Fordyce, the son of an Edinburgh lawyer who had purchased Ayton and several other forfeited estates in 1715, began business as a banker in Edinburgh and by the age of 24 had become a merchant councillor and a director of the Royal Bank. He contested Edinburgh unsuccessfully in 1761 against the candidate of the Duke of Argyll, and in 1766 succeeded his maternal uncle Allan Whitefoord as receiver-general of the land tax in Scotland. The marriage of his wife’s younger sister in 1767 to the 4th Duke of Gordon, first at Ayton and later at Fordyce’s town house, carried him into the top rank of Scottish society. The failure of his banking house, Fordyce, Malcolm & Co., in June 1772, following the crash of the business empire of his distant kinsman Alexander Fordyce,
I took no manner of notice of him, as I have all along thought that his living in plenty while numbers have been reduced to indigence by him, is (without going deeper) such dishonesty that he ought not to receive any countenance. Besides, his manners are forward and assuming, and he is a fellow of low extraction.
Boswell Private Pprs. xiii. 259-60.
Nor did the failure of three different agents while holding balances of his remittances to the Exchequer seriously damage his official career. He was removed from office and forced to assign his property to trustees in 1783, when arrears of over £90,000 were outstanding against him, but was not disgraced and was promised a non-revenue office in compensation.
as it was by your means that I was placed here in order (as you and Mr Rose were so good as to say to me) that I might have an opportunity of recommending myself to a better situation, I have studied every part of the property of the crown as if it had been my own with the hope of acquiring character from its improvement, and having become keen in the investigation it will make me very happy if I shall be allowed to devote myself to it.
PRO 30/8/136, f. 64.
Soon afterwards he was appointed a commissioner and secured a share in the secretaryship for his son. George Home, a Berwickshire man, wrote to his cousin Patrick Home, 24 Aug. 1788:
I have learned ... from very good authority, that nothing has indisposed many of the independent Members towards Mr Dundas so much as the promotion of Mr Fordyce and his son, and that many of them, both friends and foes of Mr Pitt’s, anxiously sought for an opportunity of stating it to the House. Mr Fordyce’s character you know does not stand perfectly fair particularly in his own country, and if he has a mind to play the rogue he can command a greater fortune than if he was at the head of the Treasury in England.
SRO GD267/1/13.
Although the commission reported in 1793 in favour of the union of the offices of crown lands and woods and forests and their replacement by a board of commissioners, Fordyce was appointed surveyor-general of crown lands shortly after the publication of the report; and it was only after his death that the commission’s recommendations could be put into effect.
Fordyce was returned for New Romney on the Dering interest in 1796, almost certainly at the suggestion of the Treasury. He voted with government on the loyalty loan, in which he invested £500, 1 June 1797, and the assessed taxes augmentation bill, 4 Jan. 1798, advised Pitt on matters of financial policy and Berwickshire politics, but is not known to have spoken in the House. He wrote of his warm attachment to Addington on his re-election to the Speakership, 20 Jan. 1801, and apparently supported his administration, though he observed to Dundas, 6 Jan. 1803, that Pitt ‘has not a right at his time of life to withdraw his talents from the service of the public’.
Fordyce remained deeply indebted to the public, but still accepted an invitation in October 1799 to contest Berwick, a notoriously expensive borough close to his estate. An agent reported to Lord Delaval that Fordyce had told his supporters that ‘an expense of £3,000 or £4,000 would be no object to deter him’ and added that he suspected Fordyce was showing an interest in Berwick because he wished to return his son for New Romney; but Fordyce himself assured Dundas that he had warned the electors that he ‘would engage in no doubtful or expensive contest’, and attributed his popularity to the advice he had been in the habit of giving to local merchants and to his good standing with ‘a very considerable number of people who have themselves farmed my land or been in my employment, or whose grandfathers, fathers or relations have’.
Fordyce’s appointment to the commission for revising the civil affairs of the navy in 1804 provoked the Whig Thomas Creevey to move on 19 Mar. 1805 for an inquiry into his financial affairs, as the arrears on his land tax account still remained unpaid. He was warmly defended by Pitt, who attributed his losses purely to misfortune and, with the support of Fox, shielded him from investigation before a select committee by moving for and presenting papers relating to his case.