During his final weeks in London, Erskine must have wondered whether he had made an error in accepting Richard’s offer of employment, especially when turning down a commission from the Dean and Chapter of Westminster to survey their estates. In January 1771 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society; one of his nominees was Benjamin Franklin. Before sailing to America, Erskine wrote Richard a heartfelt note: ‘I cannot have forgot the abject state to which I was reduced some years ago, nor can I ever fail calling to mind your kindness in suffering me to be a burthen to you. I am thus free in acknowledging my sentiments & obligations to prevent the most distant suspicion of ingratitude, which were it to rise in the bosom of such a friend would hurt me as much as anything I ever met with.’[7]
ALEXANDER FORDYCE was a banker well on his way to becoming one of the wealthiest men in the land; he was also the uncle of Richard’s physician friend George Fordyce, although just six years separated the older man from his nephew. It was Alexander who, having witnessed the deft way in which Richard dealt with Samuel Touchet’s unravelling affairs, had urged his associate Hutchison Mure to take on this impressive young clerk. Richard repaid the favour by offering Fordyce his unswerving loyalty.
Perhaps Fordyce saw something of himself in his protégé, for both men were the youngest children of provincial middle-class families. Fordyce had started out as the apprentice to an Aberdeen hosier, but soon leapt over the haberdasher’s counter and moved to London, where he found work as the outdoor clerk to a well-known banker. He started gambling in the public funds and stocks, and made a small fortune in 1762, towards the end of the Seven Years’ War, ‘at the time of signing the preliminaries of the late peace, of which he gained intelligence before the generality of the bulls and bears at Jonathans’.[8] He was less risk-averse than his peers and, for a while, a good deal luckier.
By 1768, Fordyce was managing partner of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down of Threadneedle Street. It was said that his ‘pride kept pace with the increase of his fortune’, and when the firm moved to premises opposite the Bank of England, he insisted that his name should be listed first on the brass plate, even making hollow threats to terminate the partnership if his senior partners did not comply.[9] Fordyce stood for Colchester in the general election that year, and Richard canvassed alongside him for several weeks. After spending £14,000 on wooing the townsfolk – a lavish sum, even by the venal standards of the day – Fordyce lost by twenty-four votes, an outcome he attempted fruitlessly to reverse by raining down charges of bribery and corruption on his opponents. ‘I really think we shall force the Mayor to return Mr. Fordyce,’ wrote Richard from the battlefield, with characteristic vim.[10]
At the height of his pomp, Fordyce purchased a princely country house at Roehampton, nine miles south-west of London, filling it with fine furniture and works of art – Raphael cartoons and suchlike – that gave every appearance of riches and sophistication. He landscaped its spacious grounds, which adjoined Richmond Park, in the naturalistic style promoted by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, felling an avenue of sixty mature elms using a contraption of Captain Bentinck’s devising ‘for drawing up trees by the roots’ – after wrapping a long chain around the trunk, it took four men about twenty minutes to prise each tree from the earth.[11]
Now, to complete his ascent to the pinnacle of society, Fordyce was on the hunt for a suitably dazzling wife. His brother James, a Presbyterian minister, was courting the governess to the children of the newly widowed Countess of Balcarres. (James Fordyce’s ponderous Sermons to Young Women, published in 1766, would later achieve dubious fame when Jane Austen had Mr Collins read them to the less-than-enthralled Bennet sisters.) Shortly after his brother’s engagement, Alexander Fordyce called upon Lady Balcarres while passing through Edinburgh, and was struck by her second daughter, Lady Margaret Lindsay, an auburn-haired girl of fifteen. The countess, at first appalled by the thought of such a vulgar connection, was soon won round – the Lindsays were poor by aristocratic standards, and the pecuniary advantages of the match were obvious. (By supporting the Jacobite uprising of 1715, the third Earl of Balcarres had ended his days under house arrest, leaving his estates deep in debt.) Fordyce married his noble bride in June 1770 at her ancestral home on the Fifeshire coast; he was forty, she was seventeen. They set off for London the next day.
IT IS AT THIS POINT in the story that Richard Atkinson comes at last into sharper focus; because Lady Anne Lindsay, the elder sister of his patron’s wife, was a dedicated lady of letters, and would go on to write about him at great length.
Anne Lindsay was a defiantly independent young woman who refused to conform to many of the conventions of submissive female behaviour. During her early years in Edinburgh, she had acquired a keen interest in literature and the arts, and a reputation as an accomplished conversationalist; she had also turned down a fair few proposals of marriage. She was thought very pretty, although perhaps not quite as arrestingly so as Margaret, from whom she had hitherto been inseparable. (The playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan would call them ‘Beauty’s twin-sisters’.)[12]
Anne would later describe how, during the lonely months after Margaret’s marriage, she daily climbed up to her little closet where, with pen in hand, she scribbled away ‘poetically and in prose’ in pursuit of ‘artificial happiness’.[13] That winter Anne wrote a ballad that may have reflected her own ambivalent feelings about the state of matrimony. ‘Auld Robin Grey’ told the story of a simple country girl who, believing her true love to be dead at sea, marries an old man out of duty; a few weeks later her sweetheart returns from his unexpectedly long voyage. This bitter-sweet song would become famous – William Wordsworth called it one of the ‘two best ballads, perhaps, of modern times’ – although Anne was always reticent about revealing herself as its author.[14]
During the spring of 1771, when she was twenty, Anne left Scotland to take up residence with the Fordyces in London. After five days on the road, her carriage pulled up at a small door in Holywell Lane, a narrow street off Shoreditch. The Fordyces were away at the time, at their country house, and Anne was ushered into the drab apartment by servants. As first impressions go, this did not augur well; had she not known that her brother-in-law was in the midst of building a splendid mansion in Grosvenor Square, she later commented, she would have been mortified by these surroundings, which offered no clues of elegance, apart from a pair of beeswax candles on the table ‘instead of the mutton-fats’ she was accustomed to.[15] At noon the following day, Anne spied the Fordyces’ coach with ‘three well-powdered footmen behind it’ pulling up outside the house; she ran downstairs, and the sisters tearfully embraced.[16]
She soon noticed a young man standing nearby, ‘his arms crossed, and with an expression of benevolence, admiration, and what the French call bonté in his countenance’. From this moment on, Anne Lindsay and Richard Atkinson – who, at thirty-two, was twelve years her senior – would get along famously. She immediately felt him to be a ‘sort of family friend’, with whom she was on the same ‘footing of ease’ as if she had always known him: ‘I was convinced I had done so, his countenance assured me of it; it was hearty, open, intelligent to the greatest degree, and it was impossible not to forgive the familiarity of his manners when ineffable good-humour and zeal was the basis.’ Social deference was not one of Richard’s habits. ‘Zooks,’ she recalled him saying, ‘life is too short for bowing and scraping. When people esteem one another beforehand, it should make short work of the business of introduction.’[17]
Even so, an earl’s daughter, arriving in London for the first time, was expected to observe certain formalities, foremost among them her presentation at court – it being reckoned ‘improper’ to be seen out in public until ‘their Majesties had had the first glance’.[18] Until then, Anne had been quite innocent of the distinction drawn by fashionable people between ‘the Man of the World and the Man of Business’, but she now perceived the gulf dividing ‘even the plain Country Gentleman’ from the ‘inhabitant of Cheapside’.[19] She also realized that her brother-in-law was a bore, and that the reason they did not receive many dinner invitations was because those who would have been delighted to welcome the sisters ‘would not consent to pay the tax of his company for the agrément of ours’. The dinners hosted by the Fordyces were dreary affairs, generally attended by a ‘few unpleasant men relieved only by the excellent Atkinson’. At one such gathering, Anne caught Richard gazing at her and Margaret with ‘an expression that had an esteem and reverence in it, that I thought was almost accompanied with a sad feeling that such a pair should be no better associated’.[20]
DURING THE SPRING of 1772, Richard began to notice that Fordyce was preoccupied; on top of the ‘hard bravery of manner and false spirits’ that he habitually projected, a certain wildness in his behaviour suggested something was wrong.[21] When Richard voiced his concerns, Fordyce burst into tears and confessed to business problems, then tried to laugh them off. Pressed further, Fordyce revealed that only a miracle would prevent his bankruptcy.
Early on the morning of 9 June, Fordyce, without warning, told Margaret and Anne that they must leave town immediately; he then bundled them into the coach ‘like frightened hares’, slammed the door and ordered the coachman to deliver them to the country house at Roehampton.[22] That evening, he returned to Holywell Lane and packed up his papers. Richard stayed with him through the night. Fordyce left shortly after dawn, instructing his clerk to inform his partners that it was ‘impracticable to carry on business’.[23] At noon on 10 June, the bank of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down stopped making payments.
While Fordyce lay low in an obscure corner of the city, Richard rushed to Roehampton. At about six o’clock he entered the parlour, finding Anne busy with her needles and silk; his face, she saw, was ‘pale and haggard’.[24] He took her hand and was silent for a moment, before revealing that Fordyce was ruined, and that bailiffs would soon be arriving to take possession of the house. The sisters hurriedly stuffed their clothes into bed sheets and set out for London in two coaches, the second of which was full of dresses. Richard did his best to buoy their spirits, but Anne soon realized he was masking his own fears. When she asked whether he had been caught up in Fordyce’s misfortunes, he replied ‘no’ with an agony that pierced her soul: ‘I saw that ruin hung impending over his own head, and that he spared to Margaret at that moment the knowledge of what would have added to her distress.’[25] Fordyce’s bachelor brother William, an eminent doctor, had offered the sisters sanctuary at his house in Sackville Street, off Piccadilly. In the gloaming of the physician’s parlour, Richard at last explained what had led to this catastrophe.
During the Falklands crisis of 1770, when it had briefly seemed that a diplomatic standoff between Britain and Spain over those remote South Atlantic islands might lead to war, Fordyce had gambled heavily on the stock market, paying handsomely for inside information from secret negotiations that were taking place on the continent. The news with which his spy had set sail ought to have made him a fortune; but a thick fog descended at sea, forcing the ship into port for twenty-four hours. Fordyce lost his advantage, and instead incurred large losses. More recently, Fordyce had received letters from India, sent by the faster but less reliable overland route via Basra, Aleppo and Constantinople, describing events that were almost guaranteed to bring down the East India Company’s stock price. He had quickly ‘borrowed’ an enormous quantity of stock and sold it short, intending to buy it back at a lower price and pocket the difference. But the stock price stubbornly refused to drop – instead it rose – so that when the day of settlement for Fordyce’s transaction arrived, he had a ‘difference of ten per cent to pay on half a million, some say, a million and a half, of India stock’.[26]
At the beginning of June 1772, the Bank of England, alarmed by a sudden decline in its gold reserves due to excessive demand from Scotland, announced that it would no longer accept many Scottish bills of exchange. These were the indispensable tools of credit of the time, pieces of paper on which one merchant made a promise to pay another a certain sum on a fixed date several months down the line. Bills of exchange were entirely transferable – they could be used by the recipient to pay a third party, or could be cashed sooner than the stated deadline, at a small discount, by a banker acting as a ‘bill broker’. They kept the wheels of commerce turning; the economist Adam Smith would vividly describe the role of paper bills, in providing a substitute for gold and silver coin, as ‘a sort of waggon-way through the air’.[27] Since much of the business of Neale, James, Fordyce & Down was with Scottish accounts, Fordyce could no longer obtain funds to cover his liabilities, and his opulent façade crumbled to dust.
RICHARD VISITED THE SISTERS the next morning, bringing the latest news from the City; so far there had been five major bankruptcies, and many more were expected. For now, Mure, Son & Atkinson held firm – but so closely intertwined were the affairs of the mercantile community that it was impossible to say whether it would survive. Later that day the wife of one of Fordyce’s partners, unhinged by her nine children’s reduced prospects, cut her own throat with a razor.
By now Fordyce was universally reviled, especially since it was rumoured he had hidden large sums from his creditors. With many bailiffs out to take him into custody, it was decided that the following Sunday, 14 June, by the light of the full moon, he would ride down to a port on the south coast and slip away to France; for his ledgers were in such disarray that to open them up to scrutiny at this point would only further blacken his name. On the continent he would have time to smooth out any irregularities within his accounts; and then, within the three months’ deadline imposed by the bankruptcy laws, he could return to London and face justice.
Fordyce had not seen his wife since before the crisis began, and a last visit was fixed for ten o’clock on the night of his departure. Margaret begged Richard to be present – both sisters had come to rely upon his support – but asked him to delay his arrival by half an hour so that Fordyce, who would doubtless be in great distress, might have time to compose himself. When Richard turned up at Sackville Street – tactfully late as requested – he found the sisters, as well as William and George Fordyce, anxiously waiting in the parlour. At last there was a hammering at the front door, and Alexander entered in a mood of such exuberance that ‘had a cannon-ball swept us all low, the company would not have had their powers more annihilated than by his manner’. Watching Fordyce drain great bumpers of port, as though celebrating some triumph, Anne wondered whether he had been ‘deranged by his misfortunes’, but on balance thought not, for she could detect ‘no phrenzy in his eyes’. Richard had noticed some ‘ugly fellows’ lurking on the street corner as he was arriving, and he went home just before midnight, wearing Fordyce’s clothes to act as a decoy.[28] Fordyce himself departed several hours later, after arguing violently with his wife. Later that morning all were relieved to hear that he had left for Dover, taking £100 advanced by Richard to cover his expenses.
The crisis came to a head in London on 22 June. ‘It is beyond the power of words to describe the general consternation of the metropolis at this instant,’ reported the Gentleman’s Magazine. ‘The whole city was in an uproar; many of the first families in tears.’[29] The day started with the news that one of the City’s greatest banks had stopped payment, having rashly accepted £100,000 worth of Scottish bills, and a false rumour was circulating that the Bank of England would soon follow suit. At the Adam brothers’ ambitious Adelphi housing development near Charing Cross, where the largely Scots workforce were entertained by perambulating bagpipers, two thousand men were laid off.
Horace Walpole, the wittiest commentator of his day, offered a characteristically lively appraisal. ‘Will you believe,’ he wrote, ‘that one rascally and extravagant banker had brought Britannia, Queen of the Indies, to the precipice of bankruptcy!’ A story, repeated by Walpole, did the rounds that Fordyce had visited a Quaker banker, begging for a loan. ‘I have known several persons ruined by two dice,’ the old man was said to have replied, ‘but I will not be ruined by Four dice.’[30]
Relative calm only returned to the London markets later in the week, after the Bank of England stepped in to offer credit to some of the City’s most reputable merchants and financiers. But it would not prop up the Ayr Bank, a splashy new operation underwritten by two dukes – Queensberry and Buccleuch – which had over the previous three years pumped out some £200,000 in paper notes. The Ayr Bank stopped payments of coin for their notes on 25 June. ‘We are here in a very melancholy Situation,’ wrote David Hume, in Edinburgh, to Adam Smith, who was hard at work on The Wealth of Nations. ‘The Carron Company is reeling, which is one of the greatest Calamities of the whole, as they gave Employment to near 10,000 People. Do these Events any-wise affect your Theory? Or will it occasion the revisal of any chapters?’[31]
Alexander Fordyce, clutching a purse full of gold and a ‘Scotch Bill’ for £10,000.
© The Trustees of the British Museum
LADY ERSKINE, a young widow with a highly developed sense of social decorum, took pity on the Lindsay sisters in the last week of June, and invited them to stay with her in Hanover Square. After breakfast on their first morning there, a ‘visitor of considerable fashion’ called on their hostess; a few minutes later, Richard’s arrival was announced. The sisters squirmed with embarrassment. He clearly had no idea that an invitation from Lady Erskine might be necessary, or that he should at least have asked them to pave the way for his call by mentioning that he might wish to see them – such delicacies as these ‘his heart would have scouted as the frippery of politeness’. As he strode across the drawing room to greet them, Anne noticed the reaction of their hostess. ‘The chill of Lady Erskine’s regard, I might say the contempt,’ she recalled, ‘might have driven all the warm blood of Atkinson’s body into his heart, like the drop of brandy which is above all proof, had he perceived it; but he was not thinking about her, and was blind as a beetle.’[32]
Richard had come with the latest news from the City. Now that the worst was over, he said, it was time ‘to bury the dead, and support those who have survived it’. Soon the first visitor left, and since Lady Erskine’s frostiness had been ‘only to mark to the other that he was not one of her set, being a citizen, and one of the people employed to stop if possible the fall of the Stocks’, she was now perfectly civil towards him. ‘Your Mr. Atkinson,’ she remarked to the sisters after he had taken his leave, ‘I really take to be a good creature.’ Her loftiness vexed them; as Anne later wrote:
To have been angry would have placed us in the wrong; was he not a good creature? And the best of all good creatures? He was not a man of fashion. Why then be angry at Lady Erskine for calling him what he was? Because we wished her to respect him both on our account and his own, and she would not give a particle more than was barely due to him whom she esteemed mauvais ton, which was with her the greatest nuisance it was possible to bring into society. His smile, his bow, his method of walking straight down the throat of the person he talked to, all put her more out of temper than I thought her collected manner would have condescended to be.[33]
Soon afterwards, the Countess of Balcarres arrived to take her daughters home to Scotland. ‘It was the kind Atkinson who had our last sorrowful look on departing,’ Anne recalled. ‘He stood at the door of the carriage as if he was losing his all for the first time.’[34] Before heading north, the sisters spent a month with their uncle in Hertfordshire. The summer had been hot and dry, and a haze of dust lingered over the fields. One day, as her stay was drawing to a close, Anne was taking a ‘little melancholy walk’ in a shrubbery that opened on to the road, when a carriage stopped and Richard jumped out: ‘I screamed for joy, and ran up to him as to our good Angel, could one be supposed stepping out of a Post-chaise.’ So busy had Richard been salvaging his own affairs that he had barely left his desk during the intervening weeks. Anne asked him how much the partnership of Mure, Son & Atkinson had lost. ‘By everything I can guess,’ he replied, ‘the sum will be above two & forty thousand pounds.’ When she wondered what proportion of this amount he was personally liable for, he grasped her hand. ‘Such a part,’ he said, ‘as sweeps bare every foundation on which presumption might have dared to build her castle.’[35]
AFTER A SUMMER of speculation about the whereabouts of the rogue banker – ‘Mr. Fordyce must be a most compleat Ubiquarian,’ observed one newspaper, ‘since he possesses the strange power, if we credit what the public prints assert, of his being almost at the same instant in Holland, Italy, France and England’ – he returned on 6 September.[36] He was lucky to be alive. A mile off the coast at Rye, the cutter on which Fordyce was crossing had snagged a wreck, gouging a hole in its bottom; the leak was temporarily plugged by a barrel of salt beef, and he and his fellow passengers had been rescued by a passing boat.
At midday on 12 September, passing with difficulty through the crowd gathered to jeer at him, Fordyce entered Guildhall. For the first two hours of his bankruptcy hearing, a succession of debts were proved before the commissioners, including £16,000 to the Bank of England and £35,000 to Mure, Son & Atkinson. Then the creditors began to interrogate Fordyce, first wishing to know how much of their money he had absconded with – to which Fordyce tearfully responded that, far from this being true, he had been obliged ‘to borrow a small trifle from a friend, to pay for a few pair of stockings which he had occasion for on his journey’.[37] Some of the creditors were suspicious of Richard’s role, observing that Fordyce had transferred large sums of money into his account during the week leading up to 9 June; but Fordyce accounted for this, explaining that Richard was a ‘particular friend’ who had ‘on emergencies, given him bills on the Bank, which he gave in payment to the Bank Clerks in the morning and refunded the money to Mr. Atkinson in the afternoon’.[38]
The commissioners proved compassionate; they even returned Fordyce’s pocket watch and Margaret’s jewellery. ‘The benevolent temper of the English nation never appeared more strongly than at Mr. Fordyce’s examination last Saturday,’ reported the London Chronicle. ‘Calumniated as he had been in all the public prints, the moment he shewed himself only intentionally upright, resentment gave way to commiseration; his misfortunes even added dignity to his character, and the very rabble grumbled pity.’[39]
After the trial, the contents of the Fordyce residences were sold off at auction. Richard purchased a pair of horses, which he presented to Margaret; another kind creditor bought back her carriage. The playwright Samuel Foote acquired a single pillow; on being asked what possible use he could have for such an item, he was said to have answered: ‘Why, to tell you the truth, I do not sleep very well at night, and I am sure this must give me many a good nap, when the proprietor of it (though he owed so much) could sleep upon it.’[40] Foote’s next production, a satire called The Bankrupt, would draw heavily on Fordyce’s woes.