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One of the more interesting characters of the South Sea Crash of 1720 (big finance fraud case, inadvertently led to the office of Prime Ministership as we know it today) is one I've found extremely difficult to research. According to all but one secondary archival source I'll link at the bottom of the post (requires login, and I find it suspect) he doesn’t really exist before 1710 or after 1726. Here's what I have so far for certain, outside of this one Britbro researchers work:
>Hired as chief cashier of the South Seas company around 1710
>Did his job, bribed officials, didn’t seemingly show up much (which isn’t weird)
>Bought a lot of land in Somerset with the plan to turn it into an estate, this would later be seized by Parliamentary order as part of a damage payment series
>Makes the papers in 1719-1720 as the guy who bribed a bunch of MP’s to secure backing for the South Sea Scheme
>Is let go/escapes to somewhere in Brussels, destination unknown, gets caught in Tienen by Hapsburg officials
>They hold him to decide whether or not to let him face judgement in Britain for a while
>They eventually let him go (PROBABLY, all the private letters between various MP’s and hapsburg officials at least talk like they didn’t bury him in the woods)
Things that I have not been able to find primary sources concerning:
>Parish records
>Baptismal records
>Family records
>Rentiers records
>Any form of guild or business records, outside of his Somerset estate ownership
>Employment records outside of his role as chief cashier in the south seas
>Any solid record he exists after around 1726, when MPs stop talking about him
For such an important figure it’s puzzling that so little exists in terms of solid, accessible records. The guy barely has a wikipedia page, and thats ignoring that his (probable) son was a member of the peerage of Ireland.
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There are a lot of pamphlets that were passed around between 1721 and 1727 that claim that he was in league with James Stuart, or in league with the pope, or that he opened a bank in Amsterdam and made a lot of money at the expense of the british populace, but it's all propaganda, and extremely obvious as such.
The article:
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0 001/odnb-9780198614128-e-75056#Exte rnalresources
According to this article at Oxford DNB, they list him as the son of a grocer and entrepreneur, got married, had kids, etc. It also claims that he was associated with John Law rather intimately, as it states that Law’s son met him at the docks in Calais, potentially to help spirit him away from British persecution. Finally, it has him opening a bank in Paris (which I have found zero corroborating evidence of) and eventually dying after bribing his way back into Britain.
This article outlines a fairly plausible map for his life, but after digging through archives for a while I haven’t found much of anything that really lines up with this account. Furthermore, I don’t have access to pretty much any of the citations listed, so I can’t even really check the sources that this researcher used. I’m not saying this article is incorrect in any capacity, in fact I think it’s probably rather accurate, I just don’t trust it regardless.
If I were to try and write a brief biography about this guy, yall have any advice? I don’t really know what I’m doing regarding archival research, I have no formal training or anything, so any lead regarding where to search for more complete records would be appreciated.