Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [506]
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