Malcolm Balen - A Very English Deceit - The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal

The terrain of the moneyed-men, marked out by the coffee houses, is small but profitable, a series of narrow passageways called Exchange Alley, which lie within the maze of narrow streets captured at the intersection of Cornhill and Lombard Street. A minute and a half is all it takes to walk through this lively, noisy financial centre, hemmed in on each side by tradesmen and barbers, lawyers and insurance clerks. On the second floor of Wren’s favourite coffee house, Gangway’s, there is a sale room where the jobbers ply their trade from a rostrum between the hours of eleven and three. Nearby, just down the street, is an upstart bank, grown lean and sharp from the days when it was an import company bringing in the Huguenot steel, which was favoured by swordsmen over its English rival. The bank has expanded through land speculation in Ireland and stands on the brink of power, aiming now to cut down its two rivals, the young Bank of England and the East India Company. In this respect, its name does not disguise its intentions. It is the Sword Blade Bank.

The buying of stocks and shares in Exchange Alley is, as yet, in its infancy. The trade was carried out previously in the Royal Exchange, a stockjobber’s shout away on the other side of Cornhill, but this discomfited the traders in the country’s more conventional merchandise, such as their largest export, wool. So the broken moved to ’Change Alley, as it is known, taking with them their ceaseless noise. Here, the practitioners are already versed in the notion of buying and selling more than they can afford. It is the fashionable new form of gambling. There is a growing sense that shares will go ever upward, like one of Wren’s perfectly balanced spires.

The dealers are raucous and seedy, unscrupulous and rough. Their aim, in the saying of the day, is ‘to sell the bear’s skin before they have caught the bear’: they are selling stock before they have paid for it in the hope that they will be able to meet the cost from the profit – or ‘bubble’ – on the deal. One anonymous observer on a journey through England in the year 1710 watches the moneyed-men of’ Change Alley at work, and reports on the scene to a friend abroad in a series of letters; in one, he comments: ‘You will see fellows, in shabby clothes, selling ten or twelve thousand pounds in stock, though perhaps he mayn’t be worth at the same time ten shillings, and with as much zeal as if he were a director, which they call selling a Bear’s-Skin ; and these men find Bubble enough to get bread by it, as the others do by gaming; and some few of them manage it so as to get pretty large estates.’

So the city-dwellers go about their money-making schemes, heads down and voices loud, and ignore Wren’s masterpiece as if it has no connection with their lives. And the truth is that it has little: the cathedral belongs to a world which they do not inhabit; it is a beautiful object of refinement and contemplation in the midst of the daily dirty struggle to survive: to earn enough to eat, drink and keep clean. As they walk, London’s citizens keep close to the walls of buildings, fearful of the water which cascades out of crude spouts from each roof; more fearful still of the sewage pumped into the gutters of the street when the houses’ wells are full.

The pavements are crammed with stalls, sheds and signposts; where they end and the road begins is hard to tell: there are no kerbstones to separate the path from the carriageway, although on the wider streets there is a line of posts and chains or wooden palings. The wide expanse of Tottenham Court Road, stretching north, has been paved for only a few years. London is not all that Wren would wish. ‘Natural beauty is from geometry,’ he has declared, ‘consisting in Uniformity and Proportion. Always the true Test is natural or geometrical Beauty.’ But the city is untidy, disorganised, unsymmetrical, full of chaotic winding streets that snake round and disappear. It is a jumble, a jungle, a teeming maze where the people live cheek by jowl – half a million of them, nearly a tenth of England’s population, crammed together in a city that has not yet spread. Piccadilly, to the west, marks its furthermost boundary.

But the capital is not just a commercial and trading centre. It is a gambler’s paradise. In the inns, bets are taken on brutal, bloody sports: bull-baiting, bear-baiting and cock-fighting, the vicious pastimes of a nation frequently at war. One German visitor to London in 1710 notes, with surprise, the aggressive nature of the English crowds:

In the afternoon we went to see the cockfighting. This is a sport peculiar to the English … a special building has been made for it near ‘Gras Inn’. The people, gentle and simple, act like madmen, and go on raising the odds to twenty guineas and more. It is amazing to see how the cocks hack with their spurs. Their combs bleed terribly and they often slit each other’s crop and abdomen with the spurs … they belong to great Lords who have brought them from Kent and other places and win a great deal of money by their wagers. Towards evening we drove to see the bull-baiting. First a young ox or bull was led in and fastened by a long rope to an iron ring in the middle of the yard; then about thirty dogs, two or three at a time, were let loose on him. Then they brought out a small bear and tied him up in the same fashion. As soon as the dogs had at him, he stood up on his hind legs and gave some terrific buffets. But the worst of all was a common little ass who was brought out saddled with an ape on his back. The ape began to scream most terribly for fear of falling off.

Later the same traveller watches two men fighting for money at the Bear Garden at Hockley in the Hole, on the outskirts of town by Clerkenwell Green, cheered on by spectators who crowd into the galleries of raised seats.

They went for each other with sword and dagger and the Moor got a nasty wound in his hand, which bled freely. When they had attacked each other with broadsword and shield, the good Moor received such a dreadful blow that he could not fight any longer. He was slashed from the left eye right down to his cheek to his chin and jaw with such force that one could hear the sword grating against his teeth. Straightaway not only the whole of his shirt front but the platform too was covered with blood. The onlookers began to cheer and threw down vast quantities of shillings and crowns.

London is a brutal, dirty, lively, joyous place. Plague and fire, and civil war, have done their worst and departed; fear of God is subsiding. Life is rushing back.

But there are warning signs that the established order can still be threatened, that England may not yet be built on firm foundations. Behind the remains of the Palace of Whitehall, torched by a recent fire, lie the marks made by the scaffold where Charles I was beheaded. And despite the splendour of Wren’s church-building, the view from Somerset House is deceptive: a thin layer of dirt has gathered upon his stonework. Already his masterpiece is tarnished, blackened by the smoke from the sea-coal, shipped from the northern mines. The coal, named from its journey rather than its origins, is taxed when it is unloaded at the Port of London in order to raise money to rebuild the city. But it is slowly eating into it instead, discolouring its buildings, clogging the nostrils of its people, coating their tongues and clouding their eyes.

Wren’s professed aim was to defy the corrosive elements and stretch across the centuries, ignoring fashion to appeal to an ideal, immutable form of design. He insisted: ‘Architecture aims at Eternity; and is therefore the only Thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions.’ His great vision was of a cathedral dome that would be grander than any other, capping not only St Paul’s, but his career. It would signify, architecturally, the might of the capital and the grandeur of England. It would lift spirits. And it would celebrate the stability of the country, its monarchy and people, after the trials of the Civil War and then the Glorious Revolution of the previous century.