Piety, Profit and Public Service in the Financial Revolution

This article reconsiders, through the case study of High Tory MP Sir Humphrey Mackworth (1657-1727), an influential thesis that core values of the landed class were incompatible with ‘projects’—new speculative commercial and industrial ventures floated in the emerging stock market. Rather than presupposing inherent tension between Whig and Tory, or Court and Country, the article explores how the High Tory, critical of Whig finance, conceptualized and lent legitimacy to his mining scheme. The first section reviews the historiography and the second introduces the case study. The article then shows that Mackworth viewed and promoted his business as a pursuit of piety, profit, and public service. This godly framework, it will be shown, was no rhetorical ornament: it even influenced how Mackworth understood the frauds he committed, which made him a notorious swindler but also an ‘innovative entrepreneur’ contributing to local economic development

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