‘Map of Bishopsgate Ward’ by Thomas Bowen, engraved by Thomas Bowles, 1767.
When he did so, he would have passed down Gracechurch Street. This is where Jane Austen pointedly situates Elizabeth Bennet’s aunt and uncle Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice. Pointedly because, as Austen makes clear in the novel, Gracechurch Street, like most of Bishopsgate, was not a fashionable or smart neighbourhood during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Bingley sisters, who gravitate conventionally towards landed society for all their own background in trade, despise the address. But, as Austen suggests, by making the Gardiners affluent and cultivated as well as virtuous, Bishopsgate, with its warehouses, insurance and shipping offices, its many coaching inns and its mushroom businesses, was a recognized site for the making of mercantile fortunes, a place for people to move up. One of Elizabeth Marsh’s woman friends in Camomile Street, for instance, was a Mrs Jewson.40 Her husband, Charles Jewson, subsequently became Chief Cashier of the Bank of England.
As far as James Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh were concerned, the evidence suggests that even in the very early 1760s they were living more than comfortably. In 1762 only thirteen other households and businesses in All Hallows Bread Street, the parish where the Crisps were living at that time, were assessed at a higher rate than they were for payments ‘towards the necessary relief of the poor of the said parish’.41 In the view of Elizabeth’s uncle George Marsh, however, it was not what the couple paid in taxes, but their level of expenditure that merited comment. He viewed them as extravagant, and he was right. Husband and wife were both already highly experienced travellers, but neither had spent much time in London before 1757, and both were young, divided, self-inventing individuals with something to prove. As a result, they clutched eagerly at the capital’s pleasures and possibilities. When their first child, Burrish Crisp, was born on 27 April 1762, and again at their daughter Elizabeth Maria’s birth two years later, James Crisp seems to have gone out of his way to seek out not just expert but highly fashionable assistance for his wife. He called in a well-known man-midwife, Dr David Orme of Threadneedle Street, a pioneer in the improved use of forceps.42
Such expensive behaviour (which in this case also suggests Crisp’s attentiveness as a husband) infuriated George Marsh. It was a perennial complaint among social commentators and satirists that upwardly mobile London tradesmen and merchants, egged on by their over-ambitious womenfolk, lived beyond their means. The economic dislocations that followed the Seven Years War amplified the stridency of this kind of critique. ‘How many packs of cards were sold in the year 1716, and how many in 1766?’ thundered a London journalist in 1767:
How many coaches, chariots, chaises, horses and footmen were kept in 1716, and how many in 1766?… How many tradesmen wore laced waistcoats in 1716, and how many in 1766? How many bankrupts were there in 1716, and how many in 1766?43
George Marsh, who enjoyed pasting improving and admonitory extracts of this sort into his commonplace book, would have agreed both with the sentiments and the implicit schadenfreude. Physically plain, fond of sober (though not inexpensive) dress, and almost immoderately temperate out of choice and because of his epilepsy, he disapproved of his niece and her glittering, indulgent husband not simply because they were extravagant, but because they were different, and to begin with successful. When this ceased to be the case, he felt thoroughly vindicated, and he converted what had happened to the couple into a morality tale of the perils of waywardness and improvidence. He also saw the Crisps, with more acuity, as exemplars of wider, international changes:
One of the worst effects of that great wealth, which flourishing manufactures and an extensive commerce bring into a country, is the prevalence of extravagance. Luxury is but another word for a rapid consumption, and as the Prince’s revenue in all modern states depends on that consumption, monarchs are in general ready enough to encourage it. Courts are the great scenes of it. Capitals are full of it … [The] frugal and modest become in the vortex of a great city, like the surrounding particles which whirl them about.
James Crisp and Elizabeth Marsh, he wrote, had been ‘too much inclined to ape the fashion and expense of people of very great fortune, in all kinds of entertainments and ruinous follies’.44 The vortex, and their undue enjoyment of it, had whirled them to destruction.
This was an insufficient explanation of events, but George Marsh’s perspective on the Crisps’ London life, and on his niece Elizabeth herself, is still valuable. He saw more of them at this stage than any other member of the family, since his work at the Navy Office in Crutched Friars and at the Victualling Office at Tower Hill brought him into close proximity with Bishopsgate. Normally he devoted little curiosity to women. Although he was careful to allot sentences to his female relations in his Family Book, he rarely enquired into their lives deeply. A ‘very nice affectionate woman’ is, for instance, virtually the sum total of his description of his own wife, Ann Marsh.45 But, even more than her husband, Elizabeth Marsh challenged and troubled his understanding, and he devoted several pages to describing her. She had been, he conceded towards the end of his life, and looking back on these years in London, ‘a handsome and very engaging woman with great abilities’ – though even now he could not resist remarking that she had eaten too much, evidence to his mind not simply of the sin of gluttony, but of undue sensuousness and a lack of discipline. By this time he was anyway even more convinced that great abilities were dispensable:
Every day’s experience ought more and more to convince the world that happiness in human life depends more on small virtues than on splendid qualities … Splendid qualities are of little use in the common transactions of the day. Let mankind then who would wish their children happy, rather than great, give them ideas and habits which will befriend them in the common transactions of the day. Of those none are more valuable than economy.46
Yet, as was often the case in Elizabeth Marsh’s experience, things were far more than they seemed, and far more than the personal. The tensions between James Crisp and members of her family stemmed from more than a clash of temperaments and lifestyles, just as what happened to her and her husband now was due to far more than their mutual delight in spending money.
At the root of these troubled family politics lay substantially different interactions with, and perspectives on, the world. George Marsh only journeyed outside Britain once in his life, but in his own modest fashion, he possessed a global perspective. As a member of the navy’s Victualling Board after 1763, he oversaw the supplying of ships in all of the world’s oceans, including those that sailed with James Cook into the Pacific. But for him, engaging with the world meant following the flag. In this he was typical of his family. By the 1760s a growing number of Marsh family males were using the British state and empire to secure and advance their own personal mobility. Milbourne Marsh, Elizabeth’s father, kept his position at Gibraltar until 1763, and then returned to being Naval Officer at Menorca, which the British regained at the end of the Seven Years War. Her elder brother Francis Milbourne Marsh was by now a captain in the British Army, and was stationed for part of this and the following decade in Ireland and the West Indies; while in 1768 her younger brother, John Marsh, was appointed British Consul at Málaga in Spain. Then there was Milbourne Warren, a son of Milbourne Marsh’s maternal aunt, who worked for the East India Company as a master shipbuilder in Madras, and who also took part in the brief British occupation of Manila in 1762–63. Marguerite Duval, the daughter of Elizabeth’s aunt Mary Duval, was married to a James Morrison who later climbed steadily up the ranks in the Mint, the agency responsible for designing and manufacturing Britain’s copper, silver and gold coins, as well, increasingly, as the coinage used in its colonies. Linked through their employments to the British state, these men were naturally predisposed to view the world through the lenses of the British nation, state and empire.
Almost certainly born outside Britain, James Crisp, by contrast, was hybrid in culture and, like many merchants
, conspicuously polyglot. He was fluent in Castilian and Catalan, and seems to have been able to make himself understood (though not to write) in Portuguese, Italian and French.47 He was used to working in mixed, highly urban neighbourhoods, employed and dealt with men (and women) of several different nationalities, and relished doing business in neutral, free ports like Livorno, Hamburg or Douglas on the Isle of Man, places operating outside – and sometimes in defiance of – the jurisdiction of major states. Although he traded with British colonies in mainland America and the Caribbean, James Crisp also did business with parts of Spain’s rival empire; and he corresponded and dealt indiscriminately with Jews, Catholics and Muslims in a fashion that could appear strange and even unscrupulous to those who were not overseas traders. Elizabeth Marsh had been shocked to see the casualness with which European merchants in Morocco (and their Muslim counterparts) shrugged aside religious barriers for the sake of mutual commercial benefit. ‘The difficulties a Christian was exposed to in that country,’ she wrote wonderingly of an encounter with a Dutch merchant who was planning to settle in Marrakech, ‘were overlooked by him as matters of no importance or consideration.’48 Like George Marsh, then, and more consciously, James Crisp thought and acted in transcontinental terms, his business interests extending across northern and southern Europe, and into Africa, Asia, and British and Spanish America. But unlike the males of Elizabeth Marsh’s family, Crisp’s contacts with and perception of the world before 1767 were not overwhelmingly determined by British state and imperial imperatives. His livelihood – and now hers – depended rather on the free movement of commodities, information and capital across state, imperial and maritime boundaries, and across ethnic, cultural and religious boundaries.
Like all major conflicts, the Seven Years War caused immediate disruptions to this kind of free economic movement. It also contributed to attitudinal shifts that were not always compatible with the kind of busy, protean adaptiveness that James Crisp exemplified and relied on. ‘A merchant,’ Adam Smith would write in The Wealth of Nations (1776),
… is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another.49
As Smith’s more than usually austere tone suggests, ancient arguments over the degree to which commerce was a national and social benefit or liability were rehearsed in the middle decades of the eighteenth century with greater political edge and precision. On the one hand, patriotic Britons were proud of their expanding commerce, while many merchants profited from the consequences of Britain’s military and imperial aggression at this time. On the other hand, intensifying national and imperial rivalries and violence also meant that individuals and groupings who were accustomed to trading and moving easily across political, religious and ethnic boundaries could sometimes find themselves obstructed or coming under greater suspicion, while the growing geographical range of warfare undermined some commercial projects and actors, even as it benefited others.50
Some of the qualities that made James Crisp a successful merchant – his cultural mix, his enthusiasm for new contacts, and his impatience with state controls and fixed boundaries; his entrepreneurship, in short – possessed the potential then to cause him problems at a time of massive warfare, and in the more nationalistic, imperially conscious British state that was so evidently emerging by 1763. The size and range of Crisp Brothers’ commercial web, spun so rapidly, and out of limited reserves of capital, were a more practical source of vulnerability. ‘Serve all nations,’ was Abbé Raynal’s advice to overseas merchants in The History of the Two Indies, ‘but whatever advantage may be offered to you from speculation, give it up, if it should be injurious to your own country.’ And Raynal added a more practical caveat: ‘Do not embrace too many objects at once.’51
To begin with, the geographical diversity and partial illegality of James Crisp’s trading interests proved advantageous. They helped him flourish despite the disruptions to trade brought about by the Seven Years War. Even though Spain’s entry into the conflict in 1762 almost halved the level of southern European imports into London that year, Crisp Brothers, with their well-established Barcelona office, cosmopolitan staff and covert Isle of Man networks, seem initially to have held on to much of their Iberian and Spanish colonial business. It was the last stages of the war, and some of its repercussions, that began fraying, one after another, the threads of the brothers’ commercial web.
Their Hamburg links probably suffered first, and as a direct result of the scale and intensity of the war. In 1763, the appetite of Frederick the Great of Prussia for wartime loans, and his limited capacity to repay them, provoked a major banking crisis in Amsterdam. This in turn put pressure on banks and merchants in Stockholm, London, Berlin and even the American colonies, but above all in Hamburg. For a while that autumn, trade in Hamburg, and its supplies of linen, grain and timber, ground to a halt, and the dislocations lasted until 1764 at least.52 Then, Britain’s own need for extra revenue to offset its huge wartime debts led to a spate of new fiscal regulations. The most notorious of these were the succession of new taxes aimed at Britain’s American colonies: the Sugar Acts of 1764 and ’66, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. But it was a connected fiscal measure, aimed however at a very different part of the world, that most affected James Crisp.
As Edmund Burke remarked, Parliament’s Revestment Act of May 1765, which returned sovereignty over the Isle of Man to the British Crown, and consequently made the island liable to customs duties established by the Westminster Parliament, was ‘to the same purpose’ as post-war British efforts to tax America. In both cases, the official intention was at once to increase revenue, to attack smuggling, and to assert London’s imperial control. In 1764, British customs officials calculated that during the 1750s Manx smuggling had cost the British Treasury £100,000 per annum in lost revenue. The Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, French, Caribbean and British-based traders who continued shipping goods into and out of the island, they further estimated, were now depriving the Treasury of three times that amount every year in customs and excise duties.53 The Revestment Act put an end to this by placing Manx commercial life under stringent new regulations. British customs and excise officers were given the power to search vessels arriving at or leaving the Isle of Man, and to confiscate illicit cargoes. As a result, the island’s capacity to foster cheap trade between Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe came to an end. The imposition of parliamentary control also put an end to the Isle of Man’s capacity to adopt a neutral stance in time of war. The opportunities it had allowed Crisp Brothers and other traders to continue transporting Continental goods and re-exports into Britain, even when Europe’s competing states were at war, were now, as James Crisp wrote, ‘infallibly ruined’.54
Nonetheless, he went on, in what might have been the motto of his life: ‘There are not wanting many profitable ways for a man to employ his capital.’ The substantial closing down of Manx smuggling also put out of work the wherries, and their mainly Irish crews, that had previously ferried contraband goods from the island into Britain. By late 1765 Crisp and a new partner, Francis Warren, had purchased some of these wherries and persuaded their crews to move to the Shetlands to expand his fishing business there. The Inspector General of Scottish Customs reported dourly on this new Crisp initiative in July 1766. ‘A separate fishery’ had been initiated, he informed his Treasury masters,
by the employing [of] eight Irish wherries of about twenty five tons burthen, each manned with eight men, inhabitants of Ireland … by which boats one thousand and fifty-six quintals of fish were caught at an earlier than usual season of the year, and at a greater distance from the shore, owing to the size of the boats, and expertness of the fishers employed; in the curing of which fish, about forty men and fifty or sixty women and children, natives of Shet
land, were employed, and the same were afterwards exported in the name and on account of the said Messrs. Crisp and Warren.55
It was an admirable act of resilient entrepreneurship. Irish sailors and fishermen, recently put out of work on the Isle of Man, had been found new jobs. Their skills and boats extended Shetland’s fishing season and catch. This in turn increased the island’s job opportunities, and James Crisp’s export business. The scheme’s only weakness was typical of its originator. It paid scant regard to the pretensions of state and nation. The Scottish landowners and merchant land-masters who still dominated Shetland’s fisheries heartily disapproved of Crisp’s Irish interlopers, not least because, as he naïvely informed the authorities, ‘the hardiness, diligence, and superior judgment of the Irish in fishing is very well known’. It was not just Scottish grandees and their Edinburgh-based lawyers who began putting pressure on the new venture, but officialdom in London too. To the extent that he thought about it all, Crisp viewed his Irish fishermen as British: ‘The subjects of Ireland being by the 13th and 14th of Charles II … and the subsequent acts accounted British’, he informed the Treasury confidently and carelessly.56 Imperial British trade was not yet that simple. In terms of fishing rights, as in so much else, the inhabitants of Ireland were not in fact ‘accounted British’. The Treaty of Union with Scotland in 1707, and subsequent legislation, had made clear that no one was to ‘catch, cure, or land fish on any part of Britain but the subjects [and] inhabitants thereof, in all which cases the Irish are expressly considered as foreigners’.57
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