X. Henry Thornton (1762-1815)

Through most of the first half of the eighteenth century, while William Beckford was making a name for himself as a great London merchant and grandee, a humbler man was honourably pursuing his calling. His name was Robert Thornton. He imported goods from Russia, and sent thither English goods in exchange, a branch of trade for which Hull, which aeems to have been his native place, was famous, and which he carried on in connection with some influential traders of Hull. He lived in the out-of-the-way village of Clapham, and must have been acquainted with Sir John Barnard, Beckford's rival as a great city merchant, and certainly at that time the wealthiest and worthiest of the pious merchants who even then had begun to make Clapham their favourite abode.

Robert Thornton had a son, John, born in 1720, who succeeded him in the Russian business, and made it very much more extensive.

"He was in business," says Mr Colquhoun, "an active merchant, keen in watching opportunities, and skilful in using them. Eminent for other qualities, he never lost the practised eye of the merchant and his watchful observation. In one of his tours in Ireland, undertaken late in life to recruit, as was his habit, his strength, he showed the habits which peculiarly characterised him. Walking out in the early morning at Cork, he turned down to the harbour, where a number of vessels, laden with tallow, had just come in. A few questions, addressed by him to the persons connected with them, put him in possession of the facts, and by a stroke of his pen he made the cargoes his own. By this adventure he cleared a handsome profit. From the harbour he strolled into a nursery garden, where he fell in with its humble proprietor. The poor man was in great perplexity, being hampered for want of capital. Mr Thornton talked to him, ascertained his circumstances, inquired into his character, and being satisfied, by another stroke of his pen helped him out of his troubles, and set him fairly on his feet."

Of that sort was his conduct through life. Always ready to see where a good bargain was to be made, and how to make it, he acquired great wealth, and was always ready to spend it in wise and charitable ways. His generous disposition has rarely been equalled. Meeting one day on the Exchange a young merchant, whom he knew to be honest and intelligent, but cramped in business by the small amount of money at his command, he said to him, "John, I have been thinking much of you and your circumstances; I think if you had a larger capital, you would now do a better business." His friend said this was certainly the case. "Well," said John Thornton, "£10,000 are at your service. If you prosper, you will repay me; if you don't, you shall never hear of the debt." The younger merchant, amazed at such an offer, asked for a few days to think over it. When the few days were past, Thornton sought him out and reminded him of their conversation. "I have been thinking over your kind offer," was the reply, "but I feel I must decline it. If I lost your money, I should be very unhappy; and, through the blessing of God, I am now doing a fair business; so I had better remain as I am."

THE PRESENT ROYAL EXCHANGE.

John Thornton spent most of his wealth in the interests of the religion that was dear to him. Earnest men of all creeds were his friends—Wesley, and Whitfield, and William Bull, the Independent, as well as John Newton, and a host of clergymen of the Established Church. His favourite plan was to buy livings, and give them, with additional endowments, to clergymen of his own generous and earnest way of thinking; and in the same way, to make large allowances, for their own use, and for philanthropic employment, to Methodists and Dissenting ministers. "I am glad you are beginning a Sunday-school," he wrote to one Dissenter; "when you want assistance, you know where to come for it; when you want money, remember I am your banker, and draw freely."

A sister of John Thornton's married an uncle of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce, as a lad, spent many years in the house of his uncle and aunt, and went often to that of the Thorntons. The associations there brought in his way, however, were distasteful to his kinsfolk, in whose opinions Christianity could not exist out of the Church of England. "If Billy turns Methodist," said his grandfather, "he shall not have a sixpence of mine." Therefore, at the age of twelve, young Wilberforce was forbidden to go to either Wimbledon or Clapham. But when he was his own master, he went back to both places with a hearty love for the religious habits which he there found enforced.

"It wa by living with great simplicity of intention and conduct in the practice of a Christian life." he said afterwards of his old friend, "more than by any superiority of understanding or of knowledge, that John Thornton rendered his name illustrious. He anticipated the disposition and pursuits of the succeeding generation. He devoted large sums annually to charitaUe purposes, especially to the promotion of the cause of religion, both in his own and other countries."

John Thornton died in 1790. He left not only the old Russian business greatly enlarged, but also a share in the extensive banking establishment of Down, Thornton, & Free, in Bartholomew Lane. Both descended to his three sons—Samuel, Robert, and Henry—although the mercantile concern was managed principally by the two elder sons, the bank being directed chiefly by the youngest and ablest.

Henry Thornton, born in 1762, seems indeed to have been the leading spirit in the bank from the first. His large powers and wise use of them helped greatly to advance the whole business while it was in his father's hands, and these appear to have been the main cause of its extension in the most lucrative of all ways of honest money-making.

"He inherited," says Mr Colquhoun, "the business talents of his father, and his untiring perseverance; but the ability, which in his father was limited to mercantile enterprise, rose in. him to a higher elevation. His mind was essentially philosophic. To investigate every moral occurrence and physical problem, to trace these through their relations and connections, to analyse their elements, to extract that which was essential from the incidental, this furnished a constant exercise to his intellectual powers. To examine carefully, to deliberate long, to balance each quality and circumstance in the scales of an equal judgment, to accept no standard but that of truth, and to bring everything to be tried by that standard—wherever law was applicable, to apply it, and, where law was silent, to test the subject by rules of equity,—this was his favourite occupation, and the delight of his leisure hours."

Like many other busy men, he found leisure for philosophical thought and philanthropic labour, without any hindrance to the due performance of his complicated pursuits in the counting-house. He was much more than a banker, but, as a banker, he had no rivals in his day.

Yet that was almost the most eventful period in the progress of banking. Henry Thornton had for competitors many men who have made especial mark in the history of their profession. The profession was then passing out of the quiet ways to which it had long been limited, and taking its place as the most important branch of modern commerce. The first bankers were men like the mediaeval Jews of Old Jewry, and the mediaeval Lombards of Lombard Street, Whittington and Gresham, Herrick and Heriot, merchants and miscellaneous traders, who increased their wealth and influence as moneymakers and money-changers, but had none of the elaborate machinery of modern banking. It was not till the seventeenth celitury that it began to be a separate and highly-developed institution. Sir Francis Child, originally a goldsmith, the founder of Child's Bank, who lived in the days of William III., was the first proper banker. Other men soon followed in his steps, and became rich by their new calling.

Among the chief of these was the family of the Hoares, Henry Hoare, the son of a humble Buckinghamshire farmer, was a merchant in London about the middle of the seventeenth century. His son Richard, born in 1648, was famous in his day for his good business qualities and his public services, for his wealth, and the good use to which he put it. "He not only governed his private life by the strictest rules of virtue," it was said of him, "but also in many public stations did ever discharge his duty with the utmost integrity and fidelity." He was a great benefactor of Christ's Hospital. He was Member of Parliament from 1710 to 1713; and, in the latter year, having been knighted, he served as Lord Mayor. He was related, both by family ties and in business, to James Hoare, an irregular banker, who lived at the sign of the Golden Bottle, in Cheapside.

James Hoare died in 1694; but a few years before that the business was removed to Sir Richard Hoare's shop in Fleet Street, also indicated by a golden bottle; and on Sir Richard's death, in 1718, it descended to his three sons, Richard, John, and Henry. The youngest son seems to have been the ablest and the worthiest. "His behaviour," said one of his friends, "was such, under the various circumstances, capacities, and relations which he passed through, that a general esteem, love, and honour, were all along most justly paid to his character." He left; £2000 to be given to various charity-schools and workhouses, £2000 to be spent in distributing Bibles, prayer-books, and religious works, and other large sums to be applied in various benevolent ways. Dying in 1725, he left a prosperous banking-house, to be chiefly managed by his eldest son, Henry, who spent a long life of eighty years in enlarging his influence, increasing his wealth, and putting it to good uses. His life was contemporary with that of John Thornton, and, as he too lived on Clapham Common, he must have been well acquainted with the pious merchant and his famous son.

THOMAS COUTTS.

Another great banker and good man, though he showed his goodness in different ways, was Thomas Coutts. His grandfather, John Coutts, was a prosperous corn-merchant in Edinburgh, who added banking to his trade in corn. The Edinburgh business was carried on by his son and grandsons; but the most enterprising of these grandsons, Thomas, came to London in 1754, when he was about twenty-three years old. In 1760 he established himself as a banker in the Strand, succeeding to the business of a George Campbell, who had originally been a goldsmith. In 1768 he rebuilt his premises, which form the present banking-house of Coutts & Company.

Coutts was charitable in his way, often very generous in his dealings with others; but the one great occupation of his life was money-making. He is described by one who often saw him shambling along the Strand, as "a pallid, sickly, thin, old gentleman, who wore a shabby coat and a brown scratch wig." One day a good-natured person, fresh from the country, stopped him in the street, and, pitying his forlorn appearance, offered him a guinea. Coutts thanked him, but declined the gift, saying that he was not in "immediate want." When he died in 1822, at the age of ninety-one, he left an immense property, and a very lucrative business, to his granddaughter, Miss Angela Burdett Coutts, whose wealthy it was reckoned a few years ago, if told in sovereigns, would weigh thirteen tons, and fill a hundred and seven flour sacks.

Henry Thornton never grew so rich as Thomas Coutts or the Hoares. But he was an abler man than any of them. He put his talents to good use. Working hard in his counting-house, he was also a zealous worker outside of it. He entered the House of Commons as Member for Southwark, and he held his seat for one-and-thirty years, during six successive Parliaments. Those were days in which bribery was much more the fashion than now it is, when very few candidates were elected for their merits alone, the corruption of poor electors or the influence of rich landlords being the accepted means for sending even honest men to Parliament. Henry Thornton was too honest to adopt either of these means. He held his ground even when the opposition at some of the elections was most violent.

"In the election of 1802," says Mr Colquhoun, "his success was doubtful. His colleague had secured his seat by assiduous attention to the voters. Henry Thornton had given his time to important duties and public business. At the nomination the show of hands was against him. But when the voting began, and he was found to stand lowest on the poll, there was a prompt rally in his favour. He had, indeed, no crowds of canvassers, nor could he win the crowd to his side by witty eloquence. But his character spoke for him; and his good deeds, experienced by many, spread a savour which influenced a wide cirele. To many families he had been a liberal benefactor; every one in distress knew where he could find a friend."

And he was returned with an overwhelming majority. The mob, that had been disposed to oust him, became furious in his favour. He was then as calm in his success as he had been at the prospect of defeat. "I had rather," he said to his children, "have a shake of the hand from good old John Newton, than the cheers of all that foolish mob, who praise me, they don't know why."

In 1807, again, there was a hard contest, and Thornton looked upon his defeat as certain. Against all the entreaties of his friends, he refused to do as others did—to treat and flatter, if not openly to bribe; and again he was placed at the head of the poll by men whose respect he had nobly earned by his disinterested conduct. Even those who would readily have taken pay for their votes gave them for nothing to a man so straightforward and disinterested. One of the doggrel verses circulated at the contest expressed the thoughts of all about their honest representative:—

"Nor place nor pension e'er got he For self or for connection; We shall not tax the Treasury By Thornton's re-election."

Henry Thornton entered Parliament, and retained his seat there, in order to promote two sorts of work which were very dear to him, and to which he devoted the chief energies of his life. One of these was the furtherance of the philanthropic efforts which he shared with Wilberforce and the other members of that famous group of religious men known as the Clapham party. The other was the propounding of enlightened views on banking and commerce which have done much to make England as rich and great as now it is.

The Bank of England was in his day, and largely through his help, entirely reorganised. It had been founded, as we have seen, by William Paterson about a hundred years before. It had grown steadily, and was already not only a great private establishment, of immense service to merchants and their callings, and very profitable to its shareholders, but also the powerful agent of the State in its financial dealings. It was allowed to be a bank for private persons, on condition of its being also a bank for the nation, competent to hold the taxes levied throughout the country, and to dispense them in the ways appointed by the ministers of the State for the country's good. But when Thornton began life, the Bank was not only being used as a depositaiy for the national income. The costly war in which England was engaged with France involved far more expense than the taxes could meet. Much of this was provided for by a great increase of the National Debt, in which the Bank was an important agent; much was supplied by the issuing of additional bank-notes, under Government authority.

For as long a time as possible the Bank, though authorised, and even compelled, to issue notes, for which it had no equivalent of gold in its coffers, was held to the terms of its charter, by which it was obliged, as now, to give gold in exchange for notes to any one who asked for it. This, of course, it would have been unable to do, had any great demand been made for gold in lieu of notes; and the danger increased with the increased excess of paper-money over coin in circulation. At length things came to such a pass, that, in October 179S, the Directors of the Bank informed William Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, that they were on the verge of bankruptcy, and could not hold out much longer. Other and more and more urgent messages followed during nearly a year and a half. The result was, that, in February 1797, the Bank was authorised by the Privy Council to refuse cash payment for its notes, or the issue of any greater amount of coin than a pound or, a pound's worth of silver at a time. In May a law, known as the Bank Restriction Act, was passed, enforcing that resolution, and sanctioning an almost unlimited issue of notes. Sheridan declared it "a farce to call that a bank whose promise to pay on demand was paid by another promise to pay at some undefined period;" and Sir William Pulteney introduced a bill "for the erection of a new bank, in case the Bank of England did not pay in specie on or before the 24th of June 1798."

But this opposition was ineffectual, and the Bank Restriction Act remained in force for two-and-twenty years. It did some good, in setting bankers and financiers to devise some better system of paper-currency; but banknotes were so lowered in value, that at one time poor people who had received five-pound notes as if they were worth £5 found they could not exchange them for more than £3 10s. or £4 a-piece.

Among all the financial reformers induced by this state of things, none was more earnest or outspoken than Henry Thornton, who, in 1803, published "An Inquiry into the Effects of Paper Credit." In it he showed that it was a great wrong to commerce and society to issue more paper-money than, in the open market, could be exchanged for its full value in actual coin; and that to force upon the people notes which were not really worth as much as they professed to be, was a short-sighted and ruinous policy. He persevered in offering the same sound arguments, and was a leading member of the famous Bullion Committee, appointed in 1810, which fully discussed the whole question, and ultimately obtained the adoption of those wiser principles of banking and monetary exchange which were partly and beneficially adopted in 1819, when the Bank of England was reconstructed by a law known as Sir Robert Peel's Act.

Before that time, however, Henry Thornton died, having done much other very useful work for his country. If merchants and statesmen honoured him most as a great financier, he was no less worthy of honour as a great philanthropist. He was one of the leaders, in some respects the chief leader, of the religious community known as the Clapham party. William Wilberforce, its acknowledged head, had learnt to be a good man in the house of old John Thornton, with Henry Thornton for his fellow-pupil. The two men became fast friends, and were fellow-helpers for life.

"When I entered life," said Thornton, "I saw a great deal of dishonourable conduct among people who made great professions of religion. In my father's house I met with a person of this sort. This so disgusted me, that, had it not been for the admirable pattern of consistency and disinterestedness which I saw in Mr Wilberforce, I should have been in danger of a sort of infidelity."

"I owed much to Wilberforce, in every sense," he said at another time; "for his enlightened mind, his affectionate and condescending manners, and his very superior piety, were exactly calculated to supply what was wanting to my improvement and my establishment in a right course. It is chiefly through him that I have been introduced to a variety of other most valuable associates."

Wilberforce spoke of Thornton in terms of no less loving praise. The two friends and their valuable associates did noble work amongst them.

"In 17891," writes Mr Colquhoun, "when both the friends, then in delicate health, resorted to the Bath waters a visit made by Wilberforce to Cowslip Green, where Hannah More, as he said, 'had shut herself up in the country, to devote her talents to the instruction of a set of wretched people sunk in heathen darkness,' led to an enterprise of benevolence which long engaged both the friends. Wilberforce's compassionate heart was touched by the savage condition of the neglected people. He engaged, if Hannah More would undertake the trouble of reclaiming them, that he would bear the cost; any calls for money he would readily meet; 'For,' he writes, 'I have a rich banker in London, Mr H. Thornton, whom I cannot oblige so much as by drawing on him for purposes like these.'

"In 1791, when the two friends were again at Bath, Henry Thornton accompanied Wilberforce to Cowslip Green, and thus began that intimate friendship between Hannah More and Henry Thornton, which lasted through their lives. Hannah More soon learnt what sort of a man Henry Thornton was. She found his purse open to her in all her difficulties; and, better than his purse, his counsels. Trials had fallen on her and her sister in their benevolent labours; threats of prosecution, calumnious charges raised by obstinate prejudice, and envenomed by jealousy, the rancorous bitterness of the rich proving more odious than the boorish apathy of the poor. So, when these things came upon her, she poured forth her story to her thoughtful friend; and no matter how busy the story found him—busy at his bank, on committees, helping Wilberforce in the cause of abolition, or assisting him to make up his mind on the question of peace with France—he was never too busy to send advice to her. No matter what the subject, he is ready. She is publishing a series of tracts, half political, half religious; he reviews, retouches, and prints them. He writes some himself. 'While we are taking down a dull evidence', he writes from the Finance Committee, 'I seize a few minutes to write to you on the subject of tracts, I have to tell you that I thought it right to prepare a tract, to be included in the printed volume.' Again: 'I have some thoughts of writing the second part of the communion tract, another of prayers for families, and one for Christmasday.'"

Those sentences will help us to understand the nature of Thornton's religious and philanthropic labours through five-and-twenty years and more. To follow it all we must study the biographies of Wilberforce, of Clarkson, of Hannah More, and a score of other worthies; yet even then we can follow it but dimly. Henry Thornton was a modest worker. He was the mainspring of a hundred movements; but he was generally in the back-ground, willing that others should have the praise; in the simplicity of his heart believing that all the praise was really due to them, and satisfied for himself in thinking that he was able to have such excellent agents and supporters in his employment, and use of the money and the talents given to him.

In one movement, however, which we may look upon as an illustration of his whole character and conduct, he was outwardly, as well as really, the leader. In 1791, he organised a Sierra Leone Company, and obtained a charter for it He was its chairman, and it started with a capital of £50,000. But money-making was not here his object. The company was intended to organise a settlement of escaped and liberated slaves from Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere, who would thus, it was hoped, not only have a comfortable home for themselves, but also be able to spread the blessings of civilisation among the native blacks of Western Africa.

"The colony works me from morning till night," he wrote in November 1791; "the importance of the thing strikes me, and fills my mind so much, that at present business, politics, friendship, seem all suspended for the sake of it."

He saw that the first ship was properly freighted, and properly sent out. He prepared a complete code of laws for the colony, and chose for its first governor, Zachary Macaulay, to whose son, the great historian, was given the name of another influential worker in the Sierra Leone scheme, and in all kindred philanthropies—Thomas Babington. Thornton, Babington, Wilberforce, and others, toiled at home through weary years on behalf of the colony, and Macaulay worked no less zealously for it on the spot Its purposes failed, partly through evils of climate, partly through the incompetence of the black colonists; and in 1808 it had to be transferred to the Crown, and subjected to different and rougher treatment. But the honour due to Thornton and his associates is as great as if their philanthropic undertaking had been crowned with the utmost possible success.

This, too, was the beginning of the noble enterprise in which Wilberforce was the chief advocate, by which the slave-trade was abolished, and a death-blow, acting slowly but surely, was given to slavery itself. Henry Thornton lived long enough to see and help on only the commencement of this proud crusade against the most grievous obstacle to civilisation and progress in modern times. But his share in it was hardly less on that account.

A marvellous career was that of this good banker and merchant, who was so much more than a mere banker and merchant The toils of half a dozen lives seemed merged in his single life.

"In his parliamentary work," says Mr Colquhoun, "his activity became every year greater as he was better known, till, in the later years of his life, there were few committees on finance, or taxes, or public economy, on which we do not find his name. When we add to these parliamentary labours the claims of his constituency, their local requirements, letters, memorials, private exigencies, and public deputations—when we reckon up the weeks of work which his infant colony of Sierra Leone cost him,—we can see how he toiled. To these labours are to be added his occupation as a banker, for of the bank he was an active partner, and his life was cast in a period of our commercial history the most critical which British trade has ever undergone.

"This business occupied his time, and interrupted his few intervals of leisure. It brought him almost daily to the city, broke his holidays, and forced him to London from Bath, Brighton, or the Isle of Wight. It left him few and uncertain seasons either for research or for reflection. No doubt, as his Parliamentary work grew, this encroached somewhat on his banking efforts; and the business of a banker, which demands constant supervision, suffered from this division of his time. But this was not leisure, but only a change of work; the substitution of one class of employment for another more absorbing."

He was an able and prolific author, too.

"He wrote as much as most men do who have health and abundant leisure. He seized every fragment of time; wrote after his days of canvassing in Southwark, or after his work at the bank, or while engaged in the construction of his colony. He jotted down his thoughts in his carriage as he travelled, even on horseback as he rode."

Besides his work on Paper Credit, he wrote a volume of "Commentaries on the Old and New Testaments." a volume of "Family Prayers," and eighty-two essays, enough to fill a dozen volumes, in the Christian Observer, which he was instrumental in founding.

"And all this work," to quote again from Mr Colquhoun, "was done by a busy politician and banker, through the orderly application of time and thought, never hurried, but never idle; never harassed, but never resting; moments caught up as well as hours; the workman ever working cheerily under a Father's gracious eye. His rest was to turn from one labour to a different one—to go from the bank to a council of benevolence—from a political discussion to a struggling colony or a school in difficulties. He lays down the pen of the financier to take up the pen of the philanthropist—to write long letters to a harassed governor—to settle differences among contending missionaries—to compose tracts for Hannah More."

"If you should sink in the midst of your work," he said in one of his letters to Hannah More, "it will be better than sinking, like Buonaparte, in the midst of the Egyptian sands, or in that Holy Land which he may have to traverse. My wife and I have lately observed, and agreed much in the observation, how much happier and better entitled to comfort are they who, towards the close of life, have to look back on scenes of activity, than they who have only been talking and feeling religiously all their days."

In that spirit he lived and worked to the last. "The close of life," if it means old age, never came to him. He worked too hard for that. He began to die while he was yet a young man, and death came upon him when had it been possible for him to be idle, he might have been in the prime of life. He was fifty-two when, in 1814, the anti-slavery crusade was beginning. "We have some dark plots in our head," he said, "for influencing the Allied Powers in favour of the abolition of the slave-trade through this earth of ours."

The plots were to continue, but he was not to share in their fulfilment. In the autumn of the same year his health, which had long been breaking, began to break rapidly. By the end of October he was very ill. Through the next two months his friends gathered round him, to take their farewell of a man whom the best of them, even Wilberforce, had to reverence for his greater worth. He himself, whenever he was strong enough, dictated the last of his "Family Prayers."

"When the shadows of the evening fall around us," he murmured in the last of all—a true utterance of his own deep thoughts—" and when age and sickness shall arrive, and human help shall fail, be then Thou, O Lord, the strength of our hearts, and our deep portion for evermore! "

In that temper he died, early in January 1815.

"His influence was great," said one of his many pious friends, Thomas Bowdler, "his understanding of uncommon power; and what one fancied was a careless opinion was often the result of such deep thought and patient investigation as would have taken other people hours to express. I have often thought it was almost an evidence of the Christian religion, that so commanding a mind as his, prejudiced as it was in early life against enthusiasm of all kinds, should quietly and soberly examine the subject for himself, with all the force of his intellect, and end in becoming not only convinced of the truth of religion, but one of the most warm and devout of her followers. How we are all to go on without him, I cannot understand. As a standard for us all to look up to, he was invaluable. Even this day, the first that has risen on his lifeless remains, I have wanted his counsel; and how many are there to whom his example gave confidence and guidance in their humble exertions, who leant on him, and looked to him in every season of doubt and temptation!"