The coaster had many calls to make on its way, the number and duration of which far exceeded Spandrel’s expectations. Tuesday morning found the vessel no further on than Deal. There Spandrel lost patience. After a salty exchange with the skipper, who declined to refund any portion of his fare, he went ashore and continued his journey by road.
He spent that night at Faversham, whence the mail-coach bore him on to London the following day. He could have reached Leicester Fields by early evening, but a whimsical notion had occurred to his mind. He put up for the night at the Talbot Inn in Borough High Street.
After a meal and several reviving mugs of ale in the tap-room, he walked up to London Bridge and stood by the railings in a gap between the houses, watching the light fade over the city he had never thought he would see again. It was good to be back. And better still to know that, this time, he could stay.
The following morning, Margaret Spandrel breakfasted in low spirits. Her attempts to shake off the sadness William had caused her by his second abrupt and un explained departure had been undermined by the realization that today was his twenty-seventh birthday. Sighing heavily and deciding to set off for Covent Garden in the hope that haggling over vegetables might improve her state of mind, she rose from the table and walked across to the window to judge the weather.
But what the weather was like she suddenly did not care. For there, standing at the edge of the lawn in the square below, was a familiar figure. And he was waving at her.
She flung up the sash and leaned out. ‘William?’ she called. ‘Is that really you?’
‘Yes, Ma,’ he called back, smiling broadly. ‘It really is.’
Later that day, another traveller returned to London from the Low Countries. Horatio Walpole, devoutly hoping he would not be sent straight back again this time, reported promptly to his brother at the Treasury.
Resilience was one of Robert Walpole’s abiding traits. He had long since rid himself of the despondency that had gripped him on the occasion of their last meeting. It seemed to Horatio, indeed, that he had already forgotten the charms of Estelle de Vries, alias Davenant, thanks either to the alternative charms of some newly discovered mistress or to a happy turn in his pursuit of Atterbury. As it transpired, both emollients to Robert’s mood had been applied.
‘You’ve done well, Horace,’ the great man and grateful brother announced over a bumper of champagne. ‘The East Indies is as far from harm’s way as anyone could ask for. As for Spandrel, I suppose the fellow’s never really meant any harm. And now he can do none. We have Atterbury by the tail.’
‘Has he been arrested?’
‘Not yet. But Plunket is beginning to see the attractions of turning King’s Evidence. When he does … we’ll have them all.’
‘I can rest my weary limbs at home for a while, then?’
‘Indeed you can. Take a well-deserved rest.’
‘And what will you do with Phoenix House?’
‘Oh, I have someone in mind for that.’ Robert winked at his brother. ‘When a mare throws you, mount a sweeter-tempered one, I say.’ At which they both laughed immoderately and recharged their glasses.
Two days later, at the Goat Tavern in Bloomsbury, Sam Burrows’ customary Saturday evening soak was enlivened by the not entirely unexpected arrival of William Spandrel.
‘You’ve heard, then, Mr Spandrel?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Come on. It’s why you’re here.’
‘I’ve been away, Sam. Apparently, Dick Surtees came looking for me. But, when I called at his lodgings, his landlady told me he’d moved – without leaving a forwarding address.’
‘Shouldn’t wonder at that.’
‘What’s it all about?’
‘Bigamy, Mr Spandrel. Well, it would’ve been bigamy, if the marriage had gone off. Seems old Mr Chesney reckoned your friend was too good to be true, so made some inquiries. And what pops up but a wife, in Paris, legally churched and well and truly living. Didn’t see Mr Surtees for dust, did we? Handsome of him to try and let you know the coast was clear, though.’
‘How’s Maria taken it?’
‘Oh, much as you’d expect. Whey-faced and weeping at first. A little better lately. But she still keeps to her room a lot. In need of consoling, I’d say.’
‘Would you?’
‘I would, now I’ve met the man to do it. Not got a wife tucked away somewhere, have you, Mr Spandrel?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Nor any skeletons in the closet likely to rattle their bones?’
‘Not a one.’
‘There you are, then. You’re just the man she needs. And an altogether finer one than Mr Surtees, if you don’t mind me venturing the opinion.’
‘No, Sam. I don’t mind at all.’
Spandrel took his place early for matins at the Church of St George the Martyr in Queen’s Square the following morning, then settled back to watch as the pews filled around him with the pious pick of local society. About ten minutes before the service was due to begin, Mr and Mrs Chesney, accompanied by their daughter, Maria, entered the church and moved to their private pew near the front. They did not notice Spandrel. But Spandrel noticed them, Maria in particular. She was looking pale, as Sam had led him to expect, and thinner than he remembered.
A tender feeling of pity for Maria stole over Spandrel, a feeling he knew, in favourable circumstances – beginning with a brief but telling encounter at the conclusion of the service – might lead to a revival of the affection they had once proclaimed for each other. It would be a delicate business, at least at first. But he was confident that he could manage it. He could not in fact recall feeling so confident about anything before in his life.
Many of the congregation were kneeling in prayer. So as not to appear out of place, Spandrel dropped to his knees, folded his hands and closed his eyes. As he did so, a strange and exhilarating thought came to him. Queen’s Square stood at the very limit of London. Beyond the gardens at its northern end lay open fields to north and east and west. This was the edge of the map. It would not always be so. The city would grow, around and beyond it. The map Spandrel had not yet even finished – the map he had helped his father draw – would be redundant. What then? Why then, of course, as the future unfolded, he would draw another. And quite possibly another after that, helped, perhaps, by his son. In its way, the thought was a kind of prayer. And Spandrel uttered it solemnly.
Postlude
July 1722–March 2000
Chapter Forty-Seven
Tragedy, Comedy and History
HISTORY IS THE geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.
The Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie vessel Tovenaer called at Madeira early in July 1722. It is not known if any passenger disembarked. Certain it is, however, that none of its passengers can have reached Java. The Tovenaer was lost with all aboard in a storm off the coast of New Holland (later to be renamed Australia) in the middle of October 1722. She has lately become the object of the eager attentions of aqualunged treasure-seekers, by virtue of her cargo of gold and silver bullion, intended to be traded for tea, textiles and porcelain, but which has served instead as a waterlogged memorial to Dutch commercial enterprise.
This disaster is unlikely to have been reported at the time in England. It almost certainly therefore did not intrude upon the early married life of William and Maria Spandrel, whose wedding had been solemnized at St George the Martyr’s Church, Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury, on Michaelmas Day of that year.
By the time of the Spandrels’ wedding, the evidence given by John Plunket had led to the arrest on charges of treasonable conspiracy of Christopher Layer, George Kelly, Lord Grey and North, the Earl of Orrery and, of course, Bishop Francis Atterbury. As soon as Par
liament met in October, the Duke of Norfolk joined them in the Tower. Walpole then pushed through the suspension of Habeas Corpus for a year and the imposition of a special tax of five shillings in the pound on Roman Catholics and non-jurors to meet the alleged cost of putting down the conspiracy.
Layer was tried and convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. In the hope of extracting information from him to use against the others, his execution was many times delayed, but in vain. Eventually, Walpole had to acknowledge a lack of clinching evidence. He therefore proceeded against Atterbury and Kelly by a Bill of Pains and Penalties, calling only for presumptive evidence. The delinquent peers were released on indefinite bail. Kelly was sentenced to life imprisonment (as was the wretched Plunket), Atterbury to permanent exile. Layer was at last put out of his misery in May 1723. A month afterwards, Atterbury was loaded aboard a man-of-war and despatched to France, whence he was never to return. Of the multitude of Jacobites Walpole feared and/or hoped might come to see the Bishop off, only the Duke of Wharton put in an appearance.
Layer’s head was duly displayed at Temple Bar, only to be blown down in a gale some years later, almost literally into the hands of Dr Richard Rawlinson, the Oxford theologian and non-juring bishop, who was so taken with this relic of Jacobite fervour that he asked to be buried with it in his right hand. It is not clear whether the request was carried out. Kelly languished in the Tower for fourteen years, then staged a dramatic escape and re-entered the Pretender’s service. He was one of the ‘Seven Men of Moidart’ who sailed with Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, from Nantes for Eriskay in June 1745. He later served as the Prince’s private secretary. He died in Rome in 1762. Plunket, meanwhile, had died in the Tower two years after Kelly’s escape.
Power breeds jealousy, especially in him who wields it. Robert Walpole, Sir Robert as he soon became, can hardly have expected to remain at the head of the nation’s affairs for the next twenty years, but remain he did, growing more lonely and more ruthless in the process. He had his private griefs to bear, no question. His invalid daughter Kate died in the midst of his campaign against the Jacobites. His other daughter, Mary, was also to die young. His sister Dolly, Viscountess Townshend, and his brother Galfridus died within a few months of each other in 1726. And with Dolly died also his forty-year friendship with Charles Townshend.
Walpole had already engineered the disgrace and dismissal of Lord Carteret, whom he saw as a potential rival. Now, without Dolly to unite them, he began to weigh Townshend’s loyalty in the balance and find it wanting. King George I expired un expectedly of a stroke en route to his beloved Hanover in June 1727 and many thought the new King would give Walpole short shrift. But Walpole had been assiduously cultivating the Princess of Wales with just this contingency in mind and Queen Caroline’s favour enabled him to manage George II much as he had managed George I. Townshend’s ministerial days were thereafter numbered. Offended by Walpole’s ever more frequent interferences in foreign policy, he resigned and retired to Norfolk to pursue his theories on crop rotation, which were to win him a form of immortality as ‘Turnip Townshend’ of the Agricultural Revolution. He died in 1738.
By then Walpole was a stubborn and bloated old man, twice a widower, tortured by the stone, baited by the press and plagued by a rising generation of ambitious young office-seekers. He was forced into a war against Spain he had no wish to fight, thanks partly – irony of ironies – to a long-running dispute between the Spanish Government and the South Sea Company. The war went badly, the general election of 1741 hardly better, and at length, early in February 1742, he resigned, retiring to the Lords as Earl of Orford.
The newly ennobled Lord Orford was an immensely wealthy man. No satisfactory explanation of his extraordinary accumulation of riches has ever been advanced. He put much of it to use in assembling, at vast and heedless cost, a collection of the very finest paintings and sculptures. Raphaels, Rubenses, Rembrandts, Titians, Vandykes, Poussins, Murillos and Domenichinos found their way to Houghton Hall, his Norfolk residence, by the priceless crate-load. A less likely connoisseur is hard to imagine. But posterity has proclaimed his taste, if not his morals, impeccable.
Walpole died at his London home, of a remedy for the stone that turned out to be worse than the disease, in March 1745, aged sixty-eight. The doctor who attended him in his final illness, James Jurin, is now believed to have been a crypto-Jacobite. The earldom – and with it the bulk of Walpole’s fortune – passed to his eldest son, Robert junior, while his surviving brother, Horatio, lingered on in the Commons until belatedly granted a peerage a few months before his death in 1757. By then Robert junior had been succeeded as Earl of Orford by his son, George, who devoted the prime years of his manhood to the seemingly impossible task of squandering his inheritance. In this he was so successful that in 1779 he was forced to sell the entire Houghton collection to Empress Catherine of Russia for a meagre £36,000. Most of the pictures now adorn the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
Walpole’s youngest son, Horace, the famous dilettante and epistolizer, lamented the sale. ‘It is the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father’s memory that I could receive,’ he wailed. ‘It is stripping the temple of his glory and of his affection. A madman excited by rascals has burnt his Ephesus.’ What Horace’s elder brother, Edward, thought about this is not known. His many years as the inactive and almost completely silent Member for Great Yarmouth had been succeeded by an increasingly reclusive existence, from which even his nephew’s gross sacrilege failed to rouse him. He died in 1784. His brother Horace inherited the earldom from the profligate George in 1791. With Horace’s passing, in 1797, the title became extinct.
The end of the Robinocracy brought an end also to the long exile of Robert Knight. Upon payment of £10,000 for a royal pardon and another £10,000 to appease the South Sea Company, he was permitted by the new Administration to return to his homeland. It appears that financial consultancy had not been unprofitable. He was able at once to buy back his estate in Essex that had been sold in his absence. And there he died in 1744. His son later sat in Parliament as the Member for Castle Rising, a Norfolk pocket borough in the gift of the Walpole family, made over to him for reasons that can only be guessed at.
Whether Knight senior ever visited Sir Theodore Janssen at his house in Hanover Square following his overdue homecoming is unknown. Certainly the wily old Flemish financier was still to be found there by those who sought him out, though not for a great deal longer. This founding director of both the Bank of England and the South Sea Company died in September 1748, aged ninety-four.
The South Sea Company itself lost its only tangible commercial asset – the Asiento for the supply of slaves to Spain’s American colonies – in an opaque and tardy sub-treaty of the none too transparent Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1750, for a flat payment of £100,000. The company lingered on pitifully for another hundred years until Gladstone arrived at the Exchequer in 1852, noticed that it was still in being and promptly administered it out of existence.
By contrast, the last gasp of the Jacobite cause was in many ways its most glorious. What would have happened had the Young Pretender’s army marched on south from Derby in December 1745 will never be known. The fact that a yacht loaded with King George II’s valuables was kept ready at Tower Quay while news from the Midlands was anxiously awaited suggests that the conclusion was far from foregone. In the event, the rebel army marched back to Scotland – and destruction at Culloden four months later. Among the unanswered questions they left behind is whether Walpole would ever have allowed them to get so far in the first place. But Dr Jurin’s ministrations had ensured that Walpole’s counsel was not available to the Government of the day.
James Edward, the Old Pretender, died in Rome in 1766. By the time of his son’s death, in 1788, even pretending had ceased to seem worthwhile.
While the King was packing his valuables, politicians were pondering their allegiance and depositors w
ere clamouring for their money at the Bank of England during those tense December days of 1745, calmer heads were mapping the present for the benefit of the future. An Exact and Definitive Map of the City and Environs of London in the Reign of His Britannic Majesty King George the Second, the work of William and James Spandrel, father and son, was published in sixteen separate sheets at monthly intervals between November 1748 and February 1750. It can be assumed to have taken anything up to ten years to produce.
The surviving subscription list shows the commercial bias one might expect. But commercial considerations are unlikely to account for the presence on the list of Sir Nicholas Cloisterman, retired Ambassador. There are, of course, many reasons for wanting to buy a map. Some of those reasons have less to do with planning journeys than remembering them.
Every map has its history, largely lost though it may be. That which remains may become, if it survives long enough, the stuff of saleroom speculation. Two hundred and fifty years after its last sheet was published, an original bound copy of the Spandrels’ map was sold at auction in New York for $148,000 – not far short of £100,000. Back in 1721, such a sum would have made a man rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It would have been, quite literally, a King’s ransom.
Appendices
Appendix A
Directory
A complete list of named characters featured in the course of the story in alphabetical order of title or surname (or forename where only this is known), with a note of their circumstances in 1721/22. Those listed in italics will not be found in any history book.
Aertsen, Henrik. Deputy to Sheriff Lanckaert of Amsterdam.
Aislabie, John. Chancellor of the Exchequer until forced to resign over South Sea scandal.
Albemarle, Arnold van Keppel, Earl of. Allied Commander at Battle of Denain, 1712.
Anne, Queen. Last reigning British monarch of the Stuart line. Died 1714. Succeeded by George I.
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