Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

MEMOIRS

OF

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS

VOLUME ILONDON: OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY, 227 STRAND. 1852.

MEMOIRS

OF

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS

AND THE

MADNESS OF CROWDSBY CHARLES MACKAY, LL.D. AUTHOR OF "EGERIA," "THE SALAMANDRINE," ETC. ILLUSTRATED WITH NUMEROUS ENGRAVINGS.

VOL. IN'en déplaise à ces fous nommés sages de Grèce, En ce monde il n'est point de parfaite sagesse; Tous les hommes sont fous, et malgré tous leurs soîns Ne diffèrent entre eux que du plus ou du moins.

BOILEAULONDON: OFFICE OF THE NATIONAL ILLUSTRATED LIBRARY, 227 STRAND. 1852. LONDON: PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN, Great New Street, Fetter Lane.

CONTENTS

THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEMEJohn Law; his birth and youthful career--Duel between Law and Wilson--Law's escape from the King's Bench--The "Land-bank"--Law's gambling propensities on the continent, and acquaintance with the Duke of Orleans--State of France after the reign of Louis XIV.--Paper money instituted in that country by Law--Enthusiasm of the French people at the Mississippi Scheme--Marshal Villars--Stratagems employed and bribes given for an interview with Law--Great fluctuations in Mississippi stock--Dreadful murders--Law created comptroller-general of finances--Great sale for all kinds of ornaments in Paris--Financial difficulties commence--Men sent out to work the mines on the Mississippi, as a blind--Payment stopped at the bank--Law dismissed from the ministry--Payments made in specie--Law and the Regent satirised in song--Dreadful crisis of the Mississippi Scheme--Law, almost a ruined man, flies to Venice--Death of the Regent--Law obliged to resort again to gambling--His death at Venice

THE SOUTH-SEA BUBBLEOriginated by Harley Earl of Oxford--Exchange Alley a scene of great excitement--Mr. Walpole--Sir John Blunt--Great demand for shares--Innumerable "Bubbles"--List of nefarious projects and bubbles--Great rise in South-sea stock--Sudden fall--General meeting of the directors--Fearful climax of the South-sea expedition--Its effects on society--Uproar in the House of Commons--Escape of Knight--Apprehension of Sir John Blunt--Recapture of Knight at Tirlemont--His second escape--Persons connected with the scheme examined--Their respective punishments--Concluding remarks

THE TULIPOMANIAConrad Gesner--Tulips brought from Vienna to England--Rage for the tulip among the Dutch--Its great value--Curious anecdote of a sailor and a tulip--Regular marts for tulips--Tulips employed as a means of speculation--Great depreciation in their value--End of the mania

THE ALCHYMISTSIntroductory remarks--Pretended antiquity of the art--Geber--Alfarabi--Avicenna--Albertus Magnus--Thomas Aquinas--Artephius--Alain de Lisle--Arnold de Villeneuve--Pietro d'Apone--Raymond Lulli--Roger Bacon--Pope John XXII.--Jean de Meung--Nicholas Flamel--George Ripley--Basil Valentine--Bernard of Trèves--Trithemius--The Maréchal de Rays--Jacques Coeur--Inferior adepts--Progress of the infatuation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--Augurello--Cornelius Agrippa--Paracelsus--George Agricola--Denys Zachaire--Dr. Dee and Edward Kelly--The Cosmopolite--Sendivogius--The Rosicrucians--Michael Mayer--Robert Fludd--Jacob Böhmen--John Heydon--Joseph Francis Borri--Alchymical writers of the seventeenth century--Delisle--Albert Aluys--Count de St. Germain--Cagliostro--Present state of the science

MODERN PROPHECIESTerror of the approaching day of judgment--A comet the signal of that day--The prophecy of Whiston--The people of Leeds greatly alarmed at that event--The plague in Milan--Fortune-tellers and Astrologers--Prophecy concerning the overflow of the Thames--Mother Shipton--Merlin--Heywood--Peter of Pontefract--Robert Nixon--Almanac-makers

FORTUNE-TELLINGPresumption and weakness of man--Union of Fortune-tellers and Alchymists--Judicial astrology encouraged in England from the time of Elizabeth to William and Mary--Lilly the astrologer consulted by the House of Commons as to the cause of the Fire of London--Encouragement of the art in France and Germany--Nostradamus--Basil of Florence--Antiochus Tibertus--Kepler--Necromancy--Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Arnold Villeneuve--Geomancy--Augury--Divination: list of various species of divination--Oneiro-criticism (interpretation of dreams)--Omens

THE MAGNETISERSThe influence of imagination in curing diseases--Mineral magnetisers--Paracelsus--Kircher the Jesuit--Sebastian Wirdig--William Maxwell--The Convulsionaries of St. Medard--Father Hell--Mesmer, the founder of Animal Magnetism--D'Eslon, his disciple--M. de Puysegur--Dr. Mainauduc's success in London--Holloway, Loutherbourg, Mary Pratt, &c.--Perkins's "Metallic Tractors"--Decline of the science INFLUENCE OF POLITICS AND RELIGION ON THE HAIR AND BEARD. Early modes of wearing the hair and beard--Excommunication and outlawry decreed against curls--Louis VII.'s submission thereto the cause of the long wars between England and France--Charles V. of Spain and his courtiers--Peter the Great--His tax on beards--Revival of beards and moustaches after the French Revolution of 1830--The King of Bavaria (1838) orders all civilians wearing moustaches to be arrested and shaved--Examples from Bayeux tapestry

LIST OF ENGRAVINGS IN VOL. I.
Frontispiece--Gardens of the Hotel de Soissons. (From a print in Mr. Hawkins' collection.)
Vignette--The Bubblers' Arms, Prosperity. (Bubblers' Mirror, or England's Folly.)
John Law. (From a rare print by Leon Schenk. 1720)
The Regent D'Orleans
Old Palais Royal from the Garden. (From a scarce print, circa 1720)
Law's House; Rue de Quincampoix. (From Nodier's Paris)
Humpbacked Man hiring himself as a Table
Hôtel de Soissons. (From Nodier's Paris)
The Coach upset
Murder of a Broker by Count D'Horn
John Law as Atlas. (From England under the House of Hanover)
Caricature--Lucifer's new Row Barge
Procession of Miners for the Mississippi
The Chancellor D'Aguesseau
Caricature--Law in a Car drawn by Cocks
M. D'Argenson
Caricature--Neck or Nothing, or Downfall of the Mississippi Company
The South-Sea House. (From a print, circa 1750)
Harley Earl of Oxford
Sir Robert Walpole
Cornhill. (Print, circa 1720)
Stock-jobbing Card, or the Humours of Change Alley. 1720. (From the Bubblers' Medley)
Caricature--People climbing the Tree of Fortune. (From the Bubblers' Medley)
The Gateway to Merchant Tailors' Hall. (Gateway from old print)
Mr. Secretary Craggs
Caricature--Beggars on Horseback. (From the Bubblers' Medley)
Caricature--Britannia stript by a South-Sea Director
Caricature--The Brabant Screen. (Copied from a rare print of the time, in the collection of E. Hawkins, Esq., F.S.A.)
Bonfires on Tower Hill
The Earl of Sunderland
Caricature--Emblematic Print of the South-Sea Scheme. (From a print by Hogarth)
Caricature--Bubblers' Arms: Despair. (From Bubblers' Mirror, or England's Glory)
Conrad Gesner
The Alchymist. (From print after Teniers)
Albertus Magnus
Arnold de Villeneuve
Raymond Lulli
House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges. (From Sommerard's Album)
Cornelius Agrippa
Paracelsus
Dr. Dee
Dr. Dee's Show-stone and Magic Crystal. (Originals in the possession of Lord Londesborough and British Museum)
Innspruck. (From Nodier's Paris)
House of Cagliostro (Rue de Clery, No. 278), Paris
Mother Shipton's House
Henry Andrews, the original "Francis Moore, physician"
Nostradamus. (From the frontispiece to a collection of his Prophecies, published at Amsterdam A.D. 1666)
Serlo clipping Henry I.'s hair
Peter the Great
Bayeux Tapestry

PREFACE.
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed on a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity. At an early age in the annals of Europe its population lost their wits about the sepulchre of Jesus, and crowded in frenzied multitudes to the Holy Land; another age went mad for fear of the devil, and offered up hundreds of thousands of victims to the delusion of witchcraft. At another time, the many became crazed on the subject of the philosopher's stone, and committed follies till then unheard of in the pursuit. It was once thought a venial offence, in very many countries of Europe, to destroy an enemy by slow poison. Persons who would have revolted at the idea of stabbing a man to the heart, drugged his pottage without scruple. Ladies of gentle birth and manners caught the contagion of murder, until poisoning, under their auspices, became quite fashionable. Some delusions, though notorious to all the world, have subsisted for ages, flourishing as widely among civilised and polished nations as among the early barbarians with whom they originated,--that of duelling, for instance, and the belief in omens and divination of the future, which seem to defy the progress of knowledge to eradicate them entirely from the popular mind. Money, again, has often been a cause of the delusion of multitudes. Sober nations have all at once become desperate gamblers, and risked almost their existence on the turn of a piece of paper. To trace the history of the most prominent of these delusions is the object of the present pages. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Some of the subjects introduced may be familiar to the reader; but the Author hopes that sufficient novelty of detail will be found even in these, to render them acceptable, while they could not be wholly omitted in justice to the subject of which it was proposed to treat. The memoirs of the South-Sea madness and the Mississippi delusion are more complete and copious than are to be found elsewhere; and the same may be said of the history of the Witch Mania, which contains an account of its terrific progress in Germany, a part of the subject which has been left comparatively untouched by Sir Walter Scott in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, the most important that have yet appeared on this fearful but most interesting subject.
Popular delusions began so early, spread so widely, and have lasted so long, that instead of two or three volumes, fifty would scarcely suffice to detail their history. The present may be considered more of a miscellany of delusions than a history--a chapter only in the great and awful book of human folly which yet remains to be written, and which Porson once jestingly said he would write in five hundred volumes! Interspersed are sketches of some lighter matters,--amusing instances of the imitativeness and wrongheadedness of the people, rather than examples of folly and delusion.
Religious matters have been purposely excluded as incompatible with the limits prescribed to the present work; a mere list of them would alone be sufficient to occupy a volume.
MONEY MANIA.--THE MISSISSIPPI SCHEME.
Some in clandestine companies combine;
Erect new stocks to trade beyond the line;
With air and empty names beguile the town,
And raise new credits first, then cry 'em down;
Divide the empty nothing into shares,
And set the crowd together by the ears.--Defoe.

The personal character and career of one man are so intimately connected with the great scheme of the years 1719 and 1720, that a history of the Mississippi madness can have no fitter introduction than a sketch of the life of its great author John Law. Historians are divided in opinion as to whether they should designate him a knave or a madman. Both epithets were unsparingly applied to him in his lifetime, and while the unhappy consequences of his projects were still deeply felt. Posterity, however, has found reason to doubt the justice of the accusation, and to confess that John Law was neither knave nor madman, but one more deceived than deceiving, more sinned against than sinning. He was thoroughly acquainted with the philosophy and true principles of credit. He understood the monetary question better than any man of his day; and if his system fell with a crash so tremendous, it was not so much his fault as that of the people among whom he had erected it. He did not calculate on the avaricious frenzy of a whole nation; he did not see that confidence, like mistrust, could be increased almost ad infinitum, and that hope was as extravagant as fear. How was he to foretell that the French people, like the man in the fable, would kill, in their frantic eagerness, the fine goose he had brought to lay them so many golden eggs? His fate was like that which may be supposed to have overtaken the first adventurous boatman who rowed from Erie to Ontario. Broad and smooth was the river on which he embarked; rapid and pleasant was his progress; and who was to stay him in his career? Alas for him! the cataract was nigh. He saw, when it was too late, that the tide which wafted him so joyously along was a tide of destruction; and when he endeavoured to retrace his way, he found that the current was too strong for his weak efforts to stem, and that he drew nearer every instant to the tremendous falls. Down he went over the sharp rocks, and the waters with him. He was dashed to pieces with his bark, but the waters, maddened and turned to foam by the rough descent, only boiled and bubbled for a time, and then flowed on again as smoothly as ever. Just so it was with Law and t

he French people. He was the boatman, and they were the waters.

John Law was born at Edinburgh in the year 1671. His father was the younger son of an ancient family in Fife, and carried on the business of a goldsmith and banker. He amassed considerable wealth in his trade, sufficient to enable him to gratify the wish, so common among his countrymen, of adding a territorial designation to his name. He purchased with this view the estates of Lauriston and Randleston, on the Firth of Forth, on the borders of West and Mid Lothian, and was thenceforth known as Law of Lauriston. The subject of our memoir, being the eldest son, was received into his father's counting-house at the age of fourteen, and for three years laboured hard to acquire an insight into the principles of banking as then carried on in Scotland. He had always manifested great love for the study of numbers, and his proficiency in the mathematics was considered extraordinary in one of his tender years. At the age of seventeen he was tall, strong, and well made; and his face, although deeply scarred with the small-pox, was agreeable in its expression, and full of intelligence. At this time he began to neglect his business, and becoming vain of his person, indulged in considerable extravagance of attire. He was a great favourite with the ladies, by whom he was called Beau Law; while the other sex, despising his foppery, nicknamed him Jessamy John. At the death of his father, which happened in 1688, he withdrew entirely from the desk, which had become so irksome, and being possessed of the revenues of the paternal estate of Lauriston, he proceeded to London, to see the world.

He was now very young, very vain, good-looking, tolerably rich, and quite uncontrolled. It is no wonder that, on his arrival in the capital, he should launch out into extravagance. He soon became a regular frequenter of the gaming-houses, and by pursuing a certain plan, based on some abstruse calculation of chances, he contrived to gain considerable sums. All the gamblers envied him his luck, and many made it a point to watch his play, and stake their money on the same chances. In affairs of gallantry he was equally fortunate; ladies of the first rank smiled graciously on the handsome Scotchman--the young, the rich, the witty, and the obliging. But all these successes only paved the way for reverses. After he had been for nine years exposed to the dangerous attractions of the gay life he was leading, he became an irrecoverable gambler. As his love of play increased in violence, it diminished in prudence. Great losses were only to be repaired by still greater ventures, and one unhappy day he lost more than he could repay without mortgaging his family estate. To that step he was driven at last. At the same time his gallantry brought him into trouble. A love affair, or slight flirtation, with a lady of the name of Villiers,[1] exposed him to the resentment of a Mr. Wilson, by whom he was challenged to fight a duel. Law accepted, and had the ill fortune to shoot his antagonist dead on the spot. He was arrested the same day, and brought to trial for murder by the relatives of Mr. Wilson. He was afterwards found guilty, and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to a fine, on the ground that the offence only amounted to manslaughter. An appeal being lodged by a brother of the deceased, Law was detained in the King's Bench, whence, by some means or other, which he never explained, he contrived to escape; and an action being instituted against the sheriffs, he was advertised in the Gazette, and a reward offered for his apprehension. He was described as "Captain John Law, a Scotchman, aged twenty-six; a very tall, black, lean man; well shaped, above six feet high, with large pock-holes in his face; big nosed, and speaking broad and loud." As this was rather a cari