Chronicles and characters of the stock exchange

by of the Bank of England John Francis

It is scarce fit to enter into a description of all the mischievous consequences which necessarily follow running down the public credit, in case of such dangers as I have mentioned above. If I should fully describe them, it would appear incredible. Every one will allow that this practice of the jobbers, carried on a little farther, would indeed appear to be the worst kind of treason.

But it is needful, after having said thus much of the crime, to say something of the place, and then a little of the persons, too. The centre of the jobbing is in the kingdom of Exchange Alley, and its adjacencies. The limits are easily surrounded in about a minute and a half, viz., stepping out of Jonathan’s into the Alley, you turn your face full south; moving on a few paces, and then turning due east, you advance to Garraway’s; from thence, going out at the other door, you go on still east into Birchin Lane; and then halting a little at the Sword-blade Bank, to do much mischief in fewest words, you immediately face to the north, enter Cornhill, visit two or three petty provinces there in your way west, and thus having boxed your compass, and sailed round the whole stock-jobbing globe, you turn into Jonathan’s again; and so, as most of the great follies of life oblige us to do, you end just where you began.

But this is by way of digression; and even still, before I come to the main case, I am obliged to tell you that, though this is the sphere of the jobbers’ motion, the orb to which they are confined, and out of which they cannot well act in their way, yet it does not follow but that men of foreign situation (I mean foreign as to them, I do not mean foreign as to nation); nay, some whose lustre is said to be too bright for the hemisphere of a coffee-house, have yet their influence there, and act by substitutes and representatives. But first I must speak to originals.

C——, a man of brass sufficient for much more business than he can be trusted with, is said to manage for three blue ribbons, and for four or five cash-keepers, who tell more money than their own. He fetches and carries with such indefatigable application, that he is said never to fail his appointments to a minute, however remote from one another. Wherever he appears, he makes an Exchange Alley in his person, and a court in his audience; he is himself a Jonathan’s coffee-house in little; though he be at a cockpit, he realizes Exchange Alley in every place, and yet he rather is directed than directs; and, like a certain great general, famed for more fire than phlegm, is fitter to drive than to lead.

S—— has twice the head, but not half the business as C—— is said to have, yet he gets more money for himself, and C—— gets more for other folks. S—— is as cunning as C—— is bold, and the reserve of one with the openness of the other, makes a complete Exchange Alley man. C—— jumps at every thing, and as he got the start of the world at his beginning, by venturing more than he was worth, so he deals now with all men as if they ventured more than they are worth. Originally he was a bite, which, in modern language, is a sharper; or, being fully interpreted, may signify the head-class of the fraternity called pickpockets.

T——, a gamester of the same board, acts in concert with C—— and S——, and makes together a true triumvirate of modern thieving. He inherits the face of C——, with the craft of S——, but seems to take state upon him, and acts the reserved part more than either; yet even this, too, is all grimace, for wherever he can be sure to kill, he can’t fawn like an Irishman.

They are all three of yesterday in their characters, yet they are old in their crime, viz., of resolving to be rich at the price of every man they can bubble. Their first blow was aimed at the Bank, but there they were outwitted; and the great Lord Treasurer Godolphin, in the late reign, gave them their just characters from that action. The defeat they met with there sticks so close to them, that they reserve the measures of their revenge, not to cool, no, not till the charter of the Bank shall expire.

However, their wings being clipped by the clause then obtained in an Act of Parliament,—that no society, corporation, &c., should issue out bills of credit as a bank, but the Bank of England only,—they were obliged ever since to turn stock-jobbers, or, if we may speak properly of them, they are the stock-jobbers’ masters; for they have so many bear-skins pawned to them at a time, so much stock deposited with them upon bottomrée, as it might be called, that indeed they may be called the city pawnbrokers; and I have been told, that they have had fifty stock-jobbers and brokers bound hand and foot, and laid in heaps at their doors at a time.

The next trick they tried, and which was, indeed, the masterpiece of their knavery, was the getting an assignment of the forfeited estates in Ireland into their hands. Indeed, they began the world upon this prospect, and expected to have had the whole kingdom of Ireland mortgaged to them. But here, too, they were disappointed, and had they not found a man that had as much money as themselves, and more honesty, that bargain of the forfeited estates had been the last they had made in the world.

The endeavours they use to cheat that gentleman, after he had delivered them from a blow that would have blown them up, is another black part of their story that remains to be told, for the illustration of their character, at another time; but in the interim, ’t is enough to say, that he who delivered them as fools, knew how to deliver himself from them as knaves; and so they were dropped out of the Irish bargain, to their great mortification.