‘the company there finding him often afflicted about a matter which nobody else took any notice of, railed him upon this uneasiness as being a visionary trouble. He ... more than once replied we might laugh at it, but it would not be long before we should want money to send our servants to market with for bread and meat.’13
The problem which worried Locke was clipping. Coins, not yet milled round the edges, had precious metal repeatedly (and illegally) clipped from them to be melted down. The coin retained the same face value but its actual worth was reduced each time it was clipped. The practice had been going on for years, and by the 1690s much of the currency had an intrinsic worth as little as half its face value. The war in Europe made the problem far worse by generating an enormous outflow of silver to pay troops and buy supplies abroad. Suddenly there was not enough currency to go around – a shortage for bankers and merchants, an endless source of trouble for investors. ‘Pray tell me whether I cannot refuse clipped money,’ Locke wrote to Edward Clarke in May 1695, ‘for I ... know not why I should receive half the value I lent instead of the whole.’14 It was ‘the badness of the coin’ which Edmund Bohun blamed for many of his woes. Golden guineas started to change hands way above their face value. Worst of all, Locke proved strictly right in his predictions. There was insufficient currency even for everyday market transactions.
The economy was already in trouble. The hasty inventions of the Financial Revolution had kept the Government solvent, but twelve months later its credit was nearly exhausted. Exchequer tallies were discounted by 30 per cent and found no takers. New loans were sucked into the balance of payments crisis, Government revenues depressed by the trade lull, while taxation (and poor harvests) generated a crisis in agriculture. The result, in 1695–7, was the biggest financial collapse of the century. East India Stock plummeted to 37. Even Bank of England stock crashed. The volume of trade in 1696–7 was less than it had been thirty years earlier. This was the flood which ended the stock boom in Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, and in it even Nicholas Barbon’s nimble feet were swept from under him. His charm, his nerve, his ruthless exploitation of the courts were unable to save him, as creditors began to call in their loans. ‘Had not his cash failed,’ Roger North wrote, ‘in all probability he might have been as rich as any in the country.’15 The greatest entrepreneur of his age would die impoverished in 1698.
At the heart of this crash was the crisis in currency. Coin itself, the hard matter of economic activity, could no longer be trusted; to English men and women it seemed as if there was no economic certainty left on earth. Meanwhile, the debate over how to repair the coinage was almost as unnerving, for the question it raised was one which traditional cultures had never had to ask at all: What is money and why do we value it?
Money is a value made by a law;16 that was Nicholas Barbon’s unsettling maxim. Dudley North, who saw the currency crisis coming before he died, agreed. ‘Gold and silver are in no sort different from other commodities,’ he wrote. Like other commodities they had their ‘ebbings and flowings’,17 and were subject to the basic laws of supply and demand. Gold and silver fluctuated against the value of other goods, and against the prices of silver and gold in Amsterdam or Paris; they fluctuated, indeed, against each other. It was a nonsense, therefore, to use precious metal currency as a yardstick of fixed value. On the contrary, as Nicholas Barbon put it, money was ‘an imaginary value made by a law for the conveniency of exchange’.18
Money could, then, theoretically be replaced by something of no intrinsic value at all – such as paper. As it happened, an experiment to test that had recently been carried out in Massachusetts, where William Phips, hero of the Hispaniola treasure-hunt, returned as Governor in 1692 (where he found himself struggling not only with economic crisis but the Salem witch-hunts – neither of which crises could be solved by the rough-and-ready tactics so effective against shipboard mutiny). The American war against the French colonies had led to a financial crisis with the colony £40,000 in debt and the treasury empty.
‘In this extremity ... The General Assembly ... appointed an able and faithful committee of gentlemen, who printed from copperplates a just number of bills and flourished, indented and contrived them in such a manner as to make it impossible to counterfeit any of them ... These bills being of several sums, from two shillings to ten pounds ... they circulated through all the hands in the colony pretty comfortably.’19
The Bills were only a temporary expedient; when the crisis was over, ‘the Governor and Council had the pleasure of seeing the Treasurer burn before their eyes many a thousand pounds’. Back in England, meanwhile, paper money was first promoted by Mordecai Abbot, one of Thomas Neale’s partners in the Million Adventure. The immediate trigger was the failure of a Tory scheme to promote a land bank – a rival to the Bank of England – which failed and left the Government printing Bills as a fall-back. The first banknotes came in denominations of £10, £20, £30, £50 and £100 – they were for businessmen, in other words, not for use as small change – and, to make them as attractive as possible, even paid interest. They proved, as one writer put it afterwards, ‘An effectual, tho’ a paper, prop to support the state, when its silver pillars were for a time removed.’20
Banknotes depended on wealth which could not be seen, touched or weighed. That was their disturbing aspect to a nation which had already forfeited so many certainties. Treasure was no longer the only reality of wealth. Beyond silver and gold stretched an expanding realm of intangible riches circulating in the exchanges of Amsterdam and London. Money is a value made by a law. That was as shocking to most people as the notion that vice enriched nations – perhaps more so. Values were no longer cast in precious metal, they shifted relative to each other in a three-dimensional economic world. And the prop to that world? Not treasure, not gold, but that shadowy spirit of Exchange Alley: credit.
The currency crisis would eventually be brought under control by none other than Isaac Newton, appointed Warden of the Mint in March 1696, who became a surprisingly effective bureaucrat and restored public confidence in the currency by refusing the devaluation which economic modernists suggested and concentrating on complete and rapid recoinage. By the time that was complete, however, old certainties about value had been severely damaged. ‘Of all beings that have existence only in the minds of men, nothing is more fantastical and nice than credit’,21 wrote the economist Charles Davenant. Nicholas Barbon was, as always, more terse: Credit is a value raised by opinion.22 On such flimsy wings did Modern economies take flight. To most people in England the crisis over the value of money was of a piece with stockjobbing, gambling and national lotteries. Dutch Finance was the disparaging name given to all the novelties of the new economic world which emerged after the Revolution: to banks and lotteries, futures markets and public credit, speculation and paper money. In the economy, as in the political world, as in religion and knowledge, old certainties were disappearing.
In less than a decade, England had seen a King ousted and monarchy diminished, the church lose its leading role, social hierarchy be eroded, and all values attacked. It had seen the state dragged into the marshlands of credit, and governments depend on gambling for their survival. It had seen its swollen capital overrun by gamblers and tricksters, wits, fops and whores. Luxury and vice were proclaimed as the motors of wealth; man had been reduced to a soulless brute driven only by his appetites.
‘In one word, all that’s valuable to us runs to wreck, our religion dwindling sensibly into downright atheism and profaneness, our liberties into slavery, our property into beggary ... the people running more and more into factions ... Add to these considerations ... the lost reputation of him who sits at the helm, [and] the growing lukewarmness and despondency of the people in general, occasioned by immoderate taxes.’
Only one thing was wanting to complete this list of woes, but the writer soon supplied it: ‘unsuccessfulness in all the late noisy projects’.’23 The crises in faith and money were the final straws for tra
ditionalists. Too much had been challenged and too much discarded too quickly. Too many doors had been opened in the years since the Revolution. It was time for the guardians of order to push them shut.
XV
‘A NATIONAL REFORMATION OF MANNERS’
One evening in the summer of 1691 a London streetwalker had an unusual encounter. She picked up a gentleman in the City and took him to a brandyshop, where they drained several glasses – nothing new there, in a town where prostitution was becoming epidemic. But when the girl began to move closer to her customer, matters took an unexpected turn. Instead of responding in the traditional manner, he leapt to his feet with the following speech:
‘Madam, keep off! ... Assure yourself I am not what I appear! Reclaim your whoredoms or you are lost!’1
The campaign to reform society was under way.
Signs of a religious revival had been visible in London for some time before the Revolution. Charismatic preachers such as Anthony Horneck attracted young men tired of Restoration excess, and ‘O! What a brave and blessed sight is it,’ exclaimed the evangelist Josiah Woodward,
‘in these degenerate and debauched times, to behold young men ... taking greater pleasure in singing of psalms than others can possibly take in their prophane and obscene songs!’
A ‘pathetic and heavenly manner ... was usual to him’, Josiah Woodward wrote of Horneck, who reputedly had to fight his way through worshippers to reach his pulpit at the Savoy chapel. (Woodward added rather ambiguously after Horneck’s death that he had now been ‘translated to eternal rest ... we hope’.) Mr Smithies, curate of St Giles’s Cripplegate, gave popular Sunday morning sermons in Cornhill. Preachers of his stamp were driven to ever bolder flights of pulpit oratory by the arrival of a Catholic King, of course, and by the time of the Revolution, the daily prayer meetings at St Clement Danes ‘never wanted a full and affectionate congregation’.’2
The campaign for a Reformation of Manners was one strand in this general revival of religion. It began in 1690 among a group of Tower Hamlet residents, none of them grand, whose manifesto declared war on urban disorder and crime, in particular on brothels, those ‘nurseries of the most horrid vices and sinks of the most filthy debaucheries’.3 From Tower Hamlets, one of the original campaigners moved to the Strand, where he fell ‘into serious discourse upon the melancholy subject of the iniquity of the times’,4 and began a new Society with half a dozen Westminster friends. While the Religious Societies promoted spirituality, the Societies for Reformation of Manners sought more visible transformations. ‘Swearing, cursing, drunkenness, revilings, lasciviousness, whoredoms, riot, gluttony, blasphemies, gamestring’ – these were the sins from which they would save England, and the methods they chose were uncompromising. Persuasion was not enough; they would rescue the nation whether it wished to be rescued or not. Scouring the streets and alleys, they sought out ‘the lurking holes of bawds, whores, and other filthy miscreants in order to their conviction and punishment according to law’.5 In other words, they planned to resurrect the backlist of statute law which turned sins into punishable crimes: blasphemy, Sabbath-breaking, drunkenness, swearing.
Fear drove them to this task. Isaac Newton’s vision of a mechanically spinning universe – created by God, but not piloted by him – was quite alien to most men and women of the late seventeenth century. Most believed that God intervened daily in the machinery of the world, awarding victory to virtuous armies, rewarding saints, and punishing sinners not in the afterlife but now, by burning down their houses or blighting their crops. Queen Mary scolded herself for taking too much pleasure ‘in the convenience of my house and neatness of my furniture’.6 God lit a fire, on 9 November 1691, and burnt Kensington Palace to the ground. And that was the fate awaiting the whole country, zealous Christians believed, if they did not mend their ways. Languishing in sin and debauchery, drunken, foul-mouthed, lecherous and vain, England lay under the sword of God’s wrath.
And England deserved it. To the picturesque sins which filled reformers’ pamphlets, the country added the compounding error of ingratitude. For this was God’s own nation, upon which He had bestowed extraordinary pains. He had rescued England from the Spanish, and then from Guy Fawkes. He had warned them off vice by plague and fire, and the English had ignored him. In 1688 He had extended his grace to save the nation from popery in ‘a deliverance ... more miraculous than that which he wrought out for his oppressed church in Egypt ... at the Red Sea’. Yet London’s theatres and gambling-dens showed it sinking ever further into the mire. ‘What monstrous ingratitude!’7 exploded one reformer. Unless sinners could be returned to the path of virtue – forcibly if need be – the nation faced certain ruin.
Such was the thinking of grass-roots campaigners in the sprawling, swelling capital, and in the aftermath of revolution their arguments struck an immediate chord with the country’s new rulers. Kings had, of course, proclaimed against vice before,* but, behind the calls for Reformation which William and Mary instituted as soon as they were crowned, there was not only more plausibility than before, there was also hard political strategy.
Virtue established a clear distinction between the new court and its predecessors. ‘I am never to forget’, wrote John Evelyn, who visited court the week before Charles II died,
‘the King, sitting & toying with his concubines Portsmouth, Cleveland [Lady Castlemaine], & Mazarine [Hortense Mancini], &c: A French boy singing love songs in that glorious gallery, whilst about 20 of the great courtiers & other dissolute persons were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least £2,000 in gold before them.’
‘Six days after,’ as Evelyn remarked, ‘all was in the dust.’8 James’s court was worse than vicious, it was Catholic, and his own philandering was public knowledge. There may have been sordid rumours about the King and William Bentinck, but apologists could at least point to his outward Calvinism and rejection of ‘Atheism, infidelity and the ridiculing of Religion’,9 while the Queen’s life was unimpeachable. The Wednesday court sermons she introduced were widely published.
Contrast with the old court was one prize worth having, but for William there was a still greater prize to be gained from virtue: legitimacy. He had not convinced many of James’s abdication. Edmund Bohun’s preferred option of rule by right of conquest was officially frowned on. Monarchy de facto was a precarious fall-back – facts changed. By me Kings reign and Princes decree justice (Proverbs VIII, 15) was the biblical message which propagandists like Gilbert Burnet chose to stress. William ruled England not because he had seized it but because God had given it to him. Had not God saved him from the North Sea (although God had not, of course, caused the storm from which he needed saving)? Blown his ships down the Channel? Diverted the cannonball at the Boyne? There were a hundred signs, visible to the faithful, to show His favour. Why such interest on the part of the Almighty? To punish the sins of Charles II and his brother, of course, and to save England from popery. England was the chosen subject of God’s grace, and William of Orange was his instrument.
But that, of course, placed a further duty on his new subjects:
‘As we cannot but be deeply sensible of the great goodness and mercy of Almighty God (by whom Kings reign) in giving so happy success to our endeavours for the rescuing these Kingdoms from Popish tyranny and superstition ... so we are not less touched with a resentment that (notwithstanding these great deliverances) impiety and vice do still abound in this our kingdom.’10
The Almighty had saved England from popery, ‘so in like manner God now expects from England and London a public or national Reformation ... This ... is the thing God looks for from us at this day’.11 That was the Society’s message, and the King’s chimed neatly with it. Virtue would cement him more firmly on the throne. And so, in February 1690, William followed up his first Proclamation with a letter to the Archbishops and to Henry Compton requesting that they order all clergy to preach against vice, and the gap between Government edict and local campaign was then enthusia
stically, bridged by reform-minded bishops. It was Edward Stillingfleet, Bishop of Worcester, who approached Mary during William’s second summer absence, in 1691, with a request that she throw the state’s weight behind the Reformation of Manners Campaign, and one can easily believe the Queen’s own response to have been sincere. On 9 July 1691 she instructed the magistrates of Middlesex to put into force more rigorously the laws ‘against the prophanation of the Lord’s Day, drunkenness, prophane cursing and swearing and all other lewd, enormous and disorderly practices’.12
Mary’s letter marked the real start of the Reformation campaign. God signalled his own approval immediately; three days later the Jacobite forces in Ireland were defeated at Aughrim. Enthused by this mark of divine pleasure, the Societies hurried to appoint treasurers and agents. In Lincoln’s Inn the ardent reformer Sir Richard Bulkeley rented chambers as a campaign headquarters. Copies of the laws were printed to be circulated round the country, and blank indictments run off to ease the task of magistrates.
‘[AB], being [age, over 16] is convicted before me of prophane swearing [no. of times], within the parish of [ ... ], this being the [ ... th] time of his conviction.’13
They even hired clerks to fill in the indictments on magistrates’ behalf. Activists recruited informers. Secretaries were employed to draw up blacklists of cursers and fornicators. Some of the names on their lists must have raised eyebrows. Was Mary Truelove a real prostitute? Did Tower Hamlets’ Madams really include Temperance Reed, and Charity Squish? It did not seem to trouble the campaigners. ‘A particular change of Providence has appeared in their present Majesties’ happy accession to the Crown’, wrote John Dunton, beginning a press campaign in his Athenian Mercury,
‘We may be bold ... to believe That for this end God raised him up ... and ‘tis to be hoped a victory may not be more difficult over the vices of their own subjects ... than the restoring the liberties and peace of Christendom.’14
The Last Revolution Page 40