Sarum

by Edward Rutherfurd

  After a pause he replied carefully:

  “I do not think the bishop would wish to attack the Forest family.”

  It was a shrewd reply. For although these trials could take place, in practice it was rare for a bishop to prosecute a member of the gentry. At worst, a gentleman might be discreetly fined.

  But Shockley only shook his head.

  “You are wrong. I have been with Bishop Ward this very morning. He is ready to prosecute. I have his word on it.”

  There was dismay in the young man’s eyes, then astonishment, and then, Shockley saw it quite clearly, though it only lasted a moment, respect – for a clever trick and a worthy adversary.

  “I will speak to my father.”

  “You have until this evening.”

  He had won. They both knew it.

  There was a commotion in the street outside. The Prince of Orange was coming. Their business was done and they moved to the door.

  “Clarendon’s here,” George remarked pleasantly. Now that the bargaining was over, he was already his normal self again. “Do you think there will be fighting?”

  “No. I think James’s men will desert.”

  Young Forest nodded thoughtfully.

  “And where does your father stand in this matter?” Shockley enquired, equally pleasantly. He had not seen the baronet for a week.

  George now gave him a charming smile.

  “With Pembroke, I believe.”

  “But Lord Pembroke is still in London. He has not declared himself yet.”

  “I know.”

  The Forests did not change.

  The young man looked at him curiously.

  “What about you, Doctor, are you pleased with this glorious revolution?”

  And now Shockley smiled. “It is not a revolution, George,” he replied. “It is a compromise.”

  He looked forward to a better world.

  THE CALM

  1720

  The Shockleys were ruined. Completely. It was his fault.

  “Madness, sir.” Immediately after breakfast, for the remaining five years of his life, he would repeat this same sentence. “To gamble – no other word for it – the future of the family: gamble all, lose all. I’m no better than a criminal.”

  For in 1720 the then eighty-five-year-old Doctor Samuel Shockley, scientist, rationalist, incurable optimist and one of the most respected inhabitants of Sarum, invested his entire fortune in the greatest orgy of unsupported speculation that England has ever seen – the South Sea Bubble. And when, within a year, it had burst, taking half the investment of the kingdom with it, Doctor Samuel Shockley was utterly ruined; as was his family.

  He lived five years more, making small but useless attempts to regain some of what was lost. He reproached himself every day. It was said that only his will to overcome his guilt and shame kept him alive. When, by 1725, he knew it was useless, he was soon gone.

  The madness which seized Shockley seized half England, and it was very understandable. For in the year 1720, it had really seemed that nothing – not even a gamble – could possibly go wrong. England at last was rich and at peace.

  The country had a new dynasty. The Protestant William and Mary had been succeeded first by Queen Anne; then when she died without heirs, the crown was offered not to the closest in hereditary line, but to her unobjectionable and quite definitely Protestant German cousin: George, Elector of Hanover.

  True, he spoke not a word of English; true – this was a pity – he preferred Hanover to England; true, he did not try to understand his new country and was often absent from it in his beloved Hanover; true, he had divorced his wife and detested his son the Prince of Wales. He was short, fat and looked stupid, though he was an able commander. But he was not a Catholic; he would not, like the Stuarts, threaten the English Church with papist intrigue. The English were indifferent to him, but he was safe. His descendants have ruled England ever since.

  The country had military peace. It had been won for Queen Anne in that series of brilliant campaigns against the threatening megalomaniac King Louis XIV of France – who had tried to overawe all Europe – by the great John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet: his heroic victories were on the lips of every schoolboy: they ensured that, for two decades, England would be safely at peace.

  The island was united too. The joining of the kingdom of Scotland with England and Wales had taken place in the sense that the Stuarts were kings of both independent kingdoms; but by the Act of Union in 1707, the kingdoms were joined by Parliament; and the Hanoverian kings, though they were still greater strangers north of the Scottish border than south of it, were undoubted kings of a united island.

  Almost. There remained the last male claimants of the old Stuart royal house – James Francis Edward, son of James II by his Italian wife and himself married to the granddaughter of the Polish king – known, sometimes facetiously, as the Old Pretender. The English, mostly, did not want him because he was Catholic. The Scots called him their own, but chiefly because he was a Stuart. The French, anxious to weaken Protestant England, supported him, but half-heartedly. In 1715 he tried to invade the kingdom – and was at once and humiliatingly driven out. Some did support him. The die-hard Tories led by Bolingbroke who did so, destroyed their own political careers with the Hanoverian kings for a generation. The Pretender and his son remained in France, always a vague threat, but often forgotten. The island had better things to do than worry about the passing of the Catholic Stuarts.

  It was time to forget civil war and religious conflict: it was time to get rich: and that, in 1720, was what thousands of investors tried to do.

  The story of the South Sea Bubble began with Marlborough’s wars against the French. They cost many millions, and rather than raise all the money in taxes, Parliament wisely decided to go into debt. The government debt, around forty million pounds, seemed huge; the largest creditors were the Bank of England – a stronghold of the Whigs – and the East India Company; the proposal was that in order to lighten the burden on the government, a new company, the South Sea Company, would take over the debt and pay the interest in return for trading concessions in the south seas. If the trade went well, then the company might make a handsome profit. And on that basis it sold shares to the general public. There were many reasons for the scheme. The Tories who started it disliked the strength of the Whigs at the Bank and wanted another large financial group of their own to rival it; the Government wanted to be free of the interest it owed. A similar scheme had been set up in France by the financier John Law: surely it would work in England. Indeed, before it began, the scheme was already so popular that soon the company had taken over most of the debt – some thirty millions.

  It was a gamble. It was the spirit of the age.

  “The possibilities, sir, are endless, I assure you,” Doctor Shockley told the dean, the canons, and his son.

  In the imagination, they were. And so were the number of satellite companies that grew up overnight around the great South Sea Company. The trading in shares between these became so complex that it was as impossible to unravel as it was nonsensical. In the main company the £100 shares rose in the first six months of 1720 to £1,100. And still there was no enterprise underneath it all, no profit: nothing but a great mountain of paper trading powered by . . .

  “Wind, sir. It was all wind. A hot gas, blowing up a huge bubble . . . all my dreams.” This was Shockley’s lament: he was precisely right.

  When the crash came he was fortunate in having a little, a very little, in the original shares which had been exchanged for actual government debt. When that greatest of eighteenth century politicians, Robert Walpole, was brought in to clear up the mess, he arranged that these shares should be redeemed by the government, though at roughly half their original worth. But for those who had invested in the rocketing stocks that rose with the Bubble – stocks invented to satisfy investors who had long lost all sense of reason – for them there was nothing.
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  “There is nothing Walpole can do for this family. Nothing. I own shares in a company for trading in human hair, another for mining gold in Wales, and another for buying a peat bog in Ireland,” the old man declared, shaking his head in disbelief. “And as for this,” he produced a huge prospectus. “What was its purpose, sir? I cannot tell you.”

  In the aftermath of the Bubble, an enterprising publisher produced a pack of playing cards, each card depicting one of the fraudulent investment schemes that had collapsed with the crash, accompanied by a satirical verse. Doctor Shockley would play with these morosely by the hour.

  In 1725 he died. A year later his son Nathaniel also died, of a sudden heart attack. The modest house on the north side of the close passed to his young grandson Jonathan, and it was in his hands that the meagre family fortune now lay. A few years later Jonathan married the daughter of one of the cathedral canons: a pleasant girl with carrotty hair and protruding teeth, with whom he was happy. She brought enough money to renew the lease of the Shockley house, and she was respectable. Through her father’s influence Jonathan found employment with Sir George Forest as general manager of his estates. In this position, he was treated, as a matter of courtesy, as a gentleman; but with a faint, unspoken condescension that reminded him, each day, that he was nonetheless really only a dependant, a sort of superior steward. He was a tall, fair man who carried himself well, and cultivated an occasional terseness of manner to mask the slight awkwardness he felt inside.

  In 1735 his only son Adam was born.

  1745

  The ten-year-old boy was almost bursting with suppressed excitement.

  Each day, as more news came in, he looked at the sedate, unruffled calm of Salisbury close, waiting for the horsemen to appear. Each day, he watched his father eagerly. Soon, his father would take down the family sword, and then he would ride. It was young Adam Shockley’s secret plan to ride with him.

  For Bonnie Prince Charlie was marching from the north. And the Shockleys would surely ride to join him.

  No object in the Shockley household was more venerated than the sword of Nathaniel Shockley, which Charles Moody had brought back from Naseby. It hung high on the wall over the stairs, gleaming dully – a daily reminder to the boy of the family’s romantic Cavalier past.

  It was a past that Jonathan liked to refer to.

  “Some Shockleys were for Parliament in those days,” he conceded to Adam, “but the best of us were for the king.”

  It gave the boy the feeling that his family, too, had been one of the loyal band of true gentlemen like the Penruddocks and Hydes who had been loyal to a sacred cause.

  And did not his father sometimes after dinner pass his hand over his wine glass, with a dour flourish, in the Jacobite sign to toast the true Stuart king over the water? The family fortune might be lost, there might be a German king on the throne and Whig politicians who tolerated religious free-thinkers, but Jonathan Shockley, a solid Tory if ever there was one, at least enjoyed this show of loyalty to a past when, by supposition, the family was more noble and the times better.

  Now the time had come. The Pretender’s son, the dashing Charles Edward, was on his way south. From the border to Derby, not a hand had been raised against him by a people who were still indifferent to Hanoverian rule.

  Each day, when Adam Shockley went to ride his pony, he whispered to it:

  “We’ll go too.”

  How strange it was, therefore, that even now, Sarum close could still be so quiet.

  Sarum close. It was a good place to be born a gentleman. It was even fashionable.

  The choristers’ school young Adam attended, run by its famous headmaster Richard Hele, provided not only the choirboys for the cathedral, but an excellent preparation for the sons of the local gentry and merchants before they went on to the great schools of Winchester and Eton. Had not the Lord Chancellor, one of the Wiltshire family of Wyndham, been one of its notable old boys? And the great Mr Addison, essayist and editor of the Spectator, had he not been at school in Salisbury too? As for the world of fashion, that was run by the redoubtable, the indefatigable, Mr James Harris who lived at the fine house by St Ann’s Gate, not a hundred yards from their own. On the south side of his house he had set an elegant sundial which bore the legend: ‘Life is but a walking shadow’. Mr Harris’s grandfather, on his mother’s side, was no less a person than the Earl of Shaftesbury. Mr Harris organised the subscription concerts in the cathedral and the Assembly Rooms; there were balls, especially after the races held above Lord Pembroke’s estate near the edge of Cranborne Chase; there were literary societies, clubs, and a theatre. The great composer Handel himself had performed next door to Mr Harris’s house.

  On any day one might expect to meet members of the local gentry – Eyres, Penruddocks, Wyndhams, even perhaps one of the Herberts from the great house at Wilton. Why, even prominent citizens of the town bore historic names – like the deputy recorder Edward Poore, descended from the very family that had founded the cathedral five centuries before; or his wife Rachel, whose kinsman Bishop Bingham had ruled the diocese soon afterwards.

  Sarum close. One did not even have to know the inhabitants to understand the place. One glance at the buildings told you that it had entered the age of elegance.

  The square Georgian façades were to be seen all round the close: at Mr Harris’ house in the north east corner, in several fine houses backing on to the river on the western side, like Myles Place and the nearly rebuilt Walton Canonry, in the smaller terraced façades appearing on the eastern side near the gates to the bishop’s place. Some were stone, some brick, some stucco. But the finest, the noblest of all was on the north side, facing the choristers’ green: Mompesson House. It was always said that Sir Christopher Wren himself had made the first designs; since then the Mompesson family and after them their relations the Longuevilles had remodelled the interior with a splendid new staircase and elegant plasterwork; quiet, solid, modest in size yet stately in proportion with its two storeys, its row of seven large rectangular windows with three dormers in the roof above, its light grey stone blending perfectly with the mellow red brick of the similar houses on each side of it, Mompesson stared from behind its iron railings unabashed – as though conscious of its own domestic perfection – towards the grass of the churchyard by the cathedral’s stately western façade. At each end of the railings that enclosed the few feet of lawn in front of the house stood a stone pillar with a heavy square lamp on top of it. The home of the Mompessons was everything a gentleman’s county town house should be.

  Not that the close was perfect. In the graveyard round the cathedral, the broad acres of lawn were thoroughly unkempt. After a heavy rain the place looked as though a herd of cows had marched through it; the ditches round the old belfry stank; it was perhaps to be regretted that Mr Brown the sexton used to sell beer in the belfry, and when Mr Henry Fielding the author had recently occupied the small house near Mr Harris’s young Adam Shockley could remember with delight the echoes of the rowdy parties that had emanated at all hours from that little house and which so amused his father and shocked his mother and the other ladies of the close.

  But this did not matter. The elegance of the eighteenth century was robust and common sense.

  There was plenty in Salisbury, from the suspected adultery of one of the canons, to the rich, pungent and variegated smells in the streets to remind Adam that life had its seamy side as well.

  Sarum was unchanging. The great cathedral with its dominating spire spoke more eloquently than any words for the security of the Church of England. The Settlement that had brought the Hanoverians to England guaranteed its easy ascendancy. The Test Act ensured that any man wanting public office must swear the oath of loyalty to the English Church – and if Protestant dissenters were released from this obligation each year by a special indemnity, the principle remained and the troublesome Catholics were denied any office.

  True, there were other religious voices at Sarum: a communit
y of Quakers at Wilton, Wesleyans, who had heard the great John Wesley himself preach on Salisbury Plain, Deists, who believed that God would reward a good man’s life regardless of his church, and even the occasional Jew. It did not greatly matter. Whatever men’s private opinions might be, whatever sects might be tolerated, the placid Church of England ruled and was unmoved.

  Sarum was independent. The government of England might be in the hands of the great Whig oligarchs close to the king – men like Walpole and after him the Duke of Newcastle and his brother – but still half the House of Commons consisted of the solid country members who mostly called themselves Tories, and who cared not a rap what the king or his ministers thought of them. These were the men that Sarum sent. For the county, as before, the local gentry stood – the Goddard or Long families usually in the north, Wyndham or Penruddock in the south. There was Wilton, for the Herbert interest. And in Salisbury, the burgesses sent independent gentlemen of their own choice. Recently, they had taken to sending as one of their members one of the family of a rich turkey merchant named Bouverie who had bought the great estate south of the town beside the ancient forest of Clarendon. But they did so because he gave generously to the town. Even a Herbert could not interfere with the Salisbury election.

  Then there was Old Sarum: still deserted: an empty, windswept, grassy mound overlooking the little village of Stratford-sub-Castle in the Avon valley below. The ancient pocket borough still had, nominally, eight electors with the right to send members to Parliament and the custom was for them to meet by a tree below the old hillfort to make their choice. In practice, it was the landlord of the place who decided.

  And Old Sarum belonged to the Pitts. For around the turn of the century both the ruin and much of the village below had been bought by one Thomas Pitt whose discovery of a huge diamond had given him the nickname Diamond Pitt. Owning the borough was more profitable than ever. Would-be members of Parliament were paying well for a seat; one could even pawn the borough to another landowner. And for the whole of the eighteenth century, with one break when they pawned it to the Prince of Wales, the family which produced two of England’s greatest Prime Ministers owned Old Sarum.