The System of the World

Greenwich
A MONTH LATER (18 SEPTEMBER 1714)

Let other Princes, surrounded with couching Slaves, glory in the unlimited Obedience of stupid Wretches that have no sense of Liberty, and little else to brag of, than that like so many Stocks or Stones, they can bear being kick’d and trod upon, whilst a King of Great Britain, almost alone in all the Universe, may boast himself to be a Monarch over Rational Creatures.

-The Mischiefs That Ought Justly to Be Apprehended from a Whig-Government, ANONYMOUS, ATTRIBUTED TO BERNARD MANDEVILLE, 1714

“NOW THERE IS SOMETHING you don’t see every day!” exclaimed Roger Comstock, Marquis of Ravenscar. It was the first thing he had said in a quarter of an hour-a long time, for him-and it prodded Daniel out of a sort of walking coma into which he had sunk during this, the third hour he and Roger had spent standing in this queue.

Daniel started awake and looked round.

Philosophers came to Greenwich all the time, and some even lived here, for the Observatory was up on the hill. Kings and Queens came here rarely, even though the place belonged to them. Architects came here frequently, and almost always wished they hadn’t. For building-projects at Greenwich always had money trouble, and things seemed to decay faster than they could be erected. Inigo Jones had been adroit enough to scamper in and out of this Slough of Despond and actually get a thing built and roofed before it got bogged down: this was the Queen’s House, and the secret to its success was that it was small. The bloody thing seemed to be a mile from the river. Or so it felt to Daniel and the others in the queue, whose head was lodged somewhere in Mr. Jones’s Opus and whose tail wandered all the way to bankside. Some stone steps descended to the river there. A gaudy barge had been made fast. Beyond, anchored in a deeper part of the Thames, was the Navy ship that had fetched George, King, over from the Eurasian landmass. Daniel was only able to see these things because he and Roger had, at long last, reached the foot of, and (half an hour later) trudged to the top of, one of the curving stairways that led up to the terrace of the Queen’s House. From there a few minutes’ shuffling and doddering had got them as far as the front door. They were on the threshold. Daniel had his back to the entrance and was enjoying the view-such as it was-down to the river. Roger, with his stoat-like instinct for dark, seething, infested places, faced opposite. The open doors expired a miasma of rose-water and armpits, cut with the tang of new paint, a-throb with a sort of Beowulfian melange of German and English. Daniel couldn’t bear to turn round and see whatever Roger found so interesting, and so he and Roger passed over the threshold in this Janus-like configuration. Daniel was convinced he had caught a glimpse of Sir Christopher Wren, about an hour behind them in the queue, and had been trying to work out some way of getting Wren’s attention, and of inducing him, by furtive gesticulations, to jump the line. But it was perfectly hopeless; this was the worst place in the world for it. Twenty-some years ago, Wren had been brought in to impose some order on this place, as only Wren could. It had been his place ever since. He was working for free-the idea was to build a hospital for Naval pensioners. Queen Mary had started flogging the plan after the battle at La Hougue in ’92, but she had expired in ’94. There was no telling when a driblet of cash might spill forth from the Royal coffers. Whenever this occurred, Wren would blow it immediately on great blocks of stone and slam them down at the corners, and later along the perimeters, of the things he proposed to build here. For he could see perfectly well that he’d be dead before it went up. Later, and lesser, architects might botch the details, but none would be able to place the actual buildings other than where Wren had flung these plinths into the earth. His deputy Nick Hawksmoor, perceiving the genius of this strategy, and very much getting into the spirit, had lately bought a great bloody block of sculpture-grade marble at some scandalously low price and arranged for it to be vomited up on to the riverbank; when they could get enough money to hire someone to beat on it with a chisel, they’d make it into a brilliant statue of whomever happened to be King or Queen then. And so the general picture that Daniel was seeing from the terrace-and that owned Wren’s attention-was one of colossal foundations, laid by giants: a tiered echelon of rectangles-a Pythagorean dream. In that it was all foundations and no actual buildings, it seemed to confirm all that the Princess of Wales had said, a month ago, about the System, and the importance of putting it on a sound philosophical base. But what Newton and Leibniz had come up with-or failed to-seemed rickety compared to the works of Wren: further evidence that Wren had chosen wisely by turning away from pure philosophy and applying his genius to architecture.

Daniel gave up all hope of catching Wren’s eye and turned round to see what Roger was on about.

“All right,” he had to admit, after a few moments’ taking it in, “you don’t see it every day.”

Two jowls, stapled together by a grimace, and supervised by a stare: the face of George. Lots of clothing to hide his body-nothing unusual there, though, beyond that the clothes were nicer than those of the people massed around him: his Court. Most of these Daniel recognized from his visit to Hanover. He pointed out a few of them to Roger, who had heard of all of them-knew more about them, as it turned out, than Daniel did-but needed a sort of key by which rumors, slanders, calumnies, and salacious anecdotes could be mapped to faces. Pretty soon they were all shooting chilly looks Daniel’s way, even though he was only about the dozenth person in the queue. Perhaps it was because they had caught him pointing and muttering to Roger. More likely, though, it was because the last time they’d seen him, in Hanover, round the time of Sophie’s death, he had been pretending to be senile and useless. Then he had been named a Regent. No proof of compos mentis, that, but they’d read into it that he had pull over someone. Certainly not George. By process of elimination, then, he’d been influencing Princess Caroline.

Caroline did not even seem to be in the room. No, on second thought, there she was in the corner with her husband. They’d already drawn their own little shadow Court of mostly young, witty Londoners, all talking too much, laughing, and drawing evil looks from the old and not so witty, who tended to keep their faces turned toward the new King. It was weirdly obvious and bold: if you thought you’d live long enough to march in George I’s funeral procession, why then you would gravitate toward the future George II. Most had the decency and good form to hew to this general principle, but Daniel Waterhouse was fouling it up by being an old man in the young people’s camp. And here he was on the arm of the Marquis of Ravenscar!

“I’d best stop pointing and staring now, as we seem to’ve been noticed,” he said to Roger, trying to look as if he were making a remark about yesterday’s weather, “but in closing I’ll just add that you can see plainly enough the fat one and the skinny one.”

As tout le monde knew, these were George’s mistresses; his actual wife, of course, was still locked up in a dank Schlo? somewhere beyond the Weser.

“I had already marked them, sir,” said Roger drily. “And they seem to have marked me-for death!”

“I think you altogether misinterpret their glaring,” Daniel said, after verifying that the fat one and the skinny one were, in fact, attempting to set fire to Roger’s eyebrows with the heat of their scrutiny. “A she-wolf in the Thuringerwald stares thus at her prey, before pouncing. But it is not out of hate that the feral bitch of the north does so, but rather a cool understanding that it’s from the hapless rabbit, sheep, or what-have-you, that she is to derive her sustenance.”

“Oh, is that all they want? Money?”

“In a word, yes.”

“I’d supposed that they wanted me to draw out my sword and plunge it into my own vitals, or something, from the way they were looking at me.”

“No,” Daniel confirmed, “they want your money.”

“It is good to know this.”

“Why? Are you going to give them some of your money now?”

“That would be impolite,” said Roger, blushing at the very thought. “But I see no obstacle to giving them someone else’s.”

Finally they had drawn near enough that it was no longer the done thing for them to acknowledge anyone other than their (as yet uncrowned) King. For once Daniel got precedence over Roger, because of being a Regent; and his majesty even recognized him. “Dr. Vaterhouse of der Royal Society,” he rattled off, as he allowed Daniel to kiss his hand-the very last occasion, or so Daniel hoped, that Daniel would ever give his Puritan ancestors occasion to roll over in their graves. Daniel was so consumed by the horror of what he was doing, and by wondering whether he was going to catch anything from that hand, which had already been kissed, today, by half of the syphilitics in England, that he failed to attend to what the King was saying. The problem was that his majesty had jumped over to some other language-some language, that is, that he actually spoke-and Daniel had not kept up-had not re-tuned his ear to follow it. With his unkissed left hand, George was gesturing toward the windows in the back, or south wall of the house, which provided a pleasant enough view over a rising green lawn, crossed here and there by paths, and tufted with carefully managed outbreaks of trees. Jutting from the biggest and most elevated of these, off to the right, was the queer edifice known as the Royal Observatory: two bookends imprisoning one book. But other than that, few buildings were visible, as the whole point was for it to be a park.

Daniel, belatedly coming alive to the fact that he was being personally addressed in an as-yet-unidentified language by the King, got only a single word: Ruben. What did it mean? To rub something? Perhaps the King was remarking that the custodians of the Queen’s House had rubbed the windows very clean? Daniel was just beginning to nod when the King helpfully said “navet.” Daniel realized in some horror that he’d switched to French to make himself better understood-but Daniel still didn’t understand! Was he talking about the Navy? That would be reasonable in a way, since the activities of the Royal Observatory were of great importance to the Navy. Daniel kept nodding. Finally Bothmar intervened-Baron von Bothmar, who’d been the Hanoverian ambassador to the Court of St. James back in the days when Hanover and England had been different countries. “His majesty hates to see good land go to waste,” Bothmar translated, “and has been eyeing yonder open space all morning, wondering how it might be put to some practical use; the difficulty being that it inclines toward the north and does not, in consequence, receive good sunlight. Knowing that you, Dr. Waterhouse, are a man of great Natural-philosophick acumen, his majesty asks you whether you are in agreement with him in thinking that, in the springtime, one might, with some hope of success, plant on that ground Ruben-navets-turnips.”

“Tell his majesty that if I had a shovel I’d go plant some right now,” Daniel said hopelessly.

The King, having been made aware of this, blinked and nodded. He had got a distant look now in his eyes, which reflected the green light of the future turnip-patch. Daniel could almost see the man’s jowls fill up with saliva as he envisioned a grand turnip-feast in a year’s time.

Ravenscar was chuckling. “How your shovel-work would discomfit those prancing, Frenchified Tory courtiers,” he remarked, “who, seeing such an excellent plot of land as that, have not the wit to imagine any use for it save to parade about on their gaudy chevals.”

“The Marquis of Ravenscar,” von Bothmar explained, and Daniel now had to avert his gaze from the not especially appetizing spectacle of Roger planting a smooch on George’s hand.

When Daniel felt it was safe to look back, the King seemed to have been put in mind of something. He was casting about for an eye-line to the Duke of Marlborough, and presently got one-Marlborough was one of the few actual English people suffered to stand anywhere near the King of England. Much as iron filings stand up and get organized in the presence of a magnet, certain facts and memories that had been scattered round the King’s periwig came into alignment when his visual cortex was stimulated by the face of Marlborough. He harrumphed and began to burp out some phrases having to do with a soiree and a Vulkan that were translated into prose, and into English, by Bothmar. “His majesty has heard from my lord Marlborough that the Duke very much enjoyed your recent party, at which the famous Volcano was made to erupt. His majesty would fain witness this amusement. Not now. Later. But my lord Marlborough spoke well of how the Royal Mint has been looked after, and of the quality of the coinage. His majesty will require good men to look after the Treasury. Good men-not a good man. For such is the importance of this task that he has decided to change the tradition of appointing a Lord Treasurer, and place that office in commission. His majesty is pleased to nominate my lord Ravenscar First Lord of the Treasury. And he is also pleased to nominate Daniel Waterhouse a member of that same Commission.”

All of which came as news to Daniel-though Roger had been winking at and elbowing him even more than usual in recent days, which ought to have given him a clew.

Rather a lot of bowing and scraping occurred round now, as tremendous gratitude had to be expressed, et cetera. Daniel happened to glance Marlborough’s way, and caught the Duke glaring at Roger. Roger, who had peripheral vision subtending a full three hundred and sixty degrees, was well aware of it; it was some sort of arranged cue. “What will be my lord’s first act as First Lord of the Treasury?” inquired Bothmar, who, too, had taken part in these silent, fevered exchanges.

“Why, to make a clean start of his majesty’s coinage!” Roger answered. “Not that there was anything wrong with that of Queen Anne-this is well established. It is more of a procedural matter-some would call it superficial pomp, but we English have a weakness for that sort of thing-there is this special box, called the Pyx, which we keep in the Tower, all locked up, and put samples of the new coins into it as they are produced. And from time to time his majesty’s council will say, ‘Let’s have a look at the old Pyx, shall we,’ just as a routine precaution, as gunners try their powder before a battle. And so out comes the Pyx, and it is carried in a sort of solemn procession to the Star Chamber at Westminster where a furnace has been set up for the occasion, and the Pyx is unlocked in the presence of his majesty’s Lords of the Council and the coins are taken out and assayed by goldsmiths from the City and compared against a trial plate, which is, as a rule, kept locked up in a crypt below Westminster Abbey along with a lot of old saints’ bones and whatnot.” Here the new King’s attention began to drift very noticeably and Roger seemed to come aware that he might as well be a witch-doctor dancing about in a fright wig and a carven mask. “Never mind, it is quite the rite, and it gives the City men a warm feeling. And when they have such a feeling it is rather a good thing for your majesty’s commerce.”

Bothmar had taken to raising his eyebrows at Roger so violently that it seemed they might fly off and stick to the ceiling. “Anyway,” Roger concluded, “time to clean out the Pyx! It is half full of most excellent coins bearing the stamp of the late Queen Anne, R.I.P. One Charles White has been looking after it-you may inquire among others as to the man’s character. In fact, you’ll probably meet him today!”

“In about ten minutes,” said Bothmar, and glanced over toward the door. “That is, if you’ll finish.” Daniel couldn’t help following Bothmar’s gaze, and had his day ruined by the sight of Mr. White, just inside the threshold, staring at him interestedly.

Roger polished it off thus: “To put to rest any possible confusion, I say, before we begin throwing new King George guineas into the Pyx, and mixing them up with Anne’s, why, let’s have a Trial of the Pyx, empty the thing out, kill the rumors, and start off your majesty’s reign with a lot of sparkling new coins.”

“For a while the schedule is terribly busy-”

“Not to worry,” Roger assured him, “the Mint would not go into production anyway until after the coronation, which I’m told is scheduled for the twentieth of October. Give us, then, say, a week for the festivities to subside…”

“Sir Isaac Newton suggests Friday, the twenty-ninth.”

“Worst possible day, I am afraid. That is a Hanging-Day at Tyburn. Impossible to move.”

“Sir Isaac is aware of the fact,” said Bothmar, “but says it is good, because on that day the Coiner shall be executed.”

“I see. Yes. Yes. On one day-practically at the same moment-the Pyx shall be put to the trial, Sir Isaac shall be vindicated, and the most notorious of all coiners shall be put to death before an audience of, oh, half a million. Practicalities aside, Sir Isaac’s proposal is, come to think of it, very clever.”

“Well,” Bothmar pointed out, “he is a genius.”

“That he is!”

“And,” Bothmar added, “his majesty thinks highly of Sir Isaac’s philosophickal prowess.”

“Did Sir Isaac have an opinion about the turnips?” Daniel inquired, but Roger stepped on his foot and Bothmar politely omitted to translate it.

“So,” said Bothmar, “unless you object-”

“Not in the least! Friday, October the twenty-ninth, it is! Get the Privy Council to wave a quill over it, and we shall make ready for a Trial of the Pyx!”

ROGER AND DANIEL were permitted to stay and mingle. But Daniel hated mingling worse than anything. He launched a desperate escape attempt via the terrace in the back, but could not work out how to get round to the Thames side and flag down a passing Ship without making a spectacle of himself. He stared across the Lawn and pretended to philosophize about the turnip farm. When he felt this pretense might be wearing a bit thin, he stared up the hill at the Observatory and wondered if Flamsteed was awake yet, and whether he’d raise objections if Daniel went up there to tinker with the equipment. This too was wearing thin when haply he came across that old last resort of introverts at cocktail parties: a document that he could pretend to be utterly absorbed in. It was a broadside, lying face down on the stone pavement of the terrace with gentlemen’s boot-prints all over it. Daniel raked it up over his toe with the tip of his walking-stick and from there was able to coax it up into a hand, and flip it over.

At the top of the sheet were two portraits of equal size, arrayed next to each other. One looked like an ink-blot. It was a miserable rendering of a black-haired black man in a black suit with two white eyes poking out. Beneath was a caption: Dappa as rendered in April 1714 by the renown’d portraitist, Charles White. The other was a rather good engraving of an African gentleman with silvery dreadlocks and a beard, dusky, of course, but with a range of skin tones suggested by the hatchures and other tricks of the engraver’s art. It was captioned DAPPA as rendered in September 1714 by-, and here was given the name of a highly regarded artist. Looking more closely Daniel saw, in the background of the picture, a barred window, through which could be espied the skyline of London rising above the Thames. It was the view from the Liberty of the Clink.

The title was ADDITIONAL REMARKS on FAME by DAPPA. Daniel began to read it. It took the form of a sugary and, Daniel suspected, sarcastic encomium to the Duke of Marlborough.

“That was inadvertent,” remarked a man who had been standing nearby, smoking a pipe. From the corner of his eye, Daniel had already marked this chap as a military man, for he was wearing an officer’s uniform. Reckoning him to be a fellow non-Mingler, he had had the simple decency to ignore him. Now this general or colonel or whatever he was had shown the poor form to irrupt in on Daniel while he was pretending to read something so as not to have to talk to anyone. Daniel looked up and saw, first, that the facings, piping, cuffs, amp;c. of the uniform were those of the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. Second, that this was Marlborough.

“What was inadvertent, my lord?”

“When you came to call on me at my levee, just after I returned to this city, a month and a half ago, I had been reading some of this chap’s work,” said Marlborough. “Must have made some remark. Those other chaps must have gone forth and spread the rumor that I was a devotee of Mr. Dappa’s work. It seems he has only become more popular since. People have sent him money-he lives now in the finest apartment that the Clink has to offer, and strolls on a private balcony there, and is called on by fops and whatnot. He says in the document you are holding in your hand there, that he has all but become a white man as a result, and presents these portraits as evidence. He still wears chains; but those are less restrictive than the chains of the mind that bind some to out-moded ideas such as Slavery. So he deems himself a Gentleman now, and has begun to place donations in escrow, in the hopes that he may purchase Charles White as soon as the price drops low enough.”

“My word! You practically have the thing memorized!” Daniel exclaimed.

“I have had to spend many hours of late waiting for his majesty to wax talkative. Dappa writes well.”

“You have command of your old regiment again, I gather?”

“Yes. The details are quite unfathomable. Others are toiling away at them. Colonel Barnes has been located, and put in charge of rounding up certain elements who were scattered during the amusements of the summer. I am glad I was not here. It all would have vexed me to no end. I understand congratulations are in order for you.”

“Thank you,” said Daniel. “I have no idea what are the duties of a member of the Treasury Commission-”

“Keep an eye on my lord Ravenscar. See to it that the Trial of the Pyx goes rather well.”

“That, my lord, hangs on what is in the Pyx.”

“Yes. I was meaning to ask you. Does anyone really know what’s in the bloody thing?”

“Perhaps he does,” said Daniel, and inclined his head toward a nearby window. A red-wigged gentleman was in there, mingling with Germans, but glancing frequently at them.

“Charles White,” said Marlborough, “is, it’s true, still in command of the King’s Messengers, who pretend to guard the Pyx. I am pleased to let you know that they are now surrounded, and carefully observed, by the King’s Own Black Torrent Guard. So Mr. White cannot make any more mischief with the Pyx. And Colonel Barnes has related to me that White was downriver with you and Sir Isaac Newton at the moment that the Pyx was molested in April.”

“Very well,” said Daniel, since, plainly enough, Marlborough had figured this all out on his own: “The only one who really knows what is in the Pyx is Jack Shaftoe.”

“Hmm. If that is the case, then I am astonished that there is not a queue before Newgate Prison quite as long as that yonder.”

“Perhaps there is,” Daniel said.

White came out on the terrace and bowed. “My lord,” he said to Marlborough. “Doctor Waterhouse.”

“Mr. White,” they both said. Then they all took turns saying, “God save the King.”

“I trust you’ll be even more busy than usual,” White said to Daniel, “now that you’ve two Mints to look after.”

“Two Mints? I do not understand, Mr. White. There is only one Mint that I know of.”

“Oh, perhaps I was misinformed,” said White, mock-confused. “People are saying there is another.”

“Do you mean Jack Shaftoe’s coining house in Surrey? The Tory Mint?” Daniel asked, and let the handbill snap in the breeze, hoping that White would notice it. He did.

“You really ought to have better sources of information. Don’t read that rubbish. Listen to what Persons of Quality are saying.”

Marlborough turned his back, which was a rude thing to do; but the way this was going, it would soon become a duelling matter unless the Duke pretended he wasn’t hearing it.

“And what are Persons of Quality saying, Mr. White?”

“That Ravenscar is coining, too.”

“People are accusing the Marquis of Ravenscar of committing High Treason? Seems audacious.”

“Everyone knows he raised a private army. ’Tis a small step from that, to a private Mint.”

“Bored toffs in drawing-rooms may believe any phant’sies they please! Such accusations require at least some evidence.”

“They say that evidence may be found in abundance,” said White, “at Clerkenwell Court, and at Bridewell, and in the cellars of the Bank of England. Good day.” And he left. Which was fortunate for Daniel. A few seconds ago he had been amused at the sheer idiocy of the notion that Roger had been coining. Now he had become too flustered to speak.

“What was that about?” Marlborough very much wanted to know.

“It is a philosophical project I have been undertaking with Leibniz,” said Daniel, “that, to make a long story-” and he gave a sketchy account of the thing to the Duke, explaining the movement of the gold from Clerkenwell to Bridewell to the Bank to Hanover. “Someone seems to have gathered rather a lot of information about it,” Daniel concluded, “and spreads now a twisted version according to which it is a coining operation.”

“We know who is spreading it-we have just been conversing with him,” said Marlborough. “It matters not where the rumor originated.” To this Daniel said nothing, for a sickening awareness had come over him that this might all have originated with Isaac.

“What does matter-very much-is that two members of the new Treasury Commission are mixed up in it,” said Marlborough.

“Mixed up in what? A science experiment?”

“In something that looks a bit dodgy.”

“I can’t help it if it looks dodgy to an ignoramus!”

“But you can help that you are mixed up in it.”

“What do you mean, my lord?”

“I mean that your experiment is at an end, sir. It must stop. And the moment it has stopped, responsible persons, trusted by the King and the City alike, must go to this Clerkenwell Court, and to Bridewell, and into the vaults of the Bank, and inspect them, and find nothing of what Mr. White has been talking of.”

“It could be stopped at any time,” Daniel said, “but to wind it up properly and cast away the residue is impossible in a day, or a week.”

“How long will it take then?”

“October twenty-ninth,” said Daniel, “is the date that has just been set for the Trial of the Pyx, the execution of Jack the Coiner, and the elimination of all doubt as to the soundness of his majesty’s coinage. No later than that date, my lord, you’ll be able to visit the places mentioned with as many inspectors as you might care to bring along with you-including even Sir Isaac himself-and you shall find nothing save Templar-tombs at Clerkenwell, hemp-pounders at Bridewell, and Coin of the Realm at the Bank.”

“Done,” said the Duke of Marlborough, and strode away, pausing to bow to a young lady crossing the terrace alone: the Princess of Wales.

“Dr. Waterhouse,” Caroline said, “I need something from you.”