No More Learning

The Peers passed this bill very expeditiously, and sent
it down to the Commons. But in the Commons it found no favour. Many
members, who professed to wish that the duration of parliaments should
be limited, resented the interference of the hereditary branch of the
legislature in a matter which peculiarly concerned the elective branch.
The subject, they said, is one which especially belongs to us; we
have considered it; we have come to a decision; and it is scarcely
parliamentary, it is certainly most indelicate, in their Lordships, to
call upon us to reverse that decision. The question now is, not whether
the duration of parliaments ought to be limited, but whether we ought
to submit our judgment to the authority of the Peers, and to rescind,
at their bidding, what we did only a fortnight ago. The animosity with
which the patrician order was regarded was inflamed by the arts and the
eloquence of Seymour. The bill contained a definition of the words,
"to hold a Parliament. " This definition was scrutinised with extreme
jealousy, and was thought by many, with very little reason, to have been
framed for the purpose of extending the privileges, already invidiously
great, of the nobility. It appears, from the scanty and obscure
fragments of the debates which have come down to us, that bitter
reflections were thrown on the general conduct, both political and
judicial, of the Peers. Old Titus, though zealous for triennial
parliaments, owned that he was not surprised at the ill humour which
many gentlemen showed. "It is true," he said, "that we ought to be
dissolved; but it is rather hard, I must own, that the Lords are to
prescribe the time of our dissolution. The Apostle Paul wished to be
dissolved; but, I doubt, if his friends had set him a day, he would not
have taken it kindly of them. " The bill was rejected by a hundred and
ninety-seven votes to a hundred and twenty-seven. [501]

The Place Bill, differing very little from the Place Bill which had been
brought in twelve months before, passed easily through the Commons.
Most of the Tories supported it warmly; and the Whigs did not venture
to oppose it. It went up to the Lords, and soon came back completely
changed. As it had been originally drawn, it provided that no member of
the House of Commons, elected after the first of January, 1694, should
accept any place of profit under the Crown, on pain of forfeiting his
seat, and of being incapable of sitting again in the same Parliament.
The Lords had added the words, "unless he be afterwards again chosen to
serve in the same Parliament. " These words, few as they were, sufficed
to deprive the bill of nine tenths of its efficacy, both for good and
for evil. It was most desirable that the crowd of subordinate public
functionaries should be kept out of the House of Commons. It was most
undesirable that the heads of the great executive departments should be
kept out of that House. The bill, as altered, left that House open both
to those who ought and to those who ought not to have been admitted. It
very properly let in the Secretaries of State and the Chancellor of the
Exchequer; but it let in with them Commissioners of Wine Licenses and
Commissioners of the Navy, Receivers, Surveyors, Storekeepers, Clerks of
the Acts and Clerks of the Cheque, Clerks of the Green Cloth and Clerks
of the Great Wardrobe. So little did the Commons understand what they
were about that, after framing a law, in one view most mischievous, and
in another view most beneficial, they were perfectly willing that it
should be transformed into a law quite harmless and almost useless.
They agreed to the amendment; and nothing was now wanting but the royal
sanction.

That sanction certainly ought not to have been withheld, and probably
would not have been withheld, if William had known how unimportant the
bill now was. But he understood the question as little as the Commons
themselves. He knew that they imagined that they had devised a most
stringent limitation of the royal power; and he was determined not to
submit, without a struggle, to any such limitation. He was encouraged by
the success with which he had hitherto resisted the attempts of the two
Houses to encroach on his prerogative. He had refused to pass the bill
which quartered the judges on his hereditary revenue; and the Parliament
had silently acquiesced in the justice of the refusal. He had refused
to pass the Triennial Bill; and the Commons had since, by rejecting two
Triennial Bills, acknowledged that he had done well. He ought, however,
to have considered that, on both these occasions, the announcement
of his refusal was immediately followed by the announcement that the
Parliament was prorogued. On both these occasions, therefore, the
members had half a year to think and to grow cool before the next
sitting. The case was now very different. The principal business of
the session was hardly begun: estimates were still under consideration:
bills of supply were still depending; and, if the Houses should take a
fit of ill humour, the consequences might be serious indeed.

He resolved, however, to run the risk. Whether he had any adviser is not
known. His determination seems to have taken both the leading Whigs and
the leading Tories by surprise. When the Clerk had proclaimed that the
King and Queen would consider of the bill touching free and impartial
proceedings in Parliament, the Commons retired from the bar of the Lords
in a resentful and ungovernable mood. As soon as the Speaker was again
in his chair there was a long and tempestuous debate. All other business
was postponed. All committees were adjourned. It was resolved that the
House would, early the next morning, take into consideration the state
of the nation. When the morning came, the excitement did not appear to
have abated. The mace was sent into Westminster Hall and into the Court
of Requests. All members who could be found were brought into the House.
That none might be able to steal away unnoticed, the back door was
locked, and the key laid on the table. All strangers were ordered to
retire. With these solemn preparations began a sitting which reminded a
few old men of some of the first sittings of the Kong Parliament. High
words were uttered by the enemies of the government. Its friends, afraid
of being accused of abandoning the cause of the Commons of England
for the sake of royal favour, hardly ventured to raise their voices.
Montague alone seems to have defended the King. Lowther, though high
in office and a member of the cabinet, owned that there were evil
influences at work, and expressed a wish to see the Sovereign surrounded
by counsellors in whom the representatives of the people could confide.
Harley, Foley and Howe carried every thing before them. A resolution,
affirming that those who had advised the Crown on this occasion were
public enemies, was carried with only two or three Noes. Harley, after
reminding his hearers that they had their negative voice as the King had
his, and that, if His Majesty refused then redress, they could refuse
him money, moved that they should go up to the Throne, not, as usual,
with a Humble Address, but with a Representation. Some members proposed
to substitute the more respectful word Address: but they were overruled;
and a committee was appointed to draw up the Representation.

Another night passed; and, when the House met again, it appeared that
the storm had greatly subsided. The malignant joy and the wild hopes
which the Jacobites had, during the last forty-eight hours, expressed
with their usual imprudence, had incensed and alarmed the Whigs and
the moderate Tories. Many members too were frightened by hearing that
William was fully determined not to yield without an appeal to the
nation. Such an appeal might have been successful: for a dissolution, on
any ground whatever, would, at that moment, have been a highly popular
exercise of the prerogative. The constituent bodies, it was well known,
were generally zealous for the Triennial Bill, and cared comparatively
little about the Place Bill. Many Tory members, therefore, who had
recently voted against the Triennial Bill, were by no means desirous
to run the risks of a general election. When the Representation which
Harley and his friends had prepared was read, it was thought offensively
strong. After being recommitted, shortened and softened, it was
presented by the whole House. William's answer was kind and gentle;
but he conceded nothing. He assured the Commons that he remembered with
gratitude the support which he had on many occasions received from them,
that he should always consider their advice as most valuable, and that
he should look on counsellors who might attempt to raise dissension
between him and his Parliament as his enemies but he uttered not a word
which could be construed into an acknowledgment that he had used his
Veto ill, or into a promise that he would not use it again.

The Commons on the morrow took his speech into consideration. Harley
and his allies complained that the King's answer was no answer at all,
threatened to tack the Place Bill to a money bill, and proposed to make
a second representation pressing His Majesty to explain himself more
distinctly. But by this time there was a strong reflux of feeling in the
assembly. The Whigs had not only recovered from their dismay, but were
in high spirits and eager for conflict. Wharton, Russell and Littleton
maintained that the House ought to be satisfied with what the King had
said. "Do you wish," said Littleton, "to make sport for your enemies?
There is no want of them. They besiege our very doors. We read, as we
come through the lobby, in the face and gestures of every nonjuror whom
we pass, delight at the momentary coolness which has arisen between us
and the King. That should be enough for us. We may be sure that we are
voting rightly when we give a vote which tends to confound the hopes of
traitors. " The House divided. Harley was a teller on one side, Wharton
on the other. Only eighty-eight voted with Harley, two hundred and
twenty-nine with Wharton. The Whigs were so much elated by their victory
that some of them wished to move a vote of thanks to William for his
gracious answer; but they were restrained by wiser men. "We have lost
time enough already in these unhappy debates," said a leader of the
party. "Let us get to Ways and Means as fast as we can. The best form
which our thanks can take is that of a money bill. "

Thus ended, more happily than William had a right to expect, one of the
most dangerous contests in which he ever engaged with his Parliament.
At the Dutch Embassy the rising and going down of this tempest had been
watched with intense interest; and the opinion there seems to have been
that the King had on the whole lost neither power nor popularity by his
conduct. [502]

Another question, which excited scarcely less angry feeling in
Parliament and in the country, was, about the same time, under
consideration. On the sixth of December, a Whig member of the House
of Commons obtained leave to bring in a bill for the Naturalisation of
Foreign Protestants. Plausible arguments in favour of such a bill
were not wanting. Great numbers of people, eminently industrious and
intelligent, firmly attached to our faith, and deadly enemies of our
deadly enemies, were at that time without a country. Among the Huguenots
who had fled from the tyranny of the French King were many persons of
great fame in war, in letters, in arts and in sciences; and even the
humblest refugees were intellectually and morally above the average of
the common people of any kingdom in Europe. With French Protestants
who had been driven into exile by the edicts of Lewis were now mingled
German Protestants who had been driven into exile by his arms. Vienna,
Berlin, Basle, Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, swarmed with honest laborious
men who had once been thriving burghers of Heidelberg or Mannheim,
or who had cultivated vineyards along the banks of the Neckar and the
Rhine. A statesman might well think that it would be at once generous
and politic to invite to the English shores and to incorporate with
the English people emigrants so unfortunate and so respectable. Their
ingenuity and their diligence could not fail to enrich any land which
should afford them an asylum; nor could it be doubted that they would
manfully defend the country of their adoption against him whose cruelty
had driven them from the country of their birth.

The first two readings passed without a division. But, on the motion
that the bill should be committed, there was a debate in which the
right of free speech was most liberally used by the opponents of the
government. It was idle, they said, to talk about the poor Huguenots or
the poor Palatines. The bill was evidently meant for the benefit, not of
French Protestants or German Protestants, but of Dutchmen, who would be
Protestants, Papists or Pagans for a guilder a head, and who would, no
doubt, be as ready to sign the Declaration against Transubstantiation
in England as to trample on the Cross in Japan. They would come over in
multitudes. They would swarm in every public office. They would collect
the customs, and gauge the beer barrels. Our Navigation Laws would be
virtually repealed. Every merchant ship that cleared out from the
Thames or the Severn would be manned by Zealanders and Hollanders and
Frieslanders. To our own sailors would be left the hard and perilous
service of the royal navy. For Hans, after filling the pockets of his
huge trunk hose with our money by assuming the character of a native,
would, as soon as a pressgang appeared, lay claim to the privileges of
an alien. The intruders would soon rule every corporation. They would
elbow our own Aldermen off the Royal Exchange. They would buy the
hereditary woods and halls of our country gentlemen. Already one of the
most noisome of the plagues of Egypt was among us. Frogs had made their
appearance even in the royal chambers. Nobody could go to Saint James's
without being disgusted by hearing the reptiles of the Batavian marshes
croaking all round him; and if this bill should pass, the whole country
would be as much infested by the loathsome brood as the palace already
was.

The orator who indulged himself most freely in this sort of rhetoric
was Sir John Knight, member for Bristol, a coarseminded and spiteful
Jacobite, who, if he had been an honest man, would have been a nonjuror.
Two years before, when Mayor of Bristol, he had acquired a discreditable
notoriety by treating with gross disrespect a commission sealed with the
great seal of the Sovereigns to whom he had repeatedly sworn allegiance,
and by setting on the rabble of his city to hoot and pelt the Judges.
[503] He now concluded a savage invective by desiring that the
Serjeant at Arms would open the doors, in order that the odious roll of
parchment, which was nothing less than a surrender of the birthright
of the English people, might be treated with proper contumely. "Let us
first," he said, "kick the bill out of the House; and then let us kick
the foreigners out of the kingdom. "

On a division the motion for committing the bill was carried by a
hundred and sixty-three votes to a hundred and twenty-eight. [504] But
the minority was zealous and pertinacious; and the majority speedily
began to waver. Knight's speech, retouched and made more offensive, soon
appeared in print without a license. Tens of thousands of copies were
circulated by the post, or dropped in the streets; and such was the
strength of national prejudice that too many persons read this ribaldry
with assent and admiration. But, when a copy was produced in the House,
there was such an outbreak of indignation and disgust, as cowed even the
impudent and savage nature of the orator. Finding himself in imminent
danger of being expelled and sent to prison, he apologized, and
disclaimed all knowledge of the paper which purported to be a report
of what he had said. He escaped with impunity; but his speech was voted
false, scandalous and seditious, and was burned by the hangman in Palace
Yard. The bill which had caused all this ferment was prudently suffered
to drop. [505]

Meanwhile the Commons were busied with financial questions of grave
importance. The estimates for the year 1694 were enormous. The King
proposed to add to the regular army, already the greatest regular army
that England had ever supported, four regiments of dragoons, eight of
horse, and twenty-five of infantry. The whole number of men, officers
included, would thus be increased to about ninety-four thousand. [506]
Cromwell, while holding down three reluctant kingdoms, and making
vigorous war on Spain in Europe and America, had never had two thirds of
the military force which William now thought necessary. The great body
of the Tories, headed by three Whig chiefs, Harley, Foley and Howe,
opposed any augmentation. The great body of the Whigs, headed by
Montague and Wharton, would have granted all that was asked. After many
long discussions, and probably many close divisions, in the Committee
of Supply, the King obtained the greater part of what he demanded. The
House allowed him four new regiments of dragoons, six of horse, and
fifteen of infantry. The whole number of troops voted for the year
amounted to eighty-three thousand, the charge to more than two millions
and a half, including about two hundred thousand pounds for the
ordnance. [507]

The naval estimates passed much more rapidly; for Whigs and Tories
agreed in thinking that the maritime ascendency of England ought to
be maintained at any cost. Five hundred thousand pounds were voted for
paying the arrears due to seamen, and two millions for the expenses of
the year 1694. [508]

The Commons then proceeded to consider the Ways and Means. The land
tax was renewed at four shillings in the pound; and by this simple but
powerful machinery about two millions were raised with certainty and
despatch. [509] A poll tax was imposed. [510] Stamp duties had long been
among the fiscal resources of Holland and France, and had existed here
during part of the reign of Charles the Second, but had been suffered
to expire. They were now revived; and they have ever since formed an
important part of the revenue of the State. [511] The hackney coaches
of the capital were taxed, and were placed under the government of
commissioners, in spite of the resistance of the wives of the coachmen,
who assembled round Westminster Hall and mobbed the members. [512]
But, notwithstanding all these expedients, there was still a large
deficiency; and it was again necessary to borrow. A new duty on salt and
some other imposts of less importance were set apart to form a fund for
a loan. On the security of this fund a million was to be raised by a
lottery, but a lottery which had scarcely any thing but the name in
common with the lotteries of a later period. The sum to be contributed
was divided into a hundred thousand shares of ten pounds each. The
interest on each share was to be twenty shillings annually, or, in
other words, ten per cent. , during sixteen years. But ten per cent. for
sixteen years was not a bait which was likely to attract lenders. An
additional lure was therefore held out to capitalists. On one fortieth
of the shares much higher interest was to be paid than on the other
thirty-nine fortieths. Which of the shares should be prizes was to be
determined by lot. The arrangements for the drawing of the tickets were
made by an adventurer of the name of Neale, who, after squandering away
two fortunes, had been glad to become groom porter at the palace. His
duties were to call the odds when the Court played at hazard, to provide
cards and dice, and to decide any dispute which might arise on the
bowling green or at the gaming table. He was eminently skilled in
the business of this not very exalted post, and had made such sums by
raffles that he was able to engage in very costly speculations, and was
then covering the ground round the Seven Dials with buildings. He was
probably the best adviser that could have been consulted about the
details of a lottery. Yet there were not wanting persons who thought
it hardly decent in the Treasury to call in the aid of a gambler by
profession. [513]

By the lottery loan, as it was called, one million was obtained. But
another million was wanted to bring the estimated revenue for the year
1694 up to a level with the estimated expenditure. The ingenious and
enterprising Montague had a plan ready, a plan to which, except under
the pressure of extreme pecuniary difficulties, he might not easily
have induced the Commons to assent, but which, to his large and vigorous
mind, appeared to have advantages, both commercial and political, more
important than the immediate relief to the finances. He succeeded,
not only in supplying the wants of the State for twelve months, but
in creating a great institution, which, after the lapse of more than a
century and a half, continues to flourish, and which he lived to see
the stronghold, through all vicissitudes, of the Whig party, and the
bulwark, in dangerous times, of the Protestant succession.

In the reign of William old men were still living who could remember the
days when there was not a single banking house in the city of London. So
late as the time of the Restoration every trader had his own strong box
in his own house, and, when an acceptance was presented to him, told
down the crowns and Caroluses on his own counter. But the increase
of wealth had produced its natural effect, the subdivision of labour.
Before the end of the reign of Charles the Second, a new mode of paying
and receiving money had come into fashion among the merchants of the
capital. A class of agents arose, whose office was to keep the cash of
the commercial houses. This new branch of business naturally fell into
the hands of the goldsmiths, who were accustomed to traffic largely in
the precious metals, and who had vaults in which great masses of bullion
could lie secure from fire and from robbers. It was at the shops of the
goldsmiths of Lombard Street that all the payments in coin were made.
Other traders gave and received nothing but paper.

This great change did not take place without much opposition and
clamour. Oldfashioned merchants complained bitterly that a class of
men who, thirty years before, had confined themselves to their proper
functions, and had made a fair profit by embossing silver bowls and
chargers, by setting jewels for fine ladies, and by selling pistoles
and dollars to gentlemen setting out for the Continent, had become the
treasurers, and were fast becoming the masters, of the whole City. These
usurers, it was said, played at hazard with what had been earned by the
industry and hoarded by the thrift of other men. If the dice turned up
well, the knave who kept the cash became an alderman; if they turned
up ill, the dupe who furnished the cash became a bankrupt. On the other
side the conveniences of the modern practice were set forth in animated
language. The new system, it was said, saved both labour and money. Two
clerks, seated in one counting house, did what, under the old system,
must have been done by twenty clerks in twenty different establishments.
A goldsmith's note might be transferred ten times in a morning; and thus
a hundred guineas, locked in his safe close to the Exchange, did what
would formerly have required a thousand guineas, dispersed through many
tills, some on Ludgate Hill, some in Austin Friars, and some in Tower
Street. [514]

Gradually even those who had been loudest in murmuring against the
innovation gave way and conformed to the prevailing usage. The last
person who held out, strange to say, was Sir Dudley North. When, in
1680, after residing many years abroad, he returned to London, nothing
astonished or displeased him more than the practice of making payments
by drawing bills on bankers. He found that he could not go on Change
without being followed round the piazza by goldsmiths, who, with low
bows, begged to have the honour of serving him. He lost his temper when
his friends asked where he kept his cash. "Where should I keep it," he
asked, "but in my own house? " With difficulty he was induced to put
his money into the hands of one of the Lombard Street men, as they
were called. Unhappily, the Lombard Street man broke, and some of his
customers suffered severely. Dudley North lost only fifty pounds; but
this loss confirmed him in his dislike of the whole mystery of banking.
It was in vain, however, that he exhorted his fellow citizens to return
to the good old practice, and not to expose themselves to utter ruin in
order to spare themselves a little trouble. He stood alone against the
whole community. The advantages of the modern system were felt every
hour of every day in every part of London; and people were no more
disposed to relinquish those advantages for fear of calamities which
occurred at long intervals than to refrain from building houses for fear
of fires, or from building ships for fear of hurricanes. It is a curious
circumstance that a man who, as a theorist, was distinguished from
all the merchants of his time by the largeness of his views and by
his superiority to vulgar prejudices, should, in practice, have been
distinguished from all the merchants of his time by the obstinacy with
which he adhered to an ancient mode of doing business, long after the
dullest and most ignorant plodders had abandoned that mode for one
better suited to a great commercial society. [515]

No sooner had banking become a separate and important trade, than men
began to discuss with earnestness the question whether it would be
expedient to erect a national bank. The general opinion seems to have
been decidedly in favour of a national bank; nor can we wonder at this;
for few were then aware that trade is in general carried on to much more
advantage by individuals than by great societies; and banking really is
one of those few trades which can be carried on to as much advantage
by a great society as by an individual. Two public banks had long been
renowned throughout Europe, the Bank of Saint George at Genoa, and the
Bank of Amsterdam. The immense wealth which was in the keeping of those
establishments, the confidence which they inspired, the prosperity
which they had created, their stability, tried by panics, by wars, by
revolutions, and found proof against all, were favourite topics. The
bank of Saint George had nearly completed its third century. It had
begun to receive deposits and to make loans before Columbus had crossed
the Atlantic, before Gama had turned the Cape, when a Christian Emperor
was reigning at Constantinople, when a Mahomedan Sultan was reigning at
Granada, when Florence was a Republic, when Holland obeyed a hereditary
Prince. All these things had been changed. New continents and new oceans
had been discovered.
The Turk was at Constantinople; the Castilian was
at Granada; Florence had its hereditary Prince; Holland was a Republic;
but the Bank of Saint George was still receiving deposits and making
loans. The Bank of Amsterdam was little more than eighty years old;
but its solvency had stood severe tests. Even in the terrible crisis
of 1672, when the whole Delta of the Rhine was overrun by the French
armies, when the white flags were seen from the top of the Stadthouse,
there was one place where, amidst the general consternation and
confusion, tranquillity and order were still to be found; and that
place was the Bank. Why should not the Bank of London be as great and
as durable as the Banks of Genoa and of Amsterdam? Before the end of
the reign of Charles the Second several plans were proposed, examined,
attacked and defended. Some pamphleteers maintained that a national bank
ought to be under the direction of the King. Others thought that the
management ought to be entrusted to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Common
Council of the capital. [516] After the Revolution the subject was
discussed with an animation before unknown. For, under the influence
of liberty, the breed of political projectors multiplied exceedingly.
A crowd of plans, some of which resemble the fancies of a child or the
dreams of a man in a fever, were pressed on the government. Preeminently
conspicuous among the political mountebanks, whose busy faces were seen
every day in the lobby of the House of Commons, were John Briscoe and
Hugh Chamberlayne, two projectors worthy to have been members of that
Academy which Gulliver found at Lagado. These men affirmed that the one
cure for every distemper of the State was a Land Bank. A Land Bank would
work for England miracles such as had never been wrought for Israel,
miracles exceeding the heaps of quails and the daily shower of manna.
There would be no taxes; and yet the Exchequer would be full to
overflowing. There would be no poor rates; for there would be no poor.
The income of every landowner would be doubled. The profits of every
merchant would be increased. In short, the island would, to use
Briscoe's words, be the paradise of the world. The only losers would be
the moneyed men, those worst enemies of the nation, who had done more
injury to the gentry and yeomanry than an invading army from France
would have had the heart to do. [517]

These blessed effects the Land Bank was to produce simply by issuing
enormous quantities of notes on landed security. The doctrine of the
projectors was that every person who had real property ought to have,
besides that property, paper money to the full value of that property.
Thus, if his estate was worth two thousand pounds, he ought to have his
estate and two thousand pounds in paper money. [518] Both Briscoe and
Chamberlayne treated with the greatest contempt the notion that there
could be an overissue of paper as long as there was, for every ten pound
note, a piece of land in the country worth ten pounds. Nobody, they
said, would accuse a goldsmith of overissuing as long as his vaults
contained guineas and crowns to the full value of all the notes which
bore his signature. Indeed no goldsmith had in his vaults guineas and
crowns to the full value of all his paper. And was not a square mile of
rich land in Taunton Dean at least as well entitled to be called wealth
as a bag of gold or silver? The projectors could not deny that many
people had a prejudice in favour of the precious metals, and that
therefore, if the Land Bank were bound to cash its notes, it would very
soon stop payment. This difficulty they got over by proposing that the
notes should be inconvertible, and that every body should be forced to
take them.

The speculations of Chamberlayne on the subject of the currency may
possibly find admirers even in our own time. But to his other errors
he added an error which began and ended with him. He was fool enough to
take it for granted, in all his reasonings, that the value of an estate
varied directly as the duration. He maintained that if the annual income
derived from a manor were a thousand pounds, a grant of that manor for
twenty years must be worth twenty thousand pounds, and a grant for a
hundred years worth a hundred thousand pounds. If, therefore, the lord
of such a manor would pledge it for a hundred years to the Land Bank,
the Land Bank might, on that security, instantly issue notes for a
hundred thousand pounds. On this subject Chamberlayne was proof to
ridicule, to argument, even to arithmetical demonstration. He was
reminded that the fee simple of land would not sell for more than twenty
years' purchase. To say, therefore, that a term of a hundred years was
worth five times as much as a term of twenty years, was to say that a
term of a hundred years was worth five times the fee simple; in other
words, that a hundred was five times infinity. Those who reasoned thus
were refuted by being told that they were usurers; and it should
seem that a large number of country gentlemen thought the refutation
complete. [519]

In December 1693 Chamberlayne laid his plan, in all its naked absurdity,
before the Commons, and petitioned to be heard. He confidently undertook
to raise eight thousand pounds on every freehold estate of a hundred and
fifty pounds a year which should be brought, as he expressed it, into
his Land Bank, and this without dispossessing the freeholder. [520] All
the squires in the House must have known that the fee simple of such an
estate would hardly fetch three thousand pounds in the market. That less
than the fee simple of such an estate could, by any device, be made to
produce eight thousand pounds, would, it might have been thought, have
seemed incredible to the most illiterate foxhunter that could be found
on the benches. Distress, however, and animosity had made the landed
gentlemen credulous. They insisted on referring Chamberlayne's plan to a
committee; and the committee reported that the plan was practicable,
and would tend to the benefit of the nation. [521] But by this time
the united force of demonstration and derision had begun to produce an
effect even on the most ignorant rustics in the House. The report
lay unnoticed on the table; and the country was saved from a calamity
compared with which the defeat of Landen and the loss of the Smyrna
fleet would have been blessings.

All the projectors of this busy time, however, were not so absurd as
Chamberlayne. One among them, William Paterson, was an ingenious, though
not always a judicious, speculator. Of his early life little is known
except that he was a native of Scotland, and that he had been in the
West Indies. In what character he had visited the West Indies was a
matter about which his contemporaries differed. His friends said that
he had been a missionary; his enemies that he had been a buccaneer. He
seems to have been gifted by nature with fertile invention, an ardent
temperament and great powers of persuasion, and to have acquired
somewhere in the course of his vagrant life a perfect knowledge of
accounts.

This man submitted to the government, in 1691, a plan of a national
bank; and his plan was favourably received both by statesmen and by
merchants. But years passed away; and nothing was done, till, in the
spring of 1694, it became absolutely necessary to find some new mode of
defraying the charges of the war. Then at length the scheme devised
by the poor and obscure Scottish adventurer was taken up in earnest by
Montague. With Montague was closely allied Michael Godfrey, the brother
of that Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey whose sad and mysterious death had,
fifteen years before, produced a terrible outbreak of popular feeling.
Michael was one of the ablest, most upright and most opulent of the
merchant princes of London. He was, as might have been expected from his
near connection with the martyr of the Protestant faith, a zealous
Whig. Some of his writings are still extant, and prove him to have had a
strong and clear mind.

By these two distinguished men Paterson's scheme was fathered. Montague
undertook to manage the House of Commons, Godfrey to manage the City. An
approving vote was obtained from the Committee of Ways and Means; and a
bill, the title of which gave occasion to many sarcasms, was laid on the
table. It was indeed not easy to guess that a bill, which purported
only to impose a new duty on tonnage for the benefit of such persons
as should advance money towards carrying on the war, was really a bill
creating the greatest commercial institution that the world had ever
seen.

The plan was that twelve hundred thousand pounds should be borrowed by
the government on what was then considered as the moderate interest
of eight per cent. In order to induce capitalists to advance the money
promptly on terms so favourable to the public, the subscribers were to
be incorporated by the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of
England. The corporation was to have no exclusive privilege, and was to
be restricted from trading in any thing but bills of exchange, bullion
and forfeited pledges.

As soon as the plan became generally known, a paper war broke out as
furious as that between the swearers and the nonswearers, or as that
between the Old East India Company and the New East India Company. The
projectors who had failed to gain the ear of the government fell
like madmen on their more fortunate brother. All the goldsmiths and
pawnbrokers set up a howl of rage. Some discontented Tories predicted
ruin to the monarchy. It was remarkable, they said, that Banks and Kings
had never existed together. Banks were republican institutions. There
were flourishing banks at Venice, at Genoa, at Amsterdam and at Hamburg.
But who had ever heard of a Bank of France or a Bank of Spain? [522]
Some discontented Whigs, on the other hand, predicted ruin to our
liberties. Here, they said, is an instrument of tyranny more formidable
than the High Commission, than the Star Chamber, than even the fifty
thousand soldiers of Oliver. The whole wealth of the nation will be in
the hands of the Tonnage Bank,--such was the nickname then in use;--and
the Tonnage Bank will be in the hands of the Sovereign. The power of the
purse, the one great security for all the rights of Englishmen, will be
transferred from the House of Commons to the Governor and Directors of
the new Company. This last consideration was really of some weight, and
was allowed to be so by the authors of the bill. A clause was therefore
most properly inserted which inhibited the Bank from advancing money to
the Crown without authority from Parliament. Every infraction of this
salutary rule was to be punished by forfeiture of three times the sum
advanced; and it was provided that the King should not have power to
remit any part of the penalty.

The plan, thus amended, received the sanction of the Commons more easily
than might have been expected from the violence of the adverse clamour.
In truth, the Parliament was under duress. Money must be had, and could
in no other way be had so easily. What took place when the House had
resolved itself into a committee cannot be discovered; but, while the
Speaker was in the chair, no division took place. The bill, however, was
not safe when it had reached the Upper House. Some Lords suspected that
the plan of a national bank had been devised for the purpose of exalting
the moneyed interest at the expense of the landed interest. Others
thought that this plan, whether good or bad, ought not to have been
submitted to them in such a form. Whether it would be safe to call into
existence a body which might one day rule the whole commercial world,
and how such a body should be constituted, were questions which ought
not to be decided by one branch of the Legislature. The Peers ought to
be at perfect liberty to examine all the details of the proposed scheme,
to suggest amendments, to ask for conferences. It was therefore most
unfair that the law establishing the Bank should be sent up as part of a
law granting supplies to the Crown. The Jacobites entertained some hope
that the session would end with a quarrel between the Houses, that the
Tonnage Bill would be lost, and that William would enter on the campaign
without money. It was already May, according to the New Style. The
London season was over; and many noble families had left Covent Garden
and Soho Square for their woods and hayfields. But summonses were sent
out. There was a violent rush back to town. The benches which had lately
been deserted were crowded. The sittings began at an hour unusually
early, and were prolonged to an hour unusually late. On the day on which
the bill was committed the contest lasted without intermission from
nine in the morning till six in the evening. Godolphin was in the chair.
Nottingham and Rochester proposed to strike out all the clauses which
related to the Bank. Something was said about the danger of setting up a
gigantic corporation which might soon give law to the King and the
three Estates of the Realm. But the Peers seemed to be most moved by
the appeal which was made to them as landlords. The whole scheme, it was
asserted, was intended to enrich usurers at the expense of the nobility
and gentry. Persons who had laid by money would rather put it into the
Bank than lend it on mortgage at moderate interest. Caermarthen said
little or nothing in defence of what was, in truth, the work of his
rivals and enemies. He owned that there were grave objections to the
mode in which the Commons had provided for the public service of the
year. But would their Lordships amend a money bill? Would they engage in
a contest of which the end must be that they must either yield, or incur
the grave responsibility of leaving the Channel without a fleet during
the summer? This argument prevailed; and, on a division, the amendment
was rejected by forty-three votes to thirty-one. A few hours later the
bill received the royal assent, and the Parliament was prorogued. [523]
In the City the success of Montague's plan was complete. It was then at
least as difficult to raise a million at eight per cent. as it would now
be to raise thirty millions at four per cent. It had been supposed that
contributions would drop in very slowly; and a considerable time had
therefore been allowed by the Act. This indulgence was not needed. So
popular was the new investment that on the day on which the books were
opened three hundred thousand pounds were subscribed; three hundred
thousand more were subscribed during the next forty-eight hours; and,
in ten days, to the delight of all the friends of the government, it was
announced that the list was full. The whole sum which the Corporation
was bound to lend to the State was paid into the Exchequer before the
first instalment was due. [524] Somers gladly put the Great Seal to a
charter framed in conformity with the terms prescribed by Parliament;
and the Bank of England commenced its operations in the house of the
Company of Grocers. There, during many years, directors, secretaries and
clerks might be seen labouring in different parts of one spacious hall.
The persons employed by the bank were originally only fifty-four. They
are now nine hundred. The sum paid yearly in salaries amounted at first
to only four thousand three hundred and fifty pounds. It now exceeds two
hundred and ten thousand pounds. We may therefore fairly infer that the
incomes of commercial clerks are, on an average, about three times as
large in the reign of Victoria as they were in the reign of William the
Third. [525]

It soon appeared that Montague had, by skilfully availing himself of the
financial difficulties of the country, rendered an inestimable service
to his party. During several generations the Bank of England
was emphatically a Whig body. It was Whig, not accidentally, but
necessarily. It must have instantly stopped payment if it had ceased to
receive the interest on the sum which it had advanced to the government;
and of that interest James would not have paid one farthing. Seventeen
years after the passing of the Tonnage Bill, Addison, in one of his most
ingenious and graceful little allegories, described the situation of the
great Company through which the immense wealth of London was constantly
circulating. He saw Public Credit on her throne in Grocers' Hall, the
Great Charter over her head, the Act of Settlement full in her view. Her
touch turned every thing to gold. Behind her seat, bags filled with coin
were piled up to the ceiling. On her right and on her left the floor
was hidden by pyramids of guineas. On a sudden the door flies open. The
Pretender rushes in, a sponge in one hand, in the other a sword which
he shakes at the Act of Settlement. The beautiful Queen sinks down
fainting. The spell by which she has turned all things around her into
treasure is broken. The money bags shrink like pricked bladders. The
piles of gold pieces are turned into bundles of rags or faggots of
wooden tallies. [526] The truth which this parable was meant to convey
was constantly present to the minds of the rulers of the Bank. So
closely was their interest bound up with the interest of the government
that the greater the public danger the more ready were they to come to
the rescue. In old times, when the Treasury was empty, when the taxes
came in slowly, and when the pay of the soldiers and sailors was in
arrear, it had been necessary for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to go,
hat in hand, up and down Cheapside and Cornhill, attended by the Lord
Mayor and by the Aldermen, and to make up a sum by borrowing a hundred
pounds from this hosier, and two hundred pounds from that ironmonger.
[527] Those times were over. The government, instead of laboriously
scooping up supplies from numerous petty sources, could now draw
whatever it required from an immense reservoir, which all those petty
sources kept constantly replenished. It is hardly too much to say that,
during many years, the weight of the Bank, which was constantly in the
scale of the Whigs, almost counterbalanced the weight of the Church,
which was as constantly in the scale of the Tories.

A few minutes after the bill which established the Bank of England had
received the royal assent, the Parliament was prorogued by the King with
a speech in which he warmly thanked the Commons for their liberality.
Montague was immediately rewarded for his services with the place of
Chancellor of the Exchequer. [528]

Shrewsbury had a few weeks before consented to accept the seals. He had
held out resolutely from November to March. While he was trying to find
excuses which might satisfy his political friends, Sir James Montgomery
visited him. Montgomery was now the most miserable of human beings.
Having borne a great part in a great Revolution, having been charged
with the august office of presenting the Crown of Scotland to the
Sovereigns whom the Estates had chosen, having domineered without a
rival, during several months, in the Parliament at Edinburgh, having
seen before him in near prospect the seals of Secretary, the coronet
of an Earl, ample wealth, supreme power, he had on a sudden sunk into
obscurity and abject penury. His fine parts still remained; and he was
therefore used by the Jacobites; but, though used, he was despised,
distrusted and starved. He passed his life in wandering from England to
France and from France back to England, without finding a resting place
in either country. Sometimes he waited in the antechamber at Saint
Germains, where the priests scowled at him as a Calvinist, and where
even the Protestant Jacobites cautioned one another in whispers against
the old Republican. Sometimes he lay hid in the garrets of London,
imagining that every footstep which he heard on the stairs was that of
a bailiff with a writ, or that of a King's messenger with a warrant. He
now obtained access to Shrewsbury, and ventured to talk as a Jacobite to
a brother Jacobite. Shrewsbury, who was not at all inclined to put his
estate and his neck in the power of a man whom he knew to be both rash
and perfidious, returned very guarded answers. Through some channel
which is not known to us, William obtained full intelligence of what
had passed on this occasion. He sent for Shrewsbury, and again spoke
earnestly about the secretaryship. Shrewsbury again excused himself.
His health, he said, was bad. "That," said William, "is not your only
reason. " "No, Sir," said Shrewsbury, "it is not. " And he began to speak
of public grievances, and alluded to the fate of the Triennial Bill,
which he had himself introduced. But William cut him short. "There is
another reason behind. When did you see Montgomery last? " Shrewsbury was
thunderstruck. The King proceeded to repeat some things which Montgomery
had said. By this time Shrewsbury had recovered from his dismay, and
had recollected that, in the conversation which had been so accurately
reported to the government, he had fortunately uttered no treason,
though he had heard much. "Sir," said he, "since Your Majesty has been
so correctly informed, you must be aware that I gave no encouragement
to that man's attempts to seduce me from my allegiance. " William did not
deny this, but intimated that such secret dealings with noted Jacobites
raised suspicions which Shrewsbury could remove only by accepting the
seals. "That," he said, "will put me quite at ease. I know that you are
a man of honour, and that, if you undertake to serve me, you will serve
me faithfully. " So pressed, Shrewsbury complied, to the great joy of
his whole party; and was immediately rewarded for his compliance with a
dukedom and a garter. [529]

Thus a Whig ministry was gradually forming. There were now two Whig
Secretaries of State, a Whig Keeper of the Great Seal, a Whig First Lord
of the Admiralty, a Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Lord Privy
Seal, Pembroke, might also be called a Whig; for his mind was one which
readily took the impress of any stronger mind with which it was brought
into contact. Seymour, having been long enough a Commissioner of the
Treasury to lose much of his influence with the Tory country gentlemen
who had once listened to him as to an oracle, was dismissed, and his
place was filled by John Smith, a zealous and able Whig, who had taken
an active part in the debates of the late session. [530] The only Tories
who still held great offices in the executive government were the Lord
President, Caermarthen, who, though he began to feel that power was
slipping from his grasp, still clutched it desperately, and the first
Lord of the Treasury, Godolphin, who meddled little out of his own
department, and performed the duties of that department with skill and
assiduity.

William, however, still tried to divide his favours between the two
parties. Though the Whigs were fast drawing to themselves the substance
of power, the Tories obtained their share of honorary distinctions.
Mulgrave, who had, during the late session, exerted his great
parliamentary talents in favour of the King's policy, was created
Marquess of Normanby, and named a Cabinet Councillor, but was never
consulted. He obtained at the same time a pension of three thousand
pounds a year. Caermarthen, whom the late changes had deeply mortified,
was in some degree consoled by a signal mark of royal approbation. He
became Duke of Leeds. It had taken him little more than twenty years to
climb from the station of a Yorkshire country gentleman to the highest
rank in the peerage. Two great Whig Earls were at the same time created
Dukes, Bedford and Devonshire. It ought to be mentioned that Bedford
had repeatedly refused the dignity which he now somewhat reluctantly
accepted. He declared that he preferred his Earldom to a Dukedom,
and gave a very sensible reason for the preference. An Earl who had
a numerous family might send one son to the Temple and another to a
counting house in the city. But the sons of a Duke were all lords; and
a lord could not make his bread either at the bar or on Change. The old
man's objections, however, were overcome; and the two great houses
of Russell and Cavendish, which had long been closely connected by
friendship and by marriage, by common opinions, common sufferings and
common triumphs, received on the same day the greatest honour which it
is in the power of the Crown to confer. [531]

The Gazette which announced these creations announced also that the King
had set out for the Continent. He had, before his departure, consulted
with his ministers about the means of counteracting a plan of naval
operations which had been formed by the French government. Hitherto
the maritime war had been carried on chiefly in the Channel and the
Atlantic. But Lewis had now determined to concentrate his maritime
forces in the Mediterranean. He hoped that, with their help, the army of
Marshal Noailles would be able to take Barcelona, to subdue the whole
of Catalonia, and to compel Spain to sue for peace. Accordingly,
Tourville's squadron, consisting of fifty three men of war, set sail
from Brest on the twenty-fifth of April and passed the Straits of
Gibraltar on the fourth of May.

William, in order to cross the designs of the enemy, determined to send
Russell to the Mediterranean with the greater part of the combined fleet
of England and Holland.