CHAP. and bankrupt. Law replied by obtaining an ordonnance of the regent, banishing the parliament to Pontoise. XXXIV. A few days before this decree, Law's carriage was assailed by the mob, in the court of the Palais Royal, and torn in pieces, he himself escaping into the palace. Several persons had been stifled at the door of the bank on that very day, seeking to change ten-franc notes, to buy provisions in the market. It is needless to enumerate the several devices by which it was sought to stay the depreciation of paper. An attempt was made to float the company by the withdrawal of a large number of shares, but this was not persevered in. To save the notes from total depreciation, the silver marc was declared to contain 120 livres. All in vain. Shares and notes were shipwrecked together. In December the regent named a new finance minister, and Law, to escape the vengeance of the people and the parliament, which had been recalled from Pontoise, fled from Paris in a carriage of the Duc de Bourbon, taking with him a few hundred livres for his immediate wants. But if thus unprovided with money, Law had made large purchases of landed property and houses, of which he could not but hope to enjoy the revenue, sure as he felt himself of the friendship of the Duc de Bourbon and the regent.* In this he took the same care of his future and made the same investments as Dubois, which makes it strange to see Law extolled as the most disinterested, and Dubois the most interested, of men. Law, who spent a considerable time in England, was often given hopes of his return; the English government, which had counselled his dismissal, also counselling his *Law had the regent's promise that his property should not be confiscated. He had the same promise from the Duc de Bourbon in writing, as he says himself, in a letter to the regent from Venice, dated Jan. 21, 1721. In that letter he proposes ceding all his property to the Company of the Indies, provided it would remit him the sum he possessed on first establishing his bank and entering upon the king's service. Lemontey, Pièces Justificatives. restoration. The outcry against him was too strong, CHAP. however, and Law died in poverty at Venice. One of the most striking chapters in the memoirs of the Duc de St. Simon is that in which he describes the sitting of the Council of Regency which followed Law's departure. The regent and the Duc de Bourbon quarrelled outright. The former, although admitting that it was by his order that Law had issued double the number of notes, considered the company responsible, and proposed that all claims should be referred to one commission, to undergo reduction and, as it was called, a visa. There were presented to this commission 511,000 claims, for a sum total of 2,222,000,000. Of these, the commission either cancelled or disallowed 522,000,000, and left 1,700,000,000 as the amount of the public debt-much the same as that which existed before Law commenced his operations. On this sum, however, but 2 per cent. interest was assigned, so that, however the capital of the debt remained undiminished, the interest sank from 80 to 40 millions annually.* It is a subject of discussion with French writers whether Law's system did not produce several good effects among many disastrous ones. It is admitted that the nobles or the landed interest profited greatly by it. It enabled them to pay their debts and liberate their property. The quantity of money raised and lavished also gave birth to many useful enterprises, such as the opening of roads and the improvement of the ports. Consumption and luxury widely increased with the classes which cater to them. Nor was there a total collapse when the system was no more, for in the years which followed, the produce of the old taxes on consumption, the fermes so greatly increased, that the regent might have restored order in his finances, had he not also prolonged and persisted in the enormous extravagance which Law's paper money had taught and *Histoire du Visa. XXXIV. XXXIV. CHAP. indulged him in. This prosperity was more probably, indeed, the result of peace than of any financial catastrophe. As to Law himself, it is surprising with what not only leniency but favour, French writers regard him; even Thiers, the least carried away by the illusions of the day, writes almost his panegyric. What strikes us most in his brief career is the violence that he employed, and the utter contempt for all right and all justice. Despotic power was never more mercilessly wielded, overthrowing and disturbing all property, fettering and terrorising society, and not sparing the extremes of torture and the executioner. These Law put in force and in practice, and at a time when the ferocity of such habits was naturally declining. The public benefits which he is said to have conferred appear more than doubtful, whereas the heavy wrong and tyranny he wreaked and inflicted are but too painfully recorded in the memoirs of the time.* Gladly would the grandees have seen the Abbé Dubois sunk in the same pit with Law. The wily minister, though not refusing to lend his aid at times to the financier, took care not to be implicated in his hazardous schemes. And whilst Law was tottering, Dubois was sedulously pursuing the path to eminence and influence. A cardinal's hat could alone enable him, as it did Mazarin, to keep pace with his proud enemies at court. He did not blush to confer upon himself the dignity of Archbishop of Cambray, so lately held by Fénelon. The regent was somewhat ashamed-so at least he affected in words. In act he did the contrary, honouring by his presence the ceremony of the new archbishop's instalment. The archbishopric was a step to the cardinalate, which was more difficult to wring from the hands of the pope. * Memoirs of D'Argenson, Histoire du Système; Law, Œuvres ; Forbonnais, with the numerous writers on the subject, including Thiers and Louis Blanc. Dubois left no stone unturned. He reversed his own policy and that of the regent, with regard to ecclesiastical matters, merely to ingratiate himself with Rome. The accession to power of the Duke of Orleans had, at least, brought tolerance, and even triumph, to the Jansenists. Dubois, however, managed to put the pressure upon them once more, and with far greater success than Père Le Tellier. The churchmen were probably sick of the controversy; and Dubois not only succeeded in making them accept the celebrated Unigenitus Bull, but in bringing about the adhesion of the Chancellor D'Aguesseau and the Cardinal de Noailles. All this, however, did not win the hat. Not only was the regent made to solicit his holiness for this purpose, but the King of England, and, strange to say, the Pretender. The confessor of the King of Spain, Daubenton, the great foe of Alberoni, was made to exert himself for the same purpose. Dubois employed every means; yet he was obliged to make a pope expressly for his great design. In the conclave which followed the death of Pope Clement the Eleventh, Dubois bargained with the successful candidate for the red hat, on the promise of French support. Cardinal Conti was elected as Pope Innocent the Thirteenth, and Dubois, in 1721, became cardinal, Rome obliging him to pay, at least, in money as largely as he had already done in efforts.* Dubois, however, had other merits to plead. The great reproach cast upon his policy and that of the regent was, that they drew closer to England, whilst detaching the French from the Spanish Bourbons, and thus sundering one of the great achievements of Louis the Fourteenth. Dubois now made his English allies consent to a renewal of the amity between France and Spain. And he contrived to follow up the disgrace of Alberoni by a reconciliation between the courts of Paris Barbier, Lemontey, Dubois' Mémoires Secrets par Tevelinges, Journal de Dorsanne. CHAP. XXXIV. XXXIV. CHAP. and Madrid. The signature of the quadruple alliance by Spain in January 1720 had removed the large differences between Philip the Fifth and the emperor, but there still remained much to settle, many grudges and suspicions to eradicate and allay. The promised succession of Don Carlos in the duchies of Parma and Tuscany, reluctantly consented to by Austria, was difficult to insure. Dubois leant to Spanish interests in the matter, whilst England inclined more to the emperor. Thus considerable antagonism rather threatened to prevail in the contemplated Congress of Cambray. Austrian perversity, however, came to modify the favourable sentiments of the English king. The emperor established an East India Company at Ostend, and in other ways displayed the foolish desire to make his possession of the Netherlands and its ports the basis of commercial rivalry with England and Holland.* The English ministers neglected to take the true way to prevent this rivalry by bribing the imperial ministers. It was, however, but natural of the emperor to seek to share in that mine of wealth which Law had apparently opened in France, and Harley in England, and which at the time was so promising that George the First allowed himself to be declared Governor of the South Sea Company. This tenacity of the emperor in turning against England and Holland those Low Countries ports and possessions which they had procured him, considerably abated their antagonism to Spain. Philip was willing to make large concessions to England, provided Gibraltar were ceded to him. The regent took upon himself to promise this for England, and a commercial treaty was concluded by which England recovered not only the old advantages stipulated by Alberoni, but the liberty of sending one vessel to trade with the ports of the Spanish Main. Having thus anticipated and removed any jealousy * Menzel. |