Business Not as Usual • 159I cann I shall advise you.” By the end of August, his situation was no better.
Customers in the country remained delinquent on past accounts; merchants
holding on in the city had no money to buy anything new. In October, com-
merce in the capital was still at a standstill, contrary to predictions by astrol-
ogers of an approaching end of the epidemic. “The sicknesse continues much
notwithstanding the coldnesse of weather,” Turner lamented to the Pocquel-
ins. “I pray God stay it. It makes a miserable trade.”^2
Sir William’s personal plight mirrored the public one. Soaring naval costs
for the war and plunging tax receipts because of the plague placed the private
and public sectors of London’s economy in jeopardy simultaneously. The
navy’s head victualer, Denis Gauden, had purchased huge quantities of naval
supplies on his own credit. At the rate he was going, he would soon owe his
contractors half a million pounds. Unfortunately, the goldsmith-bankers,
Vyner and Colvill, who usually covered these debts in the expectation of get-
ting their money back with interest from the Crown, balked at helping him
because the plague’s effect on trade had virtually halted repayments of their
existing loans and left them low on cash.^3
Yet Gauden’s navy colleague Samuel Pepys was managing to stay afloat
and prosper by working the same victualing market with his skillful personal
relations and attention to detail. Pepys’ ability to connect suppliers with the
navy’s never-ending needs and his influence with the Royal Treasury and
Lombard Street had increased his profits with every passing month of an
epidemic that was snatching purse and life from entrepreneurs far more
wealthy and powerful. The leading goldsmith-banker of the age, Alderman
Backwell, was “in greats straights for money,” having bailed out the king
once too often, Pepys wrote in his diary, and now Backwell’s assistant was
sick with the plague!^4
Pepys’ triumphant travels about town on the twenty-second of July capped
protracted financial negotiations. For weeks he had been stopping at the
Royal Exchequer in hopes of procuring one of its antiquated payment de-
vices. These were hazelwood sticks, notched to show the thousands, hun-
dreds, and tens of pounds that a creditor of the royal government was due. It
was a coup for Pepys to secure these coveted tallies. But knowing that official
payments always ran in arrears, he used the sticks to work the credit system
of the state as a consummate insider. His goldsmiths, John Colvill and Rob-
ert Vyner, gave him notes worth fifteen thousand pounds for his sticks, an
amount they could carry, even in the current debt-collection crunch, until
eventual reimbursement by the Royal Treasury with 6 percent interest plus 4
percent for the extra delays and risk.^5