Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [6]
By the late seventeenth century, wars, wages, burgeoning commerce, a growing population, and expanding overseas trade had combined to create a vast demand for credit throughout Europe. In England and Scotland, goldsmiths continued to dominate the field of money. In colonial America the situation was even worse. No sizable indigenous supply of silver and gold had been found, and colonist settlers had to rely on official British currency—and on numerous foreign coins to supplement it. So drastic was the shortage of coin that a variety of alternatives ranging from furs to maize, rice, tobacco, indigo, and shells were instituted. Money made from a type of clamshell known as wampum was one of the most popular alternatives. Already in widespread use by American Indians, wampum became legal tender in several colonies. Six beads were worth a penny in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, and in New York, the building of the citadel was paid for with a loan of wampum. The currency was noted by European settlers to have a convenient additional purpose—as well as buying and selling it, you could use it to stop nosebleeds.
By the time that John Law of Waterfut apprenticed his sons to goldsmiths, money dealing had grown sophisticated and the most successful goldsmith bankers commanded notable power and influence, parading the chilly, malodorous streets of Edinburgh clad conspicuously in scarlet cloaks and cocked hats. To the recently impoverished father, life as goldsmiths promised his sons financial security and elevated social status. William, the younger, was apprenticed to George Cleghorne and seems quickly to have made the most of his opportunities; in 1661, as he was nearing the end of his training, the bond between master and favored pupil was formally acknowledged when William married Cleghorne’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Violet. A few months later William qualified as a goldsmith and set up his own business.
William Law’s new shop was surrounded by similar premises and stood close by the Goldsmiths’ Hall, to the south of St. Giles, the hub of Edinburgh’s commercial district. Space was at a premium. “In no city in the world,” Defoe wrote, “do so many people live in so little room as at Edinburgh.” Goldsmiths’ shops to the north of the square were little more than tall narrow buildings, known as luckenbooths, made of wood with projecting superstructures that hung out over the street. Law’s was grander, but still cramped. Ground-floor space might have measured only seven feet square, yet this and similar buildings telescoped up several stories. Family life went on in upper rooms, while below pride of place was given to the tools of the trade: the forge, bellows, and crucibles where the precious molten metal would be raised and wrought into spoons, tankards, rings, church plate, or intricate drinking cups formed from silver-mounted nautilus shells.
The Laws’ nuptial bliss was short-lived. Within a year of their marriage Violet died giving birth to a baby son, who died not long after; a mortal legacy, perhaps, of Edinburgh’s unsanitary conditions. A year later, the widowed William’s affections were recaptured by Jean Campbell, the formidably intelligent and robust twenty-three-year-old daughter of a prosperous merchant from Ayrshire; she became his second