The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [272]
Isaac Seagull was the lander for the New Forest.
But behind the lander and the captain was another, more shadowy figure. The man who put up the money for the whole operation, who could buy the goods, pay for a clipper: the entrepreneur. This was the venturer.
Who was he? Nobody knew. Or if they did, they said nothing. The parish clerk at Lymington church kept all the books, so he must have known. A local bailiff took contributions from any of the farmers or merchants who wanted to invest in the enterprise; so he probably knew. The scale of operations was so large, sometimes, that it could only have been someone with very deep pockets, one of the local aristocrats, a member of the gentry.
Grockleton believed it was Mr Luttrell. Owner of a fine house called Eaglehurst, down past Mr Drummond’s Cadland estate, at the junction of the Solent water and the Southampton inlet, Mr Luttrell had built a tower, which gave him a view of the whole Solent water and the Isle of Wight. That brandy shipments of some kind came to Luttrell’s Tower was not in doubt, but this could be just some minor dealing for his own account. Was Luttrell really the secret figure, the venturer behind the whole huge New Forest coastal trade? Perhaps it wasn’t even a single gentleman at all. Perhaps it was all of them.
Whether or not they were actual participants, two things could be said not only of the gentry, but of every inhabitant of the south coast of England at this period. The first was that, aristocrat or peasant, clergyman, magistrate or poacher, they were all at the very least the knowing recipients of illegal merchandise. The second was that nobody saw anything. Two kegs of brandy might be delivered to the Lymington magistrate’s next-door neighbour, yet he was quite unaware of it. The pulpit might be full of brandy bottles but the vicar found plenty of room for his feet as he preached. Three hundred packhorses might wind along the edge of his lordship’s park; his lordship never woke. Why, even Mr Drummond, His Majesty’s personal banker, living in plain sight of Luttrell’s Tower, never saw a thing. Nothing at all.
Why, for nearly a century, did the entire population of England’s southern counties cheerfully connive at breaking the law? Because they did not like paying taxes? Nobody does. Were they all criminals?
Even the wisest legislators sometimes forget that, for the most part, government is just a business like any other. The entire population down to the humblest cottager now drank tea. The tax imposed on tea was so high that ordinary folk could not afford to pay it. Therefore they must either do without or find contraband. As much for this reason, probably, as any other, the smuggling business was not perceived as anything more than technically illegal. No one actually thought it was wrong. The law, in this instance, had no repute. Why, it was not even called smuggling. Free Trade was the name by which the enterprise was known; Free Traders were smugglers.
The case with brandy, and the many other goods shipped, was similar; but here a related factor came into play. The high level of duty actually created a potential profit margin: there was an inducement for a smuggling business to develop.
The obvious solution, one might have thought, would be to reduce the level of Customs duty. Ordinary folk might have had their tea and the smuggling trade become unprofitable. The Customs receipts would very likely have gone up. But this, it seems, never occurred to anyone – unless, of course, it had, and not every legislator wished to end the business.
The structure of the Free Trade was conventional. Profits on different commodities varied but on best brandy, the most favoured line, they ran roughly as follows.
A keg of brandy retailed in London, tax included, at about thirty-two shillings. Its cost price in France was half that. Selling at a discount of about thirty per cent off