Millionaire: The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance Read Online Free

childhood. John Law, the child destined to become the financial wizard of his age, was their fifth child and eldest surviving son. He was born, lusty, large, and bonny, in April 1671, in one of the cramped rooms perched high above the goldsmith shop in Edinburgh.
    For his father, the arrival of a healthy heir must have seemed a crowning moment in a stellar career. A year before John was born, William’s preeminence among goldsmiths had been acknowledged when he was appointed assay master for Edinburgh, responsible for supervising the testing and hallmarking of silver and gold objects made within the city precincts. In 1674, when the Scottish Parliament tasked a commission to report on the Royal Mint, he was called in to advise—further evidence of the esteem in which he was held in the city; the following year he was promoted to Dean of the Goldsmiths of Edinburgh.
    William Law was as ambitious for his children as for himself. Adamant that John should have every opportunity that his father’s misfortunes had denied him, William ensured that John was raised and educated as a gentleman. According to John’s early biographers—who may have been following the fashion for investing the famous with special qualities as young children—he was noted almost immediately for his intelligence and outstanding aptitude for numbers.
    He grew up in a rapidly changing city. When John Law was eight, he was witness to the pomp and ceremony that attended the appointment of the King’s brother, James, Duke of York, as viceroy of Scotland. With James’s arrival, the city savored a limited period of renewal. Holyrood Palace became the focus of grand entertainments: “vast numbers of nobility and gentry . . . flocked around the Duke and filled the town with gaiety and splendour,” recorded the historian Robert Chambers. As young John learned to read and solve elementary mathematical problems, James pushed the city toward modernity: the Merchant Company was founded, the physic garden extended, coffeehouses opened, an attempt made at street lighting, and, in the following years, a new Exchange in Parliament Square was built.
    Amid these developments William Law’s moneylending business flourished. Alert, quick-witted, and perceptive, John was fascinated by the lucrative financial business his father was building, as he watched deals struck over stoops of ale supped within the shadowy confines of John’s coffee shop or the ancient baker’s Baijen Hole. His curiosity was sparked by the skills of the craftsmen his father employed, while his love of the arts and patronage of craftsmen perhaps sprang from watching sheet metal formed into works of exquisite beauty.
    By 1683, when John was twelve, his father’s wealth was enough to establish him as a man of substance. He acquired Lauriston Castle, a three-story fortified building with two corbeled turrets that had been built by Archibald Napier in the late sixteenth century, and 180 acres of land fringing the southern shore of the Firth of Forth. But before the family could move from the confines of Parliament Close and take up residence on their estate, tragedy struck.
    Years of hard work had taken their toll on William’s health. Now in his middle years and at the peak of his success, he was stricken by agonizing abdominal pains, which occurred with increasing regularity, and he was diagnosed as suffering from stones in his bladder, a common seventeenth-century complaint. Soon after he had bought Lauriston he left Edinburgh for Paris, a city so famous for pioneering advances in this field and “men well practised in the cutting for it” that several leading hospitals displayed chests filled with the stones they had removed—one such trophy was apparently as large as a child’s head. The French surgeon advised a lithotomy, one of the oldest surgical procedures known to man—vividly described by Dr. Martin Lister, a zoologist and later physician to Queen Anne who watched an expert surgeon