Life of an Usurer.
HUGH AUDLEY.
There are memoirs of this remarkable man in a rare quarto tract, entitled “The Way to be Rich, according to the practice of the great Audley, who began with two hundred pounds in the year 1605, and died worth four hundred thousand.” He died on the 15th of November, 1662, the year wherein the tract was printed.
Hugh Audley was a lawyer, and a great practical philosopher, who concentrated his vigorous faculties in the science of the relative value of money. He flourished through the reigns of James I., Charles I., and held a lucrative office in the “court of wards,” till that singular court was abolished at the time of the restoration. In his own times he was called “The great Audley,” an epithet so often abused, and here applied to the creation of enormous wealth. But there are minds of great capacity, concealed by the nature of their pursuits; and the wealth of Audley may be considered as the cloudy medium through which a bright genius shone, of which, had it been thrown into a nobler sphere of action, the “greatness” would have been less ambiguous.
Audley, as mentioned in the title of his memoir, began with two hundred pounds, and lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made a good map of England. A contemporary dramatist, who copied from life, has opened the chamber of such an usurer,—perhaps of our Audley—
——“Here lay
A manor bound fast in a skin of parchment,
The wax continuing hard, the acres melting,
Here a sure deed of gift for a market-town,
If not redeem’d this day, which is not in
The unthrift’s power; there being scarce one shire
In Wales or England, where my monies are not
Lent out at usury, the certain hook
To draw in more.—”
Massinger’s City Madam.
This genius of thirty per cent. first had proved the decided vigour of his mind, by his enthusiastic devotion to his law-studies: deprived of the leisure for study through his busy day, he stole the hours from his late nights and his early mornings; and without the means to procure a law-library, he invented a method to possess one without the cost; as fast as he learned, he taught; and by publishing some useful tracts on temporary occasions, he was enabled to purchase a library. He appears never to have read a book without its furnishing him with some new practical design, and he probably studied too much for his own particular advantage. Such devoted studies was the way to become a lord-chancellor; but the science of the law was here subordinate to that of a money-trader.
When yet but a clerk to the clerk in the Counter, frequent opportunities occurred which Audley knew how to improve. He became a money-trader as he had become a law-writer, and the fears and follies of mankind were to furnish him with a trading-capital. The fertility of his genius appeared in expedients and in quick contrivances. He was sure to be the friend of all men falling out. He took a deep concern in the affairs of his master’s clients, and often much more than they were aware of. No man so ready at procuring bail or compounding debts. This was a considerable traffic then, as now. They hired themselves out for bail, swore what was required, and contrived to give false addresses. It seems they dressed themselves out for the occasion: a great seal-ring flamed on the finger, which, however, was pure copper gilt, and they often assumed the name of some person of good credit. Savings, and small presents for gratuitous opinions, often afterwards discovered to be very fallacious ones, enabled him to purchase annuities of easy landholders, with their treble amount secured on their estates. The improvident owners, or the careless heirs, were soon entangled in the usurer’s nets; and, after the receipt of a few years, the annuity, by some latent quibble, or some irregularity in the payments, usually ended in Audley’s obtaining the treble forfeiture. He could at all times out-knave a knave. One of these incidents has been preserved. A draper, of no honest reputation, being arrested by a merchant for a debt of 200l. Audley bought the debt at 40l., for which the draper immediately offered him 50l. But Audley would not consent, unless the draper indulged a sudden whim of his own: this was a formal contract, that the draper should pay within twenty years, upon twenty certain days, a penny doubled. A knave, in haste to sign, is no calculator; and, as the contemporary dramatist describes one of the arts of those citizens, one part of whose business was
“To swear and break—they all grow rich by breaking—”