Initial commitHEADmain

19 files changed, 4660 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d7b82bc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+*.txt text eol=lf
+*.htm text eol=lf
+*.html text eol=lf
+*.md text eol=lf
diff --git a/75944-0.txt b/75944-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..0f2d4ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,1692 @@
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75944 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+                          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
+
+
+
+
+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 France 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.
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH SEA BUBBLE BROADSHEET. 1720.]
+
+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 purse-strings 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.
+
+In 1720, George the First proposed that the South Sea Company should
+take over not merely the floating but the entire debt of England,
+which at that time amounted to £31,000,000. Even the staid Bank of
+England could stand it no longer. It came in with a proposal to take
+over the debt itself in the place of this upstart Company. But the
+upstart Company had several notable people behind it, amongst them the
+famous--or shall we say infamous?--Countess Von Platen; and the South
+Sea Company carried the day against the Bank of England. The shares
+jumped from 130 to 300. The King’s proposal was debated for two months
+in the House of Commons and for forty-eight hours in the House of
+Lords, and on April 7th of that year the Bill became law.
+
+Strangely enough, the South Sea Stock immediately fell. The Directors
+asked for a million more capital, offering £300 for £100. They got it,
+and they got more. Before Midsummer, the stock had risen to 800 per
+cent. The satirists, as you can imagine, got to work, but what did
+they matter? Satire, from the days of Aristophanes, has never stopped
+a rush. It will hold up this or that person, this or that group of
+people, to the ridicule of future generations, but it has no check
+upon them while they live. Neither Juvenal nor Molière deterred. The
+“Precieuses Ridicules” died not of satire but of their own inanition.
+The satirist and his fellows might rave as they liked against Change
+Alley and the South Seas but not one sedan chair dropped out of the
+crowd in consequence.
+
+It was not everybody, however, who was able to get near enough, or, if
+he did get near enough, to purchase the coveted stock. Other companies,
+therefore, with other projects no more unreasonable, sprang up in the
+same neighbourhood. The advertised capital of these companies ran, as
+a rule, into millions. And why not? The public was gullible. It was
+a matter of prestige--of the appeal rather than of actual cash. The
+nominal capital of the various undertakings floated during the years
+when the South Sea Company was at its zenith amounted to five times the
+entire currency of England and Europe. No one asked any questions--all
+were too anxious to buy.
+
+Here are a few of the proposals: a scheme for furnishing funerals to
+any part of Great Britain; another for making looking glasses and coach
+glasses, with a capital of £2,000,000; a third for the transmutation
+of quicksilver into malleable fine metal; a fourth for ensuring and
+increasing children’s fortunes; a fifth for building and rebuilding
+houses throughout all England, with a capital of £3,000,000 (this, by
+the way, is a scheme which might have a chance to-day). Yet a further
+philanthropic set of gentlemen floated a scheme for supplying the
+town of Deal with fresh water. Another set, this time more ingenious
+than philanthropic, proposed to make deal boards out of sawdust. And
+all these schemes obtained their votaries. The cry went up “Give us
+something to buy,” and the response was not inadequate.
+
+Two schemes stand out especially through the grandeur of their
+simplicity. The longer one lives, the more clearly it is proved to one
+that the old and simple dodges never fail. If you want to practice
+that amiable form of robbery known as the confidence trick, be sure to
+practice it in its most primæval form. An old man named Le Brun knew
+the ropes. He had been suitably educated, for as a boy he had sailed
+with Sir Henry Morgan when Morgan devastated Panama. He had been with
+Patterson in Darien. He had owned a privateer himself in the days when
+a privateer was a polite name for a pirate, but like the men of his
+class he had lived like a fighting cock when he had the money, and in
+his old age he was poor. The fame of Law in Paris attracted him over
+the Channel. The fame of the South Sea Company and the doings in Change
+Alley brought him hot-foot back again. He was, as it were, in his own
+country. He set out a wonderful project. You had only to possess £5
+to reap the full benefit of it. He had an office in Change Alley. It
+was called simply, broadly, sympathetically--“Office of Insurance and
+Annuity for Everybody.” “Anybody,” Mr. Le Brun announced, “who paid him
+five pounds was to be assured of receiving a life income of £100 per
+annum, as soon as a sufficient number had subscribed!” A great number
+subscribed--but not a sufficient number. The number had to be ever so
+great before Mr. Le Brun could be able to put his wonderful scheme into
+operation.
+
+A still simpler device was imagined by a gentleman whose name (alas!)
+is not known. He propounded a company for carrying on an undertaking
+of great advantage, “but nobody to know what it is.” The capital of
+this singular undertaking was to be a mere fleabite--half a million
+pounds in five thousand £100 shares. But--and here the anonymous
+benefactor showed his discretion--you had only to deposit £2 a share
+and you obtained by the mere fact of that deposit £100 a year on each
+share. This worthy person opened his office in the morning. By the time
+business in Change Alley ceased and the ladies and gentlemen retired
+to the lighted candles of the West End, he had secured deposits to the
+tune of £2,000. The next morning the office was closed and it was never
+opened again. These schemes were iridescent as the mayfly, and had just
+as long a life. They sparkled and glinted in the sunlight through a
+day, and the next morning they were not.
+
+After the shares of the South Sea Company had risen to 800 per cent.,
+a good many prudent people began to realise their fortunes, and stocks
+accordingly fell. The Directors asked for more money, obtained it, and
+the shares in August had risen to no less than a thousand per cent. But
+the end was near, and in the month of September the Bubble burst. A
+member of Parliament of that day wrote to Lord Chancellor Middleton:
+“The consternation is inexpressible, the rage beyond description,
+and the case altogether so desperate that I do not see any plan or
+scheme so much as thought of for averting the blow, so that I cannot
+pretend to guess what is next to be done.” The Bank of England made an
+effort. It asked for a subscription of three million pounds for the
+restoration of credit, but did not get it. The South Sea Stock fell to
+135, and bankers and goldsmiths who had lent money on South Sea Bonds
+were compelled to fly the country. Parliament was summoned to meet,
+and George the First returned post haste from Hanover. An enquiry was
+instituted into the management of the Company and a series of frauds
+was discovered in which members of the Government were shamefully
+involved. Mr. Secretary Craggs and Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, went down with a crash. People did not exact from
+the Ministers of the Crown in those days the same high standard of
+propriety which is demanded to-day. But the scandal in this case
+was too great for extenuation. Aislabie went to prison, and bonfires
+were lighted in the London streets on the day he was sent there. Mr.
+Secretary Craggs no doubt would have gone on the same road but his son,
+for whose sake, it was currently said, he had amassed a million and a
+half out of the Bubble, died suddenly, and the father was stricken with
+apoplexy. The Countess Von Platen, with her two nieces, was proved to
+have been given £20,000 worth of fictitious stock as an inducement to
+her to use her influence to push the Bill through Parliament. There
+were reasons why action could not be taken against her. The curious may
+turn to Thackeray’s wonderful picture of the Court of Hanover in the
+“Four Georges,” where he will be rewarded by one of the most startling
+and dramatic stories which history has ever had to tell.
+
+In the midst of these times, inauspicious for solid business proposals,
+if ever times were, the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation was
+born. A Mr. Case Billingsley, of the firm of Bradley and Billingsley,
+Solicitors, himself a member of the Mercers’ Company, proposed a
+scheme for marine insurance, and gave to it the title of the “Public
+Assurance Office.” He opened a list at the Mercers’ Hall on the 12th
+August, 1717, and asked for a subscription of £1,250,000, of which
+£100,000 was to be paid up. The list was closed in January of the
+following year. But during the months when the list was open, the
+proposer of a rival scheme, Sir John Williams, amalgamated with him.
+The list being closed, Case Billingsley applied to the Attorney General
+for a Charter. A Charter was refused, although in this case Sir Robert
+Walpole supported it; Billingsley had moreover the support of Lord
+Onslow, a member of the Government, and of Lord Chetwynd, who was
+interested in a similar scheme. A good many people did not look further
+than the end of their noses. Lady Cowper, the wife of Lord Chancellor
+Cowper, frankly wrote of both Onslow’s and Chetwynd’s proposals as
+“Bubbles,” and stated that they were on the same plane as the South Sea
+Company--frauds upon the public--no more, no less.
+
+Billingsley, however, and his Directors did not lie down under the
+refusal. They cast about and bought up for a song an old Charter of
+Queen Elizabeth’s time, which had nothing whatever to do with Assurance
+in any form. It was a Charter of the Mines Royal, Mineral and Battery
+Works, which in itself was an amalgamation dating back three years.
+Under this Charter, with its curious coat of arms of a miner working
+by candle light and extracting from the earth a veritable sleet of
+golden drops, the Billingsley Assurance Company set up to practice
+Marine Insurance. From the outset it is clear that the Company did a
+profitable business, for it declared, and so far as we know paid, a
+dividend in 1719.
+
+It did not, however, pursue its affairs without opposition. Petitions
+were presented against the Company by private underwriters who foresaw
+ruin ahead of them, on the ground that it was doing business which the
+Charter did not entitle it to do. It is impossible to say what might
+have happened to this Company had not some ingenious mind amongst its
+Directors recognised, or had not some hint been given by one of His
+Majesty’s Ministers, that King George’s Civil List was short of six
+hundred thousand pounds. The two Insurance Companies--that fathered
+by Lord Chetwynd and now known as the “London Assurance Corporation,”
+and the “Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation,” which was covered by
+the wing of Lord Onslow--proposed to make good this deficiency in
+return for their Charters. Accordingly in the year 1720, on May 4th,
+King George recommended his faithful Commons to grant the requests of
+these Corporations, and the Bill conceding them their Charters received
+the Royal Assent on June 10th. It was after the Charter was granted
+that the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation took the title which it
+has since retained. Billingsley was, as we have said, a member of the
+Mercers’ Company. He had established the offices of the Corporation in
+the Royal Exchange, and no name could have been more suitable.
+
+But it is to be observed that this was the year during which the South
+Sea Bubble swelled and burst. The Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+failed to fulfil the conditions of its Charter almost as soon as it had
+received it. The Corporation was organised on a sound financial basis,
+for in 1720, it had a surplus of £14,000 odd, after all obligations had
+been discharged. But it owned stock in the South Sea Company, and when
+that Company crumbled and all credit was shaken to its foundations,
+the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation passed through a troublous
+time. It declared a dividend, but it could not pay it, and by September
+of that year it was short of two instalments of £50,000 each, which
+it owed to the Civil List. A subsequent Act of Parliament, however,
+relieved the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation and the London
+Assurance Corporation of their liabilities in this direction, after
+they had paid between them something like a quarter of a million.
+The subsequent history of the Royal Exchange Assurance has been one
+of sound business and consequent prosperity. It began with Marine
+insurance and in 1721 added life and fire.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+ON ASSURANCE.
+
+
+The history of assurance is not a sprightly theme. It is so hedged
+about with details of old ordinances, tables of mortality and specimens
+of fire marks, as are enough to drive the general reader into the next
+parish. The historians begin as a rule with the Phœnicians. And they
+are wise. Everybody has heard of the Phœnicians and that they were the
+first known traders to visit Britain from overseas. You can safely
+assert that the Phœnicians practised marine insurance; and on the
+other hand, you can equally safely deny that they knew anything about
+assurance at all for there is no one to contradict you. There is no
+evidence of any kind.
+
+This, however, is certain. Marine assurance was the first form of
+assurance practised amongst men; and, inevitably, the first form. For
+the risk was evident and above all could be estimated with accuracy.
+The value of the ship and the worth of its cargo were known, and a
+fair reckoning could be made of the perils which were likely to be
+encountered on the voyage. Probably the very first edict concerning
+this practice was issued when Justinian was Emperor, in the year 533.
+He limited the legal rate of interest to six per cent. in all cases
+except that of “Fœnus Nauticum”; and “Fœnus Nauticum” was that early
+form of marine assurance which we know by the name of Bottomry. In this
+one case, interest was allowed to be exacted at the rate of twelve per
+cent.
+
+Upon the heels of Justinian, however, followed the Middle Ages, and
+they wiped out Justinian’s edict and any arrangement of a similar
+nature, which was to be found in any parts over which the Church ruled.
+Interest upon the investment of capital was accounted as usury and an
+offence against God, to be corrected by burnings and floggings, and the
+other delicate persuasions of those days. We have no sure knowledge
+when marine insurance was revived, but we may be fairly certain that
+its revival was due to the far-sighted policy of the Hanseatic League,
+which had made its merchants the great sea-carriers of the Northern
+nations. The League published various sea codes during the 13th century
+and consolidated them at the beginning of the 14th in an authoritative
+pronouncement known as “The Laws of Wisby.” Wisby was a town on the
+western side of the Isle of Gothland in the Baltic, and at that time
+one of the most flourishing staple towns of the North. These Laws of
+Wisby do actually for the first time mention the word Bottomry, but in
+such a way as to make it clear that Bottomry had long been practised.
+Bottomry was a wager. The Underwriter bet the Shipowner that his ship
+with its cargo would arrive safely at its port of destination. The
+great difference between Bottomry and an ordinary wager, and between
+Bottomry and a modern form of assurance, was this: the Underwriter paid
+the money over at once, and, if he won--that is, if a ship arrived
+in safety--received his money back with the addition of the premium
+agreed upon. The Shipowner, in a word, held the stakes.
+
+This primitive form of insurance developed quickly. It became insurance
+as we understand it to-day. Thus in the “Chronyk Van Vlaenden”--an
+ancient history--it is written:--
+
+ “On the demand of the inhabitants of Bruges, the Count of Flanders
+ permitted in the year 1310, the establishment in this town of a
+ Chamber of Assurance, by means of which the Merchants could insure
+ their goods, exposed to the Risks of the Sea, or elsewhere, in paying
+ a stipulated Percentage. But, in order that an Establishment so useful
+ to Commerce might not be dissolved as soon as formed, he ordered the
+ laying down of several Laws and Regulations which the Assurers as well
+ as the Assured, are bound to observe.”
+
+Bruges was at this period the very capital of the commerce of the
+North. It was the great storehouse, the chief market and the main
+sea-port of that far-flung League. It was no uncommon thing for a
+hundred and fifty tall ships to enter on a single tide into Sluys, the
+outer harbour of Bruges.
+
+The first definite ordinances concerning marine insurance, however,
+came from a very different part of the world. The Magistrates of
+Barcelona, certainly on four separate occasions during the 15th
+Century, formulated Rules which were one and all intended to prevent
+the over insurance of unseaworthy ships--a growing scandal and danger
+of those times. The Barcelona trade was mainly with the Ports of Italy;
+and the Grand Council of Venice, before the century was over, followed
+in the footsteps of Barcelona. The Venetian Decree starts by declaring
+that, owing to the perverse nature of mankind, people _will_ quarrel
+about money matters, and proceeds to deal with such very modern dangers
+as that arising from carrying an excessive cargo on deck. Ordinances
+issued in Venice were certain to find their way into England, for the
+Italians, or Lombardy men as they were called, had already gained a
+solid footing in England, and indeed were actually carrying commercial
+war into the very camp of the Stillyard.
+
+The attack of the German Emperor upon the Pope in the first half of
+the 13th Century, and the influence of the Crusades, which brought to
+England in Italian Fleets spices, carpets, silks and other luxuries
+from the East, were the chief causes of the Italian invasion. With
+the expulsion of the Jews by Edward the First, their position was
+greatly strengthened, for, in their turn, they became the usurers.
+We find the Lord Mayor, at the King’s command setting aside for them
+a district of London in which to reside--the district now known as
+Lombard Street--and so powerful did they become that even though their
+unpopularity made them objects of continual attacks by the populace and
+continual Petitions for their expulsion to successive Kings, they were
+only dislodged in the end by their own fears for their personal safety.
+
+Thus, long before any decree with regard to marine insurance was
+issued by a Government of England, the practice of insurance was
+common and regular in the country. The first British Marine Insurance
+Act bears the date of 1601, and states in its Preamble that Marine
+Insurance has been “tyme out of mynde an usuage amongste merchantes,
+both of this realme and of forraine nacyons.” It mentions, in fact,
+“an Office of Insurance within the City of London,” where a registry
+of marine insurance policies was compiled. This Act of Queen Elizabeth
+established a permanent commission for the hearing of cases arising
+out of policies of marine insurance. The Commission was to sit for the
+time being under the presidency of the Judge of the Admiralty and the
+Recorder of London. It was to consist of two members of Civil Law, two
+common lawyers and eight grave and discreet merchants, and was to hold
+its Sessions once a week.
+
+The Act, however, found no favour with the Merchants of the City of
+London, chiefly, no doubt, because it allowed appeals to the Court of
+Chancery, which in the slowness of its procedure seems in those days
+not to have lagged behind the Court of Chancery, as Dickens found
+it in the days of “Jarndyce versus Jarndyce.” The Act accordingly
+fell, after a generation, into disuse. But the practice of assurance
+steadily increased and, with the coming of Lloyds and the granting
+of the Charters to the two great Corporations--the Royal Exchange
+Assurance and the London Assurance--was gradually placed upon a legal
+and scientific basis.
+
+In the order of history, life insurance followed upon marine, and fire
+insurance upon life. At first sight, to anyone who forms in his mind
+anything like a vivid picture of the crowded wooden houses, the medley
+of thatched roofs, which made up a mediæval city, the order may seem
+strange. One might imagine that the danger of fire, and the necessity
+of guarding against its widespread terrors, would be ever present. But
+it is necessary to remember that, as before the Great Fire went the
+Great Plague in the sequence of facts, so, also, in the sequence of
+loss, mortality and damage, fire limped behind disease. The mediæval
+house in a dry summer was tinder to a spark, but winter or summer it
+was a place of unclean rushes with little, if any, sanitation. Readers
+of the “Young Visiters,” will recollect that the heroine put some “red
+ruge” on her cheeks because, as she declared, she was pale owing to
+the drains of the house. The demand for “red ruge” must have been very
+extensive in mediæval London. There was a disease called the “sweating
+sickness,” which carried off inhabitants in a few hours. The Plague
+had visited the City many times before the winter of 1665, and was
+to visit it afterwards. There was a violence in the ordinary conduct
+of life, such as you may know after the conclusion of any great war.
+Medicine was in its infancy. If your child had scarlet fever, you
+wrapped it up in a scarlet cloth; if you had the stone, as likely as
+not your Doctor would make a disgusting plaster, of which the chief
+ingredients were headless crickets and beetles, and would rub you with
+it; whilst the Clergy, into whose hands much of the duty of healing the
+sick naturally fell, were forbidden by the Pope to shed blood under
+any conditions whatever. Where the Great Fire barely slew a hundred,
+the Plague carried off its thousands. It was natural, therefore, that
+men’s minds should be set on compensations for the loss of life, before
+they reached the idea of compensations for the damage done by fire.
+The ancient Saxon Guilds did, in fact, attain the rudiments of life
+insurance in their provisions for the payment of funerals, and for the
+maintenance of dependents left in distress by the death of a member of
+the Guild.
+
+Life insurance, indeed, would no doubt have long since become as
+established a fact as the insurance of ships, but for one fatal
+difference. You knew the value of the ship; you knew the price which
+its cargo would fetch in the market; you were upon solid ground. But
+with regard to life you had nothing whatever to go upon. There were no
+figures by which you could calculate the probabilities of its duration.
+Life insurance was the merest gamble, and, even so late as the days of
+Charles the Second, you could buy a Government annuity for ninety-nine
+years for a cash payment equal to fifteen and a half year’s annuity.
+
+The Provincial Letters of Pascal drew attention first of all to the
+doctrine of probabilities, and John de Witt, a Dutchman, applied it to
+the subject of life annuities. He made a report to his Government,
+in which he used for the first time mathematical calculations in
+considering the probabilities of life. His report had no immediate
+effect. But he had sown the seed, and Leibnitz, who devoted much time
+to an investigation of the theory of chances--“c’est pour perfectionner
+l’art des arts, l’art de penser,” he explained--saved the essay from
+oblivion.
+
+But still there were no facts to go upon. It was the chance of the
+gaming table. How many times would Number 17 or Number 26 turn up on
+the Roulette board in a given evening, if neither of them had turned
+up, say, for a week before? What are the odds that “Trente et un
+et après” will be seen at the “Trente et quarante” table ten times
+in the course of an evening? It was with the limping guidance of
+such questions as these that the early forms of life assurance were
+arranged. If the grantor of the annuity were generous, that helped to a
+solution, but it was rare. If the annuitant himself were ignorant, that
+helped too, and this was more common. Until quite recently, the value
+of a life was accounted at seven years’ purchase.
+
+The Great Plague, however, which spread so much desolation, lent a
+little help in this direction. Such was the terror which the Plague
+inspired, so overwhelming was the fear of its return, that what we
+should now call the _morale_ of the race was shaken. The people of
+those days were as vague in their computations of numbers as in their
+spelling, and rumour would exaggerate into millions the deaths of
+thousands. In order, therefore, to reassure the public mind after the
+Great Plague, Bills of Mortality were issued by the various Parishes
+by Order of the Government. Up to the end of the 17th Century the
+appearance of these Bills was sporadic. But, with the beginning of the
+18th Century, so useful had they already proved, they became a regular
+element in Parish life. They were made up on Wednesdays, published on
+Thursdays, and anyone who cared to pay 4s. a year could subscribe for a
+copy.
+
+The progress towards a system of Assurance, as will be seen, is so
+far slow. We have got from the gaming tables by way of the Great
+Plague to Bills of Mortality. But still there is hardly a glimmer of
+science. The Bills of Mortality themselves suffered from a grievous
+defect from the point of view of insurance. They included a statement
+of the cause of death, and even of the particular disease from which
+the patients died, if--and it is a considerable “if”--the disease were
+amongst those known to the medical faculty. But they did not give ages.
+And without ages the probabilities of the duration of life were still
+mere guesswork. Life insurance, as we understand it, is based upon a
+scientific computation in which the ages of the insured are the first
+consideration. During that Century, however, three men appeared, to
+whose efforts the real science of insurance owes its chief debt.
+
+The first of these men--one John Graunt, the son of a tradesman, who
+had migrated from Lancaster and settled in Birchin Lane--enjoyed
+no more of the opportunities of education than the sons of other
+tradesmen. He left an unknown school early for the counter of his
+father, shared in the public work of his Ward, and became a Major
+in the train bands; but some spark in the man set his thoughts upon
+the laws of life so far as the Bills of Mortality helped to their
+elucidation. He seems to have been impressed, and even annoyed, by the
+extraordinary carelessness with which men reckoned the population of
+London. It was spoken of in millions. One grave writer, indeed, went so
+far as calmly to assert that there were two million less people living
+in London in one particular year than in the year which had preceded
+it; and he made this astounding statement as though it were a matter
+which anyone might expect.
+
+John Graunt published in 1662 his “National and Political Reflections
+on the Bills of Mortality.” The work made a great stir, and did not,
+by the way, increase its author’s popularity, for he accounted the
+population of London at 384,000, and this calculation, which was very
+near the truth, did not find favour in the eyes of those swelling
+signors who only condescended to think in millions. The book, however,
+within the year, passed into a second edition. It set men thinking,
+and it impressed one, whom, most of all, so dry a subject would have
+been likely to repel--no less a person than His Majesty Charles
+himself. Charles the Second recommended John Graunt to the Royal
+Society, and charged the Fellows in round terms “That if they found any
+more such tradesmen they should admit them all.” The book found its way
+across the Channel, and in consequence Louis XIV. ordered a register of
+births and deaths to be kept in France, of a character much more strict
+than was observed in any other country of Europe.
+
+The Reflections contained many surprising odds and ends of calculation.
+John Graunt computed that seven men out of every hundred in England
+live to the age of seventy; that only three women out of two hundred
+died in childbed and only one in labour; and that out of one hundred
+people, only one will be left alive at the age of 76 and none at the
+age of 80. He deduced from his calculations that the world was not
+more than 100,000 years old, and he drew, probably for the first time,
+that distinction in land values which has made, and continues to
+make, so loud a stir in our generation. For, in putting questions as
+to the amount of hay an acre that a meadow might bear, or the number
+of cattle which it might feed, he adds “of which particulars I quote
+the intrinsic value, for there is another value, merely accidental or
+extrinsic, consisting of the causes why a parcel of land lying for a
+good market may be worth double another parcel, though but of the same
+intrinsic goodness; which answers the question why lands in the North
+of England are worth but sixteen years’ purchase and those of the West
+above twenty-eight.” He aimed at classifying the vocations of men,
+with a word, by the way, against Doctors, who persuade “credulous and
+delicate people that their bodies are out of tune.” He thus raised a
+number of interesting problems for the speculation of thinking men, and
+there is little doubt that to the influence of his book was due a vital
+amendment in the Bills of Mortality. In 1728, the ages of the dead were
+included as well as the ailments from which they had died.
+
+The second of the three men was Sir William Petty, a man of a very
+different stamp. He was a speculator; he had a great love of money and
+a great love of land. He probably had a sense of humour, for, when
+challenged to fight a duel and having the privilege of choosing the
+place and the weapons, he selected a dark cellar and a carpenter’s axe.
+He certainly had the ambition to found a great family and leave to it a
+great inheritance, and in this he succeeded. He was the son of a Romsey
+tailor, and he left the house of Lansdowne.
+
+Petty wrote “An Essay on Arithmetic concerning the Growth of the
+City of London, with the Measures, Periods, Causes and Consequences
+thereof.” Petty estimated that in 1682 the population of London was
+670,000, it having doubled itself within the preceding forty years. He
+was at a loss, however, to account for the increase. He could, he said,
+pick up some remarkable accident and declare it to be the cause, “as
+vulgar people make the cause of every man’s sickness to be, what he did
+last eat.” But Petty was not content with such a device, and preferred
+to attribute the swelling numbers to some natural and spontaneous
+advantage that men find by living in great societies.
+
+There is already, as you will see, a glimmer of science, but still not
+much more than a glimmer. Sir William Petty was led on to some curious
+prophecies. For instance, the world would be fully peopled within the
+next 2,000 years, and the growth of London must stop of its own accord
+before the year 1800 was reached.
+
+The influence of these two men upon thought continued to grow, and in
+the year 1693, the most important year in the history of the science of
+insurance, Doctor Halley, the Astronomer Royal, published in a pamphlet
+a table of probabilities of the duration of human life at every age. He
+at last had something to go upon. He had discovered that the town of
+Breslau, in Silesia, had regularly issued Bills of Mortality in which
+the ages of the dead were recorded. He took the rate of mortality in
+that town during five successive years, and for the first time based
+the calculation of the duration of life upon a scientific foundation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+SOME ODDS AND ENDS.
+
+
+It is curious that, although the idea of insurance is utterly opposed
+to that of gambling--the one aiming at rapid gains, the other merely at
+protection from loss--still insurance took its origin from the doctrine
+of chance as observed at the gaming tables, and led to the discovery
+of quite a new form of gambling, which achieved an extraordinary vogue
+in the first half of the 18th Century. It was a period of fine clothes
+and callous natures; of high costs and lavish expenditure; of turbulent
+politics and grave risks. Such a period was the very soil in which
+gambling and speculation were sure to flourish. But, even so, the
+rapidity and the ingenuity with which the possibilities of gambling,
+by means of this new-fangled fashion of insurance, were recognised
+are quite remarkable. Indeed, during the greater part of this period,
+gambling in policies altogether superseded the legitimate business of
+insurance. The life of Sir Robert Walpole, whose person seemed at one
+time in peril from popular tumult, at another from party hatred, was
+always there to be insured, if less attractive propositions were not
+that morning to be discovered.
+
+It is difficult to imagine the state of indignation which would have
+been aroused if, during the late war when the King went to his troops
+in France, great premiums had been asked and paid against his return.
+Yet that happened to his predecessor in the 18th Century. When George
+the Second fought at Dettingen, 25 per cent. was openly paid against
+his return. The movements of Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, in
+1745, provided one with a sensation of terror in the morning and an
+opportunity of putting some cash into one’s pocket in the afternoon.
+There were no daily newspapers, and in much later days, when Wellington
+was fighting in the Peninsula, the news of Busaco and Badajoz took
+a fortnight to reach London. Charles Edward’s march to Derby at the
+head of his dreaded Highlanders, and his retreat, put a good deal of
+money into the hands of the assurers of Lloyd’s and the members of
+Garraway’s. Nor, when this rabble had melted away, and he himself was
+a fugitive in the Western Islands, was their ingenuity at a loss. The
+Young Pretender was insured against capture; he was insured against
+decapitation; and if the poor youth could only have gathered up the
+money which was wagered one way or another upon his luckless head, he
+would have had enough for another fling at the Throne.
+
+But even though Charles Edward was not captured, many of his followers
+were. Everyone remembers how Lady Nithsdale rescued her husband from
+the Tower by dressing him in her clothes and remaining behind in his.
+You would hardly believe that that gallant exploit raised the wildest
+indignation in the City of London because so many underwriters stood to
+lose if Lord Nithsdale kept his head upon his shoulders. Would Admiral
+Byng be condemned and shot? Would he be condemned and not shot?
+Would he be acquitted? What was the value of the life of the Duke of
+Newcastle, Prime Minister when Minorca was lost? Any of these questions
+could form the subject of a wager by means of a policy of assurance.
+The strangest dispute of all, however, finally led to the intervention
+of the Law, and a decision by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, that a
+policy of assurance entered into by a person holding no insurable
+interest was against public interest.
+
+This dispute, which provoked a commotion almost inconceivable to us,
+was concerned with the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon. We are apt to take
+historical events for granted, neither marvelling at their strangeness
+nor speculating upon the manner with which contemporaries received
+them. Can you imagine a Frenchman of distinction, coming to England
+upon a confidential mission, quarrelling with the Ambassador of his
+country, accusing publicly this or that statesman of treachery, and
+finally arousing the most widespread doubts as to whether he was a
+man or a woman? Yet this very thing did happen to Charles Geneviève
+Louise Auguste d’Eon de Beaumont, and we hardly need to be told
+that the assurance brokers of the City of London found this spicy
+problem very much to their taste. Policies were opened by which it
+was undertaken that, on payment of fifteen guineas down, one hundred
+should be returned whenever the Chevalier was proved to be a woman.
+The Chevalier, after some passing pretence of indignation, graciously
+allowed, that at a certain Coffee House, at the hour of noon, he
+would satisfy all whom it might concern. As may be easily imagined,
+the assurances were immediately and greatly increased, and there
+should be no reasonable doubt that the Chevalier got in return for his
+condescension what nowadays we should call a “rake off.”
+
+At the appointed hour, the Chevalier appeared in the uniform and the
+decorations of an officer, and, claiming to belong to the sex whose
+dress he wore, challenged anyone present to disprove it with sword or
+cudgel.
+
+This was not the sort of solution of the problem which commended itself
+to the citizens of that day, and all the more, since the Chevalier
+was known to be remarkably expert with the small sword. The crowd of
+underwriters and brokers dissolved, leaving the great question of
+the day unanswered. An action was brought in the Court of Lord Chief
+Justice Mansfield, who gave the decision to which we have already
+referred. An Act had already been passed that insurance made on the
+life of any person on the account of another who had no interest in
+that life should be void. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield laid it down
+that the same principle should be held even when the policy was not a
+policy on life.
+
+It is obvious that the system of insurance, once it became general,
+would give opportunities to the ingenious criminal. The cases, however,
+of such frauds or such attempted frauds are, comparatively to the
+vast volume of insurance business done, astonishingly few. Still
+fewer present those conflicts of emotion--those struggles between
+ill-assorted natures thrown together in the jumble of life--which alone
+give interest to the study of crime. Most of the insurance frauds
+represent no more than sordid efforts by mean men or women. One or
+two cases, however, do stand out by something especial in the way of
+audacity or imagination on the part of the chief criminal.
+
+That of Thomas Griffith Wainwright is probably the most remarkable.
+Wainwright was a person of amazing vanity and considerable good looks,
+who affected the military style of dress which was the last word of
+male fashion in the days when he lived. You may read a description of
+the man in Bulwer Lytton’s novel “Lucretia,” where Wainwright postures
+as Gabriel Verney. Postures is the word, for though Wainwright was not
+without talents and high abilities, to posture was the enjoyment and
+ambition of his life. He contributed articles to the “London Magazine”
+at a time when Lamb, Barry Cornwall, Haslitt and Alan Cunningham were
+the chief contributors. Under the name of “Janus Weathercock” he wrote
+on Art, the Ballet and the Opera. He wrote in a fashion which has
+become much more common to-day than it was then: the fashion, I mean,
+of creating first of all a personality, through the eyes of which the
+subjects to be reviewed are seen. The “Eye Witness” whom Wainwright
+described to the readers of the “London Magazine” was, needless to
+say, himself, and he drew the picture of himself with so loving a pen,
+such luxuriant details of his elegant dress, his fine appearance and
+his exquisite manners, as would make the very effigy of a coxcomb.
+That one might not misunderstand his writings, he enforced them with
+his pencil--he was an artist of no small ability--and drew types of
+female beauty in which “the voluptuous trembled on the borders of the
+indelicate”--we quote his own luscious phrase. As you can imagine, he
+had no high opinion of the artistic capabilities of other men, and like
+all persons endowed with so triumphant a vanity, he impressed those
+more modest craftsmen who were conscious of their imperfections. He
+fairly took in Charles Lamb, for instance, who spoke of him as kind and
+light-hearted.
+
+Never were two epithets so misapplied by a man with a genius for
+insight, for “Janus Weathercock” was a forger and had even then murder
+in his mind. He ceased to write. He went with his wife on a visit
+to his uncle. After a short illness the uncle died, and Wainwright
+inherited the property. It was not nearly enough to satisfy this
+high-flown gentleman’s needs. Moreover, it was held by trustees, so
+that only the interest reached his hands. He forged the names of his
+trustees to a Power of Attorney apparently with so much success, that
+for a long while no suspicion was aroused. He apparently forged five
+such documents, but, even so, poverty was always at his door.
+
+At what particular date he turned his thoughts to the possibilities
+of insurance we do not know, but it was in the year 1830 that the two
+young step-sisters of his wife, Helene Frances Phœbe and Madeline
+Abercrombie, began to haunt the insurance offices of the City. Helene
+Frances Phœbe wanted her life insured for sums ranging from £2,000 to
+£3,000 for periods of not longer than two to three years. From office
+to office these young ladies went, and they were actually able to
+effect these insurance policies for an aggregate amount of no less
+than £18,000. The policies once effected, Wainwright had recourse to
+an ingenious device. Phœbe gave out that she was going abroad and made
+her will in favour of her sister, Madeline, with Wainwright as the
+sole executor. He would have, in the event of Phœbe’s death, complete
+control over the money paid by the Insurance Companies, although he
+would not stand in the suspicious position of one who had had the money
+bequeathed to him by will. He might still, of course, be suspected, but
+he would be a long step further from suspicion than if the crude method
+of leaving the money to him had been adopted.
+
+There can be little doubt that Phœbe, and probably Madeline too, under
+the spell of this man’s ascendancy, were parties to the plot--as they
+understood it. Phœbe was to disappear on the Continent. By means of
+forged papers Wainwright was to prove her death, collect the insurance
+money, and join her with the rest of the family on the Continent.
+This was no doubt the plan talked over of an evening in those shabby
+furnished rooms in Conduit Street to which the family had been now
+reduced. But this was merely the plan by which Wainwright had secured
+the help of the two young and attractive girls. Unspoken, at the back
+of his mind, lay a much more sinister project. The night after Phœbe
+Abercrombie had settled her affairs, she went to the theatre with the
+rest of the family. A lobster supper followed upon their return to
+their lodgings, and in the night Phœbe was taken ill. She died--Oh!
+prudent Mr. Wainwright!--at a time when he was out walking with his
+wife. The body was examined and a certificate of death was issued by
+the doctor in the ordinary way. Wainwright began to demand his £18,000
+from the various Insurance offices. They declined to pay. Wainwright
+left England and commenced an action. But such a light did the Counsel
+for the Insurance Company throw upon Wainwright’s manœuvres that
+his claim was rejected by the Jury. The Bank of England apparently
+began now to look into that little matter of the Power of Attorney.
+Wainwright’s forgeries were discovered, and Wainwright wisely preferred
+to remain at Boulogne. He lodged there, by the way, with an English
+officer whose life he managed to insure for £5,000, and after one
+premium had been paid the English officer died. Wainwright seems then
+to have wandered for a while in France. He certainly was arrested by
+the French police and imprisoned at Paris for six months. Impelled
+by some interest of which we do not know, he returned to London for
+forty-eight hours; and during those forty-eight hours he made the one
+small fatal mistake which put an end to his activities. He stayed in
+an hotel close to Covent Garden, but, startled by some disturbance in
+the street, he for a moment drew the blind aside and looked out. By one
+of those coincidences which are not so uncommon as the pedantic would
+have one to believe, there was a man passing in the street who knew
+him. The passer-by caught a glimpse of the face peeping out from behind
+the blind and cried aloud “That’s Wainwright, the bank forger.” He was
+tried on a charge of forgery, sentenced to transportation for life, and
+died miserably, years afterwards, in Sydney.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+THE CORPORATION.
+
+
+An earlier chapter gave some account of the origin and beginnings of
+the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation. It would not be in keeping
+with this note on the occasion of the Bicentenary of the Corporation to
+enter into those details of profits, advantages and benefits, which are
+more suitable to a prospectus. But certain landmarks may well be noted.
+
+The year 1720 was, as we have seen, the difficult year in the history
+of the Corporation. It was the first year when the Corporation worked
+under its new Charter, and under its present name. It was the one year
+of all its two hundred in which for reasons which we have understood
+it paid no dividend upon its stock. Yet, during this one year of 1720,
+it gave such proofs of courage and vitality as must have inspired all
+intimately interested in its operations, with a very stout confidence;
+for although the threat of disaster was at the door, its Directors went
+blithely on their way, organising the extension of its business.
+
+In 1720 it absorbed the Sadler’s Hall Company, which with a nominal
+capital of two millions was unable to obtain a Charter under which it
+could do business. In 1721, the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+added to the Charter which it already possessed, another, granting it
+power to insure for life and against fire. In 1721, it appointed its
+first agent. Let us set down the actual date and record the name of
+the man, the fore-runner of so many thousands who were to carry on the
+torch, each in his turn, through the next two hundred years. On 22nd
+May, the Directors appointed Mr. Palmer, of Ockingham, in Berkshire,
+its agent.
+
+[Illustration: THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.
+
+Proof of First Heading on Fire Policies, 1721.]
+
+After that day the Corporation set to work very quickly to extend
+its agencies, for on the 31st of the same month it agreed to
+appoint “as many country postmasters as are proper to be country
+correspondents”; and by the next year, so widely had the system been
+increased, that it resolved, by a formal declaration, to undertake no
+responsibility in any town of America where it had not already an agent
+appointed.
+
+The Corporation’s machinery for dealing with fires was at this time,
+primitive as all such arrangements then were. It appointed one man
+whose business it was to fix the firemarks upon the houses insured,
+and in his odd times to run messages for the office. The firemark
+itself was an object of some discussion at the meetings of the Board.
+It was too heavy, and it seems there was too much gilding to satisfy
+the frugality of the Directors. Mr. Spelman, the Fire Clerk, was
+accordingly ordered to provide two new samples from which the Directors
+might choose; and he was especially enjoined to inform the Committee
+of the exact price of the mark “distinguishing what the lead will cost
+and what the gilding will come to.” It seems that the unfortunate Mr.
+Spelman, even with this sharp hint to remind him of his duties, could
+not restrain his passion for gilding. The Fire Committee accordingly
+took the matter out of Mr. Spelman’s hands and ordered “the Plumber
+that used to serve the Company to make a model of the mark with a
+large crown, and lay the expense before the Committee.” The Plumber
+understood his Committee better than Mr. Spelman, and the Firemark with
+the large crown, which to-day decorates some of the houses originally
+insured under a policy with the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation,
+is the very same mark which was designed in 1721 by that economical and
+understanding plumber. Mr. Smith, who founded the plumber’s design,
+received 14½d. for each firemark. The ha’penny alone should have been
+sufficient by the confidence which it inspired in the economical
+management of the Company to have brought hundreds of annuitants on to
+those hone stones which paved the second Royal Exchange as they had
+done the first.
+
+To the one fireman and messenger combined were shortly added others,
+and we find in the year 1752 that thirty-six firemen, nine porters and
+four carmen paraded the West end of the town--it is to be supposed as
+an advertisement for the Corporation. It was the custom of those days
+to employ as firemen, watermen who plied habitually on the Thames.
+These were stout and handy men, although since the Thames was the
+general highway of London, it looks as if their ordinary occupation
+must have suffered. They wore the liveries of their separate offices,
+and those employed by the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation must
+have cut a fine figure when they paraded the West end of the town, in a
+livery of yellow lined with pink, with music playing in front of them,
+and five shillings in their pockets for their dinners. The custom by
+which each separate insurance company kept its own firemen was a bad
+one in the public interest. For it meant that if the house in flames
+bore the firemark of a different company, the firemen simply went home
+and left the building burning. It was not until January 1866, that the
+Metropolitan Fire Brigade, as we know it, came into existence.
+
+The Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation stands to-day its own
+evidence and justification. It was the first Insurance Office to
+extend its work to the troubled country of Ireland, where fires were
+more than ordinarily common, for it opened its first office in Abbey
+Street, Dublin, in the year 1722: and it retains to-day by the activity
+of its agents and the extension of its business that pre-eminence which
+its priority in time first gave to it. Of late years it has undertaken
+much work which in other days would have been deemed quite outside the
+scope of an Insurance Corporation. It was the first Insurance Office
+in England to set up a Trustee branch. This was in 1904, when as yet
+there was no Public Trustee, and many a legatee’s affairs were plunged
+into confusion by the death or business inexperience of an Executor.
+Thus, though not a philanthropic institution, the Corporation has
+pursued its business by beneficent means. It has seen companies--such
+as that which was originated by the famed Mr. Montague Tigg--blaze for
+a moment in a false prosperity and then disappear. It has remained
+proud in its antiquity, faithful to its traditions, and yet alert to
+each new development of the machinery of life which could strengthen
+its foundations and extend its influence. It has survived the most
+momentous changes and the most difficult crises in the national life
+of Great Britain. Yes, but self-preservation is not everything. For a
+Corporation to live for two hundred years is very well in itself; but
+to live at the end of that time amidst the increasing confidence and
+good will of those who have entrusted their interests to its care is a
+greater matter of which the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation may
+well be infinitely proud.
+
+  A. E. W. MASON.
+
+
+JAS. TRUSCOTT & SON, LTD., London. E.C.
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75944 ***
diff --git a/75944-h/75944-h.htm b/75944-h/75944-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..88bf9a2
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/75944-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,2951 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html>
+<html lang="en">
+<head>
+    <meta charset="UTF-8">
+    <title>
+      The Royal Exchange | Project Gutenberg
+    </title>
+    <link rel="icon" href="images/cover.jpg" type="image/x-cover">
+    <style>
+
+body {
+    margin-left: 20%;
+    margin-right: 20%;
+}
+
+    h1,h2 {
+    text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+h1   {font-weight: normal;
+      font-size: 160%;
+      margin-top: 2em;
+      margin-bottom: 2em;
+      word-spacing: 0.3em;
+	  }
+
+h2   {font-weight: normal;
+      font-size: 130%;
+      margin-top: 2em;
+      word-spacing: 0.3em;
+      }
+
+p {
+    margin-top: .51em;
+    text-align: justify;
+    margin-bottom: .49em;
+}
+
+.p2       {margin-top: 2em;}
+.p4       {margin-top: 4em;}
+
+hr {
+    width: 33%;
+    margin-top: 2em;
+    margin-bottom: 2em;
+    margin-left: 33.5%;
+    margin-right: 33.5%;
+    clear: both;
+}
+
+hr.full {width: 95%; margin-left: 2.5%; margin-right: 2.5%;}
+
+hr.r5  {width: 5%; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 47.5%; margin-right: 47.5%;}
+
+ 
+div.chapter {page-break-before: always;}
+h2.nobreak  {page-break-before: avoid;}
+
+
+table {
+    margin-left: auto;
+    margin-right: auto;
+}
+
+.tdl      {text-align: left;}
+.tdr      {text-align: right;}
+.tdc      {text-align: center;}
+.tdrb    {text-align: right; vertical-align: bottom;}
+
+.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+    /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: small;
+    text-align: right;
+    font-style: normal;
+    font-weight: normal;
+    font-variant: normal;
+    text-indent: 0;
+} /* page numbers */
+
+
+.blockquot {
+    margin-left: 5%;
+    margin-right: 10%;
+    font-size: 90%;
+}
+
+
+.caption  {font-size: 80%;
+           text-align: center;
+           word-spacing: 0.3em;}
+
+
+.xxlarge  {font-size: 220%;}
+.up      {font-size: 160%;}
+.large   {font-size: 120%;}
+.less    {font-size: 90%;}
+.more    {font-size: 80%;}
+.med    {font-size: 70%;}
+.mid    {font-size: 60%;}
+
+.c        {text-align: center;}
+
+.sp     {word-spacing: 0.3em;}
+
+.lsp    {letter-spacing: 0.2em;}
+
+.pad     {margin-left: 15%;
+          margin-right: 10%;}
+.sp1     {word-spacing: 1em;}
+
+.ph2 {text-align: center; text-indent: 0em;
+      font-size: 140%;
+      margin-top: 1em;
+      word-spacing: 0.3em;
+     letter-spacing: 0.2em;}
+
+.dropcap  {float: left; width: auto; padding-right: 1px; font-size: 390%; line-height: 70%;}
+
+
+.greentext    { color: green;}
+
+.r        {text-align: right;
+           margin-right: 2em;}
+
+
+.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+
+
+/* Images */
+
+img {
+    max-width: 100%;
+    height: auto;
+}
+img.w100 {width: 100%;}
+
+
+.figcenter {
+    margin: auto;
+    text-align: center;
+    page-break-inside: avoid;
+    max-width: 100%;
+}
+
+
+
+/* Poetry */
+.poetry-container {display: flex; justify-content: center;}
+.poetry-container {text-align: center;}
+.poetry           {text-align: left; margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 5%; font-size:90%;}
+.poetry .stanza   {margin: 1em auto;}
+.poetry .verse    {text-indent: -3em; padding-left: 3em;}
+
+/* Transcriber's notes */
+.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA;
+    color: black;
+    font-size:small;
+    padding:0.5em;
+    margin-bottom:5em;
+    margin-top:3em;
+    font-family:sans-serif, serif;
+    border: .3em double gray;
+    padding: 1em;
+}
+.poetry .indent0 {text-indent: -3em;}
+.poetry .indent2 {text-indent: -2em;}
+
+    </style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75944 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="cover">
+</div>
+
+
+<h1>THE ROYAL EXCHANGE</h1>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig1">
+<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="exchange">
+<p class="caption">THE ROYAL EXCHANGE, LONDON.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<p class="c sp p4 lsp">
+<span class="up">THE</span><br>
+<span class="xxlarge">ROYAL EXCHANGE</span></p>
+
+<p class="pad sp large p2">
+A NOTE ON THE OCCASION OF<br>
+<span class="sp1">THE BICENTENARY OF THE</span><br>
+ROYAL EXCHANGE ASSURANCE
+</p>
+
+<p class="c more p4">
+BY</p>
+
+<p class="c large">
+A. E. W. MASON</p>
+
+<p class="c large p4">
+ROYAL EXCHANGE<br>
+LONDON</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+1920
+</p>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="ph2">CONTENTS.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="r5">
+
+<table>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><span class="large sp">PART I.—THE HOUSE.</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c1">CHAPTER I.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="med">PAGE</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Sir Thomas Gresham and the First Royal<br>
+Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb">11</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c2">CHAPTER II.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Great Fire and the Second Royal<br>
+Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb">26</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c3">CHAPTER III.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Third Royal Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr">43</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc">————</td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><span class="large sp">PART II.—THE BUSINESS.</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c4">CHAPTER IV.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The South Sea Bubble and the Birth of the<br>
+Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb">51</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c5">CHAPTER V.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">On Assurance</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr">67</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c6">CHAPTER VI.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Some Odds and Ends</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr">85</td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc"><a href="#c7">CHAPTER VII.</a></td>
+  <td class="tdr"></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Corporation</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr">97</td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="ph2">LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="r5">
+
+<table>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Royal Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#fig1"><i>Frontispiece.</i></a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="mid">FACING<br>
+PAGE</span></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The First Royal Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#fig2">20</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Second Royal Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#fig3">34</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">Interior of the Second Royal Exchange</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#fig4">41</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Destruction of the Second Royal<br>
+Exchange by Fire, 1838</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#fig5">43</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">South Sea Bubble Broadsheet, 1720</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#fig6">52</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdl"><span class="smcap">The Second Royal Exchange—Proof of<br>
+First Heading on Fire Policies, 1721</span></td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#fig7">99</a></td></tr>
+
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c sp large" id="c1">PART I.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp up">THE HOUSE.</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER I.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">SIR THOMAS GRESHAM AND THE<br>
+FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">O</span>N 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>We are to imagine, then, Sir Thomas
+Gresham conversing with his great guest<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig2">
+<a href="images/fig2big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="first">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">THE FIRST ROYAL EXCHANGE.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>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.</p>
+
+<p>From the ceremony the Queen returned to
+Somerset House through the lighted streets<span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span>
+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 <i>was</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>
+institution as pernicious to the trade of
+England as the Kingdom has ever known.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c2">CHAPTER II.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">THE GREAT FIRE AND THE SECOND<br>
+ROYAL EXCHANGE.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">P</span>OPULAR 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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>
+the household servants and dependants of
+the King.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>
+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,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>
+“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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig3">
+<a href="images/fig3big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="second">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>
+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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span>
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig4">
+<a href="images/fig4big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="second">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">INTERIOR OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig5">
+<a href="images/fig5big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="fire">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE BY FIRE, 1838.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c3">CHAPTER III.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">THE THIRD ROYAL EXCHANGE.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>T is astonishing that no one has imagined
+a curse of fire upon the Royal Exchange.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>
+street of family residences, and consequently
+fire in that crowded neighbourhood was
+more than usually terrible.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>The destruction was almost complete.
+A few relics testified by their paucity to
+the completeness of the disaster. Amongst<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>
+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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>
+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.</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span></p>
+
+<p class="c sp large" id="c4">PART II.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp up">THE BUSINESS</p>
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak">CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">THE SOUTH SEA BUBBLE AND THE<br>
+BIRTH OF THE ROYAL EXCHANGE<br>
+ASSURANCE CORPORATION.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>O 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.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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 France 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig6">
+<a href="images/fig6big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="bubble">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">SOUTH SEA BUBBLE BROADSHEET. 1720.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>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 purse-strings
+as that of adventure in the South
+Seas. Your adventure might be vicarious;<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+<div class="poetry">
+  <div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">“Then stars and garters did appear</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">Among the meaner rabble;</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">To buy and sell, to see and hear</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">The Jews and Gentiles squabble.</div>
+  </div><div class="stanza">
+    <div class="verse indent0">The greater ladies thither came,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">And plied in chariots daily,</div>
+    <div class="verse indent0">Or pawned their jewels for a sum</div>
+    <div class="verse indent2">To venture in the Alley.”</div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p>All were for getting rich quickly. Life
+was costly—in some respects more costly<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>In 1720, George the First proposed that the
+South Sea Company should take over not
+merely the floating but the entire debt of
+England, which at that time amounted to
+£31,000,000. Even the staid Bank of England
+could stand it no longer. It came in with a
+proposal to take over the debt itself in the
+place of this upstart Company. But the
+upstart Company had several notable people
+behind it, amongst them the famous—or
+shall we say infamous?—Countess Von<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>
+Platen; and the South Sea Company carried
+the day against the Bank of England.
+The shares jumped from 130 to 300. The
+King’s proposal was debated for two months
+in the House of Commons and for forty-eight
+hours in the House of Lords, and on
+April 7th of that year the Bill became
+law.</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough, the South Sea Stock
+immediately fell. The Directors asked for
+a million more capital, offering £300 for
+£100. They got it, and they got more.
+Before Midsummer, the stock had risen to
+800 per cent. The satirists, as you can
+imagine, got to work, but what did they
+matter? Satire, from the days of Aristophanes,
+has never stopped a rush. It will
+hold up this or that person, this or that
+group of people, to the ridicule of future
+generations, but it has no check upon them
+while they live. Neither Juvenal nor
+Molière deterred. The “Precieuses Ridicules”
+died not of satire but of their own
+inanition. The satirist and his fellows
+might rave as they liked against Change
+Alley and the South Seas but not one<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>
+sedan chair dropped out of the crowd in
+consequence.</p>
+
+<p>It was not everybody, however, who was
+able to get near enough, or, if he did get
+near enough, to purchase the coveted stock.
+Other companies, therefore, with other
+projects no more unreasonable, sprang up
+in the same neighbourhood. The advertised
+capital of these companies ran, as a
+rule, into millions. And why not? The
+public was gullible. It was a matter of
+prestige—of the appeal rather than of
+actual cash. The nominal capital of the
+various undertakings floated during the
+years when the South Sea Company was
+at its zenith amounted to five times the
+entire currency of England and Europe.
+No one asked any questions—all were
+too anxious to buy.</p>
+
+<p>Here are a few of the proposals:
+a scheme for furnishing funerals to
+any part of Great Britain; another for
+making looking glasses and coach glasses,
+with a capital of £2,000,000; a third for
+the transmutation of quicksilver into
+malleable fine metal; a fourth for ensuring
+and increasing children’s fortunes; a fifth<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>
+for building and rebuilding houses throughout
+all England, with a capital of £3,000,000
+(this, by the way, is a scheme which might
+have a chance to-day). Yet a further
+philanthropic set of gentlemen floated a
+scheme for supplying the town of Deal with
+fresh water. Another set, this time more
+ingenious than philanthropic, proposed to
+make deal boards out of sawdust. And
+all these schemes obtained their votaries.
+The cry went up “Give us something to
+buy,” and the response was not inadequate.</p>
+
+<p>Two schemes stand out especially through
+the grandeur of their simplicity. The
+longer one lives, the more clearly it is
+proved to one that the old and simple
+dodges never fail. If you want to practice
+that amiable form of robbery known as the
+confidence trick, be sure to practice it in its
+most primæval form. An old man named
+Le Brun knew the ropes. He had been
+suitably educated, for as a boy he had
+sailed with Sir Henry Morgan when Morgan
+devastated Panama. He had been with
+Patterson in Darien. He had owned a
+privateer himself in the days when a
+privateer was a polite name for a pirate, but<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>
+like the men of his class he had lived like a
+fighting cock when he had the money, and
+in his old age he was poor. The fame of
+Law in Paris attracted him over the
+Channel. The fame of the South Sea
+Company and the doings in Change Alley
+brought him hot-foot back again. He was,
+as it were, in his own country. He set out
+a wonderful project. You had only to
+possess £5 to reap the full benefit of it. He
+had an office in Change Alley. It was called
+simply, broadly, sympathetically—“Office
+of Insurance and Annuity for Everybody.”
+“Anybody,” Mr. Le Brun announced,
+“who paid him five pounds was to be assured
+of receiving a life income of £100 per
+annum, as soon as a sufficient number had
+subscribed!” A great number subscribed—but
+not a sufficient number. The number
+had to be ever so great before Mr. Le Brun
+could be able to put his wonderful scheme
+into operation.</p>
+
+<p>A still simpler device was imagined by a
+gentleman whose name (alas!) is not known.
+He propounded a company for carrying on
+an undertaking of great advantage, “but
+nobody to know what it is.” The capital of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>
+this singular undertaking was to be a mere
+fleabite—half a million pounds in five
+thousand £100 shares. But—and here the
+anonymous benefactor showed his discretion—you
+had only to deposit £2 a share and
+you obtained by the mere fact of that
+deposit £100 a year on each share. This
+worthy person opened his office in
+the morning. By the time business in
+Change Alley ceased and the ladies and
+gentlemen retired to the lighted candles of
+the West End, he had secured deposits to
+the tune of £2,000. The next morning the
+office was closed and it was never opened
+again. These schemes were iridescent as
+the mayfly, and had just as long a life.
+They sparkled and glinted in the sunlight
+through a day, and the next morning they
+were not.</p>
+
+<p>After the shares of the South Sea Company
+had risen to 800 per cent., a good many
+prudent people began to realise their
+fortunes, and stocks accordingly fell. The
+Directors asked for more money, obtained
+it, and the shares in August had risen to no
+less than a thousand per cent. But the end
+was near, and in the month of September<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>
+the Bubble burst. A member of Parliament
+of that day wrote to Lord Chancellor
+Middleton: “The consternation is inexpressible,
+the rage beyond description, and
+the case altogether so desperate that I do
+not see any plan or scheme so much as
+thought of for averting the blow, so that I
+cannot pretend to guess what is next to be
+done.” The Bank of England made an
+effort. It asked for a subscription of three
+million pounds for the restoration of credit,
+but did not get it. The South Sea Stock fell
+to 135, and bankers and goldsmiths who had
+lent money on South Sea Bonds were compelled
+to fly the country. Parliament was
+summoned to meet, and George the First
+returned post haste from Hanover. An
+enquiry was instituted into the management
+of the Company and a series of frauds was
+discovered in which members of the Government
+were shamefully involved. Mr.
+Secretary Craggs and Mr. Aislabie, the
+Chancellor of the Exchequer, went down with
+a crash. People did not exact from the
+Ministers of the Crown in those days the
+same high standard of propriety which is
+demanded to-day. But the scandal in this<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>
+case was too great for extenuation. Aislabie
+went to prison, and bonfires were lighted in
+the London streets on the day he was
+sent there. Mr. Secretary Craggs no doubt
+would have gone on the same road but his
+son, for whose sake, it was currently said,
+he had amassed a million and a half out of
+the Bubble, died suddenly, and the father
+was stricken with apoplexy. The Countess
+Von Platen, with her two nieces, was proved
+to have been given £20,000 worth of
+fictitious stock as an inducement to her to
+use her influence to push the Bill through
+Parliament. There were reasons why action
+could not be taken against her. The curious
+may turn to Thackeray’s wonderful picture
+of the Court of Hanover in the “Four
+Georges,” where he will be rewarded by one
+of the most startling and dramatic stories
+which history has ever had to tell.</p>
+
+<p>In the midst of these times, inauspicious
+for solid business proposals, if ever times
+were, the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+was born. A Mr. Case Billingsley,
+of the firm of Bradley and Billingsley,
+Solicitors, himself a member of the Mercers’
+Company, proposed a scheme for marine<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>
+insurance, and gave to it the title of the
+“Public Assurance Office.” He opened a
+list at the Mercers’ Hall on the 12th August,
+1717, and asked for a subscription of
+£1,250,000, of which £100,000 was to be
+paid up. The list was closed in January
+of the following year. But during the
+months when the list was open, the proposer
+of a rival scheme, Sir John Williams,
+amalgamated with him. The list being
+closed, Case Billingsley applied to the
+Attorney General for a Charter. A Charter
+was refused, although in this case Sir
+Robert Walpole supported it; Billingsley
+had moreover the support of Lord Onslow,
+a member of the Government, and of Lord
+Chetwynd, who was interested in a similar
+scheme. A good many people did not look
+further than the end of their noses. Lady
+Cowper, the wife of Lord Chancellor Cowper,
+frankly wrote of both Onslow’s and
+Chetwynd’s proposals as “Bubbles,” and
+stated that they were on the same plane as
+the South Sea Company—frauds upon the
+public—no more, no less.</p>
+
+<p>Billingsley, however, and his Directors
+did not lie down under the refusal. They<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>
+cast about and bought up for a song an old
+Charter of Queen Elizabeth’s time, which
+had nothing whatever to do with Assurance
+in any form. It was a Charter of the Mines
+Royal, Mineral and Battery Works, which
+in itself was an amalgamation dating back
+three years. Under this Charter, with its
+curious coat of arms of a miner working
+by candle light and extracting from the
+earth a veritable sleet of golden drops,
+the Billingsley Assurance Company set up
+to practice Marine Insurance. From the
+outset it is clear that the Company did a
+profitable business, for it declared, and so
+far as we know paid, a dividend in 1719.</p>
+
+<p>It did not, however, pursue its affairs
+without opposition. Petitions were presented
+against the Company by private
+underwriters who foresaw ruin ahead of
+them, on the ground that it was doing
+business which the Charter did not entitle
+it to do. It is impossible to say what might
+have happened to this Company had not
+some ingenious mind amongst its Directors
+recognised, or had not some hint been given
+by one of His Majesty’s Ministers, that
+King George’s Civil List was short of<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>
+six hundred thousand pounds. The two
+Insurance Companies—that fathered by
+Lord Chetwynd and now known as the
+“London Assurance Corporation,” and the
+“Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation,”
+which was covered by the wing of Lord
+Onslow—proposed to make good this
+deficiency in return for their Charters.
+Accordingly in the year 1720, on May
+4th, King George recommended his faithful
+Commons to grant the requests of
+these Corporations, and the Bill conceding
+them their Charters received the Royal
+Assent on June 10th. It was after the
+Charter was granted that the Royal Exchange
+Assurance Corporation took the title
+which it has since retained. Billingsley was,
+as we have said, a member of the Mercers’
+Company. He had established the offices
+of the Corporation in the Royal Exchange,
+and no name could have been more suitable.</p>
+
+<p>But it is to be observed that this was the
+year during which the South Sea Bubble
+swelled and burst. The Royal Exchange
+Assurance Corporation failed to fulfil the
+conditions of its Charter almost as soon as
+it had received it. The Corporation was<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>
+organised on a sound financial basis, for in
+1720, it had a surplus of £14,000 odd, after
+all obligations had been discharged. But
+it owned stock in the South Sea Company,
+and when that Company crumbled and all
+credit was shaken to its foundations, the
+Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+passed through a troublous time. It declared
+a dividend, but it could not pay it, and by
+September of that year it was short of two
+instalments of £50,000 each, which it owed
+to the Civil List. A subsequent Act of
+Parliament, however, relieved the Royal
+Exchange Assurance Corporation and the
+London Assurance Corporation of their
+liabilities in this direction, after they had
+paid between them something like a quarter
+of a million. The subsequent history of
+the Royal Exchange Assurance has been
+one of sound business and consequent
+prosperity. It began with Marine insurance
+and in 1721 added life and fire.</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c5">CHAPTER V.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">ON ASSURANCE.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE history of assurance is not a
+sprightly theme. It is so hedged
+about with details of old ordinances,
+tables of mortality and specimens of
+fire marks, as are enough to drive the
+general reader into the next parish.
+The historians begin as a rule with the
+Phœnicians. And they are wise. Everybody
+has heard of the Phœnicians and that
+they were the first known traders to visit
+Britain from overseas. You can safely
+assert that the Phœnicians practised marine
+insurance; and on the other hand, you can
+equally safely deny that they knew anything
+about assurance at all for there is no one
+to contradict you. There is no evidence
+of any kind.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is certain. Marine assurance
+was the first form of assurance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>
+practised amongst men; and, inevitably, the
+first form. For the risk was evident and
+above all could be estimated with accuracy.
+The value of the ship and the worth of its
+cargo were known, and a fair reckoning
+could be made of the perils which were
+likely to be encountered on the voyage.
+Probably the very first edict concerning
+this practice was issued when Justinian
+was Emperor, in the year 533. He
+limited the legal rate of interest to
+six per cent. in all cases except that of
+“Fœnus Nauticum”; and “Fœnus
+Nauticum” was that early form of marine
+assurance which we know by the name of
+Bottomry. In this one case, interest was
+allowed to be exacted at the rate of twelve
+per cent.</p>
+
+<p>Upon the heels of Justinian, however,
+followed the Middle Ages, and they wiped
+out Justinian’s edict and any arrangement
+of a similar nature, which was to be found
+in any parts over which the Church ruled.
+Interest upon the investment of capital
+was accounted as usury and an offence
+against God, to be corrected by burnings
+and floggings, and the other delicate<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>
+persuasions of those days. We have no
+sure knowledge when marine insurance was
+revived, but we may be fairly certain that
+its revival was due to the far-sighted policy
+of the Hanseatic League, which had made
+its merchants the great sea-carriers of the
+Northern nations. The League published
+various sea codes during the 13th century
+and consolidated them at the beginning of
+the 14th in an authoritative pronouncement
+known as “The Laws of Wisby.” Wisby
+was a town on the western side of the Isle
+of Gothland in the Baltic, and at that time
+one of the most flourishing staple towns of
+the North. These Laws of Wisby do
+actually for the first time mention the
+word Bottomry, but in such a way as to
+make it clear that Bottomry had long been
+practised. Bottomry was a wager. The
+Underwriter bet the Shipowner that his
+ship with its cargo would arrive safely at
+its port of destination. The great difference
+between Bottomry and an ordinary wager,
+and between Bottomry and a modern form
+of assurance, was this: the Underwriter paid
+the money over at once, and, if he won—that
+is, if a ship arrived in safety—received<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>
+his money back with the addition of the
+premium agreed upon. The Shipowner, in
+a word, held the stakes.</p>
+
+<p>This primitive form of insurance developed
+quickly. It became insurance as
+we understand it to-day. Thus in the
+“Chronyk Van Vlaenden”—an ancient
+history—it is written:—</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot">
+
+<p>“On the demand of the inhabitants of
+Bruges, the Count of Flanders permitted
+in the year 1310, the establishment
+in this town of a Chamber of Assurance,
+by means of which the Merchants could
+insure their goods, exposed to the
+Risks of the Sea, or elsewhere, in paying
+a stipulated Percentage. But, in order
+that an Establishment so useful to
+Commerce might not be dissolved as
+soon as formed, he ordered the laying
+down of several Laws and Regulations
+which the Assurers as well as the
+Assured, are bound to observe.”</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bruges was at this period the very capital
+of the commerce of the North. It was the
+great storehouse, the chief market and the
+main sea-port of that far-flung League.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>
+It was no uncommon thing for a hundred
+and fifty tall ships to enter on a single tide
+into Sluys, the outer harbour of Bruges.</p>
+
+<p>The first definite ordinances concerning
+marine insurance, however, came from a
+very different part of the world. The
+Magistrates of Barcelona, certainly on four
+separate occasions during the 15th Century,
+formulated Rules which were one and
+all intended to prevent the over insurance
+of unseaworthy ships—a growing scandal
+and danger of those times. The Barcelona
+trade was mainly with the Ports of
+Italy; and the Grand Council of Venice,
+before the century was over, followed in
+the footsteps of Barcelona. The Venetian
+Decree starts by declaring that, owing to
+the perverse nature of mankind, people
+<i>will</i> quarrel about money matters, and
+proceeds to deal with such very modern
+dangers as that arising from carrying an
+excessive cargo on deck. Ordinances
+issued in Venice were certain to find their
+way into England, for the Italians, or
+Lombardy men as they were called, had
+already gained a solid footing in England,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>
+and indeed were actually carrying commercial
+war into the very camp of the Stillyard.</p>
+
+<p>The attack of the German Emperor upon
+the Pope in the first half of the 13th Century,
+and the influence of the Crusades, which
+brought to England in Italian Fleets spices,
+carpets, silks and other luxuries from the
+East, were the chief causes of the Italian
+invasion. With the expulsion of the Jews by
+Edward the First, their position was greatly
+strengthened, for, in their turn, they became
+the usurers. We find the Lord Mayor,
+at the King’s command setting aside for them
+a district of London in which to reside—the
+district now known as Lombard Street—and
+so powerful did they become that even
+though their unpopularity made them
+objects of continual attacks by the populace
+and continual Petitions for their expulsion
+to successive Kings, they were only dislodged
+in the end by their own fears for their
+personal safety.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, long before any decree with regard
+to marine insurance was issued by a Government
+of England, the practice of insurance
+was common and regular in the country.
+The first British Marine Insurance Act bears<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span>
+the date of 1601, and states in its Preamble
+that Marine Insurance has been “tyme out
+of mynde an usuage amongste merchantes,
+both of this realme and of forraine nacyons.”
+It mentions, in fact, “an Office of Insurance
+within the City of London,” where a registry
+of marine insurance policies was compiled.
+This Act of Queen Elizabeth established a
+permanent commission for the hearing of
+cases arising out of policies of marine
+insurance. The Commission was to sit for
+the time being under the presidency of the
+Judge of the Admiralty and the Recorder of
+London. It was to consist of two members
+of Civil Law, two common lawyers and eight
+grave and discreet merchants, and was to
+hold its Sessions once a week.</p>
+
+<p>The Act, however, found no favour with
+the Merchants of the City of London,
+chiefly, no doubt, because it allowed appeals
+to the Court of Chancery, which in the
+slowness of its procedure seems in those
+days not to have lagged behind the Court
+of Chancery, as Dickens found it in the days
+of “Jarndyce versus Jarndyce.” The Act
+accordingly fell, after a generation, into
+disuse. But the practice of assurance<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>
+steadily increased and, with the coming of
+Lloyds and the granting of the Charters to
+the two great Corporations—the Royal
+Exchange Assurance and the London
+Assurance—was gradually placed upon a
+legal and scientific basis.</p>
+
+<p>In the order of history, life insurance
+followed upon marine, and fire insurance
+upon life. At first sight, to anyone who
+forms in his mind anything like a vivid
+picture of the crowded wooden houses, the
+medley of thatched roofs, which made up a
+mediæval city, the order may seem strange.
+One might imagine that the danger of fire,
+and the necessity of guarding against its
+widespread terrors, would be ever present.
+But it is necessary to remember that, as
+before the Great Fire went the Great
+Plague in the sequence of facts, so, also, in
+the sequence of loss, mortality and damage,
+fire limped behind disease. The mediæval
+house in a dry summer was tinder to a
+spark, but winter or summer it was a place
+of unclean rushes with little, if any, sanitation.
+Readers of the “Young Visiters,”
+will recollect that the heroine put some<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>
+“red ruge” on her cheeks because, as she
+declared, she was pale owing to the drains
+of the house. The demand for “red
+ruge” must have been very extensive in
+mediæval London. There was a disease
+called the “sweating sickness,” which carried
+off inhabitants in a few hours. The Plague
+had visited the City many times before the
+winter of 1665, and was to visit it afterwards.
+There was a violence in the ordinary
+conduct of life, such as you may know after
+the conclusion of any great war. Medicine
+was in its infancy. If your child had
+scarlet fever, you wrapped it up in a scarlet
+cloth; if you had the stone, as likely as
+not your Doctor would make a disgusting
+plaster, of which the chief ingredients were
+headless crickets and beetles, and would
+rub you with it; whilst the Clergy, into whose
+hands much of the duty of healing the sick
+naturally fell, were forbidden by the Pope
+to shed blood under any conditions whatever.
+Where the Great Fire barely slew
+a hundred, the Plague carried off its thousands.
+It was natural, therefore, that
+men’s minds should be set on compensations
+for the loss of life, before they reached the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>
+idea of compensations for the damage done
+by fire. The ancient Saxon Guilds did,
+in fact, attain the rudiments of life insurance
+in their provisions for the payment of
+funerals, and for the maintenance of
+dependents left in distress by the death of
+a member of the Guild.</p>
+
+<p>Life insurance, indeed, would no doubt
+have long since become as established a
+fact as the insurance of ships, but for one
+fatal difference. You knew the value of
+the ship; you knew the price which its
+cargo would fetch in the market; you were
+upon solid ground. But with regard to life
+you had nothing whatever to go upon.
+There were no figures by which you could
+calculate the probabilities of its duration.
+Life insurance was the merest gamble, and,
+even so late as the days of Charles the
+Second, you could buy a Government
+annuity for ninety-nine years for a cash
+payment equal to fifteen and a half year’s
+annuity.</p>
+
+<p>The Provincial Letters of Pascal drew
+attention first of all to the doctrine of
+probabilities, and John de Witt, a Dutchman,
+applied it to the subject of life<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>
+annuities. He made a report to his Government,
+in which he used for the first time
+mathematical calculations in considering the
+probabilities of life. His report had no
+immediate effect. But he had sown the
+seed, and Leibnitz, who devoted much
+time to an investigation of the theory of
+chances—“c’est pour perfectionner l’art
+des arts, l’art de penser,” he explained—saved
+the essay from oblivion.</p>
+
+<p>But still there were no facts to go upon.
+It was the chance of the gaming table.
+How many times would Number 17 or
+Number 26 turn up on the Roulette board
+in a given evening, if neither of them had
+turned up, say, for a week before?
+What are the odds that “Trente et un et
+après” will be seen at the “Trente et
+quarante” table ten times in the course
+of an evening? It was with the limping
+guidance of such questions as these that the
+early forms of life assurance were arranged.
+If the grantor of the annuity were generous,
+that helped to a solution, but it was rare.
+If the annuitant himself were ignorant, that
+helped too, and this was more common.<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>
+Until quite recently, the value of a life was
+accounted at seven years’ purchase.</p>
+
+<p>The Great Plague, however, which spread
+so much desolation, lent a little help in this
+direction. Such was the terror which the
+Plague inspired, so overwhelming was the
+fear of its return, that what we should
+now call the <i>morale</i> of the race was shaken.
+The people of those days were as vague in
+their computations of numbers as in their
+spelling, and rumour would exaggerate
+into millions the deaths of thousands. In
+order, therefore, to reassure the public
+mind after the Great Plague, Bills of
+Mortality were issued by the various
+Parishes by Order of the Government.
+Up to the end of the 17th Century the
+appearance of these Bills was sporadic.
+But, with the beginning of the 18th Century,
+so useful had they already proved, they
+became a regular element in Parish life.
+They were made up on Wednesdays, published
+on Thursdays, and anyone who cared
+to pay 4s. a year could subscribe for a copy.</p>
+
+<p>The progress towards a system of
+Assurance, as will be seen, is so far slow.
+We have got from the gaming tables by<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>
+way of the Great Plague to Bills of Mortality.
+But still there is hardly a glimmer
+of science. The Bills of Mortality themselves
+suffered from a grievous defect from
+the point of view of insurance. They
+included a statement of the cause of death,
+and even of the particular disease from which
+the patients died, if—and it is a considerable
+“if”—the disease were amongst those
+known to the medical faculty. But they
+did not give ages. And without ages the
+probabilities of the duration of life were
+still mere guesswork. Life insurance, as
+we understand it, is based upon a scientific
+computation in which the ages of the insured
+are the first consideration. During
+that Century, however, three men appeared,
+to whose efforts the real science of insurance
+owes its chief debt.</p>
+
+<p>The first of these men—one John Graunt,
+the son of a tradesman, who had migrated
+from Lancaster and settled in Birchin
+Lane—enjoyed no more of the opportunities
+of education than the sons of
+other tradesmen. He left an unknown
+school early for the counter of his
+father, shared in the public work of his<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>
+Ward, and became a Major in the train
+bands; but some spark in the man set his
+thoughts upon the laws of life so far as the
+Bills of Mortality helped to their elucidation.
+He seems to have been impressed, and even
+annoyed, by the extraordinary carelessness
+with which men reckoned the population
+of London. It was spoken of in millions.
+One grave writer, indeed, went so far as
+calmly to assert that there were two million
+less people living in London in one particular
+year than in the year which had preceded
+it; and he made this astounding statement
+as though it were a matter which
+anyone might expect.</p>
+
+<p>John Graunt published in 1662 his
+“National and Political Reflections on the
+Bills of Mortality.” The work made a
+great stir, and did not, by the way, increase
+its author’s popularity, for he accounted
+the population of London at 384,000,
+and this calculation, which was very
+near the truth, did not find favour in
+the eyes of those swelling signors who
+only condescended to think in millions.
+The book, however, within the year, passed
+into a second edition. It set men thinking,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>
+and it impressed one, whom, most of all, so
+dry a subject would have been likely to
+repel—no less a person than His Majesty
+Charles himself. Charles the Second recommended
+John Graunt to the Royal Society,
+and charged the Fellows in round terms
+“That if they found any more such tradesmen
+they should admit them all.” The
+book found its way across the Channel, and
+in consequence Louis XIV. ordered a
+register of births and deaths to be kept in
+France, of a character much more strict
+than was observed in any other country of
+Europe.</p>
+
+<p>The Reflections contained many surprising
+odds and ends of calculation. John
+Graunt computed that seven men out of
+every hundred in England live to the age of
+seventy; that only three women out of
+two hundred died in childbed and only
+one in labour; and that out of one hundred
+people, only one will be left alive at the age
+of 76 and none at the age of 80. He deduced
+from his calculations that the world was
+not more than 100,000 years old, and he
+drew, probably for the first time, that distinction
+in land values which has made,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>
+and continues to make, so loud a stir in
+our generation. For, in putting questions
+as to the amount of hay an acre that a
+meadow might bear, or the number of cattle
+which it might feed, he adds “of which
+particulars I quote the intrinsic value,
+for there is another value, merely accidental
+or extrinsic, consisting of the causes why a
+parcel of land lying for a good market may
+be worth double another parcel, though but
+of the same intrinsic goodness; which
+answers the question why lands in the
+North of England are worth but sixteen
+years’ purchase and those of the West
+above twenty-eight.” He aimed at classifying
+the vocations of men, with a word,
+by the way, against Doctors, who persuade
+“credulous and delicate people that their
+bodies are out of tune.” He thus raised
+a number of interesting problems for the
+speculation of thinking men, and there is
+little doubt that to the influence of his
+book was due a vital amendment in the
+Bills of Mortality. In 1728, the ages of
+the dead were included as well as the ailments
+from which they had died.</p>
+
+<p>The second of the three men was Sir<span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span>
+William Petty, a man of a very different
+stamp. He was a speculator; he had a
+great love of money and a great love of land.
+He probably had a sense of humour, for, when
+challenged to fight a duel and having the
+privilege of choosing the place and the
+weapons, he selected a dark cellar and a
+carpenter’s axe. He certainly had the
+ambition to found a great family and leave
+to it a great inheritance, and in this he succeeded.
+He was the son of a Romsey
+tailor, and he left the house of Lansdowne.</p>
+
+<p>Petty wrote “An Essay on Arithmetic
+concerning the Growth of the City of
+London, with the Measures, Periods, Causes
+and Consequences thereof.” Petty estimated
+that in 1682 the population of
+London was 670,000, it having doubled
+itself within the preceding forty years. He
+was at a loss, however, to account for the
+increase. He could, he said, pick up some
+remarkable accident and declare it to be
+the cause, “as vulgar people make the
+cause of every man’s sickness to be, what
+he did last eat.” But Petty was not content
+with such a device, and preferred to attribute
+the swelling numbers to some natural and<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>
+spontaneous advantage that men find by
+living in great societies.</p>
+
+<p>There is already, as you will see, a glimmer
+of science, but still not much more than a
+glimmer. Sir William Petty was led on
+to some curious prophecies. For instance,
+the world would be fully peopled within the
+next 2,000 years, and the growth of London
+must stop of its own accord before the
+year 1800 was reached.</p>
+
+<p>The influence of these two men upon
+thought continued to grow, and in the year
+1693, the most important year in the history
+of the science of insurance, Doctor Halley,
+the Astronomer Royal, published in a
+pamphlet a table of probabilities of the
+duration of human life at every age. He at
+last had something to go upon. He had
+discovered that the town of Breslau, in
+Silesia, had regularly issued Bills of Mortality
+in which the ages of the dead were
+recorded. He took the rate of mortality
+in that town during five successive years,
+and for the first time based the calculation
+of the duration of life upon a scientific
+foundation.</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c6">CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">SOME ODDS AND ENDS.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">I</span>T is curious that, although the idea of
+insurance is utterly opposed to that of
+gambling—the one aiming at rapid gains,
+the other merely at protection from loss—still
+insurance took its origin from the
+doctrine of chance as observed at the
+gaming tables, and led to the discovery
+of quite a new form of gambling, which
+achieved an extraordinary vogue in the
+first half of the 18th Century. It was a
+period of fine clothes and callous natures;
+of high costs and lavish expenditure; of
+turbulent politics and grave risks. Such
+a period was the very soil in which
+gambling and speculation were sure to
+flourish. But, even so, the rapidity and
+the ingenuity with which the possibilities
+of gambling, by means of this new-fangled
+fashion of insurance, were recognised are<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>
+quite remarkable. Indeed, during the
+greater part of this period, gambling
+in policies altogether superseded the
+legitimate business of insurance. The life
+of Sir Robert Walpole, whose person
+seemed at one time in peril from popular
+tumult, at another from party hatred, was
+always there to be insured, if less attractive
+propositions were not that morning to be
+discovered.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to imagine the state of indignation
+which would have been aroused if,
+during the late war when the King went to
+his troops in France, great premiums had
+been asked and paid against his return.
+Yet that happened to his predecessor in the
+18th Century. When George the Second
+fought at Dettingen, 25 per cent. was
+openly paid against his return. The movements
+of Charles Edward, the Young Pretender,
+in 1745, provided one with a sensation
+of terror in the morning and an
+opportunity of putting some cash into
+one’s pocket in the afternoon. There were
+no daily newspapers, and in much later
+days, when Wellington was fighting in the
+Peninsula, the news of Busaco and Badajoz<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>
+took a fortnight to reach London. Charles
+Edward’s march to Derby at the head of
+his dreaded Highlanders, and his retreat,
+put a good deal of money into the hands of
+the assurers of Lloyd’s and the members of
+Garraway’s. Nor, when this rabble had
+melted away, and he himself was a fugitive
+in the Western Islands, was their ingenuity
+at a loss. The Young Pretender was insured
+against capture; he was insured
+against decapitation; and if the poor youth
+could only have gathered up the money
+which was wagered one way or another upon
+his luckless head, he would have had enough
+for another fling at the Throne.</p>
+
+<p>But even though Charles Edward was not
+captured, many of his followers were.
+Everyone remembers how Lady Nithsdale
+rescued her husband from the Tower by
+dressing him in her clothes and remaining
+behind in his. You would hardly believe
+that that gallant exploit raised the wildest
+indignation in the City of London because
+so many underwriters stood to lose if
+Lord Nithsdale kept his head upon his
+shoulders. Would Admiral Byng be
+condemned and shot? Would he be<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>
+condemned and not shot? Would he be
+acquitted? What was the value of the
+life of the Duke of Newcastle, Prime
+Minister when Minorca was lost? Any of
+these questions could form the subject
+of a wager by means of a policy of assurance.
+The strangest dispute of all, however,
+finally led to the intervention of the Law,
+and a decision by Lord Chief Justice
+Mansfield, that a policy of assurance entered
+into by a person holding no insurable
+interest was against public interest.</p>
+
+<p>This dispute, which provoked a commotion
+almost inconceivable to us, was concerned
+with the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon.
+We are apt to take historical events for
+granted, neither marvelling at their strangeness
+nor speculating upon the manner with
+which contemporaries received them. Can
+you imagine a Frenchman of distinction,
+coming to England upon a confidential
+mission, quarrelling with the Ambassador
+of his country, accusing publicly this or
+that statesman of treachery, and finally
+arousing the most widespread doubts as
+to whether he was a man or a woman? Yet
+this very thing did happen to Charles<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>
+Geneviève Louise Auguste d’Eon de Beaumont,
+and we hardly need to be told
+that the assurance brokers of the City
+of London found this spicy problem
+very much to their taste. Policies were
+opened by which it was undertaken that,
+on payment of fifteen guineas down, one
+hundred should be returned whenever the
+Chevalier was proved to be a woman.
+The Chevalier, after some passing pretence
+of indignation, graciously allowed, that at
+a certain Coffee House, at the hour of noon,
+he would satisfy all whom it might concern.
+As may be easily imagined, the assurances
+were immediately and greatly increased,
+and there should be no reasonable doubt
+that the Chevalier got in return for his
+condescension what nowadays we should
+call a “rake off.”</p>
+
+<p>At the appointed hour, the Chevalier
+appeared in the uniform and the decorations
+of an officer, and, claiming to belong to the
+sex whose dress he wore, challenged anyone
+present to disprove it with sword or cudgel.</p>
+
+<p>This was not the sort of solution of the
+problem which commended itself to the
+citizens of that day, and all the more, since<span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span>
+the Chevalier was known to be remarkably
+expert with the small sword. The crowd
+of underwriters and brokers dissolved, leaving
+the great question of the day unanswered.
+An action was brought in the Court of
+Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who gave the
+decision to which we have already referred.
+An Act had already been passed that
+insurance made on the life of any person
+on the account of another who had no
+interest in that life should be void. Lord
+Chief Justice Mansfield laid it down that
+the same principle should be held even when
+the policy was not a policy on life.</p>
+
+<p>It is obvious that the system of insurance,
+once it became general, would give opportunities
+to the ingenious criminal. The
+cases, however, of such frauds or such
+attempted frauds are, comparatively to
+the vast volume of insurance business done,
+astonishingly few. Still fewer present those
+conflicts of emotion—those struggles between
+ill-assorted natures thrown together
+in the jumble of life—which alone give
+interest to the study of crime. Most of
+the insurance frauds represent no more than
+sordid efforts by mean men or women. One<span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span>
+or two cases, however, do stand out by something
+especial in the way of audacity or
+imagination on the part of the chief
+criminal.</p>
+
+<p>That of Thomas Griffith Wainwright is
+probably the most remarkable. Wainwright
+was a person of amazing vanity and
+considerable good looks, who affected the
+military style of dress which was the last
+word of male fashion in the days when he
+lived. You may read a description of the
+man in Bulwer Lytton’s novel “Lucretia,”
+where Wainwright postures as Gabriel
+Verney. Postures is the word, for though
+Wainwright was not without talents and
+high abilities, to posture was the enjoyment
+and ambition of his life. He contributed
+articles to the “London Magazine” at a
+time when Lamb, Barry Cornwall, Haslitt
+and Alan Cunningham were the chief
+contributors. Under the name of “Janus
+Weathercock” he wrote on Art, the
+Ballet and the Opera. He wrote in a
+fashion which has become much more
+common to-day than it was then: the
+fashion, I mean, of creating first of all a
+personality, through the eyes of which the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>
+subjects to be reviewed are seen. The “Eye
+Witness” whom Wainwright described to
+the readers of the “London Magazine”
+was, needless to say, himself, and he drew
+the picture of himself with so loving a
+pen, such luxuriant details of his elegant
+dress, his fine appearance and his exquisite
+manners, as would make the very effigy of
+a coxcomb. That one might not misunderstand
+his writings, he enforced them
+with his pencil—he was an artist
+of no small ability—and drew types of
+female beauty in which “the voluptuous
+trembled on the borders of the indelicate”—we
+quote his own luscious
+phrase. As you can imagine, he had no
+high opinion of the artistic capabilities of
+other men, and like all persons endowed
+with so triumphant a vanity, he impressed
+those more modest craftsmen who were
+conscious of their imperfections. He fairly
+took in Charles Lamb, for instance, who
+spoke of him as kind and light-hearted.</p>
+
+<p>Never were two epithets so misapplied by
+a man with a genius for insight, for “Janus
+Weathercock” was a forger and had even
+then murder in his mind. He ceased to<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>
+write. He went with his wife on a visit
+to his uncle. After a short illness the uncle
+died, and Wainwright inherited the property.
+It was not nearly enough to satisfy this
+high-flown gentleman’s needs. Moreover,
+it was held by trustees, so that only the
+interest reached his hands. He forged the
+names of his trustees to a Power of Attorney
+apparently with so much success, that
+for a long while no suspicion was aroused.
+He apparently forged five such documents,
+but, even so, poverty was always at his
+door.</p>
+
+<p>At what particular date he turned his
+thoughts to the possibilities of insurance
+we do not know, but it was in the year
+1830 that the two young step-sisters of
+his wife, Helene Frances Phœbe and
+Madeline Abercrombie, began to haunt the
+insurance offices of the City. Helene
+Frances Phœbe wanted her life insured for
+sums ranging from £2,000 to £3,000 for
+periods of not longer than two to three
+years. From office to office these young
+ladies went, and they were actually able to
+effect these insurance policies for an aggregate
+amount of no less than £18,000. The<span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span>
+policies once effected, Wainwright had
+recourse to an ingenious device. Phœbe
+gave out that she was going abroad and
+made her will in favour of her sister,
+Madeline, with Wainwright as the sole
+executor. He would have, in the event of
+Phœbe’s death, complete control over the
+money paid by the Insurance Companies,
+although he would not stand in the
+suspicious position of one who had had
+the money bequeathed to him by will.
+He might still, of course, be suspected, but
+he would be a long step further from
+suspicion than if the crude method of leaving
+the money to him had been adopted.</p>
+
+<p>There can be little doubt that Phœbe,
+and probably Madeline too, under the
+spell of this man’s ascendancy, were parties
+to the plot—as they understood it. Phœbe
+was to disappear on the Continent. By
+means of forged papers Wainwright was
+to prove her death, collect the insurance
+money, and join her with the rest of the
+family on the Continent. This was no
+doubt the plan talked over of an evening
+in those shabby furnished rooms in Conduit
+Street to which the family had been now<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>
+reduced. But this was merely the plan
+by which Wainwright had secured the
+help of the two young and attractive girls.
+Unspoken, at the back of his mind, lay a
+much more sinister project. The night
+after Phœbe Abercrombie had settled her
+affairs, she went to the theatre with the
+rest of the family. A lobster supper followed
+upon their return to their lodgings,
+and in the night Phœbe was taken ill.
+She died—Oh! prudent Mr. Wainwright!—at
+a time when he was out walking with his
+wife. The body was examined and a
+certificate of death was issued by the doctor
+in the ordinary way. Wainwright began
+to demand his £18,000 from the various
+Insurance offices. They declined to pay.
+Wainwright left England and commenced
+an action. But such a light did the Counsel
+for the Insurance Company throw upon
+Wainwright’s manœuvres that his claim
+was rejected by the Jury. The Bank of
+England apparently began now to look
+into that little matter of the Power of
+Attorney. Wainwright’s forgeries were discovered,
+and Wainwright wisely preferred
+to remain at Boulogne. He lodged there,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>
+by the way, with an English officer whose
+life he managed to insure for £5,000, and
+after one premium had been paid the
+English officer died. Wainwright seems
+then to have wandered for a while in France.
+He certainly was arrested by the French
+police and imprisoned at Paris for six
+months. Impelled by some interest of
+which we do not know, he returned to
+London for forty-eight hours; and during
+those forty-eight hours he made the one
+small fatal mistake which put an end to
+his activities. He stayed in an hotel close
+to Covent Garden, but, startled by some
+disturbance in the street, he for a moment
+drew the blind aside and looked out. By
+one of those coincidences which are not so
+uncommon as the pedantic would have
+one to believe, there was a man passing
+in the street who knew him. The passer-by
+caught a glimpse of the face peeping out
+from behind the blind and cried aloud
+“That’s Wainwright, the bank forger.”
+He was tried on a charge of forgery, sentenced
+to transportation for life, and died
+miserably, years afterwards, in Sydney.</p>
+<hr class="full x-ebookmaker-drop">
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span></p>
+
+<h2 class="nobreak" id="c7">CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+</div>
+
+<p class="c sp less">THE CORPORATION.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="dropcap">A</span>N earlier chapter gave some account
+of the origin and beginnings of the
+Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation.
+It would not be in keeping
+with this note on the occasion of the
+Bicentenary of the Corporation to enter
+into those details of profits, advantages
+and benefits, which are more suitable
+to a prospectus. But certain landmarks
+may well be noted.</p>
+
+<p>The year 1720 was, as we have seen, the
+difficult year in the history of the Corporation.
+It was the first year when the
+Corporation worked under its new Charter,
+and under its present name. It was the
+one year of all its two hundred in which
+for reasons which we have understood
+it paid no dividend upon its stock. Yet,
+during this one year of 1720, it gave such<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>
+proofs of courage and vitality as must have
+inspired all intimately interested in its
+operations, with a very stout confidence;
+for although the threat of disaster was at
+the door, its Directors went blithely on
+their way, organising the extension of its
+business.</p>
+
+<p>In 1720 it absorbed the Sadler’s Hall
+Company, which with a nominal capital
+of two millions was unable to obtain a
+Charter under which it could do business.
+In 1721, the Royal Exchange Assurance
+Corporation added to the Charter which
+it already possessed, another, granting it
+power to insure for life and against fire.
+In 1721, it appointed its first agent. Let us
+set down the actual date and record the
+name of the man, the fore-runner of so many
+thousands who were to carry on the torch,
+each in his turn, through the next two
+hundred years. On 22nd May, the Directors
+appointed Mr. Palmer, of Ockingham,
+in Berkshire, its agent.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="fig7">
+<a href="images/fig7big.jpg">
+<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="proof">
+</a>
+<p class="caption">THE SECOND<br>
+ROYAL EXCHANGE.</p>
+<p class="caption">Proof of First Heading<br>
+on Fire Policies, 1721.<br>
+<span class="greentext">(click image to enlarge)</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>After that day the Corporation set to
+work very quickly to extend its agencies,
+for on the 31st of the same month it agreed
+to appoint “as many country postmasters
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>as are proper to be country correspondents”;
+and by the next year, so widely
+had the system been increased, that it
+resolved, by a formal declaration, to undertake
+no responsibility in any town of
+America where it had not already an agent
+appointed.</p>
+
+<p>The Corporation’s machinery for dealing
+with fires was at this time, primitive as all
+such arrangements then were. It appointed
+one man whose business it was to fix the
+firemarks upon the houses insured, and in
+his odd times to run messages for the office.
+The firemark itself was an object of some
+discussion at the meetings of the Board.
+It was too heavy, and it seems there was
+too much gilding to satisfy the frugality of
+the Directors. Mr. Spelman, the Fire Clerk,
+was accordingly ordered to provide two
+new samples from which the Directors
+might choose; and he was especially
+enjoined to inform the Committee of the
+exact price of the mark “distinguishing
+what the lead will cost and what the
+gilding will come to.” It seems that the
+unfortunate Mr. Spelman, even with this
+sharp hint to remind him of his duties,<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>
+could not restrain his passion for gilding.
+The Fire Committee accordingly took the
+matter out of Mr. Spelman’s hands and
+ordered “the Plumber that used to serve the
+Company to make a model of the mark with
+a large crown, and lay the expense before
+the Committee.” The Plumber understood
+his Committee better than Mr. Spelman,
+and the Firemark with the large crown,
+which to-day decorates some of the houses
+originally insured under a policy with the
+Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation, is
+the very same mark which was designed in
+1721 by that economical and understanding
+plumber. Mr. Smith, who founded the
+plumber’s design, received 14½d. for each
+firemark. The ha’penny alone should have
+been sufficient by the confidence which it
+inspired in the economical management of
+the Company to have brought hundreds of
+annuitants on to those hone stones which
+paved the second Royal Exchange as they
+had done the first.</p>
+
+<p>To the one fireman and messenger combined
+were shortly added others, and we
+find in the year 1752 that thirty-six firemen,
+nine porters and four carmen paraded the<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>
+West end of the town—it is to be supposed
+as an advertisement for the Corporation.
+It was the custom of those days to employ
+as firemen, watermen who plied habitually
+on the Thames. These were stout and
+handy men, although since the Thames
+was the general highway of London, it
+looks as if their ordinary occupation must
+have suffered. They wore the liveries of
+their separate offices, and those employed
+by the Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+must have cut a fine figure when
+they paraded the West end of the town, in
+a livery of yellow lined with pink, with
+music playing in front of them, and five
+shillings in their pockets for their dinners.
+The custom by which each separate insurance
+company kept its own firemen was
+a bad one in the public interest. For it
+meant that if the house in flames bore the
+firemark of a different company, the firemen
+simply went home and left the building
+burning. It was not until January 1866,
+that the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, as we
+know it, came into existence.</p>
+
+<p>The Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+stands to-day its own evidence<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>
+and justification. It was the first Insurance
+Office to extend its work to the troubled
+country of Ireland, where fires were more
+than ordinarily common, for it opened its
+first office in Abbey Street, Dublin, in the
+year 1722: and it retains to-day by the
+activity of its agents and the extension of
+its business that pre-eminence which its
+priority in time first gave to it. Of late
+years it has undertaken much work which
+in other days would have been deemed
+quite outside the scope of an Insurance
+Corporation. It was the first Insurance
+Office in England to set up a Trustee
+branch. This was in 1904, when as yet
+there was no Public Trustee, and many a
+legatee’s affairs were plunged into confusion
+by the death or business inexperience of
+an Executor. Thus, though not a philanthropic
+institution, the Corporation has
+pursued its business by beneficent means.
+It has seen companies—such as that which
+was originated by the famed Mr. Montague
+Tigg—blaze for a moment in a false prosperity
+and then disappear. It has remained
+proud in its antiquity, faithful to its
+traditions, and yet alert to each new<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>
+development of the machinery of life
+which could strengthen its foundations and
+extend its influence. It has survived the
+most momentous changes and the most
+difficult crises in the national life of Great
+Britain. Yes, but self-preservation is not
+everything. For a Corporation to live for
+two hundred years is very well in itself;
+but to live at the end of that time amidst
+the increasing confidence and good will of
+those who have entrusted their interests
+to its care is a greater matter of which the
+Royal Exchange Assurance Corporation
+may well be infinitely proud.</p>
+
+<p class="r large">
+<span class="smcap">A. E. W. Mason.</span><br>
+</p>
+
+
+<p class="c more"><span class="smcap">Jas. Truscott &amp; Son, Ltd.</span>, London. E.C.
+</p>
+
+<hr class="full">
+
+<div class="transnote">
+
+<p class="c">Transcriber’s Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.</p>
+
+<p>Perceived typographical errors have been changed.</p>
+
+</div>
+
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75944 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/75944-h/images/cover.jpg b/75944-h/images/cover.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cba4be5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig1.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig1.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..229e6ff
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig1.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig2.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig2.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b0a44b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig2.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig2big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig2big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..df1fc6f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig2big.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig3.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig3.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d829079
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig3.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig3big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig3big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..e3a1291
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig3big.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig4.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig4.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b0cf9d8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig4.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig4big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig4big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..11a48ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig4big.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig5.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig5.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6edca53
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig5.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig5big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig5big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2a24a83
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig5big.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig6.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig6.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..32011f7
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig6.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig6big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig6big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fd713ed
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig6big.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig7.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig7.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ed63260
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig7.jpg
diff --git a/75944-h/images/fig7big.jpg b/75944-h/images/fig7big.jpg
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..8144a61
--- /dev/null
+++ b/75944-h/images/fig7big.jpg
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b5dba15
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This book, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this book outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..d992699
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+book #75944 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75944)