A person whose history will serve as a canvass to exhibit some scenes of
the arts of the money-trader was one AUDLEY, a lawyer, and a great
practical philosopher, who concentrated his vigorous faculties in the
science of the relative value of money. He flourished through the reigns
of James I., Charles I., and held a lucrative office in the "court of
wards," till that singular court was abolished at the time of the
Restoration.[72] In his own times he was called "The great Audley," an
epithet so often abused, and here applied to the creation of enormous
wealth. But there are minds of great capacity, concealed by the nature
of their pursuits; and the wealth of Audley may be considered as the
cloudy medium through which a bright genius shone, and which, had it
been thrown into a nobler sphere of action, the "greatness" would have
been less ambiguous.
Audley lived at a time when divines were proclaiming "the detestable sin
of Usury," prohibited by God and man; but the Mosaic prohibition was the
municipal law of an agricultural commonwealth, which being without
trade, the general poverty of its members could afford no interest for
loans; but it was not forbidden the Israelite to take usury from "the
stranger." Or they were quoting from the Fathers, who understood this
point, much as they had that of "original sin," and "the immaculate
conception;" while the scholastics amused themselves with a quaint and
collegiate fancy which they had picked up in Aristotle, that interest
for money had been forbidden by nature, because coin in itself was
barren and unpropagating, unlike corn, of which every grain will produce
many. But Audley considered no doubt that money was not incapable of
multiplying itself, provided it was in hands which knew to make it grow
and "breed," as Shylock affirmed. The lawyers then, however, did not
agree with the divines, nor the college philosophers; they were
straining at a more liberal interpretation of this odious term "Usury."
Lord Bacon declared, that the suppression of Usury is only fit for an
Utopian government; and Audley must have agreed with the learned Cowell,
who in his "Interpreter" derives the term ab _usu_ et _ære_, quasi _usu
æra_, which in our vernacular style was corrupted into _Usury_. Whatever
the _sin_ might be in the eye of some, it had become at least a
_controversial sin_, as Sir Symonds D'Ewes calls it, in his manuscript
Diary, who, however, was afraid to commit it.[73] Audley, no doubt,
considered that _interest_ was nothing more than _rent_ for _money_; as
_rent_ was no better than _Usury_ for _land_. The legal interest was
then "ten in the hundred;" but the thirty, the fifty, and the hundred
for the hundred, the gripe of Usury, and the shameless contrivances of
the money-traders, these he would attribute to the follies of others, or
to his own genius.
This sage on the wealth of nations, with his pithy wisdom and quaint
sagacity, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his
mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was
observed his papers would have made a good map of England. A
contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of
such an Usurer,--perhaps of our Audley.
---- Here lay
A manor bound fast in a skin of parchment,
The wax continuing hard, the acres melting;
Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town,
If not redeem'd this day, which is not in
The unthrift's power; there being scarce one shire
In Wales or England, where my monies are not
Lent out at usury, the certain hook
To draw in more.
MASSINGER'S _City Madam_.
This genius of thirty per cent. first had proved the decided vigour of
his mind, by his enthusiastic devotion to his law-studies: deprived of
the leisure for study through his busy day, he stole the hours from his
late nights and his early mornings; and without the means to procure a
law-library, he invented a method to possess one without the cost; as
far as he learned, he taught, and by publishing some useful tracts on
temporary occasions, he was enabled to purchase a library. He appears
never to have read a book without its furnishing him with some new
practical design, and he probably studied too much for his own
particular advantage. Such devoted studies was the way to become a
lord-chancellor; but the science of the law was here subordinate to that
of a money-trader.
When yet but a clerk to the Clerk in the Counter, frequent opportunities
occurred which Audley knew how to improve. He became a money-trader as
he had become a law-writer, and the fears and follies of mankind were to
furnish him with a trading capital. The fertility of his genius appeared
in expedients and in quick contrivances. He was sure to be the friend of
all men falling out. He took a deep concern in the affairs of his
master's clients, and often much more than they were aware of. No man so
ready at procuring bail or compounding debts. This was a considerable
traffic then, as now. They hired themselves out for bail, swore what was
required, and contrived to give false addresses, which is now called
leg-bail. They dressed themselves out for the occasion; a great
seal-ring flamed on the finger, which, however, was pure copper gilt,
and they often assumed the name of some person of good credit. Savings,
and small presents for gratuitous opinions, often afterwards discovered
to be very fallacious ones, enabled him to purchase annuities of easy
landowners, with their treble amount secured on their estates. The
improvident owners, or the careless heirs, were soon entangled in the
usurer's nets; and, after the receipt of a few years, the annuity, by
some latent quibble, or some irregularity in the payments, usually ended
in Audley's obtaining the treble forfeiture. He could at all times
out-knave a knave. One of these incidents has been preserved. A draper,
of no honest reputation, being arrested by a merchant for a debt of
£200, Audley bought the debt at £40, for which the draper immediately
offered him £50. But Audley would not consent, unless the draper
indulged a sudden whim of his own: this was a formal contract, that the
draper should pay within twenty years, upon twenty certain days, a penny
doubled. A knave, in haste to sign, is no calculator; and, as the
contemporary dramatist describes one of the arts of those citizens, one
part of whose business was
To swear and break: they all grow rich by breaking!
the draper eagerly compounded. He afterwards "grew rich." Audley,
silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled
pennies, every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown up
to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the
forfeiture of his bond for £500, rather than to receive the visitation
of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant
of £2000, which would have closed with the draper's shop. The inventive
genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own
times, Peacham's "Worth of a Penny;" a gentleman who, having scarcely
one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it
might procure in the days of Charles II.
Such petty enterprises at length assumed a deeper cast of interest. He
formed temporally partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen.
They underlet estates which they had to manage; and anticipating the
owner's necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for
Audley and the stewards. He usually contrived to make the wood pay for
the land, which he called "making the feathers pay for the goose." He
had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that,
having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on
the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own
science--teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to
raise the remaining rents. Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once
the means to satisfy his own rapacity, and his employer's necessities.
His avarice was not working by a blind, but on an enlightened principle;
for he was only enabling the landlord to obtain what the tenant, with
due industry, could afford to give. Adam Smith might have delivered
himself in the language of old Audley, so just was his standard of the
value of rents. "Under an easy landlord," said Audley, "a tenant seldom
thrives; contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and
not labouring for any surplusage of estate. Under a hard one, the tenant
revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would
raise my rents to the present price of all commodities: for if we should
let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily
go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates." These axioms of
political economy were discoveries in his day.
Audley knew mankind practically, and struck into their humours with the
versatility of genius: oracularly deep with the grave, he only stung the
lighter mind. When a lord borrowing money complained to Audley of his
exactions, his lordship exclaimed, "What, do you not intend to use a
conscience?" "Yes, I intend hereafter to use it. We moneyed people must
balance accounts: if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do,
then I cheat your lordship." Audley's moneyed conscience balanced the
risk of his lordship's honour against the probability of his own
rapacious profits. When he resided in the Temple among those "pullets
without feathers," as an old writer describes the brood, the good man
would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that
they, under pretence of "learning the law, only learnt to be lawless;"
and "never knew by their own studies the process of an execution, till
it was served on themselves." Nor could he fail in his prophecy; for at
the moment that the stoic was enduring their ridicule, his agents were
supplying them with the certain means of verifying it. It is quaintly
said, he had his _decoying_ as well as his _decaying_ gentlemen.
The arts practised by the money-traders of that time have been detailed
by one of the town-satirists of the age. Decker, in his "English
Villanies," has told the story: we may observe how an old story contains
many incidents which may be discovered in a modern one. The artifice of
covering the usury by a pretended purchase and sale of certain wares,
even now practised, was then at its height.
In _Measure for Measure_ we find,
"Here's young Master Rash, he's in for a commodity of _brown
paper and old ginger_, nine score and seventeen pounds; of
which he made five marks ready money."
The eager "gull," for his immediate wants, takes at an immense price any
goods on credit, which he immediately resells for less than half the
cost; and when despatch presses, the vender and the purchaser have been
the same person, and the "brown paper and old ginger" merely
nominal.[74]
The whole displays a complete system of dupery, and the agents were
graduated. "The Manner of undoing Gentlemen by taking up of
Commodities," is the title of a chapter in "English Villanies." The
"warren" is the cant term which describes the whole party; but this
requires a word of explanation.
It is probable that rabbit-warrens were numerous about the metropolis, a
circumstance which must have multiplied the poachers. Moffet, who wrote
on diet in the reign of Elizabeth, notices their plentiful supply "for
the poor's maintenance."--I cannot otherwise account for the
appellatives given to sharpers, and the terms of cheatery being so
familiarly drawn from a rabbit-warren; not that even in that day these
cant terms travelled far out of their own circle; for Robert Greene
mentions a trial in which the judges, good simple men! imagined that the
coney-catcher at the bar was a warrener, or one who had the care of a
warren.
The cant term of "warren" included the young coneys, or half-ruined
prodigals of that day, with the younger brothers, who had accomplished
their ruin; these naturally herded together, as the pigeon and the
black-leg of the present day. The coney-catchers were those who raised a
trade on their necessities. To be "conie-catched" was to be cheated. The
warren forms a combination altogether, to attract some novice, who in
_esse_ or in _posse_ has his present means good, and those to come
great; he is very glad to learn how money can be raised. The warren seek
after a _tumbler_, a sort of hunting dog; and the nature of a London
tumbler was to "hunt dry-foot," in this manner:--"The tumbler is let
loose, and runs snuffing up and down in the shops of mercers,
goldsmiths, drapers, haberdashers, to meet with a _ferret_, that is, a
citizen who is ready to sell a commodity." The tumbler in his first
course usually returned in despair, pretending to have out-wearied
himself by hunting, and swears that the city ferrets are so coaped (that
is, have their lips stitched up close) that he can't get them to open to
so great a sum as £500, which the warren wants. "This herb being chewed
down by the rabbit-suckers, almost kills their hearts. It irritates
their appetite, and they keenly bid the tumbler, if he can't fasten on
plate, or cloth, or silks, to lay hold of _brown paper_, _Bartholomew
babies_, _lute-strings_, or _hob-nails_. It hath been verily reported,"
says Decker, "that one gentleman of great hopes took up £100 in
hobby-horses, and sold them for £30; and £16 in joints of mutton and
quarters of lamb, ready roasted, and sold them for three pounds." Such
commodities were called _purse-nets_.--The tumbler, on his second hunt,
trots up and down again; and at last lights on a _ferret_ that will
deal: the names are given in to a scrivener, who inquires whether they
are good men, and finds four out of the five are wind-shaken, but the
fifth is an oak that can bear the hewing. "Bonds are sealed, commodities
delivered, and the tumbler fetches his second career; and their credit
having obtained the purse-nets, the wares must now obtain money." The
_tumbler_ now hunts for the _rabbit suckers_, those who buy these
_purse-nets_; but the _rabbit-suckers_ seem greater devils than the
_ferrets_, for they always bid under; and after many exclamations the
_warren_ is glad that the seller should repurchase his own commodities
for ready money, at thirty or fifty _per cent._ under the cost. The
story does not finish till we come to the manner "How the warren is
spoiled." I shall transcribe this part of the narrative in the lively
style of this town writer. "While there is any grass to nibble upon, the
rabbits are there; but on the cold day of repayment they retire into
their caves; so that when the _ferret_ makes account of _five_ in chase,
four disappear. Then he grows fierce, and tears open his own jaws to
suck blood from him that is left. Serjeants, marshalmen, and bailiffs
are sent forth, who lie scenting at every corner, and with terrible paws
haunt every walk. The bird is seized upon by these hawks, his estate
looked into, his wings broken, his lands made over to a stranger. He
pays £500, who never had but £60, or to prison; or he seals any bond,
mortgages any lordship, does anything, yields anything. A little way in,
he cares not how far he wades; the greater his possessions are, the
apter he is to take up and to be trusted--thus gentlemen are _ferretted_
and undone!" It is evident that the whole system turns on the single
novice; those who join him in his bonds are stalking horses; the whole
was to begin and to end with the single individual, the great coney of
the warren. Such was the nature of those "commodities" to which
Massinger and Shakspeare allude, and which the modern dramatist may
exhibit in his comedy, and be still sketching after life.
Another scene, closely connected with the present, will complete the
picture. "The Ordinaries" of those days were the lounging places of the
men of the town, and the "fantastic gallants," who herded together.[75]
Ordinaries were the "exchange for news," the echoing places for all
sorts of town-talk: there they might hear of the last new play and poem,
and the last fresh widow, who was sighing for some knight to make her a
lady; these resorts were attended also "to save charges of
housekeeping." The reign of James I. is characterised by all the
wantonness of prodigality among one class, and all the penuriousness and
rapacity in another, which met in the dissolute indolence of a peace of
twenty years. But a more striking feature in these "Ordinaries" showed
itself as soon as "the voyder had cleared the table." Then began "the
shuffling and cutting on one side, and the bones rattling on the other."
The "Ordinarie," in fact, was a gambling-house, like those now
expressively termed "Hells," and I doubt if the present "Infernos"
exceed the whole _diablerie_ of our ancestors.
In the former scene of sharping they derived their cant terms from a
rabbit-warren, but in the present their allusions partly relate to an
aviary, and truly the proverb suited them, "of birds of a feather."
Those who first propose to sit down to play are called the _leaders_;
the ruined gamesters are the _forlorn-hope_; the great winner is the
_eagle_; a stander-by, who encourages, by little ventures himself, the
freshly-imported gallant, who is called the _gull_, is the
_wood-pecker_; and a monstrous bird of prey, who is always hovering
round the table, is the _gull-groper_, who, at a pinch, is the
benevolent Audley of the Ordinary.
There was, besides, one other character of an original cast, apparently
the friend of none of the party, and yet in fact, "the Atlas which
supported the Ordinarie on his shoulders:" he was sometimes
significantly called the _impostor_.
The _gull_ is a young man whose father, a citizen or a squire, just
dead, leaves him "ten or twelve thousand pounds in ready money, besides
some hundreds a-year." Scouts are sent out, and lie in ambush for him;
they discover what "apothecarie's shop he resorts to every morning, or
in what tobacco-shop in Fleet-street he takes a pipe of smoke in the
afternoon;" the usual resorts of the loungers of that day. Some sharp
wit of the Ordinarie, a pleasant fellow, whom Robert Greene calls the
"taker-up," one of universal conversation, lures the heir of seven
hundred a-year to "The Ordinarie." A _gull_ sets the whole aviary in
spirits; and Decker well describes the flutter of joy and expectation:
"The _leaders_ maintained themselves brave; the _forlorn-hope_, that
drooped before, doth now gallantly come on; the _eagle_ feathers his
nest; the _wood-pecker_ picks up the crumbs; the _gull-groper_ grows fat
with good feeding; and the _gull_ himself, at whom every one has a pull,
hath in the end scarce feathers to keep his back warm."
During the _gull's_ progress through Primero and Gleek,[76] he wants
for no admirable advice and solemn warnings from two excellent friends;
the _gull-groper_, and at length, the _impostor_. The _gull-groper_, who
knows, "to half an acre," all his means, takes the _gull_ when out of
luck to a side-window, and in a whisper talks of "dice being made of
women's bones, which would cozen any man:" but he pours his gold on the
board; and a bond is rapturously signed for the next quarter-day. But
the _gull-groper_, by a variety of expedients, avoids having the bond
duly discharged; he contrives to get a judgment, and a serjeant with his
mace procures the forfeiture of the bond; the treble value. But the
"impostor" has none of the milkiness of the "_gull-groper_"--he looks
for no favour under heaven from any man; he is bluff with all the
Ordinarie; he spits at random; jingles his spurs into any man's cloak;
and his "humour" is, to be a devil of a dare-all. All fear him as the
tyrant they must obey. The tender _gull_ trembles, and admires this
roysterer's valour. At length the devil he feared becomes his champion;
and the poor _gull_, proud of his intimacy, hides himself under this
_eagle's_ wings.
The _impostor_ sits close by his elbow, takes a partnership in his game,
furnishes the stakes when out of luck, and in truth does not care how
fast the gull loses; for a twirl of his mustachio, a tip of his nose, or
a wink of his eye, drives all the losses of the gull into the profits of
the grand confederacy at the Ordinarie. And when the impostor has fought
the gull's quarrels many a time, at last he kicks up the table; and the
gull sinks himself into the class of the forlorn-hope; he lives at the
mercy of his late friends the gull-groper and the impostor, who send him
out to lure some tender bird in feather.
Such were the _hells_ of our ancestors, from which our worthies might
take a lesson; and the "warren" in which the Audleys were the
conie-catchers.
But to return to our Audley; this philosophical usurer never pressed
hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he
might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them.
With great fondness he compared his "bonds to infants, which battle best
by sleeping." To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the
University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate
actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the
scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually lay open a great
Bible, with Bishop Andrews's folio Sermons, which often gave him an
opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy; declaring
their religion was "a mere preach," and that "the time would never be
well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion." He was
aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of
subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of men, spreading like the spawn
of cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political economist,
as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he
said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An
apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and
drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty,
and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues
practised by this puritan among his money bags.
Yet Audley's was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from
the weaknesses of mankind. Everything was to be obtained by stratagem;
and it was his maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a
little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies
and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a
labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clue was still in his own
hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered by his
actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and
his opinions were compressed and weighty: but if he was true to his
bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the
carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honour; the pride
of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the
character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. His partners
dreaded the effects of his law-library, and usually relinquished a claim
rather than stand a latent suit against a quibble. When one menaced him
by showing some money-bags, which he had resolved to empty in law
against him, Audley then in office in the court of wards, with a
sarcastic grin, asked "Whether the bags had any bottom?" "Ay!" replied
the exulting possessor, striking them. "In that case, I care not,"
retorted the cynical officer of the court of wards; "for in this court I
have a constant spring; and I cannot spend in other courts more than I
gain in this." He had at once the meanness which would evade the law,
and the spirit which could resist it.
The genius of Audley had crept out of the purlieus of Guildhall, and
entered the Temple; and having often sauntered at "Powles" down the
great promenade which was reserved for "Duke Humphrey and his
guests,"[77] he would turn into that part called "The Usurer's Alley,"
to talk with "Thirty in the hundred," and at length was enabled to
purchase his office at that remarkable institution, the court of wards.
The entire fortunes of those whom we now call wards in chancery were in
the hands, and often submitted to the arts or the tyranny of the
officers of this court.
When Audley was asked the value of this new office, he replied, that "It
might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would
instantly go to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory:
and nobody knows what to him who would adventure to go to hell." Such
was the pious casuistry of a witty usurer. Whether he undertook this
last adventure, for the four hundred thousand pounds he left behind him,
how can a sceptical biographer decide? Audley seems ever to have been
weak when temptation was strong.
Some saving qualities, however, were mixed with the vicious ones he
liked best. Another passion divided dominion with the sovereign one:
Audley's strongest impressions of character were cast in the old
law-library of his youth, and the pride of legal reputation was not
inferior in strength to the rage for money. If in the "court of wards"
he pounced on incumbrances which lay on estates, and prowled about to
discover the craving wants of their owners, it appears that he also
received liberal fees from the relatives of young heirs, to protect them
from the rapacity of some great persons, but who could not certainly
exceed Audley in subtilty. He was an admirable lawyer, for he was not
satisfied with _hearing_, but _examining_ his clients; which he called
"pinching the cause where he perceived it was foundered." He made two
observations on clients and lawyers, which have not lost their
poignancy. "Many clients in telling their case, rather plead than relate
it, so that the advocate heareth not the true state of it, till opened
by the adverse party. Some lawyers seem to keep an assurance-office in
their chambers, and will warrant any cause brought unto them, knowing
that if they fail, they lose nothing but what was lost long since--their
credit."
The career of Audley's ambition closed with the extinction of the "court
of wards," by which he incurred the loss of above £100,000. On that
occasion he observed that "His ordinary losses were as the shavings of
his beard, which only grew the faster by them; but the loss of this
place was like the cutting off of a member, which was irrecoverable."
The hoary usurer pined at the decline of his genius, discoursed on the
vanity of the world, and hinted at retreat. A facetious friend told him
a story of an old rat, who having acquainted the young rats that he
would at length retire to his hole, desiring none to come near him;
their curiosity, after some days, led them to venture to look into the
hole; and there they discovered the old rat sitting in the midst of a
rich Parmesan cheese. The loss of the last £100,000 may have disturbed
his digestion, for he did not long survive his court of wards.
Such was this man, converting wisdom into cunning, invention into
trickery, and wit into cynicism. Engaged in no honourable cause, he
however showed a mind resolved; making plain the crooked and involved
path he trod. _Sustine et abstine_, to bear and forbear, was the great
principle of Epictetus, and our moneyed Stoic bore all the contempt and
hatred of the living smilingly, while he forbore all the consolations of
our common nature to obtain his end. He died in unblest celibacy,--and
thus he received the curses of the living for his rapine, while the
stranger who grasped the million he had raked together owed him no
gratitude at his death.