London - Edward Rutherfurd [380]
With Henry’s departure, Julius became head of the vestry; and here too he had tried to institute a more cheerful regime. Meredith had failed to become Dean of St Paul’s, and with this some of his reforming zeal seemed to have waned. Though the services at St Lawrence Silversleeves were still done in Laud’s high church manner, Martha and Gideon were told quietly by Julius that a monthly attendance would be sufficient. They still seethed, but at least he had to watch them less often.
There was one surprise: perhaps to console himself for failing to become dean Edmund Meredith, at the age of nearly sixty, married Matilda, a respectable spinster of thirty, a lawyer’s daughter who, religious herself, had fallen in love with his sermons. A year later, they had a child.
King Charles’s personal rule had brought the Duckets material gain. They had made several personal loans to the king, always at 10 per cent and always repaid in full. Better yet, as monarchs had often done, King Charles farmed out the customs. In return for a lump payment, Henry had acquired the right to collect the customs duty on several luxury goods. “We’re making 26 per cent profit,” he boasted to Julius. King Charles’s system suited them very well. “Instead of paying Parliament’s taxes, we make profits raising money,” Henry summed up. “Long may it last.”
There was, in fact, only one weakness in the system. It would work just so long as there were no national emergencies. Any armed conflict and the king would have to ask for taxes. “Which would mean a Parliament,” Henry would sometimes worry. “So what can we do to be sure that we never come to that?”
This was the problem Julius Ducket solved.
He was standing on London Bridge. It was a summer evening, and as he gazed upstream towards the sun sinking over Westminster, he noticed that its rays were causing the whole surface of the water to gleam, like a huge river of gold. And it had just occurred to him that this was entirely appropriate for such a busy commercial city when the idea came to him.
That was it. Of course: the river of gold. For if one considered the king’s financial needs over the last dozen years, what was the most striking feature? Why, their size. A hundred, two hundred thousand pounds – such sums could cause a clash with Parliament. But were they really so huge? To mighty, commercial London? Of course not. Julius himself could easily have gathered together dozens of men worth over twenty thousand pounds. The combined, available wealth of London ran into countless millions. Even the king’s emergency needs could easily be met by London, without recourse to Parliament at all. London was a river of gold.
Yet why, Julius considered, was London so hesitant to lend? It was not that the king failed to pay interest. No: the real problem lay in the nature of the loans and their repayment.
Loans to the Crown were nearly always for a particular project. The Londoners might not like it. Equally important, the loans were usually short term, to be repaid out of Crown income in as little as six months – so they could never be very large. But why should things be done this way? Money was money: whether it was invested in a loan to the king or a share of one of the great joint stock companies, it was still the same. It was earning a return. And wasn’t the stream of the king’s income, which provided the interest for the king’s loans, also a constant flow? Then the thought struck him: if I can buy shares in a joint stock company, that promises a constant supply of revenue, then why not buy shares, in a similar way, in the king’s debt? If you wanted your money back you could sell your share to another, who would receive the interest in your place. There was no reason why the king should repay the principal for twenty years, as long as he could continue the interest. It was perpetual, like Myddelton’s water supply, or the Virginia Company, or the East India, or any of the other great joint stock