The Amicable Society's founder-registrar absconded with £6,500 in 1713, partly realizing a rival society's published warning about the temptations of a large stock

John Hartley founded the Amicable Society and served as its registrar, drawing a permanent cut of "1s. per quarter out of each contribution." In 1713, seven years after the Society commenced business under its Queen Anne charter, "Mr. Hartley, the principal officer of the Society, absented himself with some £6,500 of its funds." Walford records that the episode "caused great inconvenience and loss of repute to the Society, and was not its only early misfortune" — some of its funds were also found to be invested in lottery tickets, "in (I assume) the State Lotteries of 1710 and 1712," Walford's own hedge preserved.

What makes this more than an anecdote is that a competitor had said so in advance, in print. The older Society of Assurance for Widows and Orphans had ridiculed the Amicable's claim to be "perpetual," and Walford quotes the attack: "Perpetual is too great for any humane undertaking, and especially for one of this nature. This must be granted if we consider the frailties and vices of men, the hazard that lies in employing a great stock in order to improve it; the tricks, the fraudulent combinations and practices which Companies and Societies are liable to when the temptation is great." Walford's verdict: "Some of these predictions were in part realized a few years later."

The warning was competitive rhetoric rather than analysis, and it was aimed at the wrong target — the rival's argument was that perpetuity was impossible, and the Amicable in fact ran another 153 years, until its 1866 merger into the Norwich Union. But the specific mechanism the polemic named, an officer's temptation in the presence of a large accumulating stock, is exactly what happened, and it happened to the man who wrote the rules. The Amicable's design deliberately accumulated an undivided surplus — "the undivided surplus was to accumulate, together with the proceeds from the sale of annuities—a new feature in Life Assurance" — and that accumulation helped make the fixed dividend fund sustainable. Walford names the fixed £6. 4s. annual contribution, not the accumulation, as "the chief distinction" from the Society's predecessors; but the accumulating stock was exactly the thing the rival's polemic had pointed at.