English Tradesman:
There must be some failure in the tradesman, it can be no where else; either he is less sober and less frugal, less cautious of what he does, who he trusts, how he lives, and how he behaves, than tradesmen used to be; or he is less industrious, less diligent, and takes less care and pains in his business, or something is the matter.22
Crusoe himself admits that, at a time when his plantation was beginning to flourish, “for me to think of such a voyage was the most preposterous thing that ever man in such circumstances could be guilty of.” He triumphs over adversity by learning to be both pious and prudent. It is especially in his acquisition of skills for physical survival that Defoe indicates his admiration of the characteristics which enabled men to survive in trade.
Joseph Addison also championed the commercial community in the pages of the Spectator. “There are not more useful members in a commonwealth than merchants,” he observed in one essay. “They knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of good offices, distribute the gifts of Nature, find work for the poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and magnificence to the Great.” In the archetypal merchant he created with Sir Andrew Freeport, one of the leading members of the Spectator Club, he epitomised these virtues. At his first appearance we are told that he is:
a merchant of great eminence in the City of London: a person of indefatigable industry, strong reason and great experience. His notions of trade are noble and generous, and (as every rich man has usually some sly way of jesting, which would make no great figure were he not a rich man) he calls the sea the British common.23
And yet in the end Sir Andrew sells out and becomes a country gentleman. When he resigned from the Spectator Club he informed its members that he was leaving business to set up as a landed proprietor:
as the greatest part of my estate has been hitherto of an unsteady and volatile nature, either tost upon seas or fluctuating in funds; it is now fixed and settled in substantial acres and tenements.
In this respect Sir Andrew Freeport is the archetype of the successful businessman who acquires a country estate and leaves commerce. Their upwardly mobile ambitions were both satirised and sanctioned by contemporary writers. And ultimately the goal of landownership has been criticised for eroding the entrepreneurial spirit in England.
The entrepreneurs who rose by manipulating the fiscal system set up in the Financial Revolution to acquire landed estates and set themselves up as country gentlemen were stock characters in the political satire of the age. The archetype of these was Thomas Double, a character created by Charles Davenant, who started out as a shoemaker’s apprentice in London, but left shoemaking to buy a place in the Customs with money bequeathed to him by his grandmother “who sold barley-broth and furmity by Fleet ditch.” In James II’s reign, however, he was convicted of fraud and turned out of the Customs service. Where he had previously been a loyal Tory, he now became “a furious Whig.” When his grandmother’s legacy ran out he was “forced to be a corrector of a private press in a garret, for three shillings a week.” Then the Revolution improved his condition, for he was able by an outrageous confidence trick to pass himself off as an agent of the Prince of Orange and by even more brazen cheating at dice to win money from the man he had conned. He then set out to make his fortune from the new regime, starting with shares in the discovery of concealed Crown lands, and moving into the big time with enormous frauds in the disposal of confiscated Irish estates. Double claimed the credit for the Financial Revolution, which had “run the nation head over ears in debt by our funds, and new devices.” He confessed that £50,000 had stuck to his fingers when he acted as receiver of taxes, and although it had cost him £20,000 to buy off a parliamentary inquiry by bribing MPs, he still had enough left to live at ease, with his country seat, a town house and a coach and six.24
A GENTRY OF WAR PROFITEERS?
Tory satirists built on Davenant’s Double to depict a whole new upstart gentry of Whig war profiteers who allegedly upheld the corrupt ministry of Walpole. They were indulging in what has been termed “the politics of nostalgia,” imagining a golden age when the country had been ruled by its hereditary aristocracy and gentry, before access to landed estates had been opened up to parvenus from the City of London.25 That such an era existed largely in their imaginations was irrelevant, as was the fact that entry into the landed classes remained very restricted throughout the eighteenth century. Most businessmen who aspired to life in the countryside sought a house in the country with a few acres rather than a country house with tenanted farms. Travellers noticed these country homes on the approaches to London in Essex and Surrey. Thus in Stratford, Essex, John Macky observed in 1714:
above two hundred little country houses for the conveniency of the citizens in summer, where their wives and children generally keep, and their husbands come down on Saturdays and return on Mondays.26
Similarly, Defoe noted on the other side of town, along the road from Richmond to London, “citizens’ country houses whither they retire from the hurries of business, and from getting money, to draw their breath in a clean air.”27 Most businessmen who had houses in the country were commuters rather than landed gentry. Nevertheless, it only needed a few notorious examples in reality to feed the nostalgic myth. The most outstanding was the acquisition by the goldsmith Sir Charles Duncombe of the Helmsley estate of the second Duke of Buckingham, reputedly for £80,000 in cash, to feed the paranoia of the landed interest. As Pope expressed it:
And Helmsley once proud Buckingham’s delight,
Slides to a Scriv’ner or a City knight.28
Upstart landowners who were allegedly usurping the place of traditional landlords were accused of introducing inappropriate business methods into estate management. Traditionally, country gentlemen were expected to act as patriarchs presiding over their local communities. The relationship between them and their tenants and neighbours was one of reciprocal rights and duties. Inferiors owed deference to their superiors but these in turn were required to treat those below them with sympathy and understanding, not rack-renting them in the interests of profit maximisation. The new breed of landlord was accused of acting more like patricians than patriarchs, reducing the traditional relationship to a crude cash nexus. Pope epitomised these contrary types in the characters of the Man of Ross and Timon. The Man of Ross, who was based on a real character, John Kyrle, who lived at Ross on Wye, was depicted as an exemplary patriarch.
Behold the Market-place with poor o’erspread!
The MAN OF ROSS divides the weekly bread:
Behold yon Alms-house, neat, but void of state,
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate:
Him portion’d maids, apprentic’d orphans blest,
The young who labour, and the old who rest.
Is any sick? The MAN OF ROSS relieves,
Prescribes, attends the med’cine makes, and gives.
Is there a variance? enter but his door,
Balk’d are the Courts, and contest is no more.29
By contrast, Timon exploited his position as a landlord to gratify his own aspirations rather than to satisfy those of his neighbours.
At Timon’s Villa let us pass a day.
Where all cry out “What sums are thrown away!”
So proud, so grand, of that stupendous air,
Soft and Agreeable come never there.
Greatness with Timon dwells in such a draught
As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought.
To compass this his building is a Town,
His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down:
Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees,
A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze!
Lo,