The quadrangle, however, was not long to be deprived of the patronage of his presence, for a statue of him by Grinling Gibbons, in the dress of a Roman Emperor, with a laurel wreath on his head and a truncheon in his hand, was set up in the centre fifteen years later. This statue you may still see in a niche in the south-east corner of the third Royal Exchange: while its own brother, a statue in bronze of James the Second in the same remarkable garb, by the same artist, still stands chillily in the open air with its back to the red Admiralty building, and looks across St. James’s Park towards Buckingham Palace.
It cannot be said that, beautiful in its architecture as the second Royal Exchange was, the building held the same importance as the first Exchange had done in the days of Queen Elizabeth. Social conditions were changing quickly in England. Coffee houses sprang into a rapid popularity and the merchants drifted to them more and more for the interchange of business. The shops became difficult to let and rents dwindled away. Over the Exchange there came to hang an air of disuse and squalor. The frequenters in the time of Queen Anne are thus described by the “Spectator”: “Instead of the assembly of honourable merchants, substantial tradesmen and knowing masters of shops, the mumpers, the halt, the lame and the blind or vendors of trash — apples, plums...” A little further on he tells us “the benches are so filthy that no one could sit down, yet the Beadles at Christmas have the impudence to ask for their boxes though they deserve strapado.” This is a far cry from those gaily lighted galleries where of an evening the gallants of Queen Elizabeth’s day used to loiter. Fashion had moved to the West — chiefly because fashion had been in banishment upon the Continent during the Commonwealth — and when it returned with Charles the Second into England, it found its houses already occupied.
London had spread out consequently through Lincoln’s Inn Fields to Bloomsbury and Soho; Pall Mall was laid out in great mansions; nobles moved westwards, and a new city of shops, clubs and coffee houses grew up in the neighbourhood of their new homes. The factor of numbers had thus become a cause of that gulf between the gentry and the “cit,” which the next hundred years was more and more to widen. The great wars of the 18th century dug the trench deeper. Soldiering became an ill-paid occupation demanding the monopoly of a man’s life. The sons of the nobles became the officers of Marlborough, and later on of Wellington; they were transformed into a class apart; they lost their touch with the business side of London; they even became a trifle contemptuous.
How great the change was from the days when Sir Thomas Gresham entertained Queen Elizabeth in Austin Friars any man may see by such diaries as time has handed down to us. There remain two, still kept by the descendants of Edward Forster, for many years a Governor of the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation. Mr. Forster was a commercial magnate in the grand style. He was at one time head of three great City Corporations: The Royal Exchange Assurance; the Russia Company; the Mercers’ Company; and he added to these duties that of Deputy-Governor to the London Docks. In a word, he was the very type of citizen, who two hundred years before would have been hand in glove with the great statesmen of the Realm. The diaries give us a picture of a gentleman living quietly at Walthamstow — a man with a love of nature and a taste for art, and possessed of a queer gift for painting landscapes with reeds. We read of him being robbed of his purse by a footpad on his way to the City. We read of certain simple treats to his children: “We all went to London,” writes one of them, “and after with Papa in a coach to Drury Lane Playhouse, getting in at half price with the 4th Act” — Oh! frugal Papa! But perhaps it was just as well, for the play was “Measure for Measure,” and hardly suitable for young Benjamin and Thomas. On this occasion, the family saw Mrs. Siddons in the part of Isabella. At another time, “Mama, Aunt Sukey, Miss Ward and I went to the Royal Exchange Assurance in a coach. But Pa and Ned were there; uncle came afterwards. We went into the room which looks into Cornhill, with a balcony.” This was in October of 1783, and the family went to the Royal Exchange to see and hear peace proclaimed with France and Spain. “The Heralds proclaimed it betwixt 1 and 2 o’clock. There was a long procession of horse soldiers — some men with hatchets on horseback, some with trumpets, which they sounded. Afterwards came the Lord Mayor in his coach.” Without a doubt, the period during which the second Royal Exchange stood was one during which the City merchants lost much of their high position, and probably something of their broad outlook upon the world. They became concentrated upon their immediate affairs. They lived often over their business premises in the very heart of the City itself, or, if they travelled further afield, they made their homes in suburbs like Denmark Hill, and kept on the whole to themselves.
The downfall of Napoleon, however, the extension of the Franchise — which for a time placed the whole power of Government in the hands of the middle class — and the prosperity of which steam power was the source in a hundred directions, began, in the reign of Queen Victoria, to break down that very real though intangible Temple Bar between the City and the West End. These factors did their work thoroughly in the end, but while the Royal Exchange was burning for the second time in 1838, the City of London had still a social side of its own, which it is difficult to-day even to imagine. Walk through the City streets at ten o’clock of the night now, and the echo of your footsteps will sound to you solitary and strange. You will pass beneath a chain of lamplights, gleaming upon empty pathways, looked down upon by lightless windows. If you could put yourself back to 1838, you would find the upper storeys noisy with the laughter and the games of children, while below, behind rep curtains, the elders sat over their port round their mahogany dinner tables.
CHAPTER III.
THE THIRD ROYAL EXCHANGE.
IT IS ASTONISHING that no one has imagined a curse of fire upon the Royal Exchange. Many a country estate has fallen under that ban with less reason. For on the night of the 10th January 1838 — a night of so hard a frost that the very water from the fire engines froze in mid air — the Royal Exchange was burnt down for the second time. A letter from an eye-witness is happily on record. The fire began at night, and our witness, the son of the Rector of St. Michaels, Cornhill, then a boy of four and a half years, was awakened in his nursery by the cries of warning in the street, and the noise made in dragging the Parish fire engine from the old Watch-house beneath his windows. At this time, as our last chapter has shown us, Cornhill was not merely a street of offices open by day and empty at night. It was a Street of family residences, and consequently fire in that crowded neighbourhood was more than usually terrible.
Mr. Norville, the hatter, Mr. Leggett, the print seller, and a dozen other small shopkeepers who were wont to stand in their doorways in the morning and greet each other across Cornhill, had to get their families into safety as best they could. Speed was necessary, for the great tower of the second Royal Exchange, never a satisfactory feature of the building — since already it had had once to be replaced — threatened to fall across the street and crush the houses opposite. A good many of these inhabitants found refuge in the Rectory of St. Michaels, while the valuable contents of the shops were safely stored in the Church. It seems as if some freakish spirit of humour lurked about the burning edifice, for while the tower was yet tottering, the bells started playing “There is nae luck about the house,” and then fell with a crash into the flames below.
The destruction was almost complete. A few relics testified by their paucity to the completeness of the disaster, Amongst them we must not count those statues of the Kings of England which were said to have fallen down on their faces during the first fire leaving the statue of Sir Thomas Gresham alone proudly erect. The Grinling Gibbons figure of Charles the Second as a Roman Emperor, which, as we have seen, held the post of honour in the middle of the Quadrangle, was saved with the Bushnill figures on the right and left of the Portico in Cornhill, and strangely enough, the great gilt grasshopper, which if report speaks truly, not only rode on high above the second Royal Exchange, but even above the original
building of Sir Thomas Gresham. The work of restoration was quickly taken in hand by the Mercers’ Company and the City Corporation, and before the decade was out the Third Royal Exchange was opened by Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort.
It is very likely that ancient engravings of Palaces and great courts, with the delicate flourishes of their lettering and their dainty ornamentations, lend to the buildings they portray a greater beauty than they actually possess. But it is difficult to look at any old pictures of the first two Exchanges and flatter oneself into the belief that the third Exchange vies with either of them in grace. Art is the strangest and most illusive creature — at one time it will visit a whole race of men, so that nothing they do will be insignificant or mean. Thus, the adventurers, who sailed out to the Spanish Main in the days of Queen Elizabeth, wrote down the histories of their voyages in such great English as men to-day would give their ears to have at their command; and, moreover, they wrote it easily and with a running pen. At other times Art has refused to touch with inspiration a single soul of them. The architects of the Victorian Age were not men who dreamed in stone. They could pass down Parliament Street, by the Horse Guards, Whitehall and Westminster Hall with a bandage over their eyes and over their spirit. They gave us the Crystal Palace and all the dreariness of the Cromwell Road. Londoners may be thankful when they look upon the Royal Exchange as it stands to-day. The best of it is undoubtedly the front, with its great Corinthian Pillars, its high flight of steps and the open spread of pavement in front of it. For the rest, if the building is plain, it is plain to the very point of dignity, and with its great and handsome offices, it serves its purpose to-day as the other Exchanges served theirs.
It is not the purpose of this chapter to give you an account of the building. You can buy a little book for sixpence, rich in detail and curious information, from the Beadle at the door. You can walk out past the doors of Lloyd’s offices to the Peabody statue — if you will — and looking upwards see the gilt Grasshopper of Sir Thomas Gresham’s crest on the summit of the tower turning to the wind.
Over what a curious succession of scenes and pageants has that gilt Grasshopper presided! Visits of kings and queens, now dressed in one way, now another, now riding on horseback, now drawn in great gilt carriages, now gliding silently in motor cars; proclamations of war and peace, the nation once your friend now your enemy, once your enemy now your friend! The Bank of England was not built when the Grasshopper was first lifted to its place, and where the Mansion House now stands, the cattle lowed in the Stock Market. Endow for a moment that Grasshopper with life and recollection! It has seen London spread out in an almost unimaginable growth. The sails upon the river have given place to the chimney stack, and the quiet nights of other days are now broken by the hooting of syrens. And it heard in 1914 the tramp of London men drilling upon the Gresham hone stones to fit themselves for war. We may hope that for a century at least it will hear that sound no more.
PART II. THE BUSINESS.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BIRTH OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE CORPORATION.
TO GET RICH quick in the shortest possible space of time with the least possible expenditure of effort is a natural ambition. To a man we want to acquire riches, and at all events when we are young we encourage a secret hope that we shall wake up on some glorious morning to find we have achieved them. So much of honourable ambition presumes wealth as its starting-point. With the most of us, however, the hope is kept secret — a dream to be played with rather than a definite project to be realised. But every now and then the hope breaks its bounds and spreads with the rapidity and the violence of a contagion, from man to man, and from woman to woman.
There have been several periods during which the contagion has raged. Many will remember the autumn of the year which ended with the Jameson Raid. In those months women were almost as conspicuous as men in Throgmorton Street. Dealers in South African securities would buy in the morning and sell in the afternoon and put any sum up to £10,000 in their pockets as a consequence. But the fever has never exhibited itself in so virulent and blatant a degree as during the second decade of the 18th Century — a decade made famous by the South Sea Bubble.
It is strange to realise that the man, who brought all that hubbub of fashion back to the neighbourhood of the Royal Exchange, was a tall and ungainly pockmarked Scotchman, Law by name — at one time lying in a London Prison under sentence of death for murder. Law escaped to Paris and there founded the Mississippi Company, which, during the first years of the century sent Prance wild with a frenzy of speculation. Some southerly wind blew the madness over to England, and in 1711 Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, founded the South Sea
Company, to take over England’s Floating Debt of ten million pounds. The Government guaranteed six per cent, for a term of years, and the Company was given the monopoly of trade with the Southern Atlantic Coasts of America. One or two solid brains, such as Sir Robert Walpole, stood out against the scheme, but speculation was in the air and they had no following.
It must be conceded that the name of the company was in itself a stroke of genius. The South Seas! The words have from the earliest days of Elizabeth had some queer romantic appeal to the people of England. Read “Hakluyt’s Voyages,” and you cannot but rise from your reading with a recognition that, beyond all the visions of gold and jewels and wealth which they may suggest, the South Seas have their own particular call. Even that pedestrian century — the 18th — could not be deaf to it; and there never was an idea so sure to arouse your imagination or to loosen your pursestrings as that of adventure in the South Seas. Your adventure might be vicarious; it might only be visible to you in the swelling of your banking account, but you had a hand in the voyage — in a sense you sailed those sunlit and wind-ruffled waters.
It seemed as if in response to the call, Change Alley had become the centre of England. Sedan chairs and coaches so jostled one another in the streets which surrounded it that a man on foot was known to have taken one good hour before he could cross the roadway. Women filled that narrow alley with their hoops, and so loud was the noise between the walls that the stock would be at one price at one end and at another price at the other and no one in the middle would know the difference.
“Then stars and garters did appear
Among the meaner rabble;
To buy and sell, to see and hear
The Jews and Gentiles squabble.
The greater ladies thither came,
And plied in chariots daily,
Or pawned their jewels for a sum
To venture in the Alley.”
All were for getting rich quickly. Life was costly — in some respects more costly comparatively than it is to-day. A fine gentleman would pay £126 for a suit of clothes, and that sum left out of account his silk stockings and his shoe buckles, his embroidered gloves and his clouded cane. Lord Mayor Sawbridge was stopped by highwaymen on Turnham Green, when he was returning home from Kew, and sent back to the Mansion House as naked as on the day when he was born — of so much value were the fine clothes he wore. Money was the great need and throughout the day such a roar arose from Exchange Alley as must have set the old Grasshopper trembling and quivering on the top of the Exchange.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 834