The South Sea Company and Sir Gregory Page 2nd Bt

The South Sea Company and

Sir Gregory Page 2nd Bt

William Hogarth, ‘The South Sea Scheme: speculators ruined by the collapse of the South Sea Company’ (1721)

Sir Gregory Page 2^nd Bt, a minor during the Bubble, gained £200,000 from his guardians’ speculation on his behalf. With this, he bought an estate at Wricklemarsh (now Blackheath) where he pulled down the old manor house and commissioned a large manor from architect John James. Though demolished in 1787, surviving visual evidence and fragments reveal it was an eloquent Palladian essay: a central block with pavilions linked by a colonnade and a large portico. Page was a merchant who epitomized many of the traits and characteristics to be found among the nouveau riche merchants of his era. He was in fact Gregory Page 2^nd Bt and followed a grandfather and father of the same name both of whom had been highly successful merchants in their day; 

Gregory Page 1^st Bt progressed to a career in politics. The first Gregory Page (1621-1693) was a ship owner and merchant of Wapping. He was also a director of the East India Company whilst it was under the Governorship of Josiah Child of Wanstead and an Alderman for the City of London. His son, Gregory Page 1^st Bt, was a peer of Richard Child, the son of Josiah Child and the builder of Wanstead, and both men would have been well aware of each other through their respective fathers' roles in the East India Company. Gregory Page 1^st Bt followed his father's commercial interests and was a ship owner in his own right as well as the assistant to Sir Charles Eyres, who went on to become the first President of Bengal in 1699. It was this Page who first brought his family to Greenwich in 1699 and who developed good social and trade connections through his mercantile activities with both China and the East Indies. Like his father before, he became a director of the East India Company in 1709 and Chairman in 1716 until his death in 1720. This Page was one of the first investors in South Sea Stock when the scheme was floated in 1711. Whilst Gregory Page  1^st Bt is not noted for his involvement in the arts and is not known to have been a supporter of neo-Palladianism, his son most certainly was. Gregory Page 2^nd Bt (1689-1775) became the head of the family in 1720 and, already very rich in his own right, became exceedingly wealthy when he inherited his father's fortune. Page was not on the Board of Directors of the South Sea Company and thus, when the inevitable crash came, he was permitted to retain his extensive profits, unlike his brother Ambrose, who was forced to declare his assets and pay the profits back under the South Sea Sufferers Act of 1721.

The change in Britain’s architectural aesthetic was obviously not something that happened at a stroke. The forms and feeling of baroque architecture endured even in houses constructed by South Sea gainers. At Moor Park, for example,  Benjamin Styles chose Sir James Thornhill as his architect for the remodeling – both this and the preservation of the existing house resulted in an essentially baroque appearance. Furthermore, Palladianism has its own history. The publication of the first volume of Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus was in April 1715 and its establishment as the official national style hinged upon its introduction into the Office of Works, which was not achieved until 1726 when William Kent was appointed as Master Carpenter. It was this, followed by his appointment in 1735 as Master Mason and Deputy Surveyor that resulted in Horse Guards, the Royal Mews, and the Treasury Buildings. Hogarth’s An emblematical print on the South Sea Scheme (1721) features a parody of The Monument to the Great Fire of London inscribed ‘This monument was erected in memory of the destruction of the city by the South Sea in 1720’: a testimony in stone to the effects of financial folly. In reality, the events of 1720 expressed themselves in less literal but nevertheless significant ways in Britain’s architecture. While the Bubble did not fundamentally change the social order, it destabilized old wealth and created new money. New opportunities and the emerging, flexible, and accessible style of Palladianism were to hand: thus 1720 had a powerful influence on both the quantity and the appearance of country houses, London palaces, and institutions.

The South Sea Company, established with an air of respectability by an Act of Parliament in 1711, was set up to profit out of relieving the government’s debt, which at the time amounted to £9m. Investors would buy out the national debt by purchasing shares with an enticing 6% offered as a return. The company would generate profit through commerce: it was granted use of the Crown’s monopoly on trade between England and Spain’s colonies, which had the potential to bring in considerable gains, not least through the trading of slaves. Limited by inexperience and thwarted by war, profits proved elusive. Trying to save the situation but in fact, compounding the problem, in 1719 the Directors of the South Sea Company again convinced Parliament that the public debt – which by that time stood at over £30m should be converted into stock, and in 1720, the South Sea Bill was passed.

Investors purchased shares enthusiastically and the company lent them money to purchase more. The Directors also traded in non-existent stock, sold at ever-increasing prices. Shares spiraled at a phenomenal rate: on January 1, 1720, the price of a South Sea share stood at £128; on June 24 it hit £1,050. In September (amidst rumours that the Directors had sold out) the crash came and by December shares had returned to £128. Thousands declared themselves bankrupt; banks could not collect loans and in turn, failed. The government put an inquiry in place: Directors of the Company were held to account, punishments were meted out and a bill was passed to provide financial relief. Robert Walpole saw the opportunity both to restore equilibrium and effectively to take control as Prime Minister, which he did for the next 20 years. Wealth and building go hand-in-hand, of course. The fact that speculators were minded to express their new-found riches in architectural form is evident in Jonathan Swift’s satirical poem, The South Sea Project of 1721, in which a ‘deluded bankrupt’ muses on how to spend his gains:

In stock three hundred thousand pounds,

I have in view a lord’s estate;

My manors all contiguous round!

A coach-and-six and served in the plate!

For those who profited in 1720, purchasing property was an obvious choice. At the height of the investment frenzy, the Original Weekly Journal observed: Our South Sea equipages increase daily; the City ladies buy South Sea jewels, hire South Sea maids, take new country South Sea houses; the gentlemen set up South Sea coaches, and buy South Sea estates. They neither examine the situation, the nature or quality of the soil, or the price of the purchase, only the annual rent and title...! Numerous properties changed hands. For example, William Fellowes, a South Sea investor, probably used his gains to purchase the estate of Shotesham, Norfolk, in the early 1720s, despite having no previous connection with the county. In 1720 Benjamin Styles, a merchant who made a killing in the South Sea speculations, purchased Moor Park, Hertfordshire, from the Duke of Monmouth and remodeled it over the next thirteen years at a cost of £150,000.

There were some ‘great gainers’ from the Bubble, and their financial good fortune often manifested itself in architectural form. The largest honest profit – gained not through deceptive stock-jobbing but by buying when the market was low and selling when it was high – was made by the bookseller turned philanthropist, John Guy. He had bought South Sea stock as a long-term investment designed to bring in a low-risk cash flow for his charitable projects. When the bubble inflated, he wisely sold his share and used part of the proceeds to endow his eponymous hospital in London, built between 1722 and 1725 by architect Thomas Dance. Dr John Radcliffe was similarly successful. With his South Sea profits, he paid for a number of Oxford institutions, including the Radcliffe Infirmary. Far from these magnanimous gestures being acts of atonement for worldly gain, speculation, and philanthropy sat quite comfortably together in 18th-century society, much as Bernard Mandeville observed in his epic of private gain and public profit The Fable of the Bees (1714). Guy’s Hospital would become a model of civic neoclassicism.

The ownership of a country estate was a natural aspiration for the newly wealthy. Despite Britain’s rich tradition of scholarship on this building type, however, fundamental research remains to be carried out on the financial underpinnings of country house building, acquisition, and expansion around 1720 to be able to assess the impact of the South Sea Bubble properly. In 1959, John Summerson called for an economic survey of country house buildings to establish their proper historical context, but he was also reticent about analyzing those same historical conditions. Through rough calculations, he estimated that about 150 great houses were built between 1710 and 1740, approximately one-third of which were built in the five years between 1720 and 1724, but he shied away from drawing conclusions about what might have precipitated this boom, citing only the ‘latent stylistic factors’ of emerging Palladianism and ‘remote causes… embedded in an economic and social history [which] cannot be dealt with here’. As Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley noted almost forty years later, to deal with them, he might well have looked at those architectural patrons linked to the South Sea Company. If one does attempt to follow those links, what does one find? In the absence of a survey such as Summerson proposed, and without detailed accounts of every South Sea investor’s profits an analysis is necessarily generalized and speculative. But some broad observations can be made, first by examining the records of the confiscated properties of the South Sea Directors and second by considering the clients of some of the most successful architects of the period.

Taking the Directors of the South Sea Company alone, they expanded their property holdings significantly in the years of their involvement with the South Sea Company. Many bought substantial estates, some of them immediately requiring building projects, and many invested in properties to generate rental income. John Fellows, Sub governor of the South Sea Company from 1718 to 1721, bought Carshalton, Surrey, in 1714. The house dated from the late seventeenth century and Fellows undertook re-building. Also in 1714, one of the Company’s Directors, Lambert Blackwell, bought the manor of Sprouston, Norfolk, to which he carried out ‘very large Repairs’. In addition, between 1715 and 1720/1, he acquired various properties in east Norfolk. Generally, it appears that purchases of large estates were most often made before the boom-bust year of 1720, and it was rapid purchases of multiple small properties for rent that were made when the value of stocks was spiraling upwards. As well as the financial underpinnings of construction, however, there is the matter of style, and the question as to whether the growing influence of Palladianism was in any way related to the South Sea Bubble. Palladianism was arguably particularly suitable when new money was paying the bills, thanks to its ready summation in pattern books easily available to both patrons and builders, its potential to be tailored to a variety of pockets, and its appeal to the nouveau riche through its references to a universally available classical past rather than the authority of ancient ancestry.

The most compelling case for a link between Palladianism and the South Sea Bubble is provided by looking at the clientele of the architects associated with the Palladian style. Several patrons of Colin Campbell, author of Vitruvius Britannicus and pioneer of the Palladian movement, for example, were beneficiaries of South Sea speculation. Sir Theodore Janssen, one of the Directors investigated in 1720, paid him £70 in his role as the ‘overseer’ of a new house at Wimbledon, Surrey. The house, partly built with the remains of the Elizabethan mansion, comprised a central block with two wings; there was no time to realize the intended engaged portico before Janssen forfeited the estate as punishment for his involvement in the South Sea affair. John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time of the South Sea crisis, commissioned Campbell to build a compact Palladian villa at Waverley Abbey between 1723 and 1725. Similarly, many of William Kent’s clients were beneficiaries of the South Sea Scheme, and the finances of many of Francis Smith of Warwick’s clients may also have owed their strength to South Sea gains. There is also room for conjecture about some of the more far-reaching stylistic repercussions of the bubble’s explosion. Sir Robert Walpole played a key role in restoring stability in the aftermath of the crisis. Despite personal rivalry with Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland, the First Lord of the Treasury, Walpole defended him against calls for harsh punishment following his involvement in the South Sea scandal, thereby garnering favour from George I. The price for Sunderland’s exoneration was his resignation, enabling Walpole to assume his role and, in effect, the mantle of Prime Minister. Though Walpole’s wealth did not derive from the South Sea project, one can therefore trace a connection between the glistening surfaces of the Bubble and the triumphant aesthetic of his seat at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, where Colin Campbell pushed the restrained decorum of Palladianism to its absolute limits.

The difficulty of establishing the appearance of many of the relevant houses, owing to lack of evidence, subsequent alterations, or even complete loss, remains a challenge in assessing the stylistic impact of 1720, but they need to be integrated into the surviving canon. Robert Benson, first Lord Bingley, for example, a director of the South Sea Company from 1711 to 1715, had already created Bramham Park, Yorkshire, constructed in 1698 in a restrained Baroque style. He did well out of his South Sea speculation and in 1725-26 he had a house built, possibly to his own design, on the west side of Cavendish Square, intriguingly described in 1735 as ‘one of the most singular pieces of architecture about town; rather like a convent than the residence of a man of quality’. In 1855 it was said to resemble ‘a copy of some of Poussin’s landscape ornaments’, implying a refined and austere classical style that sounds very much like a Palladian approach, but it was demolished in 1906 and in the absence of further visual evidence, one can say little more.