the draper eagerly compounded. He afterwards “grew rich.” Audley, silently watching his victim, within two years, claims his doubled pennies, every month during twenty months. The pennies had now grown up to pounds. The knave perceived the trick, and preferred paying the forfeiture of his bond for 500l., rather than to receive the visitation of all the little generation of compound interest in the last descendant of 2000l., which would have closed with the draper’s shop. The inventive genius of Audley might have illustrated that popular tract of his own times, Peacham’s “Worth of a Penny;” a gentleman who, having scarcely one left, consoled himself by detailing the numerous comforts of life it might procure in the days of Charles II.
Such petty enterprises at length assumed a deeper cast of interest. He formed temporary partnerships with the stewards of country gentlemen. They underlet estates which they had to manage; and, anticipating the owner’s necessities, the estates in due time became cheap purchases for Audley and the stewards. He usually contrived to make the wood pay for the land, which he called “making the feathers pay for the goose.” He had, however, such a tenderness of conscience for his victim, that, having plucked the live feathers before he sent the unfledged goose on the common, he would bestow a gratuitous lecture in his own science—teaching the art of making them grow again, by showing how to raise the remaining rents. Audley thus made the tenant furnish at once the means to satisfy his own rapacity, and his employer’s necessities. His avarice was not working by a blind, but on an enlightened principle; for he was only enabling the landlord to obtain what the tenant, with due industry, could afford to give. Adam Smith might have delivered himself in the language of old Audley, so just was his standard of the value of rents. “Under an easy landlord,” said Audley, “a tenant seldom thrives; contenting himself to make the just measure of his rents, and not labouring for any surplusage of estate. Under a hard one, the tenant revenges himself upon the land, and runs away with the rent. I would raise my rents to the present price of all commodities: for if we should let our lands, as other men have done before us, now other wares daily go on in price, we should fall backward in our estates.” These axioms of political economy were discoveries in his day.
Audley knew mankind practically, and struck into their humours with the versatility of genius: oracularly deep with the grave, he only stung the lighter mind. When a lord, borrowing money, complained to Audley of his exactions, his lordship exclaimed, “What, do you not intend to use a conscience?” “Yes, I intend hereafter to use it. We monied people must balance accounts: if you do not pay me, you cheat me; but, if you do, then I cheat your lordship.” Audley’s monied conscience balanced the risk of his lordship’s honour, against the probability of his own rapacious profits. When he resided in the Temple among those “pullets without feathers,” as an old writer describes the brood, the good man would pule out paternal homilies on improvident youth, grieving that they, under pretence of “learning the law, only learnt to be lawless;” and “never knew by their own studies the process of an execution, till it was served on themselves.” Nor could he fail in his prophecy; for at the moment that the stoic was enduring their ridicule, his agents were supplying them with the certain means of verifying it; for, as it is quaintly said, he had his decoying as well as his decaying gentlemen.
Audley was a philosophical usurer: he never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his “bonds to infants, which battle best by sleeping.” To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the university of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually lay opened a great Bible, with bishop Andrews’s folio sermons, which often gave him an opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring their religion was “a mere preach;” and that “the time would never be well till we had queen Elizabeth’s Protestants again in fashion.” He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence. He dreaded an inundation of men, and considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues practised by this puritan among his money bags.
Yet Audley’s was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of mankind. Every thing was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clue was still in his own hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered by his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and his opinions were compressed and weighty: but if he was true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honour; the pride of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. His partners dreaded the effects of his law-library, and usually relinquished a claim rather than stand a suit against a latent quibble. When one menaced him by showing some money-bags, which he had resolved to empty in law against him, Audley, then in office in the court of wards, with a sarcastic grin, asked, “Whether the bags had any bottom?” “Ay!” replied the exulting possessor, striking them. “In that case I care not,” retorted the cynical officer of the court of wards; “for in this court I have a constant spring; and I cannot spend in other courts more than I gain in this.” He had at once the meanness which would evade the law, and the spirit which could resist it.
The genius of Audley had crept out of the purlieus of Guildhall, and entered the Temple; and having often sauntered at “Powles” down the great promenade which was reserved for “Duke Humphrey and his guests,” he would turn into that part called “The Usurer’s Alley,” to talk with “Thirty in the hundred,” and at length was enabled to purchase his office at that remarkable institution, the court of wards. The entire fortunes of those whom we now call wards in chancery were in the hands, and often submitted to the arts or the tyranny of the officers of this court.
When Audley was asked the value of this new office, he replied, that “It might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would instantly go to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory; and nobody knows what to him who would adventure to go to hell.” Such was the pious casuistry of a witty usurer. Whether he undertook this last adventure, for his four hundred thousand pounds, how can a sceptical biographer decide! Audley seems ever to have been weak, when temptation was strong.
Some saving qualities, however, were mixed with the vicious ones he liked best. Another passion divided dominion with the sovereign one: Audley’s strongest impressions of character were cast in the old law-library of his youth, and the pride of legal reputation was not inferior in strength to the rage for money. If in the “court of wards” he pounced on incumbrances which lay on estates, and prowled about to discover the craving wants of their owners, it appears that he also received liberal fees from the relatives of young heirs, to protect them from the rapacity of some great persons, but who could not certainly exceed Audley in subtilty. He was an admirable lawyer, for he was not satisfied with hearing, but examining his clients; which he called “pinching the cause where he perceived it was foundered.” He made two observations on clients and lawyers, which have not lost their poignancy. “Many clients, in telling their case, rather plead than relate it, so that the advocate heareth not the true state of it, till opened by the adverse party. Some lawyers seem to keep an assurance-office in their chambers, and will warrant any cause brought unto them, knowing that if they fail, they lose nothing but what was lost long since, their credit.”
The career of Audley’s ambition closed with the extinction of the “court of wards,” by which he incurred the loss of above 100,000l. On that occasion he observed, that “his ordinary losses were as the shavings of his beard, which only grew the faster by them; but the loss of this place was like the cutting off of a member, which was irrecoverable.” The hoary usurer pined at the decline of his genius, discoursed on the vanity of the world, and hinted at retreat. A facetious friend told him a story of an old rat, who having acquainted the young rats that he would at length retire to his hole, desiring none to come near him: their curiosity, after some days, led them to venture to look into the hole; and there they discovered the old rat sitting in the midst of a rich parmesan cheese. It is probable that the loss of the last 100,000l. disturbed his digestion, for he did not long survive his court of wards.
Such was this man, converting wisdom into cunning, invention into trickery, and wit into cynicism. Engaged in no honourable cause, he however showed a mind resolved, making plain the crooked and involved path he trod. Sustine et abstine, to bear and to forbear, was the great principle of Epictetus, and our monied stoic bore all the contempt and hatred of the living smilingly, while he forbore all the consolations of our common nature to obtain his end. He died in unblest celibacy.—And thus he received the curses of the living for his rapine, while the stranger who grasped the million he had raked together, owed him no gratitude at his death.—D’Israeli.