Bloomsbury Square was a celebrated architectural land-mark on the fringes of a rapidly advancing city. Three sides were framed with gracious brick-fronted façades, the recently completed residences of the well-to-do who had escaped the stench of the city and gravitated to this district in search of “good air.” Spanning the northern limit stretched the imposing, multipedimented Southampton House. Beyond, formal gardens avenued with lime trees led on to open fields that separated the square from nearby St. Giles.
In spring and summer months this meadowland divide was filled with flowering grasses and scattered with cowslips, foxgloves, and heartsease. Amorous couples wandered among the peach trees that, according to the great nineteenth-century historian Macaulay, improbably flourished here; snipe nested safely among grassy tussocks of damp undergrowth. Yet a more menacing convention overshadowed this urban Arcadia: the stretch of open terrain was renowned in seventeenth-century London as a place where duels were regularly fought.
It was on this ground that John Law paced apprehensively as the man from the carriage approached. It appeared—as several witnesses later attested—that a meeting had been prearranged between them, a fact that would be significant later on. As he came face to face with Law, perhaps with a flourish of drunken confidence, the man drew his sword. Instantly and, he would later say, unthinkingly, John Law responded. Drawing his sword—“a weapon of iron and steel that had cost five shillings”—with unexpected speed he made a single defensive lunge. With a brief, anguished cry his opponent fell, mortally wounded, to the ground.
History does not record what happened next. We can surmise, however, that as in any metropolis a crowd gathered, and that among the cluster of ghoulish spectators and concerned passersby was a sheriff ’s officer. John Law seems to have made no attempt to escape. Answering the officer’s questions, he declared himself to be twenty-three years of age, a resident of the nearby parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, where he had settled several years ago after having moved from Edinburgh. The constable’s attention turned next to the victim and his companion, who introduced himself as Captain Wightman. The dead man, noted the constable, was of similar age to his assailant and grandly dressed. Examining the corpse more closely, or asking Wightman to identify it, he must have flinched with surprise: the body was that of Edward Wilson, one of London’s most enigmatic, flamboyant, and talked-about dandies. His death, the stalwart constable might have reflected, could only serve to fuel the blaze of gossip already surrounding him.
While Law settled into London, he had not only pondered mathematical and financial conundrums. In his idle hours he had continued to gamble and philander. Practice had increased his winnings in both spheres, but along with the fashionable friends, enticing amours, and triumphant gains had come enemies too. At some stage Law crossed the path of Edward Wilson, the fifth son of an impoverished gentleman from Keythorpe in Leicester, whose estate was heavily mortgaged. In his youth Wilson is believed to have served as a humble ensign in Flanders, but recently in London he had led such a flamboyant life that he had caught the eye of London society. John Evelyn described him living in “the garb and equipage of the richest nobleman for house, furniture, coaches, saddle horses.” Another eighteenth-century writer recalled that Wilson “took a great house, furnished it richly, kept his coach and six, had abundance of horses in body clothes, kept abundance of servants, no man entertained nobler, nor paid better.” But where had the money come from? Even in the gossipy circles that both he and Law frequented no one could discover its source, though many hours were wasted talking about it.
Wilson paid off his father’s debts and took care of his sisters by introducing them to polite society in the hope that they would make good marriages. One Miss Wilson moved into the same lodgings where John Law and his mistress Mrs. Lawrence were living. At some point Wilson and Law clashed. Angry letters were exchanged over the impropriety of Law’s living arrangements. Tempers ignited further when Miss Wilson, doubtless with her brother’s encouragement, flounced out of the lodgings and took rooms elsewhere. Law was roundly scolded by his landlady, who, egged on by Wilson, fussed that Law’s libertine lifestyle might damage the reputation of her hitherto respectable establishment. She did not want scandal. Law retaliated by writing more angry letters to Wilson, and when these did not improve matters, paid a visit to his mansion. Over a glass of sack he warned him, unequivocally, to stop spreading rumors.
But animosity continued to brew. Events came to a climax on the morning of April 9, 1694, the day of the duel, when Law entered the Fountain tavern in the Strand and found himself face to face with Wilson and his friend Captain Wightman. Significantly, Wightman never divulged precisely what was said in the crucial exchange leading to the fatal duel. He commented only that “after they had staid a little while there, Mr. Lawe* went away, after which Mr. Wilson and Captain Wightman took coach, and were drove towards Bloomsbury,” which implies that Wilson was the aggressor. If not, as a friend of Wilson, Wightman would have said so.
* Law’s name is variously spelled in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts—Lawe and Lawes often appear in England, and in France Lass is a common alternative.
John Law was arrested and taken to Newgate prison to await his trial. Prison life in the late seventeenth century was redolent of menace. “The mixtures of scents that arose from tobacco, dirty sheets, stinking breaths, and uncleanly carcasses, poisoned our nostrils far worse than a Southwark ditch, a tanner’s yard or a tallow chandler’s melting room. The ill-looking vermin with long rusty beards . . . came hovering round us, like so many cannibals, with such devouring countenances as if a man had been but a morsel,” one eyewitness recalled of a terrifying night spent in a typical London jail. Newgate, its cells crowded with prisoners awaiting execution or sentence for capital offenses, was the most fearsome of all London’s jails. Later Daniel Defoe was incarcerated there on charges of seditious libel, and an inkling of the horrors to which inmates were subjected may be gleaned from his novel Moll Flanders: “’Tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in . . . the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself,” Moll recalled.
Law was almost certainly spared Newgate’s worst extremes, because he had at his disposal two potent weapons that Moll did not: money and friends in high places. Though far less famous than his victim, he moved by now in elevated circles, and when word of his arrest spread, wealthy friends rallied to his support, offering guidance, and, more important, money to make his stay in prison more bearable. For a considerable fee he could enjoy the relative luxury of rooms in the king’s block, away from the misery and corruption of life “commonside.” But though gratefully availing himself of the benefits of wealth and influence, Law failed to grasp their more fundamental advantages. In seamy seventeenth-century London, they offered not only a comfortable cell but also a buffer against the corrupt wheels of justice. Against his friends’ advice, Law never attempted to deny his part in Wilson’s death. His story never changed: Wilson had drawn his sword first, Law had acted in self-defense. He was not guilty of murder, he claimed repeatedly, but of manslaughter.
Yet in the eyes of seventeenth-century justice the case was not so clear cut. The question of who initiated the fight was irrelevant. What counted was whether the fight had been premeditated, and whether Law had with malice aforethought planned to kill Wilson. There was plenty of evidence to support this hypothesis, Wilson’s relatives claimed. Wightman testified that earlier in the day the two men had quarreled bitterly. Then Wilson’s manservant revealed their long-standing rivalry over Mrs. Lawrence, and letters were found among the dead man’s belongings that proved a lengthy and acrimonious disagreement had existed. Thus, after several days in Newgate, Law was informed that he would be charged not with manslaughter but with the capital offense of murder.
The case came to cou
rt at the routine sitting of the King and Queen’s Commissions at the Old Bailey a few days later. A typical mixture of cases was to be heard; most were routine charges of stealing—jewelry, gold, silver, silk dresses, petticoats, tippets, scarves, and stockings (textiles feature high in lists of seventeenth-century burglars’ loot). A further five prisoners faced capital charges of counterfeiting and clipping coins. There were two alleged rapists and, strangely, a man accused of road rage, usually assumed to be a late-twentieth-century phenomenon: one Matthew Pryor was indicted for driving the near wheel of his coach against the left leg of a lady who later died of the injury. (He was acquitted: there was no proof he had driven with deliberate lack of care.)
Law must have shuddered when he learned that his case was to be heard by the aging Sir Salathiel Lovell, who prided himself on his high conviction rate, and who is remembered for his appalling memory, his questionable integrity, and the sadistic pleasure he derived from tormenting those who came before him. Lenient sentences were conferred on defendants who offered bribes, and he was happy, if necessary, to take a share of a criminal’s booty. Those unable to pay experienced a brutality only exceeded by his notorious contemporary Judge Jeffreys. Daniel Defoe stood before Lovell and lampooned him in the Reformation of Manners:
L——the Pandor of thy Judgment Seat
Has neither Manners, Honesty nor Wit,
Instead of which, he’s plenteously supplied
With nonsense, noise, impertinence and Pride . . .
But always serves the hand who pays him well;
He trades in justice and the souls of men
And prostitutes them equally to gain.
Law, by now just twenty-three, was an opportunist with an idealistic streak who had not, as far as we know, come before the judiciary before. With all the naïveté, stubbornness, and recklessness of youth, he refused to doubt the system, having never previously experienced it. Now, faced with Lovell’s mercenary brand of justice, he was disillusioned.
Lovell instructed the jury that everything rested on whether the two men had prearranged their duel: “If they found that Mr. Lawe and Mr. Wilson did make an agreement to fight, though Wilson drew first, and Mr. Lawe killed him, he was [by construction of the law] guilty of murder.” Legal procedure of the time meant that as defendant in a Crown case, Law was not entitled to a legal representative, or to testify or to call witnesses. His solitary means of defense was an unsworn statement that was read out in court. In it he claimed that the meeting in Bloomsbury “was an accidental thing, Mr. Wilson drawing his sword upon him first, upon which he was forced to stand in his own defence.” Therefore, he argued, “the misfortune did arise only from a sudden heat of passion, and not from any propense malice.” Numerous character witnesses “of good quality” testified at length to Law’s unquarrelsome nature and general good character.
But nothing could detract from the judge’s damning influence: “This was a continual quarrel, carried on betwixt them for some time before, therefore must be accounted a malicious Quarrel, and a design of murder in the person that killed the other,” he said, in summing up the case. Law’s friends claimed later that both judge and jury had been bought off by Wilson’s powerful and vengeful relatives, which seems highly probable, bearing in mind Lovell’s reputation. In any event Law’s case was lost. After having considered the verdict very seriously, the jury declared that he was indeed guilty of murder as charged.
A total of twenty-eight defendants were convicted during the three-day hearing. Of these, twenty-one, mostly burglars and thieves, were to be punished by branding—or “burnt in the hand,” as it was termed. One was to be transported to a penal colony. The remaining five were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were forgers and clippers of coins. The fourth was the rapist. The fifth was the twenty-three-year-old winner of a duel, John Law.
5
ESCAPE
Mr. Laws knows best how he made his escape. Many odd storys were then told, particularly that he took the sleeping of the sentinel for some hours at his door to be a trick and that he bought an underkeeper.
James Johnston,
Earl of Warriston (1719)
AFTER THE TRAUMAS OF THE DUEL, THE TRIAL, AND HISmurder conviction, Law could do little but wait for events to unfold. His mood was surprisingly sanguine. A seventeenth-century man of privilege expected justice to be pliant and merciful, particularly if his crime was widely regarded as honorable.
In the privileged world of both Law and Wilson, dueling was one of the unwritten rules of membership—a nobleman’s way of settling a dispute and thus, in some deep-rooted sense, a ritualistic badge of rank. It was expected that a gentleman would issue a challenge if his honor was in any way impugned. If he didn’t, or if his opponent resisted such a challenge, it would be tantamount to an admission that he was not a gentleman—which the dashing John Law would never have given in to. Since the restoration of the monarchy, dueling had flourished. Among the journals of the day there are numerous examples of fatal conflicts arising from the most trivial of slights. Shades of Law’s escapade echo in John Evelyn’s diary note of a duel involving a young spendthrift, Conyers Seymour, who “had a slight affront in St. James’s Park, given him by one who was envious of his gallantries, for he was a vain foppish young man.”
The covert respectability of dueling was reflected in the way surviving protagonists were treated. Charles II had issued a proclamation against duelists but invariably pardoned those convicted, and a blind eye was turned throughout William’sreign. Duelists made frequent appearances in the courts but were never put to death for their crime. “I neither heard before nor after that killing a man in a fair duel was found murder,” remarked Law’s friend James Johnston, the Earl of Warriston. In his Newgate cell, Law must have concluded calmly, therefore, that there was no cause for alarm. A reprieve was certain. Over the following weeks and months his optimism began to seem misplaced.
Wilson’s cousins—the Townsend, Ash, and Windham families—were eager to avenge the death of their kinsman. All were prominent courtiers and as such “strangely prepossessed King William.” They anticipated, correctly, that Law’s supporters would try to secure a royal pardon, so they besieged the king with counterdemands. In this particularly brutal duel, they insisted, Law had shown himself a man of dishonor. Premeditated malice had been proven, therefore no mercy should be shown. Within days of the trial, a haze of subterfuge and intrigue pervaded the cabinets and corridors of Whitehall Palace. Caught in its midst, King William became uneasy and increasingly irate whenever the matter was raised.
Law’s most stalwart supporter was the Earl of Warriston. A fellow Scot, intelligent, honest, and a brilliant lawyer, Warriston had been brought up in Holland and studied law in Utrecht. His bond with King William was long-standing—Warriston had helped to set up an intelligence network before the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which had brought William to the throne. At the time of Law’s imprisonment, Warriston was Scottish Secretary, having replaced the disgraced Earl of Stair in the aftermath of the massacre of Glencoe.
How or where Law and Warriston met is not known, but the bond between them must have been close, because Warriston braved the king’s wrath more than once to help. First he accosted William at his morning levee with the claim that Wilson’s supporters had bought off the jury, and that Law was being made unjustly to “suffer for his ingenuity.” His legal expertise told him that “without Mr. Law’s confession the fact could not have been proved, for those that saw it being strangers to him when brought to prison to see him, could only swear that it was one like him.” In other words, if Law had denied his presence he would probably have escaped sentence of death.
The king’s antipathy to his Scottish subjects was immediately apparent in his scathing retort: “What . . . Scotchmen suffer for their ingenuity. Was ever such a thing known?” The more Warriston attempted to reason with him, the more the royal anger smoldered: “When I reasoned the matter . . . I was more rudely treated by
him and the nation too than we ever had been upon any occasion.” The king was convinced that money lay at the root of the quarrel. “He could not but believe . . . that Mr. Laws had quarrelled with Wilson who, he said, was a known coward, in order to make him give him money.” This placed a sordid complexion on the matter, and he saw no reason for the death sentence to be lifted.
Warriston realized he would need help to overcome the king’s antagonism and enlisted the help of the dashing Duke of Shrewsbury, who at the time “had more power . . . with the King than any man alive,” and, fortunately for Law, also owed Warriston a favor. Shrewsbury cannily advised Warriston to play for time and let the king’s temper subside—“he would keep it out of the cabinet for a week,” he promised. In the meantime, Warriston should try to find evidence “that it was not a money business.”
Somehow Warriston made contact with one of Law’s money dealers, who confirmed that “a little before” the duel Law had received “£400 from Scotland by Bill, which the Banker’s book could show.” Law, therefore, had plenty of money and no reason to resort to extortion. Shrewsbury was convinced by this testimony and passed the information to the king with the confident assurance “that there was nothing of money in the case.” But to the king the dilemma still seemed insoluble. Now that his original objection was disproven, Warriston and Shrewsbury were pestering him to release Law; yet he had promised the Wilsons he would never pardon Law without their consent, and he could not risk upsetting them. Eventually he took the middle ground: Law was reprieved from the death sentence but not released, pending the Wilsons’ reaction.
Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance Page 4