Despite the sharpening focus of recent years, great tracts of the Catholic—and, latterly, Jacobite—diaspora that formed within continental Europe have evaded scholarly capture. While we now possess an enriched understanding of the exiled Stuart court and the religious institutions that underwrote recusant society, we know less about the wider world of soldiers, financiers, merchants and patrician émigrés who flitted through the ancien regime, often testing the boundaries of nationhood, religious identity and dynastic allegiance. Martin Murphy stands among the authors who have considered this environment, and his new book follows on from a series of articles that have shed light on the cultural history of English émigré Catholicism, and Anglo-Spanish connections in particular. This fuller study adds substantially to the existing scholarly canvas, and points towards new directions for the investigation of the English Catholic overseas world.
The ‘duchess of Rio Tinto’ was Lady Mary Herbert (1686–1775), a daughter of the Jacobite house of Powis. In reconstructing her tumultuous transnational career, the book traces the last flowering and eventual downfall of a dynasty that had shaped the politics and culture of recusancy in the British Isles for almost two centuries. Murphy concentrates on her partnership with Joseph Gage, offspring of another established recusant family, and shows how the duo sought to convert the experience of exile into a wealth-creating opportunity of boundless potential. They aimed to exploit the patronage networks of the French and Spanish courts, the openings created by shifts in European political economy, and the human resources offered by thousands of dispossessed Jacobites. The results are set out in a narrative of financial chicanery, criminal dalliance and unrequited love: sufficiently baroque as to only just survive compression into the slim volume offered by the publishers. Brought together in the Paris salons, Herbert and Gage formed a partnership that affronted their own families and scandalised social commentators, including Alexander Pope: putting aristocratic prestige to the service of fragile experiments in colonial investment, financial speculation and industrial innovation.
The Gage-Herbert alliance was, as Murphy illustrates, a product of the social and commercial histrionics stimulated in France by the apparent wizardry of John Law—whose vision for the French Mississippi stands alongside the Darien scheme and the South Sea bubble as part of a triumvirate of disasters that nearly strangled the financial revolution at birth. Murphy’s subjects drank deep of Law’s project, played the Paris stock market, and ran up debts that risked the ruin of their families. Amid the fall-out, they drew their creditors into a series of law suits so vicious that the strain may—Murphy and other authors speculate—have impelled one of them to fake his own death and take flight for Central America.
Herbert and Gage escaped recrimination by hurtling southwards across national borders, and latching onto the possibilities raised in 1724 when Philip V announced the resumption of mining in Southern Spain. The duo forged a workforce out of exiled Irish soldiers, imported Welshmen and itinerant German labourers. Over twenty years of persistence, they defied the odds, and overcame their own tendency towards self-destruction, to extract a sustainable supply of wealth from the silver and copper-filled mountains of Andalusia. In the course of this enterprise, Lady Mary bombarded her family with new designs for exporting Welsh commodities into the Iberian Peninsula, schemed to dictate the succession to the marquisate, and finally prevailed upon the Stuart Pretender to grant her the title of duchess—which she had been appropriating in correspondence for several decades anyway. Gage, her coeval and would-be paramour, availed himself, with slightly greater humility, of the status of Count.
Murphy draws upon under-explored material from archives in three different countries, and reconstructs these adventures in a suitably arresting, pacey narrative. The book is especially skilful in stepping back from the immediate entertainment to unlock a larger social and cultural context. It highlights the affinities that enabled Law, Gage and other émigrés to make a figure in Parisian society, points up the restless entrepreneurial culture that attended on the Orléanist Regency, and positions the mining projects as part of a flood of new influences that filtered into Spain after the Bourbon succession of 1700.
Many of the most interesting conclusions reflect back on the troubled arena of eighteenth-century recusancy: the world that Lady Mary was aiming to rejuvenate. The commercial practises developed by Joseph Gage and his associates may not have conformed to the moral or even the legal ideal of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, but this kind of venture was not aberrant within the British Catholic domain. As Murphy shows, Mary Herbert did not introduce the idea of mining to her family—industrial experiments had taken place for a generation on the family’s Welsh estates, as a way to bolster resources in the face of penal privations. In seeking out commerce and credit in France, both partners could turn to the expertise of a community of mobile Irish Catholics, who had been forced by forfeitures and plantations in their own kingdom to resort to alternative economic strategies.
Hitherto, the ‘capitalist’ dimension to English Catholic life remains understudied, with scholarly works still overwhelmingly drawn to the more familiar terrain of the gentry manor and the expatriate seminary. But the impetus behind financial innovation is well-sketched in the early pages of this book, when Murphy presents a sombre rollcall of recusant leaders in the Gages’ social circle who fell from the faith, under political and financial pressure, after 1715. The commercial energy of the ‘duchess’ and the ‘count’ might have offended the—equally affected—bucolic and squirearchical values vaunted by some their critics, but it responded to genuine exigencies within a community that feared for its own survival. Members of the English Catholic gentry, all-too-easily captured in colours of nostalgia and reaction, entered into the spirit of Defoe’s ‘age of projects’, in all its imaginative and often-unsavoury panache. They had little choice but to do so.
