2 - Business, Banking and Bibles in Late-Hanoverian London

Summary

Bad news always unsettles the financial markets. ‘Yesterday morning’, reported the Morning Chronicle on Friday 19 August 1814, ‘the Stock Exchange was thrown into a state of dismay by the declaration, that a person of some consideration in the City had confessed himself unable or unwilling to pay his differences, to the amount of £45,000.’ Details emerged over the next few days. This was no ordinary bankruptcy. The subject of the scandal was Robert Thornton (1759–1826), an intimate of the Prince Regent and a leading London businessman who at the time of his disgrace was Chairman of the East India Company, Marshal of the Court of Admiralty and MP for Colchester. Finding himself in difficulties, Thornton had resorted to speculation in order to maintain a lavish lifestyle at his townhouse in Grafton Street and his elegant Clapham villa. ‘At first he was very successful and gained £30,000 or £40,000,’ his sister-in-law told a friend.

This very success proved fatal, for enamoured of his own sagacity he went on venturing more and more, till the depression in the stocks annihilated all his gains and in the true spirit of a gambler he attempted to retrieve this loss by desperate efforts and at last foiled and disappointed in every effort he became a defaulter to the amount of £45,000.

This was an immense sum – worth perhaps £33 million today – and the sale of his library, his collection of prints and other property failed to satisfy Thornton's creditors. As newspaper interest built to a crescendo, his nerve broke. By September he had left his wife and fled to France under an assumed name, and in the turmoil surrounding the return of Napoleon in early 1815 ‘Richard Tyler’ emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1826. Though they had long pursued different ends, mused his brother Henry sadly, ‘I had never till now had to contemplate him as a Prodigal who had literally wandered from home.’

Robert's fall was all the more shocking because this was not the behaviour expected of a Thornton.