There are memoirs of this remarkable man in a rare quarto tract,
entitled “The Way to be Rich, according to the practice of the great
Audley, who began with two hundred pounds in the year 1605, and died
worth four hundred thousand.” He died on the 15th of November, 1662, the
year wherein the tract was printed.
Hugh Audley was 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. 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, of which, had it been thrown into a nobler sphere
of action, the “greatness” would have been less ambiguous.
Audley, as mentioned in the title of his memoir, 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
fast 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. It seems 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 landholders, 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_l._ Audley bought the debt at
40_l._, for which the draper immediately offered him 50_l._ 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_l._, rather than to receive the
visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last
descendant of 2000_l._, 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 temporary 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 monied people must
balance accounts: if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do,
then I cheat your lordship.” Audley’s monied 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; for, as it is
quaintly said, he had his _decoying_ as well as his _decaying_
gentlemen.
Audley was a philosophical usurer: he 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 opened 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. He dreaded an inundation of men, and 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. Every thing 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 suit against a latent 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,”
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 his four hundred thousand pounds, 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_l._ 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. It is probable that the loss of the last
100,000_l._ 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 to forbear, was the
great principle of Epictetus, and our monied 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.--_D’Israeli._
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