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INTRODUCTORY NOTICE
The public is here presented
with a Memoir, the genuine composition of Sir William Forbes, regarding the
history of a mercantile establishment, of which he was long the chief. The
manuscript having been accidentally shown to the editor, he saw in it so
much that was interesting, as to be induced to plead with Sir William’s
surviving friends for permission to place it before the world. It is
consequently published at the distance of fully fifty-six years from the
time when it was written, for the author appears to have closed his
narration in May 1803.
The private banking-house so long known in Scotland in connection with the
name of Sir William Forbes—merged since 1838 in the joint-stock Union Bank
of Scotland—had a somewhat complicated genealogy, reaching far back in the
last century—the century of progress in Scotland—and even faintly gleaming
through the obscurities of the one before it, when mercantile efforts and
speculations were taking their birth amidst the embers of scarcely extinct
civil wars and all kinds of private barbarisms. The genealogy is here traced
through a firm styled John Coutts & Co., of which the principal member was
John Coutts, lord-provost of Edinburgh in the years 1742 and 1743, to
Patrick Coutts, who carried on considerable merchandise at Montrose in the
reign of William III. The concern is shown as the main stock from which
branched off the eminent London banking firms of Coutts & Co., Strand, and
Herries & Co., St James’s Street.
The earlier part of the narrative exhibits banking in its original condition
as a graft upon ordinary merchandise. The goldsmith, the corn-merchant, the
commission agent, were the first who gave bills of exchange or discounted
private notes; and such were the only bankers known even in England till
near the close of the seventeenth century. The house of John Coutts & Co.
was entirely of this nature, and it had several rivals in Edinburgh. It is
curious to trace the banking part of their business as rising, from a
subordination to corn-dealing and other traffic, to be the principal, and
finally the sole business, and to learn that the banker, in consequence of
early connections, long continued to supply distant correspondents with
articles which would now be ordered from the family grocer and oilman. It
has strangely come about in our own time, that banking companies have, in
some instances, been drawn once more into what might be called merchandise,
or more properly mercantile speculation, in consequence of overgreat
advances to private traffickers. But of this vice, which we have lately seen
productive of such wide-spread ruin, there was little or no appearance
during a long middle period embraced by this Memoir. And here lies, as the
editor apprehends, one of the chief points of interest involved in the
present volume. It depicts a banking-house limiting its transactions to its
own proper sphere of business—yielding once or twice to temptations to do
otherwise, and suffering from it, till at length it put on the fixed
resolution to be a banking-house only, and neither directly nor indirectly a
mercantile speculator, and thriving accordingly. The Memoir is, however,
something more than this, for it exhibits a fine example of what prudence,
care, and diligence may achieve with small means in one of the most exalted
branches of commerce. None of the men concerned in raising up this bank were
rich, and we have details shewing us that their transactions and profits
were at first upon a very limited scale. But the business was conducted on
an appropriate scale of frugality; the simple tradesman-virtues of probity,
civility, and attention to business were sedulously cultivated. All
extravagance and needless risk were avoided. The firm was accommodated in a
floor of the President’s Stairs in the Parliament Close, and one of the
partners seems to have dwelt on ‘the premises. The whole affair thus
reminding us not a little of those modest out-of-the-way banking-houses on
the continent, which we have sometimes such difficulty in finding when we
are in search of change for a circular note. These unostentatious merits,
which we see every day raising humble traffickers to wealth and eminence,
had precisely the same effect in the case of this banking-house. The
well-descended Sir William tells the lesson with great simplicity and candour, and it is one which can never be repeated too often.
The writer of this Memoir was born in 1739, heir to a Nova Scotia baronetcy,
which his father held without any means of supporting it, beyond his
exertions as a member of the Scottish bar. Left fatherless at four years of
age, he owed much in his early days to an amiable and intelligent mother,
who contrived to maintain the style and manners of a lady on what would now
be poverty in a much humbler grade of life. His career as a banker, from an
apprenticeship entered upon at fifteen, till he became the head of an
important house, and recovered all the fortunes lost or squandered by former
generations of his family, is detailed in the work now laid before the
public, along with much of the analogous progress made by the country during
the same period. It remains to be mentioned that Sir William, in 1770,
married a daughter of Dr James Hay of Hayston in Peeblesshire, and became
the father of four sons, the eldest of whom, William, who succeeded him in
the baronetcy, and died in 1828, is addressed in this Memoir; the second,
John Hay Forbes, became a judge in the Court of Session, under the
designation of Lord Medwyn; the third, Mr George Forbes, spent his life as a
member of the banking-house; the youngest, Charles, was an officer in the
navy. Sir William, in 1805, presented to the world a life of his friend Dr
Beattie, which met a favourable reception, not merely as an elegant
narration of the biography of an eminent man, but as preserving a great
amount of the general literary history of the country which must have
otherwise perished. He did not long outlive this effort, dying of water in
the chest in November 1800, at the age of sixty-seven.
These are but the dry bones of a life distinguished in an extraordinary
degree, not merely by energy and ability in professional affairs, but by
ceaseless efforts of an enlightened character for the public good, by
inexhaustible private charity, by high taste and refinement, and the
practice of all the active virtues. One would need to have lived through the
last fifty years in Scotland, to be fully aware of the excellences of
various kinds which made people speak with such veneration of Sir William
Forbes, and maintain a faith in his modest private bank such as is now
scarcely given to the joint-stock of large copartneries. It was but
participation in a universal feeling which caused Scott to thus refer to Sir
William, in addressing one of the cantos of Marmion to the amiable banker’s
son-in-law and the poet’s friend, Mr Skene of Rubislaw:
"Scarce had lamented Forbes
paid
The tribute to his Minstrel’s shade,
The tale of friendship scarce was told,
Ere the narrator’s heart was cold—
Far may we search before we find
A heart so manly and so kind!
But not around his honoured urn
Shall friends alone and kindred mourn;
The thousand eyes his care had dried,
Pour at his name a bitter tide;
And frequent falls the grateful dew,
For benefits the world ne’er knew.
If mortal charity dare claim
The Almighty’s attributed name,
Inscribe above his mouldering clay,
“The widow’s shield, the orphan’s stay.”
Nor, though it wake thy sorrow, deem
My verse intrudes on this sad theme;
For sacred was the pen that wrote,
“Thy father’s friend forget thou not.”
And grateful title may I plead
For many a kindly word and deed,
To bring my tribute to his grave:—
’Tis little—but ’tis all I have."
And perhaps even a more
expressive testimony is given to the character of Sir William by James
Boswell, when he makes the following statement in his Tour to the Hebrides:
‘Mr Scott came to breakfast, at which I introduced to Dr Johnson and him my
friend Sir William Forbes, now of Pitsligo, a man of whom too much good
cannot be said; who, with distinguished abilities and application in his
profession of a banker, is at once a good companion and a good Christian,
which, I think, is saying enough. Yet it is but justice to record that
once, when he was in a dangerous illness, he was watched with the anxious
apprehension of a general calamity; day and night his house was beset with
affectionate inquiries, and upon his recovery, Te Dciun was the universal
chorus from the hearts of his countrymen.’
R C.
[ADDRESS OF THE AUTHOR TO HIS
SON.]
Edinburgh, 1st January 1803.
My dearest William,—
You have often heard me express an intention of writing some account of our
house of business in Edinburgh, from its first establishment by the Messrs
Coutts.
The history of a society in which I have passed the whole of my time, from
my boyish days to this present hour, during the long period of almost half a
century, cannot but be very interesting to me, especially since by means of
my connection with it, I have arrived, through the blessing of Providence,
to a degree of opulence and respectability of position, which I had very
little reason to look for on my first entrance into the world. I have often
thought that such a narrative might not be without its advantage to you, as
calculated to teach you the necessity of prudence and caution in business of
every kind, but most particularly in that of a banker, in whose possession
not only his own property, but that of hundreds of others, is at stake; and
as shewing you how, by a steady, well-concerted plan, with a strict
adherence to integrity in all your transactions, aided by civility, yet
without meanness, you can scarcely fail, by the blessing of Heaven, to
arrive at success.
From such a history, too, some general knowledge may be gained of the
progressive improvement of Scotland. For, although it is no doubt true that,
even where things remain in a good measure stationary in a country, the
business of a banking-house, the longer it exists, has a natural tendency to
increase, when it has been conducted with prudence and ability, yet it is
certainly to the rapid progress of the prosperity of this country, that the
very great extension of the business of our house during the last twenty
years must, in a great measure, be attributed. To illustrate this part of my
proposed subject, I have subjoined to my narrative a short and, I must
acknowledge, a very imperfect sketch, collected from the best authorities I
could meet with; to some of which, my situation as a man of business has
given me peculiar access. The subject is curious, and to me extremely
interesting; as I have lived in the very period when this improvement of our
native country has assumed some form, and seems still to be making daily
advances to yet greater prosperity—a reflection highly grateful to me as a
Scotsman.
To my own memory this narrative will recall many scenes on which I cannot
look back without the most heartfelt gratitude to that Almighty Being, who
has been graciously pleased to shower down upon me so large a share of
prosperity. Nor can I contemplate the many years I have spent in business,
and the number of friends of whom death has in that interval deprived me,
without the most serious reflections on the rapidity with which this life is
wearing away, and the propriety of my bending my thoughts towards another—a
subject of meditation at all times proper for a rational being; but
peculiarly so for one who has lived so long as I have done in the hurry and
tumult of a constant intercourse with the busy world—a state extremely unfavourable to sober thought and reflection.
I cannot conclude this address to you, my dearest 'William, in a better
manner than by expressing my hope that this narrative will confirm you in a
love for that profession which you probably adopted at first on my
suggestion. My wish certainly was to insure your succession to the fruits of
my labours, as far as I have had any merit in helping to raise the house to
its present flourishing state. If you continue to pay the same attention to
business that I have done (I trust I may speak it in this place without
vanity), I have no doubt that, by the blessing of Heaven on your endeavours,
you may preserve the house in credit and respectability long after I shall
have paid my debt to nature. But I never can too often nor too earnestly
inculcate that the continuance of that credit and prosperity, under
Providence, must entirely depend on yourself. If you prove yourself worthy
of the notice of your father’s friends (of which I must do you the justice
to say, I have at this moment the fairest hope), you may expect their most
cordial support, as well as a continuance of that favour and preference with
which they have so long and so steadily honoured me. But if your own
endeavours be wanting—if negligence take the place of attention to business,
and economy be abandoned for profusion of expense—you may be assured that
the concerns of the house will go speedily into decay, until at last that
decline shall terminate in absolute ruin. For, in the course of a long
experience, I can safely say that I have never known a single instance in
which relaxed management and unbounded expense did not end in total
bankruptcy.
That the providence of the Almighty may ever watch over you to shield you
from harm, is the earnest and daily prayer of,
My dearest William,
Your fond and affectionate father,
William Forbes.
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