, and advertised by " boardmen," more or less of a novelty, the " Sanspareil (the Phoenix would have revealed too much perhaps) lottery, by W. Parks." There flourished a Parks, with a different initial, whose flowery handbills were a fore-flavour of Mr. Eobins' noted advertisements, and a parallel to those of his contemporary Christie the auctioneer. Mr. Price-sub-Parks' florid posters were visible on the shutters as long after as 1826. As a precaution, he had bought up the Swindlers Chronicle, which had incorporated the bulk of the Titmouse still-born placard, and the second volume of a " Life of the Arch Im- postor, Charles Price." These threatened to be popular, and to destroy his reputation as sharp, decidedly sharjD, but " a very honest man " — for a lottery-office keeper. He was now " grown old in fraud, though yet in man- hood's bloom." In telling his gains from the lottery swindles he had been pained to see so many false Bank notes. Upon this regret was based the next and last phase in his career. Not one foot was put before another until the first had firm foothold. He banished his wife to the extreme north- west end of growing London, and dwelt himself with his tried confederate, both in disguise as elderly persons, in the north central district, near Tottenham Court road. Things were in a ferment, and it was the year of the Eiot. I 114 THE KING OF COUNTERFEITEKS. Traders were glad to get " anything that looked like money " : at the same time the bank-notes he made were so perfectly executed that they passed every department at head-quarters save that where the numbers were verified. For these £10's, he impressed or ate off with acid the watermark ; he en- graved his own plates and naade the ink, with that ever- misappUed completeness of his, which distinguished his every plot. He never went to his wife's but in disguise, for which he used a variety of costumes, false noses, paint, and wigs. He was always travestied in the lodgings taken for engaging his utterers, and his mistressrkept a third refuge where he did the printing. She moreover actively aided him by sometimes appearing as a boy, for which her exceptional stature adopted her. She sometimes passed his forgeries, but generally played the spy, or " crow" as the word goes in the vocabulary of crime ; stealing into the Bank and watching, lest the utterer should be challenged and dogged, or hovering round the coffee- houses where Price made risky appointments — ready to receive him in a coach, or flee with his outer coverings and the supply of notes. The rest was child's play to the dissimulator. He chose countrified and silly lads for messengers. These he sent to the lottery offices, where they were only too glad to take large notes. Occasionally in one week he would clear £10,000. In his repose he would make six notes of another figure, and repeat the operation. He had risen to the £40 denomination at the close of the year when the Bank handbills offered £200 reward for a decrepit old man, muffled up, bandaged, spectacled and wearing a black blinker over the eye he kept towards those he parleyed with. Hence the popular cognomen of " Old Patch." There was a chance for the police, full of faultiness then, if unity had prevailed ; but the Bank solicitor, the Bow Street clerk and the chief runner, Clarke, were at logger- heads. Price seemed to revel in parading clues, as witness among his fifty names that of Wigmore, who might thus have been inveigled into social injury through arrest. One case was unique, for a note which he had paid away was sent to the Bank for inquiry and returned as unquestion- able. THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. 115 One day Price engaged a room just to rob a string of shops in the neighbourhood witlj a few ten's, and then he took a warehouse for the bales of goods he bought, merely to have an excuse for passing fifties. Throwing off his mask and gouty gentleman's swathings, he frequented the most public places, and time and again condoled with his victims on their losses by " a precious old hypocrite." This protracted immunity put him forward in the most unlikely places. He actually hired the window of an Oxford Street stationer, who often took in his correspondent's letters, brimful of burning secrets who can doubt, in order to revile the forger Eyland who passed under it on his way to be the last executed at Tyburn. " Ha, ha ! " rang out Price's fiendish laughter ; " there goes ' Old Patch ! ' " In the summer of 1784, Price, figuring as a German Jew, under the name of Schutz, partially deceived a diamond dealer, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, though of that race, and there was but a narrow escape of £5,000 of diamonds changing hands for a bundle of forgeries. At the hour he appointed to come as frOm the Bank, the police called on Mr. Levi, to warn him against " Old Patch." In October, wearing the disguise of a consumptive, crippled, jaundiced greybeard, he worked off fourteen £50's at the Bank counter for the equivalent in good £100's. There is this excuse for the cashier, that it was the day of the Peace Proclamation and the shouting and cracking of squibs penetrated even to the ancient churchyard which is the circumvallated garden of the Bank. Fully conscious of the breezes this would stir up, and perhaps blow Messrs. Clarke and Bond and the Bank Com- mittee into concert, Mr. Price, retaining his disguise, began his jaunt in style to Paris. On the road there was a double scare ; his post-chaise was claimed in the King's name by a royal messenger, and while he was forced to share it with that dignitary, a jolt on the wretchedly rutty road burst a tin caddy honest Mr. Schutz would hold between his aged knees and a torrent of guineas burst forth. On his return to town, the King's messenger perceived a likeness in his enforced travelling companion to the man in the most recent Bank placard of "Old Patch" and mentioned the occurrence. i2 116 THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. While there was not precisely an extradition act between England and the Continent, ther^ was a way to apprehend English fugitives abroad as " national robbers," unless the gentry ran into churches for sanctuary — a possibility before the Great Revolution. And the Bank representative hurriedly crossed to Calais. The rickety Mr. Schutz had certainly landed, but there was a doubt if he had yet recovered from the crossing so as to undertake the arduous journey to the capital. In the absence of the Bank solicitor and the Bow street officer to consult with the Paris police, a Londoner sojourning at the port, by the name of Price, whom the legal gentleman re- membered as self-banished to elude the consequences of a lottery fraud, offered to keep an eye (the unpatched one ?) upon his countrymen there and denounce Mr. Schutz if he was perrfii. The lawyer, on the principle of setting a— Avell, one crafty fox to spy another of his tribe — hired Mr. Price to do so, and whizz ! for Paris. On their return, their new acolyte delightedly pointed out a suspicious arrival, whose display of gold justified his immediate examination. It was a rogue ; but only a " transferring clerk," who, entrusted with American money to fan the embers of riot in England, had saved himself and the cash-box from the Blitish lion's claws. He was released, and Mr. Price strutted away, Avaving his hand to the English packet, whilst he jingled in the other the only money he had ever somewhat honestly obtained from the Bank. It would be unjust to Mr. Clarke to say that he conceived no suspicions of the notorious chameleon when he returned to town. But the scamp daily figured on Change, where his calculating power served him well, and though there was the greatest difficulty in getting him to settle when he lost, bulls and bears united in praise of the shrewd, sharp, subtle hundred-thousand man. Forgery and the like seemed below this successful stock jobber. With this reputation he won the confidence of two brothers, named Eoberts, one a grocer in active business, the other retired. The latter he employed in uttering his forgeries, and recompensed by cheating him of upwards of £1,000 by personating an old man and writing a will, by the gene- rosity of which Mr. Eoberts was so over-joyed as to insist on rewarding Price, the introducer to their " dear Mr. Bond." THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. 117 Bond ! — still harping, Mr. Price, on that string which led you to a gallows. As for the other Eoberts, he not only passed the £50's, but got him large notes for small at the Bank when he required new impressions for models. On the trial of Eoberts for uttering, Price came forward as a witness, and was paid by him for collecting exculpatory evidence. One day, complaining of illness in a shop where only the counterman was present, that youth, with the tendency to recommend curatives indicated by a jester of old, wrote an infallible recipe. When Price looked in, the young man being again alone, he was cured ! and, in his excess of relief, insisted on his deliverer accepting £10. He deigned to mind shop while the fellow ran out to cash a £50 for that end. A day after, convinced of the shopman's dulness, he again took his place whilst he went to his master's bankers to change half-a-dozen of similar fifties ! Enraged at the persistent influx of scarcely-detectable shams, the Bank trebled their precautions. Price himself felt that a change in tactics was compulsory. Having studied the " the Great House " so long and in- timately, he struck a blow at a glaring defect. He noticed that the paying teller, separated from the cashier in pur- suance of the anti-Jesuitical policy of no employe being at the elbow-touch of another, made out orders for the actual payment on the cashier. In the crowd, in what- ever order they might be issued, they were presented at random. He engaged several messengers, part of which number he instructed to take cash to the paying teller, and bring him the tickets. These he " raised" from £10 to £100, £50 to £150, &c., and sent to the cashier, who paid them without suspicion. The discovery was not made till after the day's work was over. It was the last deed of darkness he was to draw up. All the " shadowing" by the Bow Street runners had ended in one point : the neighbourhood of the cross-road of Oxford Street and that up to Tottenham Court. There, indeed, Price had oftenest lodged, in order to have his refuges within an easy run, in case to take a coach were imprudent. Clarke had found traces here and there, but always after he or his accomplice, who had taken the names of Polton, Poultney, and the like in kinship with that of the Irish Giantess. 118 THE KING OF COUNTERFEITEKS, And the belief was growing that the age was as much of an assumption as the infirmities of Mr. Schutz, alias Proteus, himself. In his meditations, Price, Price, Price, kept coming up hke the head in the cauldron of the witches. Charles Price, Esq., stockbroker, was leading, to all ap- pearance, if not an irreproachable life, one no worse than a hundred of the newly-enriched on 'Change. Though reputed mean, he gave frequent entertainments, and, on closer inquiry, the meanness seemed to boil down to the accusation of the excise commissioner, to whom he never paid the plate tax, preferring the shabby dodge of having it from Cheapside goldsmiths. As security, Mr. Price left bank notes to large amounts. As he was punctual in the return of the silver, and the lenders handed back the notes, their character was not to be impugned. One of the traders, altogether an exception, had, under a pinch, broken into the parcel of securities, and sent a note to the Bank. It was a forgery. Nothing was done to him, nor to Price, on the spur of the moment. But he had perceived the substitution, being a wise father who knew his own offspring. He transferred his custom elsewhere. At the close of the year 1785, Mr. Clarke found that spot. It was a Berwick Street pawnbroker's. At the first interchange of questions, Clarke smiled. Mr. Aldus (a name maintained in the trade of pledge- taking) had been seeking to trace his customer home, under the fear, from his keen eye and nervous carriage of the hawk-head, that he was concocting some plot in his disfavour. The statute-book of the Georges bristled with trade clamps by which layers of traps were benefitted. " Mr. Powell," a Welsh gentleman, in which new cloak we see a harking back to his father's days, disappeared on the other side of Oxford Street, just where Clarke's bull-dogs had always seen Price vanish. Powell had the same habit as Mr. Price of depositing parcels of bank notes for security of plate. Police officers were left in the shop-parlour, and Mr. Powell- Price was arrested on his next coming. He bore himself like a fighting-cock, except as to fighting. He had over a £100 in good money in his pocket book, which he offered the runner on the way to Bow Street for the chance to fly. There he was hailed by Clarke as " Old Patch," and Mr. THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. 119 Bond shook his head at his explanation that some tissue paper in his bosom was fanpaper to make his children toy- balloons. Nobody but his mistress had been seen in his company for years, and " the dear children" were deemed fictitious. Price remained indignant and insolent. He would like to be taken to break the news to his wife and them in the Poland Street lodgings over a pastrycook's, where they were at that present speaking. He accused Bond of remembering to his prejudice the old lottery mistake, when his former master, Sir John Fielding, had censured him for tricking his Abigail. He abused Clarke for a similar raking up dead coals. As for the Bank attributing forgery of notes and altering of the teller's tickets, it was nothing but the personal enmity of Abraham Newland, chief cashier. It was well known that JSTewland's speculations on 'Change, in concert with the Dutch Jews, had been baulked by him. And more to less purpose. Sir Sampson "Wright committed him to Tothill-fields Bride- well. It was the 14th of January, 1876, the opening of his fifty-sixth year of unflagging crime. On the second examination, he laughed and hoped he would be freed by the old hypocrite being arrested indeed. He summoned many of his dupes as evidences to his respectability. His superb acting and making up as an octogenarian bafHed witness after witness. Two or three, however, swore steadily to his profile, the nose coming down and the chin going up to meet it. Then he changed colour, and said it was a plot. He with- drew his plea of "not guilty," and claimed the alteration of the teller's tickets to be a mere fraud, and what was one fraud more or less on the rich corporation, which absorbed millions through loss of notes by fire, sea, and decease of claimants. He was remanded, and retired, aware that " when faithless frauds bear fruit and foolish fancies fade, the crafty catcher comes to naught." He wrote from the rooms at Bridewell for his wife and eldest son of fifteen years. She he would not trust, but in the boy's shoe he secreted a line for Mrs. Poultney whose address he imparted to him alone. On receipt of the advice to " destroy all,'' that dog-true woman burnt all his'disguises 120 THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. as plague-infected rags, melted the copper-plates and broke them, tore the watermark wires apart and hid them in the dust heaps at the back of the house where the fields extended to Marylebone, and confided the paper-making frame to a neighbour as a mangle. He lived merrily in the gaol, so easy a place of durance to the moneyed man then, and one night, drinking with the governor, twisted a £10 note into the throttle of an empty bottle of Frontignac, to show him how carelessly he had been searched. No forgery having been brought home to him, he cherished hopes of an alleviation of the dread penalty on the other count. But Clarke, taunted publicly by him, was relentless. He told Mrs. Price of her husband's other life, of her aunt being living and her rival, and through her influence over her son and a promise to save her husband's body from the dissec- ting, table, wheedled out the lurking place of Poultney. He arrived there too late, but the frame was found, the frag- ments of wire and metal plates unearthed, and she so threatened that in her angviish she cried " Lord, a' mercy on them that fall into the hands of the Bank ! " On Saturday before his committal, he desired his son to get him a brace of gimlets and a cord with which to fasten his door within to prevent curiosity-mongers in collusion with the turnkeys staring at " Old Patch," whose long roll of evil had created him a popular personage. The Sunday he spent praying with his wife, and when she was gone, wrote some meditations on Job, a petition to the King on behalf of his wife and eight innocent children, and a letter to the head-gaoler, or governor, thanking him and for his kindnesses, lamenting his temperament by which he lost £100,000 and complaining of the legal tyranny which had destroyed his reason and his family. Then weaving the rope with a noose for his neck, and attaching it to the hat pegs behind the door fortified with the gimlets, he kicked off his shoes and took the fatal leap. So died the old-clo' door-salesman, the clerk, brewer, actor, valet de confiance, forger, thief, ending a life which was a climax of flagitious deeds. Several of his victims came to see him stabbed with the stake by torchlight in the suicide's grave by the prison. THE KING OF COUNTERFEITERS. 121 But Clarke rescued his remains in accordance with his engagement with his widow, and the empty shell was found a few days after. Mrs. Poultney may or may not have made her peace with her niece ; at all events, the Bank forebpre prosecuting her, and the rest is a blank. THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROY. In 1792 a banking house was set up in London by Messrs. Marsh, Fauntleroy and sleeping partners. Before two years it had lost some £20,000 and looked about for pillars of support. In two years more, it had added a Mr. Stracy and a Wellington's comrade-in-arms, the latter with no business aptitude whatever, and neither augmenting the capital appreciably. In the year 1800, Henry Fauntleroy, the son of the second eldest partner, entered as an unsalaried clerk, and so thoroughly manifested his ability that he succeeded his father on that gentleman's decease, six or seven years later. He was then twenty-two, and his services in the house left very few secrets for his associates to add to the paternal dying instructions. It was a height which should have been more firmly based than it was, for so young a man to have been elevated there. Spite of the great wars, London had overflowed with life, and on all sides streets were projected, kitchen gardeners ousted, and brickfields smoking. Speculating builders have a sharp eye for bankers eager for paper which they do not mean to question closely, and the advances of Marsh, Fauntleroy & Stracy were astonishingly great. From 1808 to 1810, the builders began failing, for the houses out- numbered homeless tenants. In the latter year, a great failure (Brickwood & Co.) dragged down a host of minor houses. The run for cash upon Marsh & Co. crushed out £70,000 which they had discounted and accepted. At the first pinch Henry Fauntleroy had found himself alone between the jaws of a vice. Mr. Marsh was an octoge- narian ; Mr. Stracy took life epicureanly, enjoying himself abroad for many months at a time ; neither of these seemed 122 THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROY. to remember their duties as long as they could draw for^ their desires without demur. Colonel Graham was a faithful watch-dog and saw nothing beyond his nose, and never asked to do more than fetch and carry. He introduced military and naval customers, and was Fauntleroy's City agent, ful- filling orders literally as he had been trained to do under the Iron Duke. The bank should have been suspended. Fauntleroy knew every thing within the doors of No. 6, Berners Street, where he lived. He worked as hard as any clerk. He kept himself well informed and knew that the spies' reports on the true state of their affairs were daily darkening. Unable to procure a fresh partner — no nabobs now, no army-contractors even, since the Jews had left no Englishman a chance to rival the financier of Napoleon's train — Fauntleroy determined that by any means at his dis- posal the dear old house should not fall. He took the bank stock of such depositors as he judged would longest remain incurious while their interest should be paid punctually, and realised, now secretly, now openly, as he calculated the least injuriously to do. " The higher the game, the less the risk," was the thieves' motto which governed him for the next fifteen years. Thenceforward his life was double. At this turning point of a career, . Fauntleroy was gay, bright, cheery and as pleasant as one expects the round- faced man to be. If he evinced any defect, it was vanity, the wish to be " taken for somebody," extending to a fishing for remarks on his passable facial likeness to Napoleon. A bust of that adventurer faced his own in the parlours of the bank residence, which guardedly remained in his mother's ownership. He was sociable and companionable, and read tolerably deeply in a well-chosen library, of which the chief feature was an interleaved illustrated Pennant's London,' the rumour of the importance of which elicited a royal desire to have a turning over of its innumerable prints and costly original drawings. Within these walls he was irreproachable. Gradually, so gradually that the change was bai'ely noticeable, his fair complexion became sallow, his bltieish ' Now preserved in Sir John Soane's Musevun, Lincoln's-Inn-Field's, THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROY. 123 eyes turned grey, the Napoleonic tuft on his forehead was silver-streaked, and his jovial heartiness grew less blunt. The clerks, who all hked him, a marvel in a counting-house, attributed his careworn air to his increased application to business. He took no holidays, even foregoing the inevit- able Paris trip which truces and short treaties of peace enabled the well-to-do Englishman to enjoy during the reign of the Corsican. He did as much as any three of his quill- drivers now. And for whom was he accumulating a fortune ? for none doubted that such devotion and industry garnered a for- tune? He spent little for the public eyes, a luxurious carriage was but a banker's furniture, his apparel was sober ; his appetite modest. None at the bank knew that he had been forced to privately marry a lady whom he had wronged in her extreme youth. The publication of the union, deman- ded by a brother of the victim returned from the West Indies, was postponed on the discovery that the immacu- late one was still in the chains of a mistress. The doubly injured lady withdrew and dwelt out of town with her mother. So secret had this damaging fact been kept, however, that many of his associates were unaware that two of his children remained under his care in a very quiet house in Lambeth. There, he did not hesitate to give little parties, which often partook of the character of orgies. But it was at Brighton, then in its blossom under the broad smile of the first gentle- man in Europe, that Fauntleroy, in a snug house, with a rare cellar and a mysterious unique Cura^oa, entertained his cronies. In neither of his two clubs was he known to gamble deeply ; but how he, what would have been called a "plunger" in later times, upon the Stock Exchange, must have smiled when stakes of a few hundred were being breathlessly played for. To repair his losses there he took out his clients' stock — £5,000 — at a hand dip. Fox was no more inveterate at a desperate and weighty throw than he. Eeputed rich, he had to elude the harpies who are soon set upon a banker who skims dubious society. In fact, he was between the horns and the teeth which had lacerated Goldsmid. The bulls and bears were serving him- with the unrelenting cruelty which an " outsider " always meets. 124 THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEEOY. What poisoned the wounds was the report of Ms spies upon the Bank spies, who had reported in the beginning of 1818, that the firm united could not raise £15,000. This rumour alarmed his bosom-friend and boon-companion, an ex-sheriff (whose tales of the good old hanging days, had added a zest to the curious Curagoa), who inflicted on him the insult of withdrawing over £20,000, in Exchequer Bills, though he left a large balance against the settlement of which Fauntleroy found many and successful excuses. In truth, he had picked the plums ; £30,000 to begin wdth, £5,000 and £6,000 for each finger of the hand, and now sums disdained heretofore were cautiously turned into cash. The regular payment of dividends on the abstracted stock lengthened his vigils over these books which no clerk was allowed to understand. In 1816, he had made away with £100,000 ! The task of the Danaides was his singlehanded, and they would have lost hope where he never ceased to labour. Even three years more passed in this attempt to fill a bottomless abyss ; he dared not on peril of his life — the good name was secretly shadowed — refuse to pay the family of his most respected partner when he died and they claimed the capital. That money he found — like the rest, " though unable" as he con- fessed to himself. He had his warnings, more than once, when a demand not to be gainsaid or longer deferred had arisen, he had been compelled to replace the stolen stock, though as fate would have it for his enhanced punishment, always " at a rise." Whilst he was toiling in his chains, fearfully recompensed with illicit pleasures, two of his partners continued to recreate themselves, drawing £100,000 for their five years' pleasure. He who had been admitted their associate with- out capital, had no right to murmur, so they seemed to suppose, if they gave him a thought. And there was poor, brave Graham marching into the City daily, imperturbable to the horseplay on 'Change, carry- ing out orders of vital moment without the least attempt to read between the lines. It is not only opportunity, but the surroundings that make and maintain the thief. Fauntleroy's face was thinning, his hair required no powder ; he was comparatively a young man when he looked so elderly. THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEEOY. 125 It was impossible to let the books be investigated, and he durst not seek fresh capital now ; large customers shunned Berners Street by instinct or private advice. As if to taunt him in his unillumined despair, he recog- nised in a field officer returned home the boy grown up, whose life he had generously spared at the outset of his career, when he had been the innocent one. The youth had forged several names on the back of a £600 bill, on which Fauntleroy humanely advanced ten per cent, to enable him to join his regiment abroad. One of the pretended acceptors, Lord Kildare, with true Irish feeling, had met the bill, and, by the banker's connivance the black secret was buried. The soldier had washed away the stain in blood. The banker, steeped in the forger's ink, felt that he was irrevoc- ably doomed. Not even that certainty lessened his coolness. All his dupes were his close friends, necessarily to prevent his being taken unawares, and his intrepidity not once failed him. Once, at the bank, catching sight of a gentleman entering, even whilst he was handing over the counter his own forged transfer, his fingers did not tremble as hfe made some plausible apology to recover the paper, with which in his hand he walked over to his friend and entered into chat. On another occasion, having fully j^repared a power of attorney to sell out bank stock, he waited till the owner called on him in his bank parlour. Under his eyes he wrote his name in the thoroughly studied fac-simile, amd, stepping out a moment, paid that paper with the fresh, unblotted glistening ink before the two clerks whom he required as Avitnesses ! How could they doubt that the visitor whom they had seen pass in there had just put the pen to it? In 1824, Colonel Graham was seen more and more often in the city. His senior was reckless and scraped for cash on every hand. The Caesar, whose head he flattered himself he bore, would have reckoned it an omen that the last time he attended the bank, January 5th, 1824, the clerk chatted with him upon the ghastly topic of the day, the murder of the gamester Weare by Thurtell and Hunt. Upon that very paper he tendered, and the evidence of that clerk the same jury condemned Fauntleroy ! A Chancery decision had ordered the payment to the 126 THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROY. accountant-general of Bank stock to the amount of upwards of £50,000. In vain Fauntleroy deferred the dread moment ; his joint trustee, a clergyman appalled at the least delay when so huge a responsibility was theirs, nervously antici- pated the preparations which he never doubted the banker was more methodically making by going himself to the Bank. The stock had been sold out to the 4ast £500 ! What the Bank authorities had suspected long since was verified. If that evil action stood not alone, their loss loomed up terrible, even to such an establishment, perhaps. The delinquent was not caught napping. At the best, it was a mere question of days now, he knew. It was, in reaUty, one of a few brief hours. All the possible pre- cautions of a selfish and vindictive man had been perfected. His personal effects were ingeniously shielded from creditors. He had revenged himself on his wife's family by robbing them of £15,000, strangely enough left in his charge, spite of their knowledge of his true nature. He was without the means for flight to the Continent, where his mistress, educated in France, would have been at home. There was not £500 in currency in the Bank till, and his offer of £10,000 to the Bow-street officer, who entered his sanctum with the warrant was sheer " bounce." The news spread rapidly, but was hardly credited outside the inner circle of City men who had already death- sentenced the rotten house. The names of his victims point to the families into which he launched desolation. The Earl of Ossory, Lord Aboyne, Mrs. Ferrar, General Young, Lady Nelson, ex-sheriff Parkins, who had saved his £20,000, it is true, but lost £4,000, and so on. The Bank of England had lost some £400,000 with the sole drawback of Fauntleroy having paid the interest. But what added to this sting was the finding among the forger's papers a document written in 1816 enumerating the sums he had converted to the use of the banking house, adding them up, and concluding with an averment that it was done purely to keep up the credit of the house, and with this scorpion sting: " P.S. — The Bank having refused our acceptances, they shall smart for it ! " • It was conjectured that this signed sheet, a hanging matter THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROT. 127 for fifty men, was designed to have exculpated the self- denouncer's partners in case he had absconded at any time. The duration of the crime, the dehberate procedure, and the despoiling of his very intimates, terrified the pubhc. Although it was generally understood that no one con- victed of forgery would be pardoned, whatever their social position, as in the cases of the Perreaus and Dr. Dodd, there was a fear that this unexampled deceiver would somehow escape the gallows. The legal quibble, as it was accounted, of the London jury not being competent to pronounce on the forgery, com- mitted beyond its jurisdiction, but merely on the uttering (none the less a capital ofience) seemed ominous. The Times was the popular mouthpiece in denouncing the governors of the House of Correction where the forger was most comfortably lodged, of dangerous leniency, and the affliction of Fauntleroy's mistress when he was removed to Newgate, underlined, so to say, his own half-betraying observation that he would not have escaped to the detriment of so kind a guardian. Yet he cherished no illusion ; when he heard that the in- criminatory self-accusation had fallen into the hands of the Bank solicitor, he said : " I am a dead man ! " The greed of the court officials overleaped itself, as the galleries of the Old Bailey court-room did not fill at an exaggerated fee. Nevertheless, the rest of the hall was thronged by unusual visitors to see the pale, thin, Napoleonic face, the slightly bowed figure in premonitory mourning, and the grey hair from which the powder lazily fell upon the hat held peculiarly, not to prevent the judge or jury inspecting his features, but to conceal them partly from the lowlings in the body of the room. (Fashionables immediately adopted the Fauntleroy attitude with their beavers, by the way.) In the jury-list figure for this dramatic scene, the names linked with stage annals of Keeley, Mowatt, Eeeve, Joyce, and Horton. There was no lack of evidence, but the bank had chosen to base the prosecution upon the fraud of the prisoner's family. His wife's sister, whose stock had been replaced and a relinquishment of her claims for unpaid interest also 128 THE FRAUDS OF FAUNTLEROY. purchased, in order to clear her evidence of monetary bias, put the rope round the neck of their two-fold betrayer. He was found guilty, and no wrangle among the superior law-lords could cancel his own declaration of war against the Bank — and society. Lest he should baffle the hangman, he was watched night and day by two men. One of his visitors was a merchant whom he had secretly advised to draw out his deposit in Berners street, and who came to thank him ; another a boon companion who tried to learn the place of origin of that noted Cura^oa. The morning of the 30th November, 1824, broke in a smother of yellow fog and an indigo drizzle. Neither daunted an immense mob, which not merely massed itself in all the places high and low whence a view of the scaffold was possible, but even was compacted in the side streets, where it might, at worst, feel the thrill of emotion wh«i the culprit paid the penalty of grievous evil. It was estimated that the 100,000 host which howled at the Cato street conspirators was outnumbered. Henry Fauntleroy came to the drop composedly, closing his eyes, displaying no emotion. Every hat was removed by the same impulse, rather of pity than to satisfy sight- seeing, and in two minutes the hypocrite and preyer upon the widow and orphan was no more. The absurd tale, unflattering to popular belief in justice, which always flies about when a criminal of wealthy and influential connections is executed, was let loose : his friends had bribed the executioner; a silver tube had been slipped into his throat ; his body had been removed quickly ; and Henry Fauntleroy, whatever became of the corpse interred as his, was enjoying that Paris sojourn which he had often promised himself. KBIAT & CO., PRISTEH3, GATE STREET, W.O. ; ASD MIDDLE MILL, KISySrON-ON-THAMES. JUST PUBLISHED. POST OCTAVO, PRICE SIX SHILLINGS THE QUEEK AND THE ROYAL FAMILY Jlnccboics anb ^arrafiDcs, BASED ON CONTENTS. The Queen and the Royal Family in Contemporary Literature. I. — ^The Princess Victoria. II.— The Earlier Years of the Queen's Married Life. III.— The Queen according to Foreign Sources. IV. — The Queen and Bishops "Wilberforoe and ThirlT^all. v.— The Queen and Men of Letters. VI. — The Queen and her Ministers. VII. — Later Years. VIII. — The Queen's Journeys. IX. — Notes on some Members of the Royal Family. L'Envoi. EXTEACT FEOM THE PREFACE. " A few words may be said respecting the scope of this little volume. There is no intention of trying to gather up the history of the Eeign from the enormous existing materials for such a purpose. Neither is there any intention of repeating that private history which the Queen has so graciously condescended to give the world in various volumes connected with the lamented Prince Consort and herself. But there is a third source of information respecting the Eeign, constituting very valuable material, of which little use has hitherto been made. This is to be found scattered over a very wide surface of contemporary literature ; to be gleaned from various biographical, political, and general sources. These are not only from English, but from French, German, Italian, and even American writers. Such information only has been admitted as seemed of an authentic character, and such as would be eagerly sought for and prized by the future historian. Some of these passages are now familiar to many readers, but the compiler believes that to nearly all of them the combination will be interesting, from the number, variety, and iipportance of the citations. He has been enabled to add gleanings of his own — more especially when he has been thrown into the track of her Majesty's travels. *' A few notes, comments, and brief narratives have been inserted, where explanatory lines seemed needful. Some literary notes respecting various members of the Eoyal Family have also been added." Post 8vo., Price Six Stiillings, THEEE-COENERED ESSAYS. BY A MIDDLE-AGED ENGLISHMAN. COSM'arEZZO'irS. I. On the Three-Comered Way of Looking at Things. II. On becoming Middle-aged. Ill, On the Advantages of Keeping a £5 Note in One's Pocket. ] V. On being Knocked Down and Picked up Again. V. On Going About in the World. TL On the Straws that Turn Us. VII. On the Advantages of an Occasional Day in Bed. VIII. On the Artistic Treatment of a Slap in the Face. IX. The Inconveniences of a Limited Income. X. On Having Too Much and Too Little to Do. XI. On Behaviour in a Crowd. XII. On Angularities and Cantankeroa.'>tiess. XIII. How Every Man Writes his Own Memoirs. XIV. Concerning the Unexpected. XV. On Reading Between the Lines. XVI. Concerning Recreation. XVII. On the Lost Arts of Conversation and Letter- Writing. XVIII. On Giving and Taking. LONDON! JAMES HOGG, -22, Exeter Street, Strand. ONE SHILLING-MONTHLY. "Genuine and innocent wit is surely the flavour of tlie mind, Man could nut direct his way by plain rea- son, and support his life by tasteless food ; but God has g ven us wit, and flavour, and brightness, and laugh- ter, and perfumes, to en- liven the days of man's pil- grimage, and to charm his- pained steps over the burn- ing marl." Sydney Smith. = . < a is- s "A laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market." . CHAEES LAMB. " O glorious laughter ! thou man-loviug spirit, that for a time doth take the burden from the weary back; that doth lay falve to the weary feet, bruised and cut by flints and shards." Douglas Jbekold. "ANECDOTE CORNER" THE New Monthly Feature £ IN LONDON SOCIETY Tkts is the most Amusing, £)iverting, Enjoy- able thing now current in Magazine Literature — a rare Fund of Good Stories happily blended: yest, Witticism, Humour, and Drollery; Puns, Quips, and Repartee; Sayings Playful and Sar- castic; iVhims, Banter, and Waggery ; Bon-Mots and Epigrams, arranged in Groups embracing all Classes of English Society. " ANECDOTE CORNEH " opens in the Number for JULY 1882-*^ihe First of a New Volume- "Fun has no limits. It is like the human race and face t there is a family like- ness among all the species, but they all differ." Sam Slick {Jv4ge Haliburton). " I should call Humour a mixture of Love and Wit." W. M. THACKERAY. '^ i-i a tzl "A good jest in time of misfortune is food and drink. It is strength to the arm, digestion to the sto- mach, and courage to the heart. A prosperous man can afford to be melancholy ; but if the miserable are so, they are worse than dead — it is sure to kill them." '4^011. ,..iU Mil", ^^A-«