Sea Change (41 page)

Power breeds jealousy, especially in him who wields it. Robert Walpole, Sir Robert as he soon became, can hardly have expected to remain at the head of the nation's affairs for the next twenty years, but remain he did, growing more lonely and more ruthless in the process. He had his private griefs to bear, no question. His invalid daughter Kate died in the midst of his campaign against the Jacobites. His other daughter, Mary, was also to die young. His sister Dolly, Viscountess Townshend, and his brother Galfridus died within a few months of each other in 1726. And with Dolly died also his forty-year friendship with Charles Townshend.

Walpole had already engineered the disgrace and dismissal of Lord Carteret, whom he saw as a potential rival. Now, without Dolly to unite them, he began to weigh Townshend's loyalty in the balance and find it wanting. King George I expired unexpectedly of a stroke en route to his beloved Hanover in June 1727 and many thought the new King would give Walpole short shrift. But Walpole had been assiduously cultivating the Princess of Wales with just this contingency in mind and Queen Caroline's favour enabled him to manage George II much as he had managed George I. Townshend's ministerial days were thereafter numbered. Offended by Walpole's ever more frequent interferences in foreign policy, he resigned and retired to Norfolk to pursue his theories on crop rotation, which were to win him a form of immortality as 'Turnip Townshend' of the Agricultural Revolution. He died in 1738.

By then Walpole was a stubborn and bloated old man, twice a widower, tortured by the stone, baited by the press and plagued by a rising generation of ambitious young office-seekers. He was forced into a war against Spain he had no wish to fight, thanks partly — irony of ironies — to a long-running dispute between the Spanish Government and the South Sea Company. The war went badly, the general election of 1741 hardly better, and at length, early in February 1742, he resigned, retiring to the Lords as Earl of Orford.

The newly ennobled Lord Orford was an immensely wealthy man. No satisfactory explanation of his extraordinary accumulation of riches has ever been advanced. He put much of it to use in assembling, at vast and heedless cost, a collection of the very finest paintings and sculptures. Raphaels, Rubenses, Rembrandts, Titians, Vandykes, Poussins, Murillos and Domenichinos found their way to Houghton Hall, his Norfolk residence, by the priceless crate-load. A less likely connoisseur is hard to imagine. But posterity has proclaimed his taste, if not his morals, impeccable.

Walpole died at his London home, of a remedy for the stone that turned out to be worse than the disease, in March 1745, aged sixty-eight. The doctor who attended him in his final illness, James Jurin, is now believed to have been a crypto-Jacobite. The earldom — and with it the bulk of Walpole's fortune — passed to his eldest son, Robert junior, while his surviving brother, Horatio, lingered on in the Commons until belatedly granted a peerage a few months before his death in 1757. By then Robert junior had been succeeded as Earl of Orford by his son, George, who devoted the prime years of his manhood to the seemingly impossible task of squandering his inheritance. In this he was so successful that in 1779 he was forced to sell the entire Houghton collection to Empress Catherine of Russia for a meagre £36,000. Most of the pictures now adorn the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

Walpole's youngest son, Horace, the famous dilettante and epistolizer, lamented the sale. 'It is the most signal mortification to my idolatry for my father's memory that I could receive,' he wailed. 'It is stripping the temple of his glory and of his affection. A madman excited by rascals has burnt his Ephesus.' What Horace's elder brother, Edward, thought about this is not known. His many years as the inactive and almost completely silent Member for Great Yarmouth had been succeeded by an increasingly reclusive existence, from which even his nephew's gross sacrilege failed to rouse him. He died in 1784. His brother Horace inherited the earldom from the profligate George in 1791. With Horace's passing, in 1797, the title became extinct.

The end of the Robinocracy brought an end also to the long exile of Robert Knight. Upon payment of £10,000 for a royal pardon and another £10,000 to appease the South Sea Company, he was permitted by the new Administration to return to his homeland. It appears that financial consultancy had not been unprofitable. He was able at once to buy back his estate in Essex that had been sold in his absence. And there he died in 1744. His son later sat in Parliament as the Member for Castle Rising, a Norfolk pocket borough in the gift of the Walpole family, made over to him for reasons that can only be guessed at.

Whether Knight senior ever visited Sir Theodore Janssen at his house in Hanover Square following his overdue homecoming is unknown. Certainly the wily old Flemish financier was still to be found there by those who sought him out, though not for a great deal longer. This founding director of both the Bank of England and the South Sea Company died in September 1748, aged ninety-four.

The South Sea Company itself lost its only tangible commercial asset — the Asiento for the supply of slaves to Spain's American colonies — in an opaque and tardy sub-treaty of the none too transparent Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1750, for a flat payment of £100,000. The company lingered on pitifully for another hundred years until Gladstone arrived at the Exchequer in 1852, noticed that it was still in being and promptly administered it out of existence.

By contrast, the last gasp of the Jacobite cause was in many ways its most glorious. What would have happened had the Young Pretender's army marched on south from Derby in December 1745 will never be known. The fact that a yacht loaded with King George II's valuables was kept ready at Tower Quay while news from the Midlands was anxiously awaited suggests that the conclusion was far from foregone. In the event, the rebel army marched back to Scotland — and destruction at Culloden four months later. Among the unanswered questions they left behind is whether Walpole would ever have allowed them to get so far in the first place. But Dr Jurin's ministrations had ensured that Walpole's counsel was not available to the Government of the day. James Edward, the Old Pretender, died in Rome in 1766. By the time of his son's death, in 1788, even pretending had ceased to seem worthwhile.

While the King was packing his valuables, politicians were pondering their allegiance and depositors were clamouring for their money at the Bank of England during those tense December days of 1745, calmer heads were mapping the present for the benefit of the future. An Exact and Definitive Map of the City and Environs of London in the Reign of His Britannic Majesty King George the Second, the work of William and James Spandrel, father and son, was published in sixteen separate sheets at monthly intervals between November 1748 and February 1750. It can be assumed to have taken anything up to ten years to produce.

The surviving subscription list shows the commercial bias one might expect. But commercial considerations are unlikely to account for the presence on the list of Sir Nicholas Cloisterman, retired Ambassador. There are, of course, many reasons for wanting to buy a map. Some of those reasons have less to do with planning journeys than remembering them.

Every map has its history, largely lost though it may be. That which remains may become, if it survives long enough, the stuff of saleroom speculation. Two hundred and fifty years after its last sheet was published, an original bound copy of the Spandrels' map was sold at auction in New York for $148,000 — not far short of £100,000. Back in 1721, such a sum would have made a man rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It would have been, quite literally, a King's ransom.

Appendices

APPENDIX A

Directory

A complete list of named characters featured in the course of the story in alphabetical order of title or surname (or forename where only this is known), with a note of their circumstances in 1721/22. Those listed in italics will not be found in any history book.

AERTSEN, Henrik. Deputy to Sheriff Lanckaert of Amsterdam.

AISLABIE, John. Chancellor of the Exchequer until forced to resign over South Sea scandal.

ALBEMARLE, Arnold van Keppel, Earl of. Allied Commander at Battle of Denain, 1712.

ANNE, Queen. Last reigning British monarch of the Stuart line. Died 1714. Succeeded by George I.

ARRAN, Charles Butler, Earl of. Jacobite landowner in Windsor Forest. ATTERBURY, Francis. Bishop of Rochester, Dean of Westminster. Jacobite plotter. BARLAEUS. Supposed name of Zuyler's landlord in Amsterdam (see Ugels).

BLAIN, Percy. British Consul in Florence.

BLAIN, Elizabeth, 'Lizzie'. Wife of Percy Blain.

BLAND, Dr Henry. Provost of Eton College.

BLUNT, Sir John. Director of South Sea Company.

BORTOLAZZI, Cardinal. Pro-Governor of the City of Rome.

BOUVIN, Host of card-playing and musical evenings in Geneva.

BRODRICK, Thomas. Chairman of House of Commons Secret Committee of Inquiry into South Sea Company.

BUCKTHORN, Giles. One of two supposed Grand Tourists whom Spandrel meets with Estelle de Vries in Switzerland (see Silverwood).

BURROWS, Sam. Footman to the Chesney household in London.

CADOGAN, William, Earl. Army general, sometime British Ambassador to The Hague and Windsor Forest landowner.

CALDERINI. Banker used by Spandrel and Estelle de Vries in Rome.

CAROLINE, Princess of Wales.

CARTERET, John, Lord. Secretary of State for Southern Department from March 1721.

CASWALL, George. Banker to and former director of South Sea Company. Also Member of Parliament.

CHANDOS, James Brydges, Duke of. Former Paymaster-General.

CHARLES EDWARD, Prince. The Young Pretender. Son of James Edward, the Old Pretender and heir to the Stuart line. Born December 1720.

CHESNEY, George. Businessman. Director of New River Company.

CHESNEY, Louisa. Wife of George Chesney and mother of Maria.

CHESNEY, Maria. Daughter of George and Louisa Chesney.

CLEMENT XI. Pope until March 1721.

CLEMENTINA, Princess. Wife of James Edward, the (Old) Pretender. CLOISTERMAN, Nicholas. British vice-consul in Amsterdam.

CRABBE. Engraver of the Spandrels' map.

CRAGGS, James the elder. Postmaster-General until March 1721.

CRAGGS, James the younger. Son of James the elder. Secretary of State for Southern Department until February 1721.

DALRYMPLE, Evelyn. Charge d'affaires at British Embassy in The Hague. DAVENANT, Mrs. Name used by Estelle de Vries in London.

DEKKER, Gustaaf. V.O.C. merchant aboard the Tovenaer. van

DILLEN, Jacob. Deceased mutual friend of Sir Theodore Janssen and Ysbrand de Vries.

DIRK. Pickpocket with whom Spandrel shares a cell in Amsterdam Stadhuis. DRUMMOND, Lachlan, Colonel. British Government spy at Pretender's court in Rome.

DUBOIS, Cardinal. Foreign Minister of France.

EDGAR, James. Secretary to James Edward, the (Old) Pretender.

GEERTRUID. Maid at de Vries house in Amsterdam.

GEORGE I, King of England and Elector of Hanover. Governor of South Sea Company.

GEORGE, Prince of Wales. Son and heir of George I. Governor of South Sea Company.

GODOLPHIN, Francis, Earl of. Brother-in-law of Earl of Sunderland, both having married daughters of the Duke of Marlborough.

GORDON, Sir William. Commissioner of Army Accounts. Also Member of Parliament.

GREY AND NORTH, William, Lord. Jacobite plotter.

HARLEQUIN. Francis Atterbury's pet dog.

HARRIS. Clerk at British Embassy in The Hague.

HATTON, John, Captain. Soldier. Fiancé of Dorothea Wagemaker. Died of wounds during War of Spanish Succession, 1712.

HEINSIUS, Anthonie. Former Grand Pensionary of Holland. Died 1720. Succeeded by Isaac van Hoornbeeck.

HENRIK. One of three ruffians who try to kill Spandrel in Amsterdam (see Jan and Roelant).

HONDSLAGER, Cornells. Name given by Zuyler to Spandrel as that of leader of the ruffians who try to kill him in Amsterdam (see Jan), van

HOORNBEECK, Isaac. Grand Pensionary of Holland.

INNOCENT XIII. Bishop of Osimo, elected as Pope in succession to Clement XI, May 1721.

JACQUINOT, Madame. Proprietress of Auberge du Lac, Vevey.

JAMES EDWARD, Prince. The (Old) Pretender. Son of King James II of England and claimant to the British throne.

JAN. Leader of the ruffians who try to kill Spandrel in Amsterdam.

JANE. Maid-of-all-work taken on by Mrs Spandrel after her move to Leicester Fields. JANSSEN, Sir Theodore. Director of South Sea Company and Member of Parliament.

JANUS, 'Big'. Turnkey at Amsterdam Stadhuis.

JOHNSON, James. Alias of George Kelly.

JOYE, Charles. Director and Deputy Governor of South Sea Company.

JURE, Nicodemus. Valet to Sir Theodore Janssen.

JURIN, James, Dr. Physician. Secretary of Royal Society.

KELLY, George. Secretary to Francis Atterbury. Jacobite plotter.

KEMP, Mr and Mrs. Travelling aliases of Estelle de Vries and Pieter Zuyler. KEMPIS. Alias used by Pieter Zuyler in The Hague.

KENDAL, Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenburg, Duchess of. Mistress to King George I.