Sarum (156 page)
Authors: Edward Rutherfurd
“Who knows what lovers she may have had,” he finally suggested.
Shockley exploded.
“Nonsense, sir, and you know it.” The boy was even worse than he thought. “I’ve seen the girl. I’ve been a doctor nearly thirty years. I know. It’s yours.”
At least Forest had the sense not to try to answer him back. He paused, surveying him coldly.
“You may be grateful I have not spoken to your father. You shall do that for yourself. But you will make the girl an allowance.”
George Forest looked doubtful.
“Perhaps,” he said thoughtfully, “thirty pounds would take care of the child.”
Shockley snorted.
“Fifty a year.”
It was a handsome sum, but he meant to get it for the girl.
George Forest looked at him straight in the eye.
“My father would never agree to such a thing.”
That, Shockley knew, was perfectly true.
Which was why, that morning, he had taken a certain precaution.
“If you do not, then you will be brought before the bishop’s court,” he said calmly. “He has the power to fine and excommunicate you. I do not think your father would like that.”
It was one of the benefits of the Restoration, Shockley thought, that, at least in theory, the Anglican bishops had gained these rights to try moral offences of various kinds, including, as it happened, bastardy. He smiled at young Forest blandly. The disgrace would be tremendous.
The boy was white as a sheet. But he was thinking.
After a pause he replied carefully:
“I do not think the bishop would wish to attack the Forest family.”
It was a shrewd reply. For although these trials could take place, in practice it was rare for a bishop to prosecute a member of the gentry. At worst, a gentleman might be discreetly fined.
But Shockley only shook his head.
“You are wrong. I have been with Bishop Ward this very morning. He is ready to prosecute. I have his word on it.”
There was dismay in the young man’s eyes, then astonishment, and then, Shockley saw it quite clearly, though it only lasted a moment, respect – for a clever trick and a worthy adversary.
“I will speak to my father.”
“You have until this evening.”
He had won. They both knew it.
There was a commotion in the street outside. The Prince of Orange was coming. Their business was done and they moved to the door.
“Clarendon’s here,” George remarked pleasantly. Now that the bargaining was over, he was already his normal self again. “Do you think there will be fighting?”
“No. I think James’s men will desert.”
Young Forest nodded thoughtfully.
“And where does your father stand in this matter?” Shockley enquired, equally pleasantly. He had not seen the baronet for a week.
George now gave him a charming smile.
“With Pembroke, I believe.”
“But Lord Pembroke is still in London. He has not declared himself yet.”
“I know.”
The Forests did not change.
The young man looked at him curiously.
“What about you, Doctor, are you pleased with this glorious revolution?”
And now Shockley smiled. “It is not a revolution, George,” he replied. “It is a compromise.”
He looked forward to a better world.
THE CALM
1720
The Shockleys were ruined. Completely. It was his fault.
“Madness, sir.” Immediately after breakfast, for the remaining five years of his life, he would repeat this same sentence. “To gamble – no other word for it – the future of the family: gamble all, lose all. I’m no better than a criminal.”
For in 1720 the then eighty-five-year-old Doctor Samuel Shockley, scientist, rationalist, incurable optimist and one of the most respected inhabitants of Sarum, invested his entire fortune in the greatest orgy of unsupported speculation that England has ever seen – the South Sea Bubble. And when, within a year, it had burst, taking half the investment of the kingdom with it, Doctor Samuel Shockley was utterly ruined; as was his family.
He lived five years more, making small but useless attempts to regain some of what was lost. He reproached himself every day. It was said that only his will to overcome his guilt and shame kept him alive. When, by 1725, he knew it was useless, he was soon gone.
The madness which seized Shockley seized half England, and it was very understandable. For in the year 1720, it had really seemed that nothing – not even a gamble – could possibly go wrong. England at last was rich and at peace.
The country had a new dynasty. The Protestant William and Mary had been succeeded first by Queen Anne; then when she died without heirs, the crown was offered not to the closest in hereditary line, but to her unobjectionable and quite definitely Protestant German cousin: George, Elector of Hanover.
True, he spoke not a word of English; true – this was a pity – he preferred Hanover to England; true, he did not try to understand his new country and was often absent from it in his beloved Hanover; true, he had divorced his wife and detested his son the Prince of Wales. He was short, fat and looked stupid, though he was an able commander. But he was not a Catholic; he would not, like the Stuarts, threaten the English Church with papist intrigue. The English were indifferent to him, but he was safe. His descendants have ruled England ever since.
The country had military peace. It had been won for Queen Anne in that series of brilliant campaigns against the threatening megalomaniac King Louis XIV of France – who had tried to overawe all Europe – by the great John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. Blenheim, Oudenarde, Malplaquet: his heroic victories were on the lips of every schoolboy: they ensured that, for two decades, England would be safely at peace.
The island was united too. The joining of the kingdom of Scotland with England and Wales had taken place in the sense that the Stuarts were kings of both independent kingdoms; but by the Act of Union in 1707, the kingdoms were joined by Parliament; and the Hanoverian kings, though they were still greater strangers north of the Scottish border than south of it, were undoubted kings of a united island.
Almost. There remained the last male claimants of the old Stuart royal house – James Francis Edward, son of James II by his Italian wife and himself married to the granddaughter of the Polish king – known, sometimes facetiously, as the Old Pretender. The English, mostly, did not want him because he was Catholic. The Scots called him their own, but chiefly because he was a Stuart. The French, anxious to weaken Protestant England, supported him, but half-heartedly. In 1715 he tried to invade the kingdom – and was at once and humiliatingly driven out. Some did support him. The die-hard Tories led by Bolingbroke who did so, destroyed their own political careers with the Hanoverian kings for a generation. The Pretender and his son remained in France, always a vague threat, but often forgotten. The island had better things to do than worry about the passing of the Catholic Stuarts.
It was time to forget civil war and religious conflict: it was time to get rich: and that, in 1720, was what thousands of investors tried to do.
The story of the South Sea Bubble began with Marlborough’s wars against the French. They cost many millions, and rather than raise all the money in taxes, Parliament wisely decided to go into debt. The government debt, around forty million pounds, seemed huge; the largest creditors were the Bank of England – a stronghold of the Whigs – and the East India Company; the proposal was that in order to lighten the burden on the government, a new company, the South Sea Company, would take over the debt and pay the interest in return for trading concessions in the south seas. If the trade went well, then the company might make a handsome profit. And on that basis it sold shares to the general public. There were many reasons for the scheme. The Tories who started it disliked the strength of the Whigs at the Bank and wanted another large financial group of their own to rival it; the Government wanted to be free of the interest it owed. A similar scheme had been set up in France by the financier John Law: surely it would work in England. Indeed, before it began, the scheme was already so popular that soon the company had taken over most of the debt – some thirty millions.
It was a gamble. It was the spirit of the age.
“The possibilities, sir, are endless, I assure you,” Doctor Shockley told the dean, the canons, and his son.
In the imagination, they were. And so were the number of satellite companies that grew up overnight around the great South Sea Company. The trading in shares between these became so complex that it was as impossible to unravel as it was nonsensical. In the main company the £100 shares rose in the first six months of 1720 to £1,100. And still there was no enterprise underneath it all, no profit: nothing but a great mountain of paper trading powered by . . .
“Wind, sir. It was all wind. A hot gas, blowing up a huge bubble . . . all my dreams.” This was Shockley’s lament: he was precisely right.
When the crash came he was fortunate in having a little, a very little, in the original shares which had been exchanged for actual government debt. When that greatest of eighteenth century politicians, Robert Walpole, was brought in to clear up the mess, he arranged that these shares should be redeemed by the government, though at roughly half their original worth. But for those who had invested in the rocketing stocks that rose with the Bubble – stocks invented to satisfy investors who had long lost all sense of reason – for them there was nothing.
“There is nothing Walpole can do for this family. Nothing. I own shares in a company for trading in human hair, another for mining gold in Wales, and another for buying a peat bog in Ireland,” the old man declared, shaking his head in disbelief. “And as for this,” he produced a huge prospectus. “What was its purpose, sir? I cannot tell you.”
In the aftermath of the Bubble, an enterprising publisher produced a pack of playing cards, each card depicting one of the fraudulent investment schemes that had collapsed with the crash, accompanied by a satirical verse. Doctor Shockley would play with these morosely by the hour.
In 1725 he died. A year later his son Nathaniel also died, of a sudden heart attack. The modest house on the north side of the close passed to his young grandson Jonathan, and it was in his hands that the meagre family fortune now lay. A few years later Jonathan married the daughter of one of the cathedral canons: a pleasant girl with carrotty hair and protruding teeth, with whom he was happy. She brought enough money to renew the lease of the Shockley house, and she was respectable. Through her father’s influence Jonathan found employment with Sir George Forest as general manager of his estates. In this position, he was treated, as a matter of courtesy, as a gentleman; but with a faint, unspoken condescension that reminded him, each day, that he was nonetheless really only a dependant, a sort of superior steward. He was a tall, fair man who carried himself well, and cultivated an occasional terseness of manner to mask the slight awkwardness he felt inside.
In 1735 his only son Adam was born.
1745
The ten-year-old boy was almost bursting with suppressed excitement.
Each day, as more news came in, he looked at the sedate, unruffled calm of Salisbury close, waiting for the horsemen to appear. Each day, he watched his father eagerly. Soon, his father would take down the family sword, and then he would ride. It was young Adam Shockley’s secret plan to ride with him.
For Bonnie Prince Charlie was marching from the north. And the Shockleys would surely ride to join him.
No object in the Shockley household was more venerated than the sword of Nathaniel Shockley, which Charles Moody had brought back from Naseby. It hung high on the wall over the stairs, gleaming dully – a daily reminder to the boy of the family’s romantic Cavalier past.
It was a past that Jonathan liked to refer to.
“Some Shockleys were for Parliament in those days,” he conceded to Adam, “but the best of us were for the king.”
It gave the boy the feeling that his family, too, had been one of the loyal band of true gentlemen like the Penruddocks and Hydes who had been loyal to a sacred cause.
And did not his father sometimes after dinner pass his hand over his wine glass, with a dour flourish, in the Jacobite sign to toast the true Stuart king over the water? The family fortune might be lost, there might be a German king on the throne and Whig politicians who tolerated religious free-thinkers, but Jonathan Shockley, a solid Tory if ever there was one, at least enjoyed this show of loyalty to a past when, by supposition, the family was more noble and the times better.
Now the time had come. The Pretender’s son, the dashing Charles Edward, was on his way south. From the border to Derby, not a hand had been raised against him by a people who were still indifferent to Hanoverian rule.
Each day, when Adam Shockley went to ride his pony, he whispered to it:
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