THE ROYAL EXCHANGE
[Illustration: THE ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON.]
THE
ROYAL EXCHANGE
A NOTE ON THE OCCASION OF
THE BICENTENARY OF THE
ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE
BY
A. E. W. MASON
ROYAL EXCHANGE
LONDON
1920
CONTENTS.
PART I.--THE HOUSE.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
SIR THOMAS GRESHAM AND THE FIRST ROYAL
EXCHANGE 11
CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT FIRE AND THE SECOND ROYAL
EXCHANGE 26
CHAPTER III.
THE THIRD ROYAL EXCHANGE 43
PART II.--THE BUSINESS.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE BIRTH OF THE
ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE CORPORATION 51
CHAPTER V.
ON ASSURANCE 67
CHAPTER VI.
SOME ODDS AND ENDS 85
CHAPTER VII.
THE CORPORATION 97
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
THE ROYAL EXCHANGE _Frontispiece._
FACING
PAGE
THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE 20
THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE 34
INTERIOR OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE 41
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SECOND ROYAL
EXCHANGE BY FIRE, 1838 43
SOUTH SEA BUBBLE BROADSHEET, 1720 52
THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE--PROOF OF
FIRST HEADING ON FIRE POLICIES, 1721 99
PART I.
THE HOUSE.
CHAPTER I.
SIR THOMAS GRESHAM AND THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE.
On the afternoon of January 23rd, in the year 1571, Queen Elizabeth
went from her Palace of Somerset House to dine with Sir Thomas Gresham
at his fine mansion in Austin Friars. She went in state with her
Trumpeters and Halberdiers, but the visit was no such great mark of
distinction as in these days it would be. For one thing, Sir Thomas
was a person of much importance in the Realm. He was a member of the
Mercers’ Company which was established as long ago as 1172; he was the
Royal Agent in the Low Countries, and by other important services had
Her Majesty in his debt. There was another reason not to be lost sight
of in any narrative which is concerned with the City of London. The
social barriers--which at a later date were to divide the City from
the Court for the best part of a couple of centuries--had not yet been
erected. Wars and the art of soldiering have been from time immemorial
the great origins of social divisions, and these were times of peace.
Seventeen years had still to come before the Armada was to sail out of
Corunna harbour. Moreover, there was no West End. Great nobles lived
cheek by jowl with the great merchants, and the latter held their own
in social esteem much as they have done during the last fifty years.
The Queen was on her way to open Sir Thomas Gresham’s new Burse, and
she sat at dinner with Sir Thomas Gresham upon her right hand, and
upon her left the French Ambassador, Monsieur La Motte Fénélon, to
whom we are indebted for an account of his share in that great woman’s
conversation. We have no record, worse luck, of what passed between
her and Sir Thomas Gresham. But no doubt she whispered to him her
intention to dignify his Exchange with the epithet of “Royal,” and no
doubt he took the occasion to embroider upon certain passages from a
letter which he had had the honour to write to her from Bruges: “The
Stillyard hath been the chiefest point in the undoing of this your
Realm and the Merchants of the same.”
We are not to picture Sir Thomas as unduly elated; the building was,
to be sure, a great thing in the history of London and a definite help
to the commerce of England. It had been mooted before. His father,
Sir Richard Gresham, Master of the Mercers’ Company and Lord Mayor of
London, for many years had advocated the erection of an Exchange in
London and to him credit for the original conception must be given.
Henry the Eighth in the twenty-sixth year of his reign sent his letters
to the City for the making of a new Burse at Leadenhall, but by a show
of hands the City had refused it, preferring that the merchants should
still meet to conduct their business on the cobble stones of Lombard
Street. Now, however, the Exchange was a fact. It stood facing Cornhill
with the great gilt Grasshopper of Sir Thomas Gresham’s crest perched
on the top of its tall tower. But the Exchange was not the end of Sir
Thomas Gresham’s policy--it was no more than the half-way house on
the road of his high ambitions. It was to be one of the means by which
Englishmen were to become masters in their own City and the pernicious
rule of the Lombardy men, and above all of the Stillyard was to be
destroyed.
The Stillyard was, to the modern understanding, one of the strangest
institutions which the world has ever seen. It took its origin from
the debts of the early English kings and the money with which the
German traders from the Baltic, the Easterlings as they were called,
were able to provide them. These Easterlings or Emperor’s men--the
latter designation in time came to supersede the earlier--were the
representatives in England of the famous Hanseatic League, and for the
greater part of the five centuries which followed upon the reign of
Edward the Confessor, they used England’s inability to finance her wars
on the Continent, and her Crusades in the East, to fix a stranglehold
upon British Commerce. They were established in rights and privileges
which no English shared with them; they paid fixed taxes; they held
a monopoly of the export of the most valuable raw materials, such
as wool, and of the import of the most valuable finished products.
The early history of this country gives many a significant little
proof of the great power which they held. They were responsible for
the upkeep of Bishopsgate, except the hinges, for which the Bishop
of London was responsible, and on account of this obligation they
were relieved from the tax called “Murage,” which was devoted to the
upkeep of the City walls. In 1303, Edward the First, when replying to
a Petition, presented by the Mayor, Aldermen and Commoners of the City
of London, asking that the Lombards might be forbidden from dwelling
in the City, acting as brokers, or buying and selling by retail,
stated, that if the Citizens would put the City under good government,
no foreigner should be allowed so to dwell or act in the City or its
Liberties, save and except the merchants of the Hanseatic towns.
They were exempted, moreover, from the particular service of keeping
watch against the Pirates, who from the 13th to the 16th Centuries
infested the Channel and the mouth of the Thames. This exemption
is all the more remarkable since the Alemanes or Alemans--another
of their many designations--having practically the monopoly of the
sea-borne commerce, were the first to benefit by that vigilance.
How dangerous these Pirates were, can be easily understood from the
fact that when Henry the Fourth crossed the Thames from Queenborough
in Sheppey to Leigh in Essex, in order to escape a pestilence which
was raging in London, one of his ships, containing his baggage and
some of his retinue, fell into the hands of Pirates, while the King
narrowly escaped capture himself. The power of the Stillyard was
thus a formidable thing, and its governors had surrounded it by such
precautions and safeguards as made it doubly difficult to destroy.
The Members of the Steelyard or Stillyard--spelling was never an
exact science until a very recent date--lived, for instance, upon the
Monastic plan. No guild or corporation or trades union which ever
existed set so strict a limit to the number of its members. Its great
yards and buildings stood upon the bank of the Thames where to-day the
arches of the South Eastern Railway carry the lines into Cannon Street
Station. They were known first of all as the “Stapelhof,” the Stapel
House; this name was contracted into “Staelhof”; the Staelhof in its
turn became anglicised into “Stilliards,” and then, by a change which
had nothing to do with the meaning of the institution, was transmuted
in common parlance into “the Steelyard.” The Steelyard, which had
subsidiary houses at Boston and Lynn, was the great storage building of
England. The raw products for exportation, of which tin, hides and wool
were the chief, were assembled there. Thither, too, came the imports
from abroad--wheat, rye, grain, cables, wax, steel, linen, cloth and
tar in particular. The walls were fortified against attack--a very
necessary precaution considering the ill-feeling which the Yard aroused
amongst British Londoners. No member of the Stillyard was allowed to
marry or even to visit any person of the other sex. At a fixed hour in
the evening, all had to be at home, and the gates were rigidly closed;
and at a fixed hour in the morning the gates were opened again. All
meals were taken in common, and the members submitted themselves
to a Government which consisted of a Master, two assessors and nine
common councilmen. This committee held office for a year, the election
taking place upon New Year’s Eve, and the new Master, with his council,
solemnly took oath upon the following day to uphold all the rights
and privileges entrusted to his vigilance. It can be easily imagined,
therefore, what power a body of this kind possessed, a body without
home life or any interests except its commerce, having besides not only
the crown of England in its fee, but the monopoly of its sea-borne
commerce, and the monopoly of its great product, wool--for it was said
in the 14th Century that England with its wool kept the whole world
warm--and the stupendous efforts required to destroy it. Yet to destroy
it, was again not all of Sir Thomas Gresham’s policy. He meant, while
destroying it, to graft upon English commerce the business methods by
which the Hanseatic League had achieved its pre-eminence. Amongst these
methods, by the way, was insurance.
We are to imagine, then, Sir Thomas Gresham conversing with his great
guest upon these grave matters, and she in time turning to her
companion upon her left. La Motte Fénélon was an old friend of hers,
and it is clear that they did some pretty sparring over the vexed
question whether she should or should not marry the Duc D’Anjou. It
seems that Elizabeth was in great good humour that day. She had not
visited the City for two years, and was received with so loving a
welcome that probably nothing like to it was afterwards seen until the
Jubilee processions of Queen Victoria. But “Gloriana” was not the woman
to lose her head, and to hold out hopes that she would marry a foreign
prince was one of her favourite tricks with foreign ambassadors. She
told Monsieur La Motte Fénélon that she was well aware that the Duc
D’Anjou had not the best of reputations, but that she would, if she
married him, do her best to be a loving wife and the mother of a fine
boy. She broke off to ask him how he thought she was looking--we may
be very sure she did not put this question to the great Sir Thomas
Gresham. La Motte Fénélon replied that she was divinely beautiful. He
could really under the circumstances say no less. He does not go quite
so far in his account of this dinner party to his own Government, but
he admits that since she was rising forty, as the phrase goes, she was
really surprising.
We must take it that the dinner was a success, for it was nearly seven
o’clock in the evening--a late hour for those days--when, accompanied
by a great escort of torch bearers, she went on to the Exchange. The
building was constructed almost entirely of foreign material. The
alabaster came from the Low Countries; the stone from Flanders; even
the little blocks of hone stones which still to-day pave the centre of
the quadrangle came from Turkey. The Master who superintended the work
was Flemish--one Henrik--and almost to a man the builders were from
overseas.
[Illustration: THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE.]
It is curious that an Englishman, who was devoting his energies to the
release of British commerce from the grasp of the foreigner, should
have gone abroad for the material and the workmen for what was to
be the monument of English commercial independence. Is it possible
that Sir Thomas Gresham had just that touch of snobbery in small
matters--so common a trait of the English character, which professes
admiration for everything foreign so long as English interests are not
seriously attacked?--the same sort of snobbery which a few years ago
filled a suburban drawing room with cheap books and photographs of the
Rhine and Switzerland, and found no place for any views of England.
However that may be, the first Royal Exchange had little that was
English in its composition, even that gallery in which Queen Elizabeth
made her clear speech, declaring that henceforth the building was to
be the Royal Exchange, must have an outlandish name. It was called the
“Pawn,” and like the rest of the Exchange, was lit up--brilliantly
for those days--in the Italian style with coloured glass cups full of
burning grease, and great wax torches burning in sconces on the walls.
The Pawn was decorated with rich hangings and carpets from the East,
and the shops glittered with glass and jewellery, silver and gold.
From the ceremony the Queen returned to Somerset House through the
lighted streets by way of Cheapside and Temple Bar--all London was
abroad, jostling in the narrow ways, a torrent of splendid colour,
ringing cheers, and the orange splashes of torch flames. The Queen
could not but be moved. “It does my heart good,” she cried, “to see
my subjects so loyal and myself so well beloved.” The tears came into
her eyes, and she whispered to La Motte Fénélon, who rode at her side,
“My people have only one regret--they know me to be mortal and that I
have no child to reign over them after my death.” La Motte Fénélon was
touched, as no doubt he was meant to be. Her sincerity was apparent to
him, and he had greater hopes than ever that the Duc D’Anjou would sit
by her side on the Throne of England. Very likely she _was_ sincere,
but she was too subtle a woman and too wary a Queen not to make use of
her sincerity to fortify that throne of hers which meant so much to the
prosperity of her people.
Thus ended a great day in the history of London, and seven years later
Sir Thomas Gresham had his way. The Queen, encouraged by Sir William
Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, and Sir Thomas Gresham, declared all
the privileges of the Stillyard merchants of whatever nature, null and
void for ever. The next year she struck a harder blow. She forbade them
to export wool, thus depriving them of the most profitable branch of
their business. The Stillyard merchants were unwise enough to appeal to
the Diet of the Hanseatic League at Bruges. The Diet responded to the
appeal. It threatened England that, unless the Stillyard was restored
to its former privileges and rights, the English Company of Merchant
Adventurers would be expelled from every town in Germany in which it
had established a branch. The Diet, however, did not know the Lady with
whom it had to deal. The answer came prompt and sharp in a proclamation
which not only closed the Stillyard itself peremptorily, but bade every
German merchant leave the Kingdom before the last day of February,
1597. This proclamation was carried out, the German merchants left, the
Stillyard was handed over as a store house to the Admiralty, and thus
disappeared an institution as pernicious to the trade of England as
the Kingdom has ever known.
But these Germans had built their house well and the great walls of the
Yard were still standing in 1863, when the South Eastern Railway built
Cannon Street Station.
As for the Royal Exchange itself, it became at once the meeting place
of merchants and the promenade of men of fashion. In the day-time grave
people of business paced those Turkish hone stones, adjusted their
disputes and engaged in transactions with outlandish people from all
the then known countries in the world. In the evening the butterflies
of fashion would flit from Paul’s Walk to the gaily lighted shops of
the Pawn, where all they could want from lace, glass, strange curios,
to that queer new useful invention--the common pin--was laid out to
attract them. “What artificial thing,” says an old writer, “was there
that could entertain the senses or the phantasies of man that was not
there to be had? Such was the delight that many gallants took in that
magazine of all curious varieties that they could almost have dwelt
there, going from shop to shop like bees from flower to flower if they
had but had the fountain of money that could not have been drawn dry.”
The evening, however, was not apparently ended in the Pawn. There was a
certain routine in the amusements of the people of fashion as there is
to-day. From the Pawn the stream of gay people flowed to Bucklersbury,
where were the Indian shops with their scents and perfumes, and the
Italian Confectioners, where they took their supper before going home
to bed. Thus for ninety years the first Royal Exchange played its
important part in the life of London. In 1666 the Great Fire swept it
away.
CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT FIRE AND THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.
Popular faith for a long time swayed between two ultimate reasons for
the Great Fire. It was either a visitation from God upon London for its
vices and its lack of religion, or it was a dispensation of Providence
to clear the City altogether from the germs of the Plague. But, as
a fact, mediæval London was neither more wicked nor more unhealthy
than any large city of those days. More than one foreign Chronicler,
indeed, pays his tribute to the beauty of the City, its gardens and
clear springs, and to the orderly character of its inhabitants; though,
to be sure, we must measure those eulogies by the standards of the
times. London, like any other mediæval town, was especially liable
to fire; its streets were narrow to begin with, and, to make things
worse, permissions were readily granted for the extensions of the
upper storeys upon pillars. These extensions called “Hautpas,” were no
doubt conceded because they formed a protection against the weather to
passers-by and the shops beneath. They were no less warmly welcomed
by the owner because they increased the size of his house without
necessitating the purchase of additional ground. London, indeed, was as
crowded then as it is to-day. The streets and alleyways were thick with
a jostle of people from morning until late at night, and decree after
decree of the City Fathers sought in vain to restrain the invasion from
the countryside. All this press of people made carelessness more common
and the danger of fire more likely, and when the King with his Court
came to the Tower of London, the demand upon the City space became
almost intolerable, for there was never room within the Tower for the
retinue which he carried with him. There was a permanent officer upon
his staff called the “Sergeant Harbourer,” whose business it was to
find lodgings for the household servants and dependants of the King.
The houses were built of wood and roofed with thatch. Glass was
rare--probably none was imported into England until the reign of Henry
the Third, and although a hundred years afterwards, in the reign of
Edward the Third, glass was so far known that a Guild of Verrers or
Glaziers was definitely established, most of the houses, especially
of the poorer class, were unprotected by it. Let a fire once get hold
of one of these houses, in a dry season, it would roar through the
narrow streets as through a funnel, driving burning fragments of wood
and cloth and paper through the unglazed windows into the mansions on
either side. London was thus ripe for fires, but she was chastised out
of all measure. Both in the first year of Stephen’s reign and in 1212,
fires ravaged the City. Indeed, in the latter case, many more lives
were lost than in the Great Fire of 1666.
A singular feature of all these fires is that they took their origin
in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. Thus the great Fire began early
on a Sunday morning, the 2nd September, in the house of Farryner, the
King’s baker, in Pudding Lane. Pepys, from a window of his house in
Seething Lane, noticed the blaze at about 3 o’clock in the morning, but
thought little of it and returned to his bed. The summer, however, had
been hot; the houses were little better than tinder and a high wind
was blowing. Appliances and regulations there were of a kind, but of
too primitive a kind to check the progress of this fire. Each Ward,
for instance, was equipped with a hook to pull down houses, two chains
and two strong cords, all in charge of the Beadle. Large houses were
compelled to keep one or two ladders and, during the summer, a barrel
of water in the courtyard. Certain houses too had stone partitioned
walls, since, by the Assize of Fitz-Ailwyne, special civic privileges
were given to those who built in stone rather than in wood. But such
houses were few. For instance, if a stone house stood at any boundary
which you wished to indicate, you had but to say “The Stone House” and
no one would mistake you. The fire spread up Thames Street, drove north
and west along Gracechurch Street, Lombard Street, Cornhill, Austin
Friars, Lothbury, Bartholomew Lane. All were devoured. The Exchange was
utterly destroyed. “A sad sight,” says Pepys, “nothing standing there
of all the statues or pillars, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the
corner.” By September 4th the flames had reached St. Paul’s, round
about the roof of which a mass of scaffolding had been erected, so that
it fell an easy prey. The stones of the walls burst asunder with the
noise of cannon under the heat, and the lead rolled down in streams.
To recall the glory of that historic building with its marvellous
rose-window, only Dr. Donne’s tomb and the charred stumps of a few
cloister pillars remained. Eighty-four of the old City churches were
swept away with St. Paul’s, and but for the courage and energy of the
Duke of York, the Temple Church would have vanished too. Every kind of
ill-luck, indeed, seemed to help on the work of destruction. London was
afflicted by a weak and inefficient Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth.
“Lord, what can I do?” he fluttered; “I am spent and my people pay me
no heed. We pull down houses, but Oh! Lord, the fire goeth on the same,
and burns others before we have done.”
On the other hand, Charles the Second and his brother kept their heads.
They were about from morning till night. Westminster Abbey, the Tower
although its outer precincts caught fire, Temple Bar, Lincoln’s Inn
Gateway, Gresham College, Smithfield, Bishopsgate Street and Aldgate
were saved. The river was crowded with the boats of fugitives; the
heights of Hampstead were covered with tents and such rough huts as
could be speedily set up. Volumes of black suffocating smoke hung over
the burning city like a pall. Of the four hundred and fifty acres
within the City walls from Ludgate to the Tower and from the river to
Cripplegate, only seventy-five were left with houses still standing
upon them, while of the liberties beyond the walls, sixty-three acres
were consumed. Houses, however, could be rebuilt, even wonderful
churches could be replaced if there were an architect with the genius
to design them--and such an architect England had the good fortune at
that hour to possess. But some irreparable losses were sustained, and
amongst them none more grievous than the losses of the manuscripts of
Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. It seems that a great many of
these were taken from Paternoster Row, and placed for security in the
crypt of St. Paul’s, where indeed they were safe from the actual touch
of flame, even in such a fire as that which had raged during this first
week of September, but so great was the heat that the manuscripts were
all reduced to ashes.
On the afternoon of September 6th the fire was finally stopped at
Temple Bar; and it must be reckoned an astounding example of the
courage of the race that the houseless population set itself at once
methodically to work to rebuild their city. Within a week, three plans
for a new London were presented to Charles the Second; one made by
John Evelyn, famous for his diary; the second by Robert Hook, the
philosopher; the third by Sir Christopher Wren. This last was accepted.
Had it been carried out, we should have had a London made beautiful
by straight broad streets and central “Piazzes,” as he called them.
But it would have been a London a little too formal perhaps to suit
the English independence. As a matter of fact, the citizens did not
wait for any plans, but returning to the sites of their old houses
which must have been still smouldering and hot to the foot, they began
forthwith to rebuild. Amongst the first of such undertakings was the
Royal Exchange.
[Illustration: THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.]
Sixteen days after the Fire of London had first broken out in
Pudding Lane, a committee was formed to rebuild the Royal Exchange.
The business of the Exchange, even to the shops of the Pawn, was
transferred to Gresham College. The shopkeepers offered to pave the
quadrangle of the new building in exchange for their accommodation in
Gresham College: and with the hope--a vain hope as it proved to be--of
preventing destruction by another fire, the City Surveyors determined
to draw a street on the west and on the east of the new building. The
credit for this second building, which was erected from materials as
far as possible resembling those which had been used in the original
building, has been improperly given to Sir Christopher Wren, but the
records of the Building Committee make it clear that Mr. Jarman, the
second City Surveyor, was the architect who designed the plan. It
is to be noticed that once more the front of the Royal Exchange was
upon Cornhill, with a fine portico, which earned the special favour
of Charles the Second, no doubt because in a nitch upon one side was
a statue of Charles the First, and in a nitch upon the other, one of
his royal self. It is possible that his approbation would have been
less hearty if he could have foreseen that after the next fire that
same statue of him would be put up to auction and sold for £9. Almost
within a year of the burning there was once more a royal procession,
when Charles the Second rode on horseback with several persons of
quality. He placed the first stone with the usual ceremonies in the
presence of a great many people, and then in a special shed upon the
new Scottish Walk, roofed with a canopy and hung with tapestry, he was
entertained to dinner by the City and the Mercers’ Company. Pepys saw
the King pass with his kettle drums and his trumpets on the way to
the Exchange, and in his busy way hurried after him, but the poor
man found the gates shut when he arrived at the building, and could
only get in to see it after the stone had been laid and the King had
departed. A month later, the Duke of York laid the foundation stone
of the pillar on the east side of the north entrance, and a fortnight
afterwards Prince Rupert performed the same ceremony on the east side
of the south entrance. There was some delay in the building, and for
reasons which strike home to-day. Bricks were dear; the only suitable
bricks were to be got from Walham Green, and the supply was below the
demand. The work however, except for the statues and no doubt other
ornamentations, was completed within three years, and was opened
without any great ceremony by Sir William Turner, the Lord Mayor
of the day, who “came and walked twice about it and congratulated
the merchants of the ’Change on its account.” Charles the Second
was expected, but he did not come: and we picture to ourselves the
disappointment of the assemblage--disappointment mingled probably with
a good deal of outspoken criticism, and not a few sarcasms as to
whether some new beauty had not come to Court; and, probably, on the
part of the Committee, sharpened by an uneasy recollection of a certain
fine equestrian statue in white marble upon which they had turned
their backs. This was a statue of the King on horseback, and it was
offered by Sir Robert Vyner to stand in the middle of the Quadrangle.
The Committee, however, came to the conclusion that it was too big for
the site and would interfere with the main business of the building,
which was the transaction of business by the merchants of the City.
Charles the Second was not a man to take with humility any disregard
for his Royal dignity, and it is quite possible that, with a chuckle
of pleasure, he left his good citizens to wait for him on the Royal
Exchange as a lesson to them in the future.
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.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.]
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.
[Illustration: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE BY FIRE,
1838.]
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