1620: Diary of Edward, 35th Duke of Mallard
Mallard House
My wealth has grown so vast that even arithmetic recoils from it. I cannot quite compute the thing—it grows like ivy upon ivy, self-instructed, and I am left merely to prune sentiment where it threatens visibility. What does one do when the treasury itself has become, as that scurrilous Dutchman de Waal said in his On the Natural Prodigality of Princes, “a moral organism, consuming its own virtue for warmth”? One toys with the organism, naturally.
I spent the morning dispensing advice to the accountant—a patient ghost whose intellect I own by statute—and signing something or other about our holdings in Kent and Navarre (the latter chiefly ornamental, since the Navarrese are notoriously theoretical about sovereignty). Still, one must maintain appearances: empires do not oppress themselves.
The question of scale has preoccupied me all week. One fifth of my yearly interest could sustain the royal household for a decade—and yet His Majesty speaks of debt. Debt! It is the beggar’s poetry: full of metaphors and shame. I suggested, in jest, that we consolidate the Crown’s more sensitive liabilities under my signature. A harmless experiment—purely theoretical and profitable—but my steward remarked that such acts might be construed as regicide by accountancy. These simpler minds so persist in distinguishing arithmetic from virtue.
After dinner—quail, truffles, a wine from our lost cousins’ vineyards in Burgundy (the surviving vintner pretends to enjoy my patronage, though I suspect he dreams of republican ruin)—I took to my study to draft instructions for my heirs. Every Duke, if he intends posterity to revere him properly, must write as if he were already posthumous. Mine shall be called The Economic Testament of the House of Mallard, Being Certain Whimsies Upon Dominion and Liquid Capital. The first principle is charitable: that to manage money well is to liberate the world from its moral pretences. The second, less charitable: that wealth unattended becomes religion.
I suppose I have cultivated a kind of sacerdotal awe around coinage. Even the goldsmiths, when I walk among them, lower their eyes as if tested upon judgment. Not long ago, I amused myself by purchasing the debt of a certain French cleric, thereby owning, indirectly, a sliver of his conscience. It gladdened me to think of his daily prayer accruing to my moral portfolio, like interest compounded in heaven.
Our relatives on the Continent never quite recovered from the recent catastrophes—those wide and delicate financial detonations of our own design. We took the French experiment too far, perhaps. Their system was all atmosphere, no architecture. Still, the collapse was elegant in its ruin. Cousin Henri wrote from Paris that “money evaporates quicker than theology.” He perished soon after—spontaneously, I am told, within a sermon on moderation.
This afternoon, while strolling the west gardens, I entertained myself by imagining new uses for abundance. What would happen if one purchased entropy itself—stock by stock, decay by decay—until even dust required my authorisation to settle upon a surface? A form of spiritual monopoly, perhaps, where death becomes another of my tenants. Theologians might protest, but their stipends come through Mallard’s accounts.
At times—I confess in this private enclosure of the page—I experience a faint discomfort around definition. I am spoken of as powerful, but governance is merely the clerical face of mastery. It fascinates me only when it ceases to mean anything precise. I have ruled halls, estates, continents of figures, yet the world remains this curious mirror-room, infinitely deferred. My signature appears before I think; my fortune grows while I hesitate. What am I governing but the ungovernable frequency of possession?
My valet, who has a voice like a madrigal watered down with milk, dared to ask whether I might consider endowing an almshouse. I told him, quite truthfully, that charity is the modeller’s clay of the poor: give them enough to shape illusion, not enough to fire it. Still, I made a note to purchase a ruin somewhere near Devon and dedicate it to mercy—an empty act, to be sure, but emptiness well performed is profit beyond accounting.
At supper, I entertained some merchants newly enriched by my own coinage experiments. They spoke reverently of “circulation,” as if money, like blood, required regular bleeding to remain divine. One quoted from a pamphlet—The Metallic Soul: Treatise on Motion and Credit—which alleged that currency moves toward its maker. I smiled; the author, though he does not know it, owes me his press, his paper, his supper’s salt.
Later I composed a few lines upon the subject:
Man’s heart was coined in Heaven, they say; mine returned with interest among angels ill-paid.
It will do for the margin of my Testament.
When I retired, I stood before the great mirror in my chamber. The reflection was generous but uncertain—it had the aspect of inheritance observing itself. I half expected the ghost of my grandfather, who famously proclaimed that “the Fitzarturs never lose, only translate,” to step forth and invoice me for the sentiment. Perhaps we are all translations of a sum no one remembers beginning.
Before sealing this page, I should fix certain notions for the benefit of my successors. Let no one of the Mallard blood confuse stewardship with restraint. Wealth is language; you must speak it until syntax breaks. Only then will you know what it worships.
As to the question—what does one do with limitless wealth?—the answer remains elusive. One experiments, one instructs, one corrodes taste for amusement. And when even corruption begins to bore, one writes a diary, feigning confession to keep the arithmetic alive.
Tomorrow: I shall buy the silence of Parliament for a fortnight and see what happens when legislation stops breathing.
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