The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  From the outset, then, James Crisp enters this story as an agent of communication between different countries and ports, and as someone traversing the legal boundaries established by states and politicians. It was his extra income from captaining the Lovel that enabled him to propose to a woman lacking capital, as well as a secure reputation. Before Menorca came under French threat in 1756, the packet boat was probably bringing Crisp in some £1000 a year. It seemed enough to gamble on; enough for him to retire from active sea-going and become a land-based merchant; enough for marrying Elizabeth Marsh and setting up house with her in London.

  For all the growth of Britain’s outports, London was still the undisputed hub of the country’s overseas trade, shipping and retail industries, as well as its political, cultural and financial centre. Well before James Crisp made the city his prime base, he and his brother were paying rent on vaults and a warehouse in Mark Lane, near the Thames.17 From London, James Crisp looked outwards to five other prime commercial locations. There was Barcelona, where his brother Samuel Crisp and another partner, a Swiss merchant called Jacob Emery, presided over a counting house; Emery, in turn, linked the company with a woman partner, Cathalina Lavalée, who operated out of Montpellier. A major port for Mediterranean and Atlantic trade and a mart for Catalonia’s important salt trade, Barcelona was a site of Spain’s emerging industrial revolution, a place of tobacco-processing plants, textile manufacturers and calico printers.18 The second side of James Crisp’s trading web was made up of a cluster of ports on Italy’s western coast, especially Genoa and Livorno, both of which had close commercial links with Spain, and with North Africa and the Levant.19 Then there was Hamburg. This was a markedly cosmopolitan free port of ninety thousand inhabitants, where foreigners enjoyed religious freedom and the right to trade on equal terms with the local burghers. Blessed by its situation on the River Elbe, which was ice-free except in the coldest winters, Hamburg was another big importer of Spanish wines and colonial produce, and a leading exporter of linen, grain and timber.20

  By comparison with these great cities and entrepôts, James Crisp’s two other favoured business locations within Europe might appear minor, even eccentric choices. They were not. The Shetlands, a group of sparsely inhabited islands about a hundred miles off northern Scotland, where Crisp and his brother began purchasing and salting cod in 1759, four thousand quintals every year (a quintal equaled 112 pounds), was ‘at the centre of the European fishing world’. With little arable land available, most adult men on the Shetlands worked in fishing and whaling, sometimes venturing as far north as Greenland; and their fresh and salted fish was always in high demand, especially in Catholic countries for fast days, and for victualling ships bound on long-distance voyages.21 The commercial significance of the Isle of Man, James Crisp’s final site of concentration within Europe, was also out of all proportion to its size. Barely thirty miles long and a dozen miles wide, the island was held from the British Crown by the Dukes of Atholl. This quasi-autonomous status allowed it to function as a busy, unsupervised warehouse for large quantities of imported goods from a wide variety of destinations. Rather like the American colonies, the Isle of Man accepted the authority of the British monarch, but did not recognize the fiscal control of the Westminster Parliament. Ships arriving at or leaving the island, and the cargoes they carried, were exempt from the attentions of English, Scottish and Irish customs and revenue officers; and the Dukes of Atholl themselves charged no export duties except on the island’s own products, and only token import duties. As a result, the Isle of Man was a haven for comparatively free trade. It was also, as Edmund Burke remarked, ‘the very citadel of smuggling’, a well-known stopping-off place for anyone wanting to ship goods into Britain, Ireland and beyond, duty-free.22

  These different locations – London, Barcelona, Hamburg, Livorno and Genoa, the Shetlands and the Isle of Man – provided James Crisp and his partners with a closely interconnected trading network. Fish caught and salted by Crisp employees in the Shetlands would be shipped to London. Once there, the ship might also take on grain from Mark Lane’s famous Corn Exchange. Crisp’s ship’s masters might sail with these cargoes to Barcelona, since Spain was Europe’s biggest market for salted fish, or to Livorno, another fish-hungry market, or to Genoa, a city with a poor agricultural hinterland that was always in need of external supplies of foodstuffs. Once in port in Spain or Italy, Crisp’s ships would take on wine, brandy, silk or other textiles and – from Barcelona – salt. They might unload these goods in Hamburg, lading in return linen for Barcelona’s textile factories, or yet more grain for Genoa. Or they might return to London, where the salt would promptly be shipped onwards to the Crisps’ fishing venture in the Shetlands. Or they might offload their cargo at the Isle of Man, in which case some of the Crisps’ wine, brandy and textiles would be reloaded onto large wherries moored off the island, many of them crewed by Irishmen, and sailed into secluded coves and bays off western Scotland. In 1764, a Scottish customs official described what usually happened then:

  The farmers, their servants, and the lower sort of people in general are adventurers or abettors of the smugglers, and on the particular parts of the coast at which any wherries or boats are expected to arrive a great number of people with horses do assemble, and as fast as the goods are landed they are put upon horses … and in this manner, escorted by a number of the principal smugglers, they proceed up this country, and into the north of England through moors and unfrequented roads, and then dispose of the goods to shopkeepers, carriers, and other persons.23

  This sort of commercial circuit, with goods and vessels moving between separate but connected sites of business, was common even among perfectly law-abiding merchants, because it made for an efficient use of ships’ holds. The idea was for some cargo to be transported at every leg of a merchantman’s voyage, with no expensive ship time and space being wasted simply carrying ballast. Yet while James Crisp’s commercial web was designed to operate in this way, it was never self-contained. At each of its main nodes, Crisp Brothers and their agents branched out in search of additional business. Thus, their Barcelona office also traded with Cadiz, Valencia and Madrid, with Palma on Majorca, and Lisbon in Portugal.24 Moreover, at no stage was the Crisps’ trading web exclusively European. In commercial terms, as increasingly in other respects, Europe, Asia, the Americas and parts of Africa were not distinct or separable entities; and the way of life that James Crisp and his new wife constructed for themselves in London in the late 1750s and early ’60s was funded in part by the profitable exchange of goods between all of these continents.

  Each of the main nodes of Crisp’s commercial web allowed him to reach beyond Western Europe. This was manifestly true of London, then the world’s busiest port, an imperial metropolis and the Crisp family’s traditional power base. It seems likely, for instance, that James Crisp had an interest in the Countess of Effingham, a two-hundred-ton ship commanded by his kinsman Rowland Crisp, that sailed regularly in the 1750s and ’60s with cargoes of wine between London, Madeira, Boston and Jamaica, returning loaded with sugar, rum and ginger.25 James Crisp also made his own forays into the Caribbean. The 1764 issue of Lloyd’s Register lists four ships for which he was the managing owner (one indicator of his considerable success at this stage). Three of these ships, the Favourite, the Maria and the Union, left London that year declared to be bound respectively for Italy, Spain and the Shetlands. The fourth, the Maria Burrish (named after a relation of Crisp’s mother), was carrying cargo to Dominica, a former Spanish colony seized by Britain in 1761.26 James Crisp did not confine himself to a single imperial system. Some of the salted fish he exported to Barcelona from the Shetlands, and on occasions from Boston, ended up on Spanish domestic dining tables. But imported salt fish, bacalao, also went to victual the royal fleets sent out at intervals to Spain’s colonies in South America. And Crisp Brothers traded to Spanish America directly, and in their own right. In 1761 the company’s Barcelona office took delivery of 379 cask
s of olive oil from ‘San Juan in the New World’, in other words from Puerto Rico. Notarial documents make clear that the two brothers worked hard to maintain these links with Spain and its imperial markets even in 1762–63, when Madrid and London went to war over trade and colonies.27

  By the same token, Hamburg offered the Crisps not only a ready market for colonial re-exports (perhaps from Jamaica, or Boston, or Dominica, or Spanish America), but also access to trade with the Baltic, and to a network of fairs and exchanges in its hinterland that extended as far as Archangel in Russia. From Livorno, a port that was open to ships from every state and to merchants of all religions, and firmly neutral in wartime, James Crisp gained access to business in the Levant and North Africa. In 1764, for instance, his company was exporting Spanish textiles and wine to Tunis, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire, and taking on foodstuffs for Italian markets in return.28 A disproportionate number of the traders and bankers Crisp dealt with in Tunis and Livorno were Jewish. ‘There are Turks, Levantines, some few French, Venetians, Genoese, Corsicans, Greeks, Armeneans, Neapolitans,’ wrote the British ambassador of Livorno’s merchant community in the 1760s, but prefaced this by remarking that ‘the Jews are more numerous than any’. An important site for Hebrew publishing, Livorno contained Europe’s biggest concentration of Sephardic Jews after Amsterdam, and the financiers and merchants among them controlled a third of the city’s commercial houses. Livorno’s Sephardi community was especially prominent in the city’s jewel trade, dealing in Indian diamonds, mainly from Goa, and coral, ‘which is fished for about Corsica by the Neapolitans and others, is totally in the hands of the Jews … and is a very lucrative trade; the greatest part of it is sent to England and from thence to the East-Indies’.29

  James Crisp is known to have possessed family associations with the international trade in precious stones. At least three of his kinsmen, Nicholas Crisp, Thomas Crisp and Edward Crisp, worked (among other things) as jewellers in London. It seems likely that an occasional aspect of James Crisp’s business activity in the early 1760s was shipping in coral, and possibly diamonds, from Livorno for these jewel-making and jewel-trading kin, and facilitating the export of their finished products to the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere.30

  Yet it was the smallest point of his commercial web, the Isle of Man, which allowed Elizabeth Marsh’s husband the widest access to the world. His contacts here were long-standing. Already, in 1752, ships owned by the island’s merchant-cum-smuggler-in-chief, George Moore, were carrying New England fish to the Crisps in Barcelona, and lading wine and brandy in return.31 James Crisp’s connection with Moore, and with another important Manx merchant, John Taubman, proved invaluable when Britain went to war with France after 1756, and with Spain in 1762–63, and trade between these countries was officially suspended. Manxmen took scarcely more notice of London’s wars than they did of its taxes, and the island’s neutrality protected it from attack or invasion. So, throughout the Seven Years War, some of Crisp’s Spanish wares, like those that his agents persisted in obtaining from Marseilles, Montpellier and other French ports, went on being unloaded on the Isle of Man, and were ferried discreetly over to Britain and Ireland by way of wherries operating out of its two main ports, Douglas and Peel.

  ‘A New Map of the Isle of Man’ by Thomas Kitchin, 1764.

  Apart from brandy and other spirits and wines, the contraband goods that James Crisp and his brother increasingly concentrated on were Barcelona silk handkerchiefs. These were large, four to five palms in width, made of soft Spanish twilled silk, variously coloured, and favoured as luxury fashion accessories by both sexes. They were also perfect articles for smuggling, being light, easy to transport in large numbers, and yielding a very good price. The Crisps shipped out tens of thousands of them from Barcelona to the Isle of Man over the years: plain black handkerchiefs for purchase by men and women in deep mourning, handkerchiefs in ‘black with red cross bars’ for use in light mourning, and ‘assorted in lively colours’ for everyday display. The brothers shipped them in boxes marked only with letters of the alphabet, and fudged names on the bills of lading. They supplied their sea captains with ‘fictitious papers’ in case their vessels were stopped and searched; and during wartime they were careful to employ only Danish or other neutral ships. In the process, they made a great deal of money. Between January and June 1765 alone, John Taubman purchased over £7000-worth of smuggled goods from Crisp Brothers (the equivalent now of over half a million pounds), mainly in the form of silk handkerchiefs and brandy.32 As in Tunis and Livorno, the brothers’ business transactions here involved Jewish agents. The Isle of Man had ‘no restrictions … against any sect of religion’. ‘Equity and justice to the trading part of the isle’ were the only criteria for being allowed the freedom to operate. So when Abraham Vianna, Solomon Da Costa and Jacob Osorio applied to the Duke of Atholl for naturalization on the Isle of Man in 1760, James Crisp in London and his brother Samuel in Barcelona were able cheerfully to act as their referees, along with traders in Amsterdam, Cork, Gothenburg, Lisbon, Cadiz, Venice and Leeds.33

  Relative openness to dealers from different nations and religions, minimal import and export duties, and resolute neutrality were only part of the Isle of Man’s attractions. Rather like Livorno, the island produced few exports of its own, but it offered invaluable storage for outside goods that were then shipped lucratively elsewhere. Not all of James Crisp’s contraband wine, brandy and silk handkerchiefs transported by way of Manx wherries into Scotland ended up moving southwards into England. Some went to Glasgow, to be re-exported to the American colonies. Some of his other imports into the island (especially the textiles) may even have reached West Africa, since slave ships operating out of Liverpool, Whitehaven and Lancaster routinely stopped at the Isle of Man to pick up any goods that might serve as barter in the trade for slaves.34 As far as Crisp himself was concerned, the island was also one of several points of access to Asian commodities. French, Danish, Dutch and Swedish merchantmen regularly brought in cargoes of East Indian goods. By law, such commodities could only enter Britain through London and under licence from the East India Company; but Crisp Brothers ships unloading cargoes in the Isle of Man could take on East Indian goods in return. John Taubman, for instance, was in a position to supply them with occasional cargoes of tea from Canton shipped into the island, virtually duty-free, by Dutch traders.35

  It was in part these highly flexible, essentially cosmopolitan business practices – this commercial international – that caused George Marsh, a loyal employee of the British state, to view his nephew-in-law as lax, duplicitous and, as time went on, wicked. James Crisp, he wrote at one point, appeared ‘to have no good principles’.36 Yet there were important respects in which Crisp’s behaviour was not aberrant at all. Over the course of the mid-eighteenth century, British merchants became notably more aggressive and successful in exploring extra-European markets, and Crisp’s progress, from a concentration on Mediterranean commerce to involvement in ever more distant seas, perfectly exemplified this trend. Nor was it unusual, at this or at any other time, for traders to seek out ways of evading government regulations restricting the free flow of goods. To the extent that Elizabeth Marsh’s new husband was at all unusual, it was in being for a while so successful, so quickly.

  The prominence of some of his early business associates is one indication of his calibre. In Livorno, James Crisp dealt with James Clegg, who made a fortune from salted fish, Francis Jermy, a Norfolk-born banker whose profits allowed him to build a lavish and beautiful villa outside the city, and Peter Langlois, a member of its best-known Huguenot trading dynasty.37 He also worked closely with George Moore and John Taubman, who were probably the chief Manx merchants of their time, and with the Català family in Barcelona, who were among the city’s main calico printers. The Crisp family’s name and pre-existing networks may have smoothed his way to such contacts, but – for all the suspicions he aroused among some members of the Marsh family – James Crisp seems a
lso to have possessed unusual energy, enterprise, and a personal capacity to impress. He was ‘a merchant of so much eminence’, wrote a British aristocrat and former cabinet minister who knew him socially as well as a businessman, ‘and so large dealings’.38

  The life that the Crisps constructed for themselves in London also bore witness to James’s skills as a merchant – and to Elizabeth Marsh’s own ambition. The couple seem to have moved from one rented address to another, but by late 1765 they were living in Camomile Street, in Bishopsgate ward. This area had remained untouched by the Great Fire of 1666, and was still full of narrow, crowded streets and wooden tenements and courtyards. Markedly ancient as a place of habitation (Roman remains were periodically unearthed in Camomile Street throughout this period), the neighbourhood was conspicuously mixed and dynamic. The local rate books reveal a markedly high proportion of Huguenot, Dutch and Sephardic Jewish names even by London standards – van Neck, de Aguilla, Benjamin, Israel, Salvador, Modigliani – and a rapid turnover of tenants, businesses and warehouse lessees.39 Dirty, crowded and polluted, the location’s advantages for James Crisp emerge most clearly from glancing at a map. Camomile Street intersected with Bishopsgate Street, one of the main coach roads to the north of England, which was convenient for when business took him to Scotland or the Isle of Man. Devonshire Square, where merchants involved in Britain’s Levant trade concentrated, was only two streets away; and East India House in Leadenhall Street, the headquarters of the East India Company, was at most five minutes’ walk from the Crisp residence. This was probably on the south side of Camomile Street, where the house plots included space for warehousing. James Crisp had only to walk southwards for fifteen to twenty minutes in order to reach the Thames, the customs house, Billingsgate fish market and his firm’s vaults in Mark Lane.