Читать книгу A Very English Deceit: The Secret History of the South Sea Bubble and the First Great Financial Scandal - Malcolm Balen - Страница 8

George Soros became frustrated because his huge wealth seemed to give him no political influence in the West. He realized he needed to become a public personality. In the late summer of 1992, a time of great pressure on European institutions, he didso with a vengeance. He shorted, betting that the pound would not be able to hold its value against other currencies traded within the Exchange RateMechanism. On Sept. 16, with Soros and others selling pounds, the British government responded by raising interest rates 2 percentage points to attract buyers. By evening sterling had been forced from the ERM. Soros scooped up $1 billion from that escapade and became known all over the world as the Man Who Broke theBank of England. ‘I had no platform,’ he says today. ‘So I deliberately [did] the sterling thing to create a platform. Obviously people care about the man who made a lot of money.’Time.com, 1 September 1997

John Blunt was not a handsome man. He was fat and pompous, and a very different character from John Law. Unlike with Law, there would be no madcap chase for the wilder things in life, nor any occasion when, through gambling, he would have to sell his family home or be bailed out by his mother. He had one aim in life, which was to better himself through business. His would be a focused search for wealth and power. Unlike Law, he had no intellectual backbone – he simply had a desire to get rich quick.

But John Blunt did have one redeeming quality. Whilst he was loud and overbearing, he possessed great self-confidence, even charisma; he was on the make but charming – a man bursting with ideas and energy, who dominated any group. His gift was for making money, and he would prove himself to be an inspired promoter of companies. Within a decade he would become rich from backing a project to bring water into London, despite the rivalry of the New River Company, and another for the manufacture of linen. Within a decade, too, he would move closer to the political world, winning election in the City as a councillor in the Cornhill ward, which included Exchange Alley. Blunt was religious, a Baptist by faith, and as the years went by the three worlds of business, politics and religion would merge seamlessly to his advantage.

Blunt was the son of a reasonably well-off shoemaker in Rochester; but he had come up, if not the hard way, then via a route that was tougher than Law’s relatively privileged upbringing in Scotland. He had started his working life as a humble member of the Worshipful Company of Scriveners, serving his apprenticeship in Holborn, London. Fittingly, for someone who wanted to aim high, his company’s coat of arms was an eagle, coloured gold, standing on a red book, its wings raised, poised to soar. Blunt’s choice of profession may have been a deliberate step in his planned path to power and influence. The scriveners were originally a kind of legal assistant, calligraphers with a monopoly on the paperwork for buying and selling houses. Gradually this gave them inside knowledge of the business affairs of merchants and landowners, and they became brokers who negotiated loans, an early type of merchant banker or land speculator. Such was the range of their financial activities that they seemed to occupy no firm place in society; one scrivener might tidy up the legal affairs of large estates, to the chagrin of the lawyers, while another might make his living by acting as a moneylender.

It was, in all, a fitting profession for a man on the make. During his long apprenticeship to Daniel Richards in Birchin Lane, on the perimeter of Exchange Alley, where he wrote letters for a groat (or sixpence), Blunt built up a view of English society, steeping himself in the knowledge of who was rich and who was poor, and those who seemed well-to-do but were just keeping up appearances. But few scriveners became as rich as the goldsmith-bankers like John Law’s father, who could lend large sums on credit, and make much more in return. The motto of the scriveners through the years was Scribite scientes – ‘Write, learned men.’ For Blunt, this was just a means to an end. He wanted to be the exception to the rule that few scriveners rose to great wealth or eminence in the City. In 1689, at the age of twenty-five, he left his apprenticeship to seek out new opportunities. Within four months of leaving his apprenticeship, he was married, a first step on the ladder towards social respectability – the string of affairs which John Law had enjoyed was not for Blunt. His choice of bride was Elizabeth Court, who came from a solid Warwickshire family. Blunt had married above himself, but not indecently so. A second marriage further up the social scale, to the daughter of a former Governor of Bengal, would come later.

Blunt was seeking his fortune in an England humming with new ideas. In the 1690s, the moneyed-men, grown rich on lending to the government, had begun to promote an extraordinary range of companies. The catalyst had been the success of a sea captain, one Captain Phipps, who had salvaged Spanish silver by the ton and precious jewels by the sackful from the bottom of the sea off the island of Hispaniola in the West Indies. He returned to England in triumph and to an instant knighthood: his backers had made an extraordinary 10,000 per cent profit on the adventure, a sum close to £200,000 – many millions of pounds today. Inspired by the captain’s success, copycat diving companies had arisen by the dozen, many of which came to London to show off their new deep-sea devices in a public demonstration on the Thames. The novelist and pamphleteer Daniel Defoe invested, and lost, £200 in one diving firm; he also owned a brick and tile factory on marshland near Tilbury, and, more quixotically, seventy civet cats – a leading scientist had once advocated breeding them for the secretion of their glands, which was a basic essence in the manufacture of perfume. The many other projects calling for investors to back them ranged from the Night Engine Company, which patented a burglar alarm, to the ‘Company for the Sucking-Worm Engines’ which had invented a machine to put out fire. Until 1697 when the impecunious government debased the coinage, puncturing investor confidence and putting many firms out of business, the stock market thrived. One coffee trader, John Houghton, published a twice-weekly paper listing share prices, taking care to explain to his readers the mysteries of the new profession: ‘The manner of the trade is this: the monied-man goes among the brokers and asks how stocks go? And upon information, bids the broker buy or sell so many shares of such and such stocks if he can, at such and such prices. Then he tries what he can do among those that have stocks, or the power to sell them, and if he can, makes a bargain.’

In such a speculative age, Blunt, with his glib personality and gift of the gab, was a man of his time, just as Law was far ahead of it. His initial route to power was through a company whose original business matched the bellicose nature of the times: the Sword Blade Company.

At the turn of the century, the Sword Blade Company had spotted a gap in the arms market. The English rapier, heavy and flat, was considered both by combatants and by those who wished, more peaceably, merely to make a fashion statement, to be less effective and less pleasing on the eye than the French equivalent, which had a grooved blade. From 1691 the Sword Blade Company, helped by some imported Huguenot craftsmen, was granted a charter to make French blades in England. But the company was soon to widen its horizons and change direction. It moved to Birchin Lane, and John Blunt became its company secretary. Working with him were three men who would play leading roles in the development of the South Sea Company: the goldsmith Elias Turner would become the Governor of the Company; Jacob Sawbridge, the Deputy Governor; and the third was George Caswall, whose family had held the Leominster seat in Parliament for more than a hundred years.

The Sword Blade Company was a child of its aggressive times, an exploiter of the government’s financial difficulties, and the progenitor of the most corrupt financial institution the country was ever to spawn. The company’s first step was to buy up large tracts of Ireland, at the bottom of the market, acquiring for about £200,000 land worth £20,000 a year in rents. To bankroll its purchase, it decided to issue stock in the company. It did so in a complicated but highly profitable manner, announcing that it would exchange its stock not for money but for government debts called ‘army debentures’. Debentures were slips of paper given to people who had lent money to the government, a type of IOU issued by the Paymaster of the Forces to raise money for the constant state of war. The debts were unsecured, however, and had fallen in value since they first came on the market.

The Sword Blade’s idea was to call in as many debentures as it could from the people who had lent the government money, by offering them what looked like a profitable exchange deal. The debentures stood at 85 on the stock market, and their holders were offered, in return, Sword Blade shares worth 100. How then could the company make a profit? The answer was that it had, effectively, rigged the market through what today would be called ‘insider trading’. It simply bought up as many debentures as cheaply as it could before announcing its plans, knowing that the scale of its share-swap scheme would cause their price to rise. By this method, the company made an estimated profit of around £25,000. The government, too, was satisfied. As well as buying land from it, the company lent it some £20,000 at a low level of interest as a ‘sweetener’ to facilitate the business between them. Through its financial adventures it became the Sword Blade Bank. It was a key moment in its history, the turning point in what became a growing, and corrupt, entanglement with affairs of state.

The Bank of England looked on unamused. Its banking monopoly had been enshrined in an Act of 1697, and now it seemed the Sword Blade Company was acting as a land bank, not just as a land corporation. Treasury lawyers pored over the case, and pronounced in favour of the Bank, but no action was ever taken. The deal had been too profitable for the government. But there was worse to come for the Bank of England. A mysterious syndicate, its backers unknown but almost certainly including partners from the Sword Blade Company, offered to lend the government £1.5 million. The Bank could clearly see the danger of such a manoeuvre by its unknown rival. Its charter had only three more years to run, and only by offering to match the size of the loan, and by cutting interest rates to 4.5 per cent, did it see off the threat to its position. Its reward was the extension of its charter to 1732.

This early skirmish between the two rivals presaged what would be in 1720 their all-out hostility, and the government seemed to be the beneficiary, paying less for its money than before. But the charter’s extension still proved to be a problem for the Chancellor, Robert Harley. The government had, by confirming the Bank’s monopoly, tied itself to a single banking institution to raise money for its conflicts and, over the next three years, the Bank increasingly struggled to deliver. What else could Harley do?

In 1710, battling with the nation’s finances, he was impressed by the acumen of John Blunt, and the profit he was making. Harley began to discuss the issue of the national debt with Blunt in the hope of finding a radical solution. The first proposal that his new ally put forward, however, was distinctly traditional. Just five years after John Law had produced what would turn out to be one of the greatest analyses of the eighteenth century as a possible cure for Scotland’s economic ills, Blunt persuaded Harley to resurrect the old Whig solution of the lottery; and to let him run a far bigger game than the one which had captured von Uffenbach’s attention in the Banqueting House back in 1710, one which offered even bigger cash prizes and was more a game of chance. It would capitalise on the general fever for gambling and have the delightful side-effect, if it succeeded, of wresting some financial control from the Whig-dominated Bank of England. On 3 March 1711, the new lottery was launched.

Ostensibly, it was the traditional way of raising loans, to be paid back through yearly payments, or annuities, at a guaranteed rate of interest. One hundred and fifty thousand numbered tickets, costing £10 each, were to be sold, inscribed with the legend: ‘This ticket entitles the bearer to ten Pounds to be paid in due course with Interest to commence from the Nine and twenty Day of September One thousand seven hundred and eleven or a better chance’ – that is, a prize. Interest was to be paid at 6 per cent. But Blunt had made big changes to the scale of the prize money. There were 25,000 prizes to be won, with the smallest at £20 and the largest at a staggering £12,000. The first and last tickets drawn out of the box would win an extra £500. In total, more than £678,000 – nearly as much as it cost to build St Paul’s Cathedral – was to be given away in prize money. Not surprisingly, the lottery was a tremendous success. One knight of the realm complained to a friend who asked him to buy tickets: ‘You may assure yourself that I used my endeavours to have put your money in the Lottery, but it was impossible to do it though I was very early that morning in the City, and a vast number of persons was disappointed as well as myself … As for buying up tickets, I cannot tell how to advise you, such advantage is made of them by the stock-jobbers.’

John Blunt was on his way to the top, but at a price. The lottery was the first to raise huge sums for the state, triggering a succession of similar enterprises over the next decade, while weighing down the government with the annuities it was obliged to pay to the subscribers. By raising the stakes with such large prize money, the lottery also prepared the ground for the grand speculation of 1720. Eventually, there was to be an explosion of investment which made Wren’s continual pleas for cash to fund his dome seem like requests for loose change, rather than the serious financial commitment that Parliament invariably resisted.

After the triumph of his first lottery, Blunt immediately marketed his second, known as ‘the Adventure of Two Millions’ or ‘the Classis’. Never before had the state attempted to hold a lottery on this scale; the tickets cost £100, which was half the annual income of a middle-class family and ten times the income of a manservant. The top prize was £20,000, the equivalent of the multimillion-pound jackpot today. The tickets were within the reach of only the very rich, except when the stockjobbers sold shares in them. But Blunt’s revolutionary idea was to divide the draw into five ranks, or classes, each with a different level of prizes. In the First Classis (or section), 1,330 tickets would win prizes ranging from £110 to £1,000. Then the prize money was stepped up: in the Second Classis, 2,670 tickets would win between £115 and £3,000; in the Third Classis there were 4,000 prizes, from £120 to £4,000; in the Fourth Classis, 5,340 tickets would win £125 to £5,000; and in the final draw, the Fifth Classis, there were 6,660 winning tickets with prizes ranging from £130 to the top prize, again, of £20,000. In effect, there were five different lotteries, draw succeeding draw so as to build the excitement to fever pitch. If their number did not come up, investors would not know whether to be pleased or disappointed until the last ticket of the fifth and final draw was produced from the box to win the biggest prize of all.

The Sword Blade Company was in charge of marketing the game, and all the tickets were sold within nine days. In this short space of time, Blunt’s two lotteries raised £3.5 million. Some investors were either very lucky, or bought heavily: the Duchess of Newcastle won eleven times, the Dukes of Rutland and Buckingham eight times. In the Second Classis an apothecary from Reading, Robert Dean, won the top prize of £3,000; in the Third, a gentleman from Westminster, Thomas Layton, the £4,000 jackpot. In the Fourth, Thomas Scawen, an alderman from London, won the £3,000 prize; another London merchant, John Upton, £4,000; and a gentleman from Northamptonshire, John Hunt, the top prize of £5,000. In the Fifth Classis, ‘The Hon. Thomas Cornwallis of St Martins in ye Fields, esquire’ won £3,000; a London scrivener, James Colebrook, £4,000, and Samuel Strode, a London surgeon, £5,000. The final ticket to be drawn belonged to Thomas Weddell, a merchant of Gray’s Inn, who scooped the £20,000 jackpot.

Encouraged by their success, Blunt and Harley now set to work on their most ambitious scheme of all: to try to find a way to reduce the national debt. The government owed money everywhere, in a confusing tangle of loans. There were the goldsmiths and moneyed-men who had lent it money; there were the holders of lottery tickets, and the holders of the Treasury’s notched hazel tallies; then there was money raised by the Army, the Navy, the customs, the Commissioners of Victualling – the government’s obligations seemed endless.

Harley’s idea was to found a trading company. It was a move that appeared conventional enough. Trade and war were the unholy twins of commerce. It suited both the financial nostrums and the bellicosity of England to develop a new company which would trade abroad and, if necessary, kill natives in order to repatriate the proceeds. Daniel Defoe, who was a lifelong admirer of Sir Walter Raleigh, had long been captivated by the spirit of Elizabethan adventurism and impressed by the vast profits that Spain was still coining from its colonies. Galleons from Mexico and South America were held to carry dazzling cargoes of gold, silver and jewels, but Defoe had consistently argued that there was an even greater profit to be made if the trade was better managed. There is no evidence that Blunt and Harley were swayed by Defoe’s arguments, but he reflected the spirit of the times. There was, the pair agreed, a huge commercial prize to be won in South America, offering a ready market for English cloth, with an endless supply of gold and silver in payment.

But Harley was also taking a politically radical step: he intended the proposed trading company to become a new financial institution to rival the Bank of England and the East India Company. On 2 May 1711, when he announced the new company’s formation, he declared that not only would it trade in the South Seas but it also aimed to take over the ‘floating’ portion of the national debt, put at £9 million: this was the debt that could be paid off if the government had enough money, rather than the fixed sums it had agreed to pay to annuitants for many years ahead at generous rates of interest. The company would ask the government’s creditors to exchange the money they were owed, directly, for shares in the new trading venture. To help service the interest on the debt, the company itself would be paid more than half a million pounds a year by the government.

Harley’s spirits were high, and found a ready outlet in symbolism. The company was awarded a coat of arms, designed by the College of Heralds and emblazoned with the motto A Gadibus usque Auroram – ‘From Cadiz [still held to be the empire’s last outpost] to the Dawn’. And, in keeping with its heraldry, it was given a suitably grandiose, if overly optimistic, monopoly on trade. It was granted the right to the ‘sole trade and traffick, from 1 August 1711, into unto and from the Kingdoms, lands etc. of America, on the east side from the river Aranoca, to the southernmost part of the Terra del Fuego, on the west side thereof, from the said southernmost part through the South Seas to the northernmost part of America, and unto, into and from all countries in the same limits, reputed to belong to the Crown of Spain, or which shall hereafter be discovered’.

Ominously, however, there would have to be a peace deal with Spain and France if the lands which were ‘reputed to belong to the Crown of Spain’ were to yield their supposed riches to the company’s trading vessels. There were therefore two big catches: peace had to be struck on advantageous terms; and the conceded territories had to yield the fabulous wealth which it was so fondly imagined they possessed. The government’s propaganda machine, ably spearheaded by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift, went into action. They printed lists of exports which might prove suitable on the markets of South America, from silk handkerchiefs to Cheshire cheese, and they spun stories of South American wealth, the ready market for exports and the generous profits to be made from the slave trade. Portugal had been actively engaged in the traffic in African slaves for more than two centuries; Spain had built a lucrative sugar empire by importing slave labour to the New World. Harley was right to think the profits could be immense: between 1698 and 1708 a stake in the Portuguese slave trade to Jamaica had earned the English government £200,000 a year in bullion. Within half a century, Britain would be shipping a third of a million slaves to the New World and the national economy would depend on the trade.

Aided by his propagandists, Harley’s plan succeeded in capturing the imagination of investors. Some of them were political opponents who saw a chance to make money. Some were Dutch or Italian financiers, some were merchants, some were goldsmiths. Blunt and his team of directors also bought thousands of pounds’ worth of shares, believing they would make their fortune from the enterprise. Intellectuals such as Swift and Isaac Newton held stock, as did a large number of women. So too, curiously, did government departments.

But if Harley was genuinely attracted by the bold adventurism of the project, by the prospect of faraway riches which would replenish the war-weary coffers of the Exchequer, there were to be other consequences far closer to home. Blunt had won for himself a political and financial lever, a place in society and a position in the City. The Bank of England, officially, might have managed to protect its position, but a rival had been born and – whether it considered it or not – the Bank could not predict what sort of creature it might become. A company which had begun life by making sword blades had turned to land speculation. From land, it was now venturing out to sea. Where next?

On 10 September 1711 the South Sea Company was formally created, with Harley as its Governor. Nine of the thirty appointments were political, and five came from the Sword Blade Bank itself.

Not one of them had any experience of trading with South America.

For now, the political and financial path which had led to the formation of the company appeared to be one and the same. Harley genuinely wanted peace with Spain and France, and believed he could extract, as its price, the right to trade in the southern seas. But first he had to negotiate a deal. Peace, if it was to be struck, had to be struck quickly, so as to enable the South Sea Company to trade successfully and pay off the portion of the national debt it had shouldered. Harley had already begun the process, but he had failed to inform Parliament, and he did not yet have its consent.

Harley had the support of his party and of the country: both thought the war had to end. But the Whig-dominated House of Lords was in a rage, and mobilised for attack. Their aim was to bring down the Tory ministry in a political contest that ranged the old aristocratic Whig order against the upstart who was running the country. In some desperation, Harley tried to delay the return of Parliament, which was in recess. But confrontation at some point was inevitable, a sure sign of which was the propaganda war unleashed by Harley and his pet pamphleteer, Daniel Defoe.

For polemical persuasiveness Defoe had few equals. In his pamphlets on The Balance of Europe, an Essay upon the National Credit of England, and in Reasons why this Nation ought to put a Speedy END to this Expensive WAR, where Defoe argued his most trenchant case of all, the ink flowed as thick and fast as the imagery:

How have we above twenty years groaned under a long and a bloody war? How often has our most remote view of peace gladdened our souls and cheered up our spirits. Our stocks have always risen and fallen, as the prospects we had of that amiable object were near or remote.

Now we see our treasure lost, our funds exhausted, all our public revenues sold, mortgaged, and anticipated, vast and endless interests entailed upon our posterity, the whole kingdom sold to usury, and an immense treasure turned into an immense debt to pay; we went out full, but we are returned empty.

But even with Defoe on his side, Harley faced a struggle to get his policy accepted. When he could avoid a vote on his peace moves no longer, he found himself defeated by a majority of one. His policy lay in tatters. But Harley was adamant that he would not be forced from office, and circumvented the Lords’ hostility by creating a dozen peers to back his peace policy, and with it secure the future of the fledgling South Sea Company. Emboldened, he moved against his Whig enemies by charging the Duke of Marlborough and Robert Walpole with corruption over the Army’s accounts, sending Walpole to the Tower.

For Harley it was now imperative to circumvent Parliament and strike a peace deal, whatever the cost. Despite the peace negotiations led by the poet and diplomat Matthew Prior the spring campaign against the French was about to start, with the Duke of Ormonde leading British, German and Dutch forces in Flanders. So the British politicians decided to sabotage their own battle plan. The allied forces were ordered by the leading Tory minister Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, to avoid fighting. Worse still, and with official sanction, via a go-between he revealed the battle plan to the French foreign minister. Then he sent the infamous ‘Restraining Orders’ to the Duke of Ormonde: ‘It is the Queen’s positive command to your Grace that you must avoid engaging in any siege, or hazarding a battle, till you have further orders from Her Majesty.’ Ormonde was in an impossible position: he was the leader of an army which had been forced to keep the peace by not fighting at all. He was not even allowed to tell his allies, but was ordered to make excuses for the attack’s delay, until finally – to the amazement of the allies – the French and British announced their truce.

But the French now advanced on the allied army, capturing town after town, inflicting defeat after defeat on a force which, until the British treachery, had confidently expected to win the war. It was one of the most discreditable episodes in British history. It was peace, but not with honour. In the light of future events it was appropriate that it was on the back of this disgrace that the South Sea Company was launched. Bonfires were lit around the country to celebrate its foundation.

But political and financial interests now started, unnoticed, to spin apart. They were two halves of a lottery ticket which at first sight appeared to join but whose flourishes failed to match. In September 1711, Harley addressed the South Sea directors but, significantly, failed to admit he had abandoned his peace demands for trading settlements in South America. In January 1712, the South Sea directors, secure in their ignorance, informed Harley, now Earl of Oxford, that they wanted to raise an expeditionary force of four thousand soldiers, forty transport ships, twenty men-of-war, plus store ships and hospital ships. Harley, keeping his secret to himself, began to stay away from the directors’ meetings. By September, twelve hundred tons of merchandise lay rotting in London warehouses, awaiting dispatch to the South Seas.

In March 1713, eighteen months after he had conceived the South Sea Company, a peace deal was finally signed at Utrecht. Harley had triumphed over the old generation, steeped in war. But in return for the decades of fighting, Britain had won a comparatively trifling prize: a thirty-year slaving contract, and a licence to send a single merchant ship a year on a direct mission to one of the seven ports where the Company was allowed to set up trading stations, but not to establish settlements: Buenos Aires, Caracas, Cartagena, Havana, Panama, Portobello and Vera Cruz. Britain had won no territorial guarantees near the South Seas as a result of the peace treaty. The war was over, though, and Harley stood at last unchallenged on the political stage.

But the child of Harley’s peace project, the South Sea Company, was in fact becalmed. The next year, seven ships, including the Hope and the Liberty, carried more than 2,500 slaves – voyages financed by the Company raising £200,000 in bonds. But it never made a profit in its cargo of human flesh, not least because the Spanish charged such heavy taxes. Then Queen Anne declared that she had the right to keep a quarter of any profits. But the Company must take its share of the blame for its failure to make money: in 1714 it took woollens to Cartagena, where there was no market for them, rather than to Vera Cruz, where there was, so they were left behind to be eaten by the moths and rats. By default, if not intention, the Company had become nothing more than a financial corporation, a ship to float the national debt. As a trading enterprise, it effectively lay at anchor.

By 1713, Harley, too, was going nowhere. The political combination of middle-ground Tories he had put together had proved to be a temporary structure without firm foundations. Harley was hemmed in, too, on the other side, by the Tory hardliners in the October Club, whose members drank together in Westminster and proudly took their name from the month in which the strongest beer was brewed. Their constant harassment of the government to try to shake it out of its moderation on occasions ground the Commons’ business to a halt. With the war over, and with credit seemingly restored, Harley could not give his party what it most wanted: clear and decisive Tory leadership. He had not even managed to rid himself of the national debt: by the end of his rule, the government owed another £9 million from the lotteries which Harley had continued to run. Ironically, this sum exactly matched the amount of government debt the South Sea Company had taken over.

The pressure told. Like many a politician, he had found solace in drink. On 25 July 1714 Anne was finally forced to sack Harley from his post. She told the Lords he ‘neglected all business; that he was seldom to be understood; that when he did explain himself she could not depend upon the truth of what he said; that he never came to her at the time she appointed; that he often came drunk; that lastly, to crown all, he behaved himself toward her with ill manner, indecency and disrespect’. She would not reign long without him: she was dead within the week.

The Hanoverian era was upon the country and with it a change in political power. George I had a distaste for the Tories matched only by the contempt he held for a foreign kingdom which could never match his beloved homeland. Harley was to be impeached for ‘high treason and other crimes and misdemeanours’. In contrast, his Whig rival, Robert Walpole, who had been sent to the Tower for corruption, had been handed a route back to office. Before he left his prison, he penned a note to his sister Dorothy:

Dear Dolly,

I am sure it will be a satisfaction to you to know that this barbarous injustice being only the effect of party malice, does not concern me at all and I heartily despise what I shall one day revenge, my innocence was so evident that I am confident that those who voted me guilty did not believe me so.

His enemies should have taken note. Robert Walpole would prove to have a long memory.