King was aware of the approximation inherent in any such project. But he was supported in that by the work of John Locke. ‘Since the attaining [of true knowledge]’, he wrote in his preface, ‘is next to impossible, we must content ourselves with such near approaches to it as the grounds we have to go upon will enable us to make.’30 Locke had placed mankind in a world where probability, not certainty, was an acceptable end. In the 1690s such a world seemed to be taking shape on every side. Probability was becoming the natural medium of human thought, and risk, a necessary engagement with the future. Businessmen embraced risk; so did insurers, bankers, philosophers and statisticians. ‘No man can expect to undertake anything in this world with certainty,’ a life insurance advert in 1708 would proclaim, ‘probability being the only grounds we may proceed upon in the ordinary affairs of life.’31 The Revolution appeared to have created a world built not on certainty but on risk, not on static laws but on endless dynamic change.
VIII
‘THINGS HAVE NO VALUE’
‘The market is the best judge of value ... Things are just worth so much as they can be sold for.’1
Nicholas Barbon, 1690
Both in knowledge and religion, then, and wherever the new culture of risk took effect, the years after the Revolution saw dramatic developments. No less extraordinary were the innovations which overturned traditional economics.
Dudley North died in 1691. He maintained his bluff exterior to the last, but the years after the Revolution were difficult for him as he failed in business and was cold-shouldered in the City. His enemies would not forgive him. At one point he was even targeted by an agent provocateur who came to his house insisting on a private meeting, then ‘leaned close, and whispering, said he was Just come from Ireland. “Sir,” said Sir Dudley aloud, “I care not where you came [from], nor whither you go.”’2 Fortunately Dudley had made sure he had a servant within earshot throughout the meeting. In the shadows of his last years, however, Dudley did produce one lasting legacy. Dudley had thirty years’ experience of business, and his mind was focused by the threat to trade. The Discourses upon Trade he published in his final year addressed the new economic questions which recent years had thrown up: What were trade and wealth? How much did they matter to the country, and how could they best be stimulated?
One answer to this last question had already been suggested by Josiah Child: lower interest rates. Low rates in Amsterdam were held responsible for the Dutch economic miracle, and in the aftermath of the Revolution, proposals were put forward to bring the cost of borrowing in England down from the official level of 6 per cent. Dudley saw no virtue in them. It was not that he objected to low interest rates. His doubts – and those of other economic writers, John Locke among them – were more far-reaching: he objected to government control. The 6 per cent official rate was widely ignored, with borrowers paying up to 14 per cent for their money. There was no reason to think a lower official rate would be treated with any more respect. What Dudley North and others wanted was a free market in money.
‘As plenty makes cheapness in other things, as corn, wool &c ... so if there be more lenders than borrowers, interest will also fall ... When all things are considered, it will be found best for the nation to leave the borrowers and lender to make their own bargain.’
This was a shocking suggestion to late seventeenth-century ears. How could money itself be a commodity? Why could governments not control the very coin which bore the King’s head? And if they could not, then what was the mysterious force which did control it? Besides, what did this mean for families whose wealth was in goods prized since time immemorial for their enduring value: gold, silver and land? For them, Dudley had another uncomfortable, indeed revolutionary, message:
‘No man is richer for having his estate all in money, plate &c lying by him ... That man is richest, whose estate is in a growing condition, either in land at farm, money at interest or goods in trade.’3
In other words, wealth was dynamic, not static. What mattered was not its current position but its trajectory – not value but growth. And to this growth, the new economists concluded, there need be no end. Wealth did not simply circulate within a known compass. Like knowledge, like London, like the universe, it could expand, and its expansion need have no limit.
Any number of frightening possibilities followed from this. That some men could get unimaginably wealthier and others, who were now rich, poorer, so wrenching apart the fixed certainties of rank. That the future, swollen by new wealth, might be quite unlike the present. That the state itself might lose its importance in a global free market, since ‘a nation in the world,’ as Dudley wrote, ‘as to trade, is in all respects like a city in a kingdom, or family in a city’.4
In the years after the Revolution, such calls for free trade were heard ever more widely. ‘If your parliaments’, wrote Benjamin Furly to Locke in November 1690, ‘would never trouble their heads about ... religion and trade, we should grow both religious and rich.’5 Just as governments were being called on to retreat from the world of belief, so they were being asked to pull back from another realm which they had always reckoned their own: the economy. When John Locke turned to economic matters, indeed, he gave this newly-identified force, the free market, principles which sounded almost like Newton’s physical laws:
‘The price of any commodity rises or falls by the proportion of the number of buyers and sellers ... This rule holds universally in all things that are to be bought and sold.’6
Supply and demand was a force as mysterious as the laws which held planets in the heavens, but its effects could be seen on every side. Farmers had once driven their grain to market, and sold it there at prices dictated by the state. No longer; the corn market was being invaded by a new breed of commercial middleman, the ‘badger’, who interposed himself between farmer and customer, dealing from samples in the back rooms of taverns. ‘Where, in the memory of many inhabitants,’ one writer complained early in the next century, ‘there us’d to come to town upon a day, one, two, perhaps three, and in some boroughs, four hundred loads of corn, now grass grows in the marketplace.’7 Central control of the wool market was also disintegrating. The traditional rector of wool prices, the aulnager, would disappear by the mid-1720s.
It was frightening to watch traditional ways disappearing and to contemplate an economic world which no longer had fixed rules or boundaries. There was worse to come for traditionalists, however, when the economic Moderns turned their attention to the nature of growth. Everyone knew what made nations great: mighty Kings and virtuous subjects. Now even that solid notion was turned on its head. Roger North first encountered the new heresy in a conversation with his brother, perhaps on one of the weekly evenings they spent together in Dudley’s house.
‘He used to say that the public profited exceedingly from luxury and vanity and that many good works moved from them.’8
Luxury and vanity were sins – impossible that the public should benefit from them. Certainly they were symptoms of wealth. Tea caddies and coffee houses, wigs ever higher, pockets ever longer, handkerchiefs, canes, perfumes and jewels, frivolities on the dining table, inlaid cabinets and laquered chairs, wall-screens, wall-hangings, Chinese paper and blue and white porcelain – all these were signs of England’s new wealth, but they were signs, too, of its decay. Was it not luxury which brought Rome to its fall? Luxury was the background to the sinful licentiousness seen at Charles II’s court. After Delarivier Manley broke with Lady Castlemaine (who accused her of trying to ensnare her son) she retaliated with a scandalous description of Castlemaine’s seduction of the young Earl of Dover. Its setting was deliberately, scandalously modern:
‘The sashes open ... tuberoses set in pretty gilt and china pots ... placed advantageously upon stands, the curtain of the bed drawn back to the canopy made of yellow velvet ... the panels of the chamber, looking-glass ... the young Dover ... newly risen from the bath ... in a loose gown of carnation taffeta, stained with Indian figures.’9<
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All this was decadence. ‘Pretty gilt and china pots’, pier glasses, taffeta dressing gowns were not real trade, merely the froth on its surface. The novelties in the Modena’s hold may have been marks of England’s prosperity, but they would also destroy her; that was the traditional assumption. Vanity and luxury were the abiding sins of a Godless nation, impoverishing and not strengthening her.
On the contrary, they were the engine driving her growth, argued Dudley North. ‘Did men content themselves with bare necessities,’ he wrote, ‘we should have a poor world.’10 He, after all, had made a fortune from just such eastern fripperies, and seen the market for them expand without limit. The main effect of a reduction in interest rates, Dudley thought, would be to increase spending on luxuries. Nor was his the only voice promoting such ideas. Not surprisingly it was Nicholas Barbon who went the furthest in heresy – or perhaps London’s sharpest entrepreneur merely showed the least concern for the sensibilities of his readers.
‘The promoting of new fashions ought to be encouraged because it provides a livelihood for a great part of mankind ... It is not necessity that causeth the consumption, nature may be satisfied with little, but it is ... fashion and desire of novelties, and things scarce, that causeth trade.’11
John Locke wondered aloud how many luxuries were bought only ‘because they come at dear rates from Japan and China, which if they were our own manufacture or product, to be had common and for a little money, would be contemned and neglected?’12 French products such as brandy or clothes sold for double the cost of English equivalents. Things have no value in themselves – that was Nicholas Barbon’s shocking conclusion. ‘It is opinion and fashion brings them into use and gives them a value.’13 What Barbon described as opinion and fashion may have been no more than greed and desire in the eyes of moralists, but Nicholas Barbon was not one to panic if the economy was driven by greed and desire. Men saw luxuries and lusted after them. They saw their neighbour wearing a new gown and wanted one like it. ‘Man being naturally ambitious, the living together [in cities] occasion emulation, which is seen by outvying one another in apparel, equipage, and furniture of the house.’14 To less heretical eyes, such men were little more than animals at the mercy of their appetites; this was a vision of mankind dangerously close to the savage materialism of the Moderns. It made no difference to the economists. As they saw them, the decadents in the West End were not just walking embodiments of sin. They might have been wasteful, slothful, vain, frivolous, extravagant, lustful, covetous, ridiculous and shallow; but they were making the nation rich.
Had these been mere theoretical flights of fancy, perhaps such ideas could have been ignored. But they were not. The changing face of fashion and trade was visible all over the country. In Taunton, Jaques and Anne Elisabeth Fontaine sold their shop not long before William and Mary’s coronation and went instead into the fashion business. ‘At Norwich they made a fabric called calamanco,’ Jaques wrote,
‘handsome and durable, then very much in fashion. I thought of imitating this fabric ... I did not want to make serge, which was the occupation of the whole town. Serge was so much out of fashion that the old makers hardly earned water to drink. They could not make anything else. They only knew by rote what they had seen their masters do.’
So Jaques set to work. Despite Anne Elisabeth’s teasing, he mastered the technique of singeing thread to stop the cloth twisting when he wove it. He invented a singeing machine and had different sections made by different carpenters to stop its secret getting out. Soon he was employing three weavers, all sworn to secrecy. He opened a new shop where he sold the imitation calamanco at 2/6 a yard, a 100 per cent mark-up. ‘I succeeded so well that in seven or eight months I had 12 or 15 looms going.’ Eventually the competition caught up, so Jaques and Elisabeth moved on, the former Calvinist Minister inventing first polka dot calamanco and then ‘dotted serge which was handsome and which I sold for three times what they could get for their plain ones’.’15 Each time the Fontaines’ novelties were imitated, the market was flooded and the price dropped, so they came up with something new. As soon as everyone else was wearing calamanco, the Taunton trendsetters wanted something else instead. In three years the Fontaines made £1,000.
Technical innovation, fashion, emulation – here, in embryo, was a cycle which would have far-reaching consequences. To the new economists, fashion, not necessity, was the motor of economic growth; fashion which could go on changing forever; fashion which had the potential to transform societies. Jaques and Anne Elisabeth Fontaine could see its effects even in Taunton, and if the cycle of fashion and emulation could have such giddy effects there, how much more dramatic would they be in the capital? London, after all, with its shops full of luxuries and pavements swarming with the rich and fashionable, had been devouring novelties for twenty years. London was home to the heretics and risk-takers who were proclaiming a new era. In London, the new world predicted by the economic moderns was already coming into being.
IX
‘THE IDLE AND GAY FOLK OF THE TOWN’
‘London is a world by itself; we daily discover in it more new countries and surprising singularities than in all the universe besides. There are among the Londoners so many nations differing in manners, customs and religions, that the inhabitants themselves don’t know a quarter of ‘em.’1
Tom Brown, 1700
Europeans had sailed to the furthest corners of the earth, discovered the Americas and penetrated Cathay, but what of the marvels in their own country? Imagine an Indian brought back to England and ‘dropped perpendicularly from the clouds’ into Europe’s greatest city.
‘At first dash the confused clamours near Temple Bar stun him, fright him, and make him giddy. He sees an infinite number of machines, all in violent motion, with some riding on the top, some within, others behind, and Jehu on the coach-box, whirling towards the devil some dignified villain who has got an estate by cheating the public ... Some carry, others are carried. “Make way there”, says a gouty-legged chairman, that is carrying a punk [prostitute] of quality to a morning’s exercise; or a Bartholomew baby-beau, newly launched out of a chocolate house, with his pockets as empty as his brains ... One tinker knocks, another bawls ... A fat greasy porter runs a trunk full-butt upon you ... ‘Turn out there, you country putt’, says a bully with a sword two yards long jarring at his heels, and throws him into the kennel.’2
Tom Brown, the author of this conceit, made his living (when sober) describing the extraordinary transformation which was taking place on the banks of the Thames. He took his ‘Indian’ to a coffee house, to a gambling-den, to a brothel. He took him to witness the Moderns in earnest discussion at the Royal Society. London was in a ferment. ‘“You behold”, cried I to him, “the circulation that is made in the heart of London, but it moves more briskly in the blood of the citizens. They are always in motion and activity. Their actions succeed one another with so much rapidity that they begin a thousand things before they have finished one, and finish a thousand others before they may be properly said to have begun them.”’
One thing above all struck Tom Brown’s ‘Indian’, when he recovered his breath: that everything in London seemed to be for sale. Brown took him to the Royal Exchange, where traders bawled for news from Syria or shouted out the prices of imports. Dudley North’s predictions of a global marketplace already seemed to be coming true. Handbills plastered the walls, ‘a ship to be sold ... passages to Pennsylvania ... a tutor to be hired ... a milch-ass, to be sold at the night-man’s in Whitechapel’. Other vendors appeared to possess no wares at all. ‘[They] talk of nothing but trucking and bartering, buying and selling, borrowing and lending, paying and receiving,’ gasped Tom Brown’s ‘Indian’, ‘and yet I see nothing they have to dispose of!’3 Genuine visitors to London were also startled by its vibrant commercial bustle. Silverware came from the workshops of Huguenot immigrants, guns from Pierre Monlong, precision instruments from Thomas Tompion and silks from Soho and Spitalfields. T
hey could buy wigs and canes, Italian olives and French wines. ‘For pleasure or luxury,’ wrote Guy Miège, ‘London is a magazine, where all is at hand and scarce anything wanting that money can purchase.’4
It was not only the range of goods on sale which struck visitors. The manner in which they were sold was almost as startling. The craftsman’s workshop, little changed since the Middle Ages, was giving way to something new. Along the Strand and Cheapside, shop windows glittered with displays of fabrics, pastries or sweets. Daniel Defoe remarked that shopkeepers spent less on their stock than on ‘painting and gilding, fine shelves, shutters, boxes, glass doors, sashes and the like, in which, they tell us now, ‘tis a small matter to lay out two or three hundred pounds’.5 And if this was the beginning of retailing, it would soon be accompanied by other attributes of the modern market-place. The smarter shops would begin to print elaborately decorated trade cards to advertise their wares; handbills were stuck to the walls; newspapers, ever more numerous, filled their columns with printed advertisements. Print was creating a dynamic virtual marketplace.
One such advertisement appeared in the London Gazette in October 1689.
‘The concerts of music that were held in Bow Street and in York Buildings are now joined together, and will be performed in York Buildings on Thursday next, being the 17th instant, at 7 a clock at night, and will continue every Monday and Thursday.’6
The Last Revolution Page 34