John Law: A Scottish Adventurer of the Eighteenth Century by James Buchan (review)

Despite Buchan’s being the son of the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and although he himself is a novelist as well as an historian, this is far from a popular history. The following illustrates the complexity of Law’s story, the nature of the sources consulted to tell it, and the style of the biographer. In late 1720 the financial crisis that had started in France with the Mississippi bubble and the failure of Law’s “System” soon appeared in England as well (“East India dropped with South Sea.”). Law had previously supported James III, the Old Pretender, but out of altruism more than policy, and to a degree so minor that only Jacobites could view it as meaningful. (Buchan speaks of “their expertise in lost causes.”) His financial system, built on the continuing expansion of the money supply by substituting his companies’ credit for the debts of the monarch, had gone into a death spiral, made even worse by plague, raging in Marseilles, which further crimped trade and put increasing demands on his balance sheet. Still, the financial ill wind in England was construed by the ever-hopeful followers of James, especially his representative General Arthur Dillon, as cause for celebration: “For the Jacobites in Paris, the disorder in British credit was manna from heaven. Dillon was beside himself with excitement. At Windsor Castle, his letters to his master in Rome are still dimpled and smudged where post officers in the Italian states had doused them with vinegar against the plague.” But the scheme to attack the English West Country and Scotland with ships from Law’s Company of the Indies outlined in his letters never came close to execution, unsurprisingly.

Buchan’s opening sentence suggests John Law’s variegated life by listing some of the ways he was identified—noble and professional titles including “proprietor of Arkansas in the New World,” as well as “888.75.1804,” a Jacobite cipher. Born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a goldsmith turned banker, Law became an expert tennis player as a young man, but the attraction may well have been less the sport than the gambling always attached to it. (Buchan rarely misses an opportunity to draw apposite literary reference but here he does: Law’s subsequent biography reveals him to be as much “the tennis ball of fate” as Louis XIV in Swift’s early poem or as Smollett’s Roderick Random in his mother’s dream.) Law’s first bounce is to London in 1692, where he apparently learned about lotteries and the need for creative means to finance expensive foreign wars, and what it meant to be a Scot in England. He killed a man either in a duel or on the way to a duel and seemed just the person of whom to make an example—or so Archbishop Tillotson argued to the King. When royal pardon frequently granted was denied, he fled to Europe and may never have returned to the island, despite being granted a pardon many years later.

A brief summary of Law’s biography is difficult. Lady Katherine Knowles became the love of his life and lived as his wife, although it is dubious that they were legally married. She was descended from the Boleyns—yes, those Boleyns. Law lived apparently for a time in the low countries, but it was in Paris that he achieved his towering, albeit ephemeral, financial success by reorganizing France’s finances with his “System,” expanding the money supply, and shifting the responsibility of debt from the king to commercial interests. After the crash, which occurred in Holland and England as well as France, he fled again, this time eventually to Italy, and spent much of the remainder of his life in Venice, where he died in 1729.

Buchan convincingly exonerates Law on several fronts. About the Mississippi Company: “The notion, still widespread in the United States, that Law’s Louisiana...