EIGHT

A Heartbreaking Letter

LADY ANNE LINDSAY’S self-imposed exile in Scotland, following her brother-in-law Fordyce’s bankruptcy, would last four years. In Edinburgh, that great city of the Enlightenment, she would shine in the company of some brilliant older men, notably the philosophers David Hume and Lord Monboddo. At one memorable dinner, hosted by the physician Sir Alexander Dick in 1773, she even managed to impress Samuel Johnson.

The famous doctor of letters, then sixty-three, was touring Scotland at the time with the ‘faithful Bozzy, his friend, adorer and biographer’. The old Countess of Eglinton, Johnson told the spellbound company, always called him ‘Son’, since he had been born the year after she was married. James Boswell interrupted to correct the great man – no, he said, it was the year before she was married. ‘Had that been the case,’ Johnson retorted, ‘she would have had little to boast of.’ At this point Anne piped up: ‘Would not the Son have excused the Sin?’ Prior to her interjection, Anne noticed, Johnson had been ‘disposed to be sulky’, but afterwards he became ‘excessively agreeable & entertaining’. Most pleasingly, she had later watched Boswell ‘steal to the window to put down the Jeu de mot in his commonplace book’.[1]

It was during these years that Anne would make the acquaintance of Henry Dundas, an ambitious young lawyer who had lost much of his fortune in the banking crash of 1772, and had recently been elected to parliament for the first time. Anne’s friendship with Dundas was never quite straightforward; the ‘partiality’ he formed for her ‘had for its basis nothing at all’, as she recalled it. ‘It was a hearty, serviceable, admiring, gallant good-will, such as was in his nature for all womankind, old and young, tho’ more particularly for the young.’[2]

Lady Margaret Fordyce’s time in Scotland had been curtailed by the unwelcome discovery that the £500 a year settled on her by her husband before their marriage, while safe from the grasp of his creditors, was dependent on their living together. She returned to London, and they set up home at Harley Street in Marylebone, on the unfashionable north side of Oxford Street. Their reconciliation proved merely perfunctory, but luckily he was often away. In a typically outlandish bid to make a new fortune, Alexander Fordyce was busy setting up a chemical works at South Shields, near Newcastle, to harness a method of manufacturing ‘fossil alkali’ (sodium carbonate) and ‘marine acid’ (hydrochloric acid) which had recently been discovered by his chemist nephew George.

It was only in 1777, when she was twenty-six, that Anne decided to move back to London, after a modest legacy from her grandmother endowed her with some financial independence. Despite their connection to the notorious bankrupt Fordyce, the sisters still had an entrée into the smartest salons, where as Anne would recall they were ‘prized by many and welcomed like little holidays into society’.[3] Often they were asked to sing, at which they were both extremely accomplished. ‘Lady Margaret Fordyce is at this time confessedly the first voice in the list of fashionable amateurs; she is a pupil of the Italian school, and executes the most difficult passages in the most finished manner,’ reported one newspaper. ‘Lady Anne Lindsay has likewise a charming pipe, but her style is quite the reverse of her sister’s being entirely confined to the plaintive melody of Scotch ballads!’[4] The novelist Fanny Burney described the sisters’ late arrival one evening at a lavish party at Lady Gideon’s: ‘I had hopes they would have sung, but I was disappointed, for they only looked handsome.’[5] It goes without saying that Richard was delighted to have them both back in the capital – Anne remembered him welcoming them ‘like boons sent from Heaven’.[6]

Anne’s male admirers tended to follow a pattern – as she herself described it, ‘starting up with zeal … vanishing like meteors’. She attributed this to her relative poverty: ‘I had nothing for my lovers to pay their debts with, or to appropriate to younger children.’[7] Viscount Wentworth was one of the few who stuck around. They first met at a musical soirée in 1778, where he was charmed by her singing, while she was taken with his flute-playing, not to mention his fine figure, which ‘spoke him more decidedly the man of rank’ than most of his sex.[8] But Anne would soon learn that Wentworth was less available than he appeared. For more than a decade, he had been living with a mistress, Catharine Vanloo; she had come over from Flanders as the governess to his younger sisters, seducing him when he was virtually a boy, and had since borne him two children. He was also in regular attendance at the gaming tables of St James’s, where he was diligently squandering his inheritance. The on-off relationship between Anne and Lord Wentworth would cause them both considerable anguish over the coming years.

One day in 1779, Richard overheard the Lindsay sisters discussing the pension for which their mother, Lady Balcarres, had unsuccessfully applied to the king, and he discreetly asked Anne (‘pardon me the presumption of the question’) where she kept her money. ‘In the Moon! We are all as poor as Church mice,’ she answered. ‘I am the only person of fortune in the family as I had a legacy left me in money, of £300, not long ago, by my Grandmother.’ Richard went on to explain that there were many ways in which such a sum might be put to work, and he begged Anne to entrust it to his care. ‘’Tis so little, my good friend, that it is scarce worthy your troubling yourself about it,’ she said. ‘We must teach it then to become bigger,’ he replied with a smile.[9]

The worst hurricane in memory tore through the West Indies in October 1780; the western parishes of Jamaica took a particular pounding. This was yet more dire news for Richard’s partner Hutchison Mure, whose Suffolk residence, Great Saxham Hall, had burnt down the previous year. Financial troubles now forced Mure into the confession of an ‘alarming and disgraceful secret’, hidden for fifteen years. Back in 1766, when Richard joined the partnership, Mure had neglected to mention private debts of £30,000 for which they would be jointly liable, an omission which had caused the old man so much stress during the intervening years that ‘he had sometimes feared for his reason’.[10] His creditors were closing in; unless he could quickly sell off a couple of his sugar estates, he would be undone.

Although the revelation came as a profound shock to Richard, it also presented him with the opportunity to acquire Jamaican property of his own for a good price. In raising the capital to buy Dean’s Valley Dry Works in Westmoreland Parish, he was assisted by a loan of half its value from his friend Captain David Laird; while he purchased the Bogue estate in St James Parish as a joint venture with a slippery financier named Paul Benfield.[11] Through these transactions, Richard became the co-owner of some five hundred enslaved men, women and children. A few months later, in April 1781, Hutchison Mure folded his Suffolk landholdings into the assets of the partnership, paving the way for another of his sons – William, who had previously been living in Jamaica – to join the firm.[12] Thus Mure, Son & Atkinson became Mures, Atkinson & Mure.

THE TREASURY WAS FORCED to borrow vast sums of money during the American war, the national debt nearly doubling in seven years. Doom-mongers predicted economic collapse; but the enormity of these sovereign debts paradoxically confirmed the strength of the British financial system. It was the Treasury’s practice to pay a low interest rate on government loan stock, but to sell it to investors at a generous discount on its nominal value – this, in time, guaranteed a handsome return on their initial outlay. The close-knit relationship between the Treasury and the most powerful men of the City of London ensured the ministry’s access to funds for pursuing the war. A slice of the national debt was the most secure possible investment, and financiers selected by the Treasury to partake of the loan stock gained the power to bestow considerable largesse on family, friends and associates.

When Lord North announced to the House of Commons, on 7 March 1781, that he would need a £12 million loan for the following year, he neither expected an easy ride, nor did he receive one. Charles James Fox, who took an opposing view to the prime minister on almost all matters, sourly accused him of raiding the public purse in order to prop up his parliamentary majority through bribes for supporters. Sir Philip Jennings Clerke suggested that North had parcelled out the loan to his private friends as a reward for past services: ‘In particular, he was well informed that Mr. Atkinson the contractor, and partner with Mr. Mure, had no less than £3,300,000 to his own share.’[13] The prime minister rubbished the ‘very idea’ of such a sum being allocated to one man: ‘Great bankers, the House well knew, applied for many other persons, as well as on their own account, but no person would have such a proportion as the hon. gentleman had mentioned.’[14]

This was far from the end of the matter. In a fierce debate the following week, the opposition let rip about the mishandling of the loan, and the role of a certain notorious rum contractor. George Byng, MP for Middlesex, complained that the list of individual subscribers and their allocations had not been sent to the Bank of England, as was customary, before the loan was presented to parliament; instead, he claimed, it had been held back at the Treasury for three days, where it had ‘undergone many garblings, and many corrections’. Moreover, he knew of ‘very suspicious’ circumstances relating to the part played by Richard in the distribution of the loan: ‘It was pretty certain that he was in a room at the Treasury by himself, with the list, while many respectable and responsible men had it not in their power to converse with the noble lord on the subject.’

John Robinson, in a rare speech, admitted that Richard had been consulted about small-scale applicants from the City whose names were unknown to the Treasury – lottery-office keepers, tailors and suchlike – but ‘as to Mr. Atkinson having the list in a room by himself, the fact had never happened, he had neither settled the list, nor had he the list to interfere with at all’.[15]

When the full list of subscribers was published, Mures, Atkinson & Mure’s official portion was found to be £200,000 – a sizeable chunk, but by no means unprecedented. Richard had also quietly set aside loan stock worth £30,000 for Anne Lindsay’s personal benefit. The financial markets were buoyant. ‘The stock has risen greatly already,’ he told her shortly afterwards, ‘but a week hence it will overtop expectation: have you nerves to stand it?’[16] On 13 March, the noise of cannon fire at the Tower of London reverberated around the City. Admiral Rodney had captured the Dutch island of Saint Eustatius in the West Indies, cutting off a crucial source of supplies for the Continental Army; almost half the ships entering Philadelphia and Baltimore over the previous year had come from this supposedly neutral port. ‘What an unlooked-for piece of good fortune,’ wrote Richard to Anne.

A few days passed, and the markets climbed even higher: ‘All remains steady.’ Then came news of failed peace negotiations with France and Spain, and the stock tumbled. When Anne heard what had happened, she put on her ‘oldest bonnet’, strolled up to the open fields at the top of Harley Street, and ‘walked and reasoned and fatigued’ herself into accepting her diminished expectations: ‘I have not lost all (thought I) if I can feel in this manner, and if I still possess the friendship of Atkinson.’[17]

Richard called at Harley Street early the next day. Fordyce was away, and Margaret indisposed; as he had hoped, he had Anne all to himself. ‘You are a philosopher indeed,’ he smiled as he entered the room. ‘I had fortunately reason, from a friend of mine who crossed with the messenger, to suspect how this was likely to be.’ He had cashed in her loan stock, if not at the very top of the market, then not far off it. ‘Here is your little gain,’ he said, handing her a printed certificate for ‘long Annuities’ worth £3,475, which promised her £200 a year.

It was the first time she had ever felt herself to be ‘decidedly rich’, and she reacted by bursting into tears.[18] ‘The more I reflect on the generous proof you gave me this morning of your friendship & zeal for the interests of one who is so destitute of every means of shewing her gratitude but by her words,’ she would write to him later that day, ‘the more vexed I am with this vile tongue that did not do my feelings Justice.’[19]

The City of London was abuzz with rumours of staggering gains. ‘It is reported upon ’Change,’ said the Gazetteer, ‘that the celebrated Mr. Atkinson’s clerks are complimented with upwards of £150,000 of the new loan.’[20] Meanwhile, at Westminster, Sir George Savile introduced a parliamentary motion for a committee to look into the allocation of the loan, on grounds that a ‘certain gentleman’ had been allowed to doctor the lists ‘in what manner best suited his own interest’.[21] George Byng, seconding the motion, pedantically read out to the chamber the names of the loan’s 1,147 subscribers; among those that caught his eye were Messrs. Smith & Sill, who were well known as Richard’s lawyers, and David Laird, whose £10,000 allocation was most surprising, since he had only arrived from America ‘a few days before the noble lord opened his budget; but Captain Laird is the friend of Mr. Atkinson’.[22]

To avoid the scrutiny of her peers and – worse still – the clutches of her brother-in-law, Anne kept her newly acquired fortune a secret. Alexander Fordyce bragged endlessly about the riches that would soon spew forth from his soap-making factory in County Durham; but he was up to his old tricks again, bullying associates into lending him money, and flying into a rage if anyone had the temerity to question his dealings. ‘He has drained the best powers of every friend he has,’ Richard told Anne. ‘Our House has suffered (if a mercantile interest is included) above a Hundred thousand pounds by him, he holds it as his worst enemy because it will go no further. Apart from this I have lent him (which I consider as gone) £13,000, and by what shifts and duplicities has it been obtained!’[23]

Once more, during a tearful two-hour tête-à-tête that dredged up unwelcome memories of that fateful day, nine years earlier, when he had brought word of her husband’s impending bankruptcy, it fell to Richard to break to Margaret the unwelcome news of these debts. The following morning, as the sisters were eating breakfast, bailiffs turned up at Harley Street to seize the contents of the house; but Richard was already on the spot, waiting to intercept them, and immediately took charge of the situation, paying off the sum for which Fordyce was being pursued. As Anne would recall: ‘When he returned to us (gentle and unostentatious in all his modes), he sat down on his chair as if he thanked the friendship of those who allowed him to occupy it. This painful business over for the present, he departed, leaving a letter which he said he had forgot to deliver to Margaret, containing Two hundred pounds to discharge her own immediate bills.’[24]

GIVEN THE RUMPUS surrounding Richard’s rum contracts, their settlement was a surprisingly low-key business. What ought to have been the routine matter of agreeing a fair price for this most ordinary of commodities had mutated into a full-blown political scandal, the subject of at least twenty-seven Treasury Board meetings. But on 31 May 1781, after a hiatus of almost two years while waiting for the Attorney General to determine the principles by which they should be guided, the referees Francis Baring and John Purrier were ready to deliver their verdict.

They marked down both Richard’s first contract (100,000 gallons at the price paid by the navy in Jamaica, plus freight, leakage and insurance, agreed with the prime minister in September 1775) and his second (100,000 gallons at 5s 3d, agreed with the Treasury in May 1776), compelling him to refund £9,171 of the £61,608 that he had already received. (Even so, the judgement offered Richard vindication of sorts, for during the first failed attempt at arbitration, four years earlier, Beeston Long had refused to take the soaring cost of insurance into consideration; Baring and Purrier, on the other hand, factored it into their calculations.) With the referees’ ruling on his third contract (350,000 gallons at a price to be determined by the Treasury, agreed with General Howe in April 1777), Richard had cause for satisfaction, for they set the price at 5s 2d per gallon – only a penny less than the much-criticized second contract. Furthermore, Captain Laird certified that 499,738 gallons had been delivered to New York in fulfilment of the third contract, in nineteen ships unloaded under his supervision – a colossal over-delivery which valued the rum at £129,099.[25] Mures, Atkinson & Mure had already been paid most of this amount; the remaining £24,767 was authorized by royal warrant on 26 July, in the dead of the summer recess, when anyone who might have kicked up a fuss was out of town.[26] The final settlement of the rum business marked the end of one difficult chapter of Richard’s life, and the start of another, more emotional one.

IT WAS SOON after my discovery of Bridget Atkinson’s ‘receipt book’ – at a time when it was first dawning on me that I had somehow unearthed an astonishing family story, but as yet had little sense of where it might lead me – that I learnt about Richard’s correspondence with Lady Anne Lindsay, in an old volume which I came across online. How many such letters existed, the book did not divulge; to find out more, I would need to visit the National Library of Scotland.

One Thursday evening, just before midnight, I boarded the sleeper train at Euston; seven hours later it trundled into Edinburgh Waverley station, on a gleaming spring morning. I arrived at the library as it opened – I had already been warned by the curator of manuscripts that the reading room would close at lunchtime, and there was a great deal for me to get through. I started with the printed catalogue of the Lindsay family archive, and was amazed to learn that the collection included hundreds of letters written by members of the Atkinson family over three generations – Richard had merely initiated a correspondence which had continued into the 1830s. I had an inkling that these later letters might relate to Jamaican property, but this would need investigation another time – the twenty-six letters written by Richard to Anne would keep me busy for one morning. Three hours later, I emerged on to the cobbles of Edinburgh’s Old Town, into bright sunshine, feeling giddy, elated, and just a little besotted with my namesake.

Until this moment in the story, Richard’s most heartfelt sentiments have remained under wraps – which might, perhaps, have caused you to draw the conclusion that he was not the marrying type. You would be mistaken, though, for Richard had fallen in love with Anne Lindsay the moment he first laid eyes on her, and had ever since been working towards a day when he might have sufficient wealth to transcend the social gulf that separated them.

One Sunday in July 1781, when he was forty-two, Richard sat down to write the letter on which his future happiness would hinge. He had already primed Anne to expect a note about a ‘matter more interesting’ to him than any other, hoping that she might be able to offer him ‘very salutary counsel’ on a point where he confessed himself ‘at a loss how to decide’.[27] That evening Anne was alone at Harley Street, and expecting a visit from her fickle suitor Lord Wentworth, when Richard’s letter was delivered – her first impression was that ‘it was a thick one’.[28]

When Anne (much, much later) wrote her life story, she cherry-picked quotes from hundreds of old letters so that they slotted neatly into her narrative – rather as I have tried to do. When the time came to recount the circumstances surrounding this particular letter, however, her powers of précis deserted her; instead she chose to present Richard’s words unabridged. As she would explain to her readers: ‘It is so much my duty to do justice to that excellent man, that you must forgive me if on this occasion I sacrifice your patience to him.’[29] Two hundred years on, I find myself facing a similar predicament – the main difference being that I am not quite so willing to test my readers’ patience. So I will only say that Richard’s letter, as an account of how he had reached this pivotal moment, is as revealing a self-portrait of the man as exists, and can be found in its entirety on page 419. But here is its tremulous final paragraph:

And now, by what tenderest Epithet, shall I adjure My Counsellor to tell me whether my Desires ought to be laid at my fair Friend’s Feet or not! I tremble from the fear of diminishing the Share I at present hold in her Esteem, but the Knowledge I have of the Generosity of her Heart supports me in the Hope that she will not put an unkind Construction upon any part of my Conduct. And altho’ I suspect her in one particular to be an Economist yet I am sure she is no Niggard, but that her Heart will feel the inestimable Value of a frank Avowal – and that if your happy Counsel at eleven tomorrow (if not forbid) is to embolden me to submit my Passion – she will with one Look of Kindness at our first Interview extend to me the Golden Sceptre and tranquilize my Spirits by that assurance that there exists no absolute & insurmountable Bar to my Happiness; beyond which meaning I will not attempt to interpret her Goodness till she gives me leave. How many Blessings does my Heart wish to pour upon her![30]

Anne had not quite finished reading this ‘heart-breaking letter’ when she heard Margaret come in through the front door, and she hastily retreated to her bedchamber, for she did not want her sister to know that she had been sobbing. Anne realized, from the ‘delusion of hope’ which pervaded Richard’s letter, that ‘no report respecting Lord Wentworth’ had reached his ears; and it was with deep sadness that she sat down at her desk and revealed her attachment to another man. ‘Never did I find a letter so difficult to write, every feeling in my nature was at jar,’ she recalled. ‘Loaded with obligations, in my own person and in Margaret’s, yet returning nothing, disappointing the constant heart that had been so long devoted to me … The Watchman called one … and two … and three … and four; and five found me with the pen still in my hand, & my letter unfinished.’[31]

At eight on Monday morning, a messenger delivered Anne’s letter to Fenchurch Street. ‘Could I only find words, gentle without conveying Illusion, unreserved yet consoling how eagerly would I not use them,’ she had written,

But there I must stop – if you will permit to make him who calls himself my client my confidant perhaps I may in the course of a day or two find courage to paint the situation of a heart which has long strayed from home into the possession of one who I hope has by degrees learnt to value it – there it rests and ever will remain. I would not have hurried this point to my friend had I not learnt at one time from a painfull experience how severe a moment that of uncertainty is. God bless you, I pray for your happiness.[32]

Richard called at Harley Street on Wednesday, at Anne’s invitation, and was shown up to the drawing room. ‘Ten years seemed added to his appearance, which made me start, and filled my heart with something like remorse,’ she remembered.[33] The conversation was general, for he was one of several callers that morning, and was thus unable to say what he had wished to be able to say. That evening he wrote to Anne:

Escaped at length from the tiresome Task of talking about one thing whilst my mind is wholly intent upon another, I fly to the Relief which an undisguised communication with my Friend alone can give me. I hope I did not betray myself today to Lady M, altho’ I am not sure of it. I do not misinterpret your Intention in not seeing me alone, but you had very near taxed my Fortitude too high. The Wind & the Dust for these two days (of which from the Impossibility of excusing myself from seeing multitudes if I staid at home I have spent a great part in the Streets) have been my very good Auxiliaries in preventing observation.[34]

Richard’s great dread, having revealed his innermost feelings to Anne, was that she might henceforth shun his company, to avoid ‘adding fresh Fuel to a hopeless Flame’; so he set out to prove that any such qualms were unnecessary. ‘For the Inquietude I have given you I will not attempt a common Apology which you would despise,’ he wrote to her the following week. ‘I rather dare flatter myself with your approbation of my having disclosed my Sentiments under the circumstances in which I did it; and that bearing Adversity like a Man, my Friend will not think hardly of me for having felt it as a Man.’ Now, as he explained, he hoped to foster a relationship of a fraternal kind:

My Hopes are dead. I know too well the force of a true attachment in a strong and virtuous Mind to expect a change whilst any thing like a proper conduct is reciprocally held. I solemnly repeat therefore that all my Hopes are at an end. That I feel I can rejoice in your happiness with another, and when the proper time arrives can cordially court his Friendship. I entertain not a Sentiment at this Moment that ought to alarm or offend him. Let me not then upon mistaken Ground be held distant! Let me have leave to cultivate the Affection of a Brother, and to watch over your Welfare as far as my Knowledge extends, with a kind Brother’s Care![35]