The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh

by Colley, Linda.

  James Crisp tried hard to legitimize his new Shetlands initiative by reference to patriotic arguments that did not come naturally to him. ‘The granting of this indulgence,’ he pleaded, ‘… would be a means of your memorialist carrying on this great and valuable branch of trade to the kingdoms, in a more extensive manner than it has been,’ but the Treasury in London and various Scottish dynasts were unmoved. Nor were they impressed by Crisp’s proposal that he should be allowed to ‘ship thirty-five thousand gallons of British spirits duty free’ every year into the Shetlands, ‘for the use of about one thousand five hundred fishermen’. As Crisp pointed out, it was common knowledge that Shetlanders smuggled in large quantities of spirits from Continental Europe, since how else could they withstand the bitter winters, short days and long, dark nights that geography inflicted on them for much of the year, and the iciness of their coastal waters. But as far as his official critics were concerned, fiscal principles were at stake, and ultimately the authority of the state. Allowing Crisp to ship British spirits into the Shetlands duty-free might establish ‘a dangerous precedent’, wrote one bureaucrat. ‘In its nature’ such an enterprise was ‘not subject’ to adequate state control.58

  The saga of James Crisp’s first economic ruin is much less, then, a morality tale of the penalties of personal extravagance, as George Marsh contended, than a more representative fable of how individual enterprise and transnational and transoceanic trade and contacts could come under extreme pressure from state interference, national rivalries, war and imperial adventures. This was not the entire story, however. Crisp would probably have survived the combined effects on his business of Anglo–Spanish warfare in 1762–63, the temporary collapse of Hamburg’s trade, and the assaults on his Isle of Man outlet and his Shetland ventures, had his wider Mediterranean trading world remained intact. But after 1764, this part of his commercial web also began to unravel.

  ‘Map of the Islands of Shetland’ by Herman Moll, 1745.

  On 16 April 1764, three Crisp Brothers ships arrived at Genoa loaded with flour and wheat, the Peggy, the Kitty and the Young Lady Maria, the latter possibly named in celebration or anticipation of the Crisps’ new daughter, Elizabeth Maria, whom her parents always referred to as ‘The Young Lady’.59 The ships’ captains were under orders to take on more goods at Genoa, and then to sail quickly on to Livorno and Naples so as to take advantage of the rocketing prices in those ports caused by a local grain shortage. Instead, Genoa’s Senate, anxious about the republic’s own acute dearth of grain, impounded the three ships and their cargoes. Such flour as the Crisps were able eventually to recover was (they claimed) substantially spoilt, while for the grain and flour retained for Genoan use, Crisp Brothers were allowed only a 20 per cent profit on the purchasing price. This, they insisted, was ‘so far out of proportion to the then actual price … [at] Leghorn and Naples markets, that it makes a difference to your memorialists of about two thousand pounds sterling’.

  This represented a hideously large sum for a still-young firm with limited capital. Although James Crisp had insured his ships and cargoes with a London broker, marine insurance at this time rarely covered these kinds of losses; and the campaign the brothers initiated to recover the money they believed Genoa owed them, plus damages, made things worse, because it went on for almost two years, soaking up legal fees and their own time, optimism and enterprise. The dispute lasted for so long because it hinged on something far more momentous than a few petty cargoes belonging to a small merchant house, which was why both Genoa’s Senate and magistrates and senior British politicians became involved, the latter for once weighing in on Crisp’s side. Once again, this was in essence a clash between mercantile appetite for unhampered long-distance trade on the one hand, and local loyalties and state priorities on the other. It was vital, the Genoa authorities insisted in a lengthy written defence of their actions, ‘that every nation should be supplied with such commodities as are wanting in their own country at a reasonable price’. Nations were ‘reckoned among themselves to be in a state of nature’, and a ruler’s authority and his inhabitants’ needs outweighed the interests of any private traders or companies. Certainly, they conceded, Crisp Brothers had lost money on their original grain speculation, and been deprived for a while of their own property, but this was nothing by comparison with the risk of allowing merchants and the market unmitigated freedom: ‘For should the proprietors be invested with such power … the Prince would be deprived of the supreme right in him invested, of fixing just and equitable prices on grain, a step so highly necessary for the preservation of his own subjects’ lives.’60

  Against this position, the British Board of Trade deployed diplomatic pressure, and ultimately a counter-manifesto signed by thirty-four of ‘the most able and respected merchants in London’. Temporary food shortages, these men and James Crisp countered, were no justification for a state to bypass the free market. This would be shifting off ‘that calamity upon a foreigner, which the hand of God had laid upon the state itself’. If Genoa’s Senate wanted Crisp’s wheat and flour to feed its citizens, it should have paid for these cargoes ‘according to the price at the market to which they were destined’. Issues of fairness or human need had nothing to do with it. James Crisp himself was adamant:

  Nothing (the proprietors desire to repeat and insist upon it) can give any Prince or State a power to lay any kind of restraint upon a foreign subject in the disposal of his property … To talk of what is equitable and reasonable independent of circumstances, is to talk at random. The reasonable because the real price of everything is what it will sell for.61

  The reasonable because the real price of everything is what it will sell for. It was a thoroughly stark and modern position, and James Crisp’s insistence on it shows again how, behind the sentimentality that made him name his ships after female relations, lay an uncompromising conviction of the overwhelming importance of unfettered trade, and an impatience with anything restricting it – distance, corporate monopolies, national and imperial boundaries and diktats, and even human need and ancient notions of a just price for grain. Yet, for all his grand certainties and ambitions, Crisp and his partners were still small-time merchants with very limited leverage. Not until February 1766, and then only under sustained British diplomatic pressure, did Genoa’s Senate finally agree in principle to settle the dispute, and it is unlikely that Crisp Brothers ever received their compensation, for by then the damage had long since been done.62

  As was true of all merchants, the glue of James Crisp’s commercial web was credit. Crisp Brothers’ continuing success depended on his own and his firm’s reputation for reliability and fair dealing, and on bills of exchange. These were documents roughly comparable to today’s travellers’ cheques: not simply promises to pay, but orders to pay in a foreign place, in a foreign currency, at some future time. Byway of networks of agents and bankers, merchants used bills of exchange to arrange credit with each other across large geographical distances, to raise loans, and to take advantage of favourable exchange rates in different locations. In the process, however, they quickly became caught up in a string of reciprocal legal and financial obligations that could tighten around them if things went wrong. As the geographical range of trade widened in the eighteenth century, as credit networks expanded, and as ever more transactions and locations had to be dovetailed together, so the possibilities of things going wrong multiplied, not least because in some respects overseas commerce remained a dangerously primitive business.63

  For all that James Crisp’s enterprises extended into Africa, Asia, the Americas and Western and Eastern Europe, his goods still could not travel faster than a sailing ship or a horse could carry them. For much of the time he dealt with people he had never seen, who were located in places even he had never visited. For information on these individuals and places he relied mainly on a stream of business letters, which again could only travel as fast as a sailing ship or a horse. The regular invocations of Providence in James Cris
p’s surviving business correspondence, like the phrase ‘by the Grace of God, in good order’ included in the manifests drawn up by his ships’ captains, show the degree to which commerce remained at the mercy of natural and man-made contingencies, and was fraught with risk.64 Genoa had been impounding incoming grain ships for some weeks before Crisp’s vessels were seized in April 1764, but this was insufficient time for a written warning of what was happening in the republic to reach him or his brother in London and Barcelona. Even if, by some lucky chance, such a message had reached them in time, there would of course have been no speedy way for them to communicate this information to their three ships as they sailed confidently towards Genoa and the trap.

  The slow haemorrhage of their firm’s credit in the wake of this Genoa episode, and other setbacks, can be measured by the succession of failed bills of exchange crossing the desk of Sebastià Prats, the brothers’ Barcelona notary. By late 1765 Crisp Brothers was desperately presenting bills of exchange to those traders in different countries who still owed them money. Since some of the latter were also in difficulties from post-war economic dislocations, many of these debts were never paid.65 Earlier, the Crisp brothers’ own credit reputation had been good. ‘We are well persuaded of your punctuality at maturity,’ the Livorno fish merchant James Clegg had assured James Crisp in 1764, but over the next two years the brothers began repeatedly to default. By early March 1767, Samuel Crisp was renouncing shares in ships’ cargoes arriving in Barcelona that the company had previously purchased on credit, because there was no money available to honour the bills. Some weeks later it was left to Juan Francisco Fontannaz, the Crisps’ chief assistant in Barcelona, to turn away the ships’ captains coming eagerly to the door of their counting house in search of future cargoes, for by now Samuel Crisp and Jacob Emery had slipped out of the city and away from their creditors.66 That same month, March 1767, the London newspapers published the formal announcement that James Crisp was bankrupt.67

  Just before, he had written to his main banker in Scotland, William Hogg & Son of Edinburgh. He was in ‘extreme anguish’, he confided, shocked for once out of the customary impersonal style of business correspondence. Crisp Brothers was still owed, he claimed, ‘between 15 & £16,000’ – over £1.3 million in present-day terms – but he hoped that, out of ‘extraordinary friendship’, the banker would be content with confiscating the company’s ships, buildings and fishing equipment in the Shetlands, for the brothers had no liquid capital left. ‘Please to destroy this,’ he scrawled at the end of the letter.68

  James Crisp was not destroyed, but he was damaged. Bankruptcy was too much part of economic normalcy in London, especially in the 1760s, to be regarded as irrefutable proof of a trader’s incompetence or improper dealings. Nonetheless, his freedom and independence were now far more limited, and his ambition of expanding a firm that had been mainly Mediterranean in scope into a business operating across different oceans and continents was in tatters. And, as always, bankruptcy was a personal as well as a monetary and commercial blow. It engulfed the victim’s family, and easily poisoned relations and trust between husband and wife. A wife who purchased goods on credit was exempt by law from imprisonment for these debts. So, to the extent that Elizabeth Marsh herself had been extravagant during the couple’s time in London – and George Marsh suggests that she was – any debts that she had accumulated continued to be James Crisp’s responsibility, for all that he was now bankrupt.69

  This may have embittered him, but Elizabeth was also given cause to feel bitter. In the spring of 1767 she, and not merely her husband, had to live with the humiliation of seeing repeated notices of his failure printed in the London Gazette and other newspapers, and with the knowledge that friends, relations and business rivals were reading these notices too. As was routinely the case with bankrupts, their home was searched so that Crisp’s assets could be scrutinized and assessed. The law allowed ‘doors, trunks, and chests’ to be broken open if necessary. Any moveable property could be seized to pay the bankrupt’s debts, except for ‘the necessary apparel of himself, wife and children’; and the bankruptcy commissioners might ‘examine on oath the bankrupt’s wife’. Crisp was obliged to attend a series of creditors’ meetings at London’s Guildhall and at the Rainbow coffee house, Cornhill, a favourite resort of ship-owners and overseas traders. Like all bankrupts, he had to agree to the election of assignees, four of them in his case, who took responsibility for the valuation and sale of his estate.70

  Only when the commissioners of bankruptcy were satisfied with a bankrupt’s cooperation, and four-fifths of his creditors ‘in number and value’ had agreed to sign a special certificate, was he able securely to retain a percentage of assets, and win release from any remaining obligations and from the fear of being sued or arrested. It is unclear whether James Crisp ever succeeded in obtaining this essential document. Some London newspapers reported in late May 1767 that he had, but George Marsh, predictably, refused to the end of his life to believe it.71

  One of the results of James Crisp’s bankruptcy was indeed that the balance of power between himself and his in-laws swung markedly in their favour. For all their early ambivalence, the Marsh family had previously held him in some respect as their social superior, and as Elizabeth Marsh’s rescuer. Now, however, while so many Marsh family members were rising in society and the state, James Crisp was in the shadows. This influenced how they all, including his wife, subsequently wrote about him; but it did not prevent members of the Marsh family from trying to help him, while simultaneously entangling him in imperial and national projects that were more their métier than his. In October 1765, when Crisp was still struggling to recover what was owed him at Genoa, Milbourne Marsh left Menorca for the position of Agent Victualler at the naval dockyard at Chatham, Kent, in order to be within easier reach of his daughter and son-in-law. George Marsh drew on his patronage powers at the Victualling Board to effect this transfer, and he did more. He introduced James Crisp to John Perceval, 2nd Earl of Egmont, and since 1763 the First Lord of the Admiralty, and thereby opened up to his niece and her husband the prospect of a fresh start and a new world.

  It is worth examining just how George Marsh, the son of a ship’s carpenter, came to be able to make introductions to one of the most important figures in the British state, because it illumines why this deceptively ordinary, essentially second-rate man was so persistently successful, and why Elizabeth Marsh’s own progress was punctuated by his interventions. In the mid-1740s George Marsh had gone out of his way to provide Perceval, at that stage heir to an Irish peerage and a Member of the Dublin Parliament, with some useful naval and legal information. Perceval responded by grandly extending the promise of future favours, but Marsh was too shrewd to take him up on the offer immediately. Perceval was still an opposition politician, a stray Irishman with a reputation as an intellectual and a visionary, scarcely an appropriate patron for an aspiring civil servant in London. On the evening of 10 October 1763, this changed. As George Marsh was reading his newspaper ‘at my lodging in Peckham’, he noticed that Egmont, as he now was, had been ‘appointed First Lord of the Admiralty’. By 6 o’clock the following morning, he had composed his letter and dispatched it: ‘If his Lordship thought I could be of any service to him, I would do myself the honour of waiting upon him.’ One week later, George Marsh had secured his meeting and one of the most crucial breaks in his career. Egmont ‘desired to know if I would accept of being his private secretary, as he should stand in great need of my assistance in naval affairs’. Apart from its intrinsic significance, the position of private secretary to the First Lord traditionally carried with it promotion to the Victualling Board; and soon George Marsh was hiring ‘a chariot by the month’ (not for him the extravagance of purchasing a carriage) ‘as I was obliged to go every day to the Admiralty’.72

  George Marsh used a similar blend of patient, studious deference and shameless self-advancement to woo subsequent Lords of the Admiralty. When John Montagu, Earl of
Sandwich, regained the position in 1771, Marsh not only bombarded him with sycophantic letters, but also lent him money, and even seems to have made room in his house for a relation of Sandwich’s mistress, Martha Ray. Yet, at base, it was Marsh’s industriousness, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of naval administration, that made him indispensable to successive patrician First Lords. These were the qualities that impressed Egmont, an intelligent, deeply serious man; it was rather different aspects of Egmont’s character that drew him for a while into collaboration and even friendship with James Crisp.73

  Egmont and Crisp were drawn together by their taste for enterprise and their broad, even romantic, geographical vision and imagination. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Egmont had been the leading sponsor of two important circumnavigations of the world, John Byron’s in 1764–66, and that captained by Samuel Wallis in 1766–68. His interest in the extra-European world was dynastic and personal as well as official and imperial. In the 1730s, Egmont’s father, the 1st Earl, had been one of the main sponsors of Georgia, at that point Britain’s southernmost American colony. The 2nd Earl inherited these transatlantic interests, and his position at the Admiralty enabled him to take maximum advantage of the speculative boom in North American land that followed Britain’s victory in the Seven Years War. Defeating the French and Spanish empires in North America had resulted in the transfer to Britain of some 1240 million acres there. This provoked a rash of Anglo-American land acquisition and development schemes during the 1760s. On the American side of the Atlantic, the decade saw the creation of the Mississippi Company, a syndicate of wealthy Virginia and Maryland colonists, including George Washington, who petitioned for a total of 2.5 million acres along the Ohio, Wabash and Tennessee rivers. Somewhat later, Benjamin Franklin and others formulated a scheme to found a new colony called Vandalia on the banks of the upper Ohio. The British government was opposed to further westward settlements of this sort, but it did favour expansionist schemes to the north and south of the original thirteen colonies, and these were the 2nd Earl of Egmont’s own chosen directions for investment.74