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

city walls. London—ten uncomfortable days distant by coach—drew him. His mother probably raised no objection when he told her of his wish to travel, perhaps hopeful that a change of environment might entice her son to involve himself in something other than hedonistic pursuits. Perhaps it was with a small sigh of relief as well as a shiver of foreboding that she bade him farewell as he set out on his long, hazardous journey south.

3
    L ONDON

    Some in clandestine companies combine,
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town,
And raise new credits first, then cry’em down:
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
To set the town together by the ears.
The sham projectors and the brokers join,
And both the cully merchant undermine;
First he must be drawn in and then betrayed,
And they demolish the machine they made:
So conjuring chymists, with their charm and spell,
Some wondrous liquid wondrously exhale;
But when the gaping mob their money pay,
The cheat’s dissolved, the vapour flies away.

    Daniel Defoe,        
    Reformation of Manners
(1702)        

    L ONDON WAS A REVELATION . L ARGER THAN ANY OTHER Western European capital (only Paris could come close), it was home to some 750,000 inhabitants, many of whom, like Law, had gravitated from elsewhere. The streets were thronged with markets, shops, and hawkers noisily touting oysters, oranges, whalebone stays, patch boxes, glass eyes, ivory teeth, and mandrake potions. Amid the bustling street life, workmen toiled to complete vast building programs begun after the Great Fire. A grand new Royal Exchange had already replaced the old one founded by Gresham, a new Dutch-style custom house now flanked the Thames, while forty-five livery company halls, fifty-one city churches, and innumerable private houses were emerging to replace those that had been destroyed. It was an energetic, exciting milieu, but one in which the gulf between affluence and poverty was starkly evident. To the north and east, factories and workshops drew workers who lived in stinking, insanitary shantytown hovels. Westward, framed by green fields, St. James’s, the Strand, and Piccadilly were inhabited by aristocrats and entrepreneurs who were transforming once rural sites into elegant piazzas, arcades of shops, and avenues of grandiose mansions.
    The sharp-witted, rapacious Law must have greeted the city as James Boswell, a fellow Scotsman, did when he caught his first glimpse almost a century later: “When we came to Highgate Hill and had a view of London, I was all life and joy . . . my soul bounded forth to a certain prospect of happy futurity. I sung all manner of songs, and began to make one about an amorous meeting with a pretty girl.”
    Law set himself up in lodgings in London’s newly fashionable suburb of St. Giles. Surrounded by countryside, it was virtually a village, on higher ground than the city and encompassing Holborn, Covent Garden, Seven Dials, and Blooms bury. The area was renowned for its verdant surroundings; the grand Bloomsbury Square, the bustling, flower-filled Covent Garden market with its church—well known as a meeting place for unfaithful wives—and its “sweating house,” the Hummums Bagnio, where for five shillings one could find oneself “as warm as a cricket at an oven’s mouth.”
    From the outset Law was determined to make his social and intellectual mark. Immaculately dressed, he presented himself as a new young man about town. He visited theaters such as the Drury Lane to enjoy the latest drama and admire the most celebrated actresses, strolled in the elegant walks of St. James’s and Vauxhall Gardens, shopped in the fashionable New Exchange—a favorite with beaux who, according to Ned Ward, a chronicler of London’s less well-publicized customs, were happy to “pay a double price for linen, gloves or sword-knots, to the prettiest of the women, that they might go from thence and boast among their