No More Learning

But Etherege's She Would If She
Could, Wycherley's Country Wife, Dryden's Translations from the Fourth
Book of Lucretius, obtained the Imprimatur without difficulty; for
Dryden, Etherege and Wycherley were courtiers. From the day on which the
emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of
our literature began. That purification was effected, not by the
intervention of senates or magistrates, but by the opinion of the great
body of educated Englishmen, before whom good and evil were set, and who
were left free to make their choice. During a hundred and sixty years
the liberty of our press has been constantly becoming more and more
entire; and during those hundred and sixty years the restraint imposed
on writers by the general feeling of readers has been constantly
becoming more and more strict. At length even that class of works
in which it was formerly thought that a voluptuous imagination was
privileged to disport itself, love songs, comedies, novels, have become
more decorous than the sermons of the seventeenth century. At this day
foreigners, who dare not print a word reflecting on the government under
which they live, are at a loss to understand how it happens that the
freest press in Europe is the most prudish.

On the tenth of October, the King, leaving his army in winter quarters,
arrived in England, and was received with unwonted enthusiasm. During
his passage through the capital to his palace, the bells of every church
were ringing, and every street was lighted up. It was late before he
made his way through the shouting crowds to Kensington. But, late as it
was, a council was instantly held. An important point was to be decided.
Should the House of Commons be permitted to sit again, or should there
be an immediate dissolution? The King would probably have been willing
to keep that House to the end of his reign. But this was not in his
power. The Triennial Act had fixed the twenty-fifth of March as the
latest day of the existence of the Parliament. If therefore there were
not a general election in 1695, there must be a general election in
1696; and who could say what might be the state of the country in 1696?
There might be an unfortunate campaign. There might be, indeed there
was but too good reason to believe that there would be, a terrible
commercial crisis. In either case, it was probable that there would be
much ill humour. The campaign of 1695 had been brilliant; the nation
was in an excellent temper; and William wisely determined to seize the
fortunate moment. Two proclamations were immediately published. One of
them announced, in the ordinary form, that His Majesty had determined to
dissolve the old Parliament and had ordered writs to be issued for a new
Parliament. The other proclamation was unprecedented. It signified the
royal pleasure to be that every regiment quartered in a place where an
election was to be held should march out of that place the day before
the nomination, and should not return till the people had made their
choice. From this order, which was generally considered as indicating
a laudable respect for popular rights, the garrisons of fortified towns
and castles were necessarily excepted.

But, though William carefully abstained from disgusting the constituent
bodies by any thing that could look like coercion or intimidation, he
did not disdain to influence their votes by milder means. He resolved
to spend the six weeks of the general election in showing himself to
the people of many districts which he had never yet visited. He hoped to
acquire in this way a popularity which might have a considerable
effect on the returns. He therefore forced himself to behave with a
graciousness and affability in which he was too often deficient; and the
consequence was that he received, at every stage of his progress, marks
of the good will of his subjects. Before he set out he paid a visit in
form to his sister in law, and was much pleased with his reception.
The Duke of Gloucester, only six years old, with a little musket on his
shoulder, came to meet his uncle, and presented arms. "I am learning my
drill," the child said, "that I may help you to beat the French. " The
King laughed much, and, a few days later, rewarded the young soldier
with the Garter. [617]

On the seventeenth of October William went to Newmarket, now a place
rather of business than of pleasure, but, in the autumns of the
seventeenth century, the gayest and most luxurious spot in the island.
It was not unusual for the whole Court and Cabinet to go down to the
meetings. Jewellers and milliners, players and fiddlers, venal wits and
venal beauties followed in crowds. The streets were made impassable by
coaches and six. In the places of public resort peers flirted with maids
of honour; and officers of the Life Guards, all plumes and gold
lace, jostled professors in trencher caps and black gowns. For
the neighbouring University of Cambridge always sent her highest
functionaries with loyal addresses, and selected her ablest theologians
to preach before the Sovereign and his splendid retinue. In the wild
days of the Restoration, indeed, the most learned and eloquent divine
might fail to draw a fashionable audience, particularly if Buckingham
announced his intention of holding forth; for sometimes His Grace would
enliven the dulness of a Sunday morning by addressing to the bevy of
fine gentlemen and fine ladies a ribald exhortation which he called
a sermon. But the Court of William was more decent; and the Academic
dignitaries were treated with marked respect. With lords and ladies from
Saint James's and Soho, and with doctors from Trinity College and King's
College, were mingled the provincial aristocracy, foxhunting squires and
their rosycheeked daughters, who had come in queerlooking family coaches
drawn by carthorses from the remotest parishes of three or four counties
to see their Sovereign. The heath was fringed by a wild gipsylike camp
of vast extent. For the hope of being able to feed on the leavings of
many sumptuous tables, and to pick up some of the guineas and crowns
which the spendthrifts of London were throwing about, attracted
thousands of peasants from a circle of many miles. [618]

William, after holding his court a few days at this joyous place, and
receiving the homage of Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire and Suffolk,
proceeded to Althorpe. It seems strange that he should, in the course
of what was really a canvassing tour, have honoured with such a mark of
favour a man so generally distrusted and hated as Sunderland. But the
people were determined to be pleased. All Northamptonshire crowded to
kiss the royal hand in that fine gallery which had been embellished by
the pencil of Vandyke and made classical by the muse of Waller; and
the Earl tried to conciliate his neighbours by feasting them at eight
tables, all blazing with plate. From Althorpe the King proceeded to
Stamford. The Earl of Exeter, whose princely seat was, and still is, one
of the great sights of England, had never taken the oaths, and had, in
order to avoid an interview which must have been disagreeable, found
some pretext for going up to London, but had left directions that the
illustrious guest should be received with fitting hospitality. William
was fond of architecture and of gardening; and his nobles could not
flatter him more than by asking his opinion about the improvement of
their country seats. At a time when he had many cares pressing on his
mind he took a great interest in the building of Castle Howard; and a
wooden model of that edifice, the finest specimen of a vicious style,
was sent to Kensington for his inspection. We cannot therefore wonder
that he should have seen Burleigh with delight. He was indeed not
content with one view, but rose early on the following morning for the
purpose of examining the building a second time. From Stamford he went
on to Lincoln, where he was greeted by the clergy in full canonicals,
by the magistrates in scarlet robes, and by a multitude of baronets,
knights and esquires, from all parts of the immense plain which lies
between the Trent and the German Ocean. After attending divine service
in the magnificent cathedral, he took his departure, and journeyed
eastward. On the frontier of Nottinghamshire the Lord Lieutenant of the
county, John Holles, Duke of Newcastle, with a great following, met
the royal carriages and escorted them to his seat at Welbeck, a mansion
surrounded by gigantic oaks which scarcely seem older now than on the
day when that splendid procession passed under their shade. The house in
which William was then, during a few hours, a guest, passed long after
his death, by female descents, from the Holleses to the Harleys, and
from the Harleys to the Bentincks, and now contains the originals of
those singularly interesting letters which passed between him and his
trusty friend and servant Portland. At Welbeck the grandees of the north
were assembled. The Lord Mayor of York came thither with a train of
magistrates, and the Archbishop of York with a train of divines. William
hunted several times in that forest, the finest in the kingdom, which in
old times gave shelter to Robin Hood and Little John, and which is now
portioned out into the princely domains of Welbeck, Thoresby, Clumber
and Worksop. Four hundred gentlemen on horseback partook of his sport.
The Nottinghamshire squires were delighted to hear him say at table,
after a noble stag chase, that he hoped that this was not the last run
which he should have with them, and that he must hire a hunting
box among their delightful woods. He then turned southward. He was
entertained during one day by the Earl of Stamford at Bradgate, the
place where Lady Jane Grey sate alone reading the last words of Socrates
while the deer was flying through the park followed by the whirlwind of
hounds and hunters. On the morrow the Lord Brook welcomed his Sovereign
to Warwick Castle, the finest of those fortresses of the middle
ages which have been turned into peaceful dwellings. Guy's Tower was
illuminated. A hundred and twenty gallons of punch were drunk to His
Majesty's health; and a mighty pile of faggots blazed in the middle of
the spacious court overhung by ruins green with the ivy of centuries.
The next morning the King, accompanied by a multitude of
Warwickshire gentlemen on horseback, proceeded towards the borders of
Gloucestershire. He deviated from his route to dine with Shrewsbury at
a secluded mansion in the Wolds, and in the evening went on to Burford.
The whole population of Burford met him, and entreated him to accept a
small token of their love. Burford was then renowned for its saddles.
One inhabitant of the town, in particular, was said by the English to
be the best saddler in Europe. Two of his masterpieces were respectfully
offered to William, who received them with much grace, and ordered them
to be especially reserved for his own use. [619]

At Oxford he was received with great pomp, complimented in a Latin
oration, presented with some of the most beautiful productions of the
Academic press, entertained with music, and invited to a sumptuous feast
in the Sheldonian theatre. He departed in a few hours, pleading as
an excuse for the shortness of his stay that he had seen the colleges
before, and that this was a visit, not of curiosity, but of kindness. As
it was well known that he did not love the Oxonians and was not loved
by them, his haste gave occasion to some idle rumours which found credit
with the vulgar. It was said that he hurried away without tasting the
costly banquet which had been provided for him, because he had been
warned by an anonymous letter, that, if he ate or drank in the theatre,
he was a dead man. But it is difficult to believe that a Prince who
could scarcely be induced, by the most earnest entreaties of his
friends, to take the most common precautions against assassins of whose
designs he had trustworthy evidence, would have been scared by so silly
a hoax; and it is quite certain that the stages of his progress had been
marked, and that he remained at Oxford as long as was compatible with
arrangements previously made. [620]

He was welcomed back to his capital by a splendid show, which had been
prepared at great cost during his absence. Sidney, now Earl of Romney
and Master of the Ordnance, had determined to astonish London by an
exhibition which had never been seen in England on so large a scale.
The whole skill of the pyrotechnists of his department was employed to
produce a display of fireworks which might vie with any that had been
seen in the gardens of Versailles or on the great tank at the Hague.
Saint James's Square was selected as the place for the spectacle. All
the stately mansions on the northern, eastern and western sides were
crowded with people of fashion. The King appeared at a window of
Romney's drawing room. The Princess of Denmark, her husband and her
court occupied a neighbouring house. The whole diplomatic body assembled
at the dwelling of the minister of the United Provinces. A huge pyramid
of flame in the centre of the area threw out brilliant cascades which
were seen by hundreds of thousands who crowded the neighbouring streets
and parks. The States General were informed by their correspondent that,
great as the multitude was, the night had passed without the slightest
disturbance. [621]

By this time the elections were almost completed. In every part of the
country it had been manifest that the constituent bodies were generally
zealous for the King and for the war. The City of London, which had
returned four Tories in 1690, returned four Whigs in 1695. Of the
proceedings at Westminster an account more than usually circumstantial
has come down to us. In 1690 the electors, disgusted by the Sacheverell
Clause, had returned two Tories. In 1695, as soon as it was known that a
new Parliament was likely to be called, a meeting was held, at which it
was resolved that a deputation should be sent with an invitation to two
Commissioners of the Treasury, Charles Montague and Sir Stephen Fox. Sir
Walter Clarges stood on the Tory interest. On the day of nomination
near five thousand electors paraded the streets on horseback. They were
divided into three bands; and at the head of each band rode one of the
candidates. It was easy to estimate at a glance the comparative strength
of the parties. For the cavalcade which followed Clarges was the least
numerous of the three; and it was well known that the followers of
Montague would vote for Fox, and the followers of Fox for Montague. The
business of the day was interrupted by loud clamours. The Whigs cried
shame on the Jacobite candidate who wished to make the English go
to mass, eat frogs and wear wooden shoes. The Tories hooted the two
placemen who were raising great estates out of the plunder of the poor
overburdened nation. From words the incensed factions proceeded to
blows; and there was a riot which was with some difficulty quelled.
The High Bailiff then walked round the three companies of horsemen, and
pronounced, on the view, that Montague and Fox were duly elected. A poll
was demanded. The Tories exerted themselves strenuously. Neither money
nor ink was spared. Clarges disbursed two thousand pounds in a few
hours, a great outlay in times when the average income of a member of
Parliament was not estimated at more than eight hundred a year. In the
course of the night which followed the nomination, broadsides filled
with invectives against the two courtly upstarts who had raised
themselves by knavery from poverty and obscurity to opulence and power
were scattered all over the capital. The Bishop of London canvassed
openly against the government; for the interference of peers in
elections had not yet been declared by the Commons to be a breach of
privilege. But all was vain. Clarges was at the bottom of the poll
without hope of rising. He withdrew; and Montague was carried on the
shoulders of an immense multitude from Westminster Abbey to his office
at Whitehall. [622]

The same feeling exhibited itself in many other places. The freeholders
of Cumberland instructed their representatives to support the King, and
to vote whatever supplies might be necessary for the purpose of carrying
on the war with vigour; and this example was followed by several
counties and towns. [623] Russell did not arrive in England till after
the writs had gone out. But he had only to choose for what place he
would sit. His popularity was immense; for his villanies were secret,
and his public services were universally known. He had won the battle of
La Hogue. He had commanded two years in the Mediterranean. He had there
shut up the French fleets in the harbour of Toulon, and had stopped and
turned back the French armies in Catalonia. He had taken many vessels,
and among them two ships of the line; and he had not, during his long
absence in a remote sea, lost a single vessel either by war or by
weather. He had made the red cross of Saint George an object of terror
to all the princes and commonwealths of Italy. The effect of his
successes was that embassies were on their way from Florence, Genoa
and Venice, with tardy congratulations to William on his accession.
Russell's merits, artfully magnified by the Whigs, made such an
impression that he was returned to Parliament not only by Portsmouth
where his official situation gave him great influence, and by
Cambridgeshire where his private property was considerable, but also by
Middlesex. This last distinction, indeed, he owed chiefly to the name
which he bore. Before his arrival in England it had been generally
thought that two Tories would be returned for the metropolitan county.
Somers and Shrewsbury were of opinion that the only way to avert such a
misfortune was to conjure with the name of the most virtuous of all the
martyrs of English liberty. They entreated Lady Russell to suffer her
eldest son, a boy of fifteen, who was about to commence his studies at
Cambridge, to be put in nomination. He must, they said, drop, for one
day, his new title of Marquess of Tavistock, and call himself Lord
Russell. There will be no expense. There will be no contest. Thousands
of gentlemen on horseback will escort him to the hustings; nobody will
dare to stand against him; and he will not only come in himself, but
bring in another Whig. The widowed mother, in a letter written with
all the excellent sense and feeling which distinguished her, refused
to sacrifice her son to her party. His education, she said, would be
interrupted; his head would be turned; his triumph would be his undoing.
Just at this conjuncture the Admiral arrived. He made his appearance
before the freeholders of Middlesex assembled on the top of Hampstead
Hill, and was returned without opposition. [624]

Meanwhile several noted malecontents received marks of public
disapprobation. John Knight, the most factious and insolent of those
Jacobites who had dishonestly sworn fealty to King William in order to
qualify themselves to sit in Parliament, ceased to represent the
great city of Bristol. Exeter, the capital of the west, was violently
agitated. It had been long supposed that the ability, the eloquence, the
experience, the ample fortune, the noble descent of Seymour would make
it impossible to unseat him. But his moral character, which had
never stood very high, had, during the last three or four years, been
constantly sinking. He had been virulent in opposition till he had got
a place. While he had a place he had defended the most unpopular acts
of the government. As soon as he was out of place, he had again been
virulent in opposition.

His saltpetre contract had left a deep stain on his personal honour. Two
candidates were therefore brought forward against him; and a contest,
the longest and fiercest of that age, fixed the attention of the whole
kingdom, and was watched with interest even by foreign governments. The
poll was open five weeks. The expense on both sides was enormous. The
freemen of Exeter, who, while the election lasted, fared sumptuously
every day, were by no means impatient for the termination of their
luxurious carnival. They ate and drank heartily; they turned out
every evening with good cudgels to fight for Mother Church or for King
William; but the votes came in very slowly. It was not till the eve
of the meeting of Parliament that the return was made. Seymour was
defeated, to his bitter mortification, and was forced to take refuge in
the small borough of Totness. [625]

It is remarkable that, at this election as at the preceding election,
John Hampden failed to obtain a seat. He had, since he ceased to be a
member of Parliament, been brooding over his evil fate and his indelible
shame, and occasionally venting his spleen in bitter pamphlets against
the government. When the Whigs had become predominant at the Court and
in the House of Commons, when Nottingham had retired, when Caermarthen
had been impeached, Hampden, it should seem, again conceived the hope
that he might play a great part in public life. But the leaders of
his party, apparently, did not wish for an ally of so acrimonious and
turbulent a spirit. He found himself still excluded from the House of
Commons. He led, during a few months, a miserable life, sometimes trying
to forget his cares among the wellbred gamblers and frail beauties who
filled the drawingroom of the Duchess of Mazarine, and sometimes sunk
in religious melancholy. The thought of suicide often rose in his mind.
Soon there was a vacancy in the representation of Buckinghamshire,
the county which had repeatedly sent himself and his progenitors to
Parliament; and he expected that he should, by the help of Wharton,
whose dominion over the Buckinghamshire Whigs was absolute, be returned
without difficulty. Wharton, however, gave his interest to another
candidate. This was a final blow. The town was agitated by the news that
John Hampden had cut his throat, that he had survived his wound a few
hours, that he had professed deep penitence for his sins, had requested
the prayers of Burnet, and had sent a solemn warning to the Duchess of
Mazarine. A coroner's jury found a verdict of insanity. The wretched man
had entered on life with the fairest prospects. He bore a name which was
more than noble. He was heir to an ample estate and to a patrimony much
more precious, the confidence and attachment of hundreds of thousands
of his countrymen. His own abilities were considerable, and had been
carefully cultivated. Unhappily ambition and party spirit impelled
him to place himself in a situation full of danger. To that danger his
fortitude proved unequal. He stooped to supplications which saved him
and dishonoured him. From that moment, he never knew peace of mind.
His temper became perverse; and his understanding was perverted by
his temper. He tried to find relief in devotion and in revenge, in
fashionable dissipation and in political turmoil. But the dark shade
never passed away from his mind, till, in the twelfth year of his
humiliation, his unhappy life was terminated by an unhappy death. [626]

The result of the general election proved that William had chosen a
fortunate moment for dissolving. The number of new members was about a
hundred and sixty; and most of these were known to be thoroughly well
affected to the government. [627]

It was of the highest importance that the House of Commons should, at
that moment, be disposed to cooperate cordially with the King. For it
was absolutely necessary to apply a remedy to an internal evil which had
by slow degrees grown to a fearful magnitude. The silver coin, which was
then the standard coin of the realm, was in a state at which the boldest
and most enlightened statesmen stood aghast. [628]

Till the reign of Charles the Second our coin had been struck by a
process as old as the thirteenth century. Edward the First had invited
hither skilful artists from Florence, which, in his time, was to London
what London, in the time of William the Third, was to Moscow. During
many generations, the instruments which were then introduced into our
mint continued to be employed with little alteration. The metal was
divided with shears, and afterwards shaped and stamped by the hammer.
In these operations much was left to the hand and eye of the workman. It
necessarily happened that some pieces contained a little more and some
a little less than the just quantity of silver; few pieces were exactly
round; and the rims were not marked. It was therefore in the course of
years discovered that to clip the coin was one of the easiest and most
profitable kinds of fraud. In the reign of Elizabeth it had been thought
necessary to enact that the clipper should be, as the coiner had long
been, liable to the penalties of high treason. [629] The practice of
paring down money, however, was far too lucrative to be so checked; and,
about the time of the Restoration, people began to observe that a large
proportion of the crowns, halfcrowns and shillings which were passing
from hand to hand had undergone some slight mutilation.

That was a time fruitful of experiments and inventions in all the
departments of science. A great improvement in the mode of shaping
and striking the coin was suggested. A mill, which to a great extent
superseded the human hand, was set up in the Tower of London. This
mill was worked by horses, and would doubtless be considered by modern
engineers as a rude and feeble machine. The pieces which it produced,
however, were among the best in Europe. It was not easy to counterfeit
them; and, as their shape was exactly circular, and their edges were
inscribed with a legend, clipping was not to be apprehended. [630] The
hammered coins and the milled coins were current together. They were
received without distinction in public, and consequently in private,
payments. The financiers of that age seem to have expected that the new
money, which was excellent, would soon displace the old money which was
much impaired.
Yet any man of plain understanding might have known that,
when the State treats perfect coin and light coin as of equal value, the
perfect coin will not drive the light coin out of circulation, but will
itself be driven out. A clipped crown, on English ground, went as far in
the payment of a tax or a debt as a milled crown. But the milled crown,
as soon as it had been flung into the crucible or carried across the
Channel, became much more valuable than the clipped crown. It might
therefore have been predicted, as confidently as any thing can be
predicted which depends on the human will, that the inferior pieces
would remain in the only market in which they could fetch the same price
as the superior pieces, and that the superior pieces would take some
form or fly to some place in which some advantage could be derived from
their superiority. [631]

The politicians of that age, however, generally overlooked these very
obvious considerations. They marvelled exceedingly that every body
should be so perverse as to use light money in preference to good money.
In other words, they marvelled that nobody chose to pay twelve ounces of
silver when ten would serve the turn. The horse in the Tower still paced
his rounds. Fresh waggon loads of choice money still came forth from
the mill; and still they vanished as fast as they appeared. Great masses
were melted down; great masses exported; great masses hoarded; but
scarcely one new piece was to be found in the till of a shop, or in the
leathern bag which the farmer carried home from the cattle fair. In the
receipts and payments of the Exchequer the milled money did not exceed
ten shillings in a hundred pounds. A writer of that age mentions the
case of a merchant who, in a sum of thirty-five pounds, received only a
single halfcrown in milled silver. Meanwhile the shears of the clippers
were constantly at work. The comers too multiplied and prospered; for
the worse the current money became the more easily it was imitated.
During more than thirty years this evil had gone on increasing. At first
it had been disregarded; but it had at length become an insupportable
curse to the country. It was to no purpose that the rigorous laws
against coining and clipping were rigorously executed. At every session
that was held at the Old Bailey terrible examples were made. Hurdles,
with four, five, six wretches convicted of counterfeiting or mutilating
the money of the realm, were dragged month after month up Holborn Hill.
On one morning seven men were hanged and a woman burned for clipping;
But all was vain. The gains were such as to lawless spirits seemed more
than proportioned to the risks. Some clippers were said to have made
great fortunes. One in particular offered six thousand pounds for a
pardon. His bribe was indeed rejected; but the fame of his riches did
much to counteract the effect which the spectacle of his death was
designed to produce. [632] Nay the severity of the punishment gave
encouragement to the crime. For the practice of clipping, pernicious as
it was, did not excite in the common mind a detestation resembling
that with which men regard murder, arson, robbery, nay, even theft.
The injury done by the whole body of clippers to the whole society was
indeed immense; but each particular act of clipping was a trifle. To
pass a halfcrown, after paring a pennyworth of silver from it, seemed a
minute, an almost imperceptible, fault. Even while the nation was crying
out most loudly under the distress which the state of the currency had
produced, every individual who was capitally punished for contributing
to bring the currency into that state had the general sympathy on his
side. Constables were unwilling to arrest the offenders. Justices were
unwilling to commit. Witnesses were unwilling to tell the whole truth.
Juries were unwilling to pronounce the word Guilty. It was vain to tell
the common people that the mutilators of the coin were causing far more
misery than all the highwaymen and housebreakers in the island. For,
great as the aggregate of the evil was, only an infinitesimal part of
that evil was brought home to the individual malefactor. There was,
therefore, a general conspiracy to prevent the law from taking its
course. The convictions, numerous as they might seem, were few indeed
when compared with the offences; and the offenders who were convicted
looked on themselves as murdered men, and were firm in the belief that
their sin, if sin it were, was as venial as that of a schoolboy who goes
nutting in the wood of a neighbour. All the eloquence of the ordinary
could seldom induce them to conform to the wholesome usage of
acknowledging in their dying speeches the enormity of their wickedness.
[633]

The evil proceeded with constantly accelerating velocity. At length in
the autumn of 1695 it could hardly be said that the country possessed,
for practical purposes, any measure of the value of commodities. It was
a mere chance whether what was called a shilling was really tenpence,
sixpence or a groat. The results of some experiments which were tried at
that time deserve to be mentioned. The officers of the Exchequer weighed
fifty-seven thousand two hundred pounds of hammered money which had
recently been paid in. The weight ought to have been above two hundred
and twenty thousand ounces. It proved to be under one hundred and
fourteen thousand ounces. [634] Three eminent London goldsmiths were
invited to send a hundred pounds each in current silver to be tried by
the balance. Three hundred pounds ought to have weighed about twelve
hundred ounces. The actual weight proved to be six hundred and
twenty-four ounces. The same test was applied in various parts of the
kingdom. It was found that a hundred pounds, which should have weighed
about four hundred ounces, did actually weigh at Bristol two hundred and
forty ounces, at Cambridge two hundred and three, at Exeter one hundred
and eighty, and at Oxford only one hundred and sixteen. [635] There
were, indeed, some northern districts into which the clipped money had
only begun to find its way. An honest Quaker, who lived in one of these
districts, recorded, in some notes which are still extant, the amazement
with which, when he travelled southward, shopkeepers and innkeepers
stared at the broad and heavy halfcrowns with which he paid his way.
They asked whence he came, and where such money was to be found. The
guinea which he purchased for twenty-two shillings at Lancaster bore a
different value at every stage of his journey. When he reached London
it was worth thirty shillings, and would indeed have been worth more had
not the government fixed that rate as the highest at which gold should
be received in the payment of taxes. [636]

The evils produced by this state of the currency were not such as have
generally been thought worthy to occupy a prominent place in history.
Yet it may well be doubted whether all the misery which had been
inflicted on the English nation in a quarter of a century by bad Kings,
bad Ministers, bad Parliaments and bad judges, was equal to the misery
caused in a single year by bad crowns and bad shillings. Those events
which furnish the best themes for pathetic or indignant eloquence are
not always those which most affect the happiness of the great body of
the people. The misgovernment of Charles and James, gross as it had
been, had not prevented the common business of life from going steadily
and prosperously on. While the honour and independence of the State
were sold to a foreign power, while chartered rights were invaded, while
fundamental laws were violated, hundreds of thousands of quiet, honest
and industrious families laboured and traded, ate their meals and
lay down to rest, in comfort and security. Whether Whigs or Tories,
Protestants or Jesuits were uppermost, the grazier drove his beasts to
market; the grocer weighed out his currants; the draper measured out
his broadcloth; the hum of buyers and sellers was as loud as ever in
the towns; the harvest home was celebrated as joyously as ever in the
hamlets; the cream overflowed the pails of Cheshire; the apple juice
foamed in the presses of Herefordshire; the piles of crockery glowed in
the furnaces of the Trent; and the barrows of coal rolled fast along the
timber railways of the Tyne. But when the great instrument of exchange
became thoroughly deranged, all trade, all industry, were smitten as
with a palsy. The evil was felt daily and hourly in almost every place
and by almost every class, in the dairy and on the threshing floor, by
the anvil and by the loom, on the billows of the ocean and in the depths
of the mine. Nothing could be purchased without a dispute. Over every
counter there was wrangling from morning to night. The workman and his
employer had a quarrel as regularly as the Saturday came round. On a
fair day or a market day the clamours, the reproaches, the taunts, the
curses, were incessant; and it was well if no booth was overturned
and no head broken. [637] No merchant would contract to deliver goods
without making some stipulation about the quality of the coin in which
he was to be paid. Even men of business were often bewildered by the
confusion into which all pecuniary transactions were thrown. The simple
and the careless were pillaged without mercy by extortioners whose
demands grew even more rapidly than the money shrank. The price of
the necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The
labourer found that the bit of metal which when he received it was
called a shilling would hardly, when he wanted to purchase a pot of beer
or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence. Where artisans of more
than usual intelligence were collected together in great numbers, as in
the dockyard at Chatham, they were able to make their complaints heard
and to obtain some redress. [638] But the ignorant and helpless peasant
was cruelly ground between one class which would give money only by
tale and another which would take it only by weight. Yet his sufferings
hardly exceeded those of the unfortunate race of authors. Of the way in
which obscure writers were treated we may easily form a judgment from
the letters, still extant, of Dryden to his bookseller Tonson. One day
Tonson sends forty brass shillings, to say nothing of clipped money.
Another day he pays a debt with pieces so bad that none of them will go.
The great poet sends them all back, and demands in their place guineas
at twenty-nine shillings each. "I expect," he says in one letter, "good
silver, not such as I have had formerly. " "If you have any silver that
will go," he says in another letter, "my wife will be glad of it. I lost
thirty shillings or more by the last payment of fifty pounds. " These
complaints and demands, which have been preserved from destruction only
by the eminence of the writer, are doubtless merely a fair sample of the
correspondence which filled all the mail bags of England during several
months.

In the midst of the public distress one class prospered greatly, the
bankers; and among the bankers none could in skill or in luck bear a
comparison with Charles Duncombe. He had been, not many years before, a
goldsmith of very moderate wealth. He had probably, after the fashion of
his craft, plied for customers under the arcades of the Royal Exchange,
had saluted merchants with profound bows, and had begged to be allowed
the honour of keeping their cash. But so dexterously did he now avail
himself of the opportunities of profit which the general confusion of
prices gave to a moneychanger, that, at the moment when the trade of
the kingdom was depressed to the lowest point, he laid down near ninety
thousand pounds for the estate of Helmsley in the North Riding of
Yorkshire. That great property had, in a troubled time, been bestowed by
the Commons of England on their victorious general Fairfax, and had been
part of the dower which Fairfax's daughter had brought to the brilliant
and dissolute Buckingham. Thither Buckingham, having wasted in mad
intemperance, sensual and intellectual, all the choicest bounties of
nature and of fortune, had carried the feeble ruins of his fine person
and of his fine mind; and there he had closed his chequered life under
that humble roof and on that coarse pallet which the great satirist
of the succeeding generation described in immortal verse. The spacious
domain passed to a new race; and in a few years a palace more splendid
and costly than had ever been inhabited by the magnificent Villiers rose
amidst the beautiful woods and waters which had been his, and was called
by the once humble name of Duncombe.

Since the Revolution the state of the currency had been repeatedly
discussed in Parliament. In 1689 a committee of the Commons had been
appointed to investigate the subject, but had made no report. In 1690
another committee had reported that immense quantities of silver were
carried out of the country by Jews, who, it was said, would do any thing
for profit. Schemes were formed for encouraging the importation and
discouraging the exportation of the precious metals. One foolish bill
after another was brought in and dropped. At length, in the beginning of
the year 1695, the question assumed so serious an aspect that the Houses
applied themselves to it in earnest. The only practical result of their
deliberations, however, was a new penal law which, it was hoped, would
prevent the clipping of the hammered coin and the melting and exporting
of the milled coin. It was enacted that every person who informed
against a clipper should be entitled to a reward of forty pounds, that
every clipper who informed against two clippers should be entitled to a
pardon, and that whoever should be found in possession of silver filings
or parings should be burned in the cheek with a redhot iron. Certain
officers were empowered to search for bullion. If bullion were found in
a house or on board of a ship, the burden of proving that it had never
been part of the money of the realm was thrown on the owner. If he
failed in making out a satisfactory history of every ingot he was
liable to severe penalties. This Act was, as might have been expected,
altogether ineffective. During the following summer and autumn, the
coins went on dwindling, and the cry of distress from every county in
the realm became louder and more piercing.

But happily for England there were among her rulers some who clearly
perceived that it was not by halters and branding irons that her
decaying industry and commerce could be restored to health. The state of
the currency had during some time occupied the serious attention of four
eminent men closely connected by public and private ties. Two of
them were politicians who had never, in the midst of official and
parliamentary business, ceased to love and honour philosophy; and
two were philosophers, in whom habits of abstruse meditation had not
impaired the homely good sense without which even genius is mischievous
in politics. Never had there been an occasion which more urgently
required both practical and speculative abilities; and never had the
world seen the highest practical and the highest speculative abilities
united in an alliance so close, so harmonious, and so honourable as that
which bound Somers and Montague to Locke and Newton.

It is much to be lamented that we have not a minute history of the
conferences of the men to whom England owed the restoration of her
currency and the long series of prosperous years which dates from
that restoration. It would be interesting to see how the pure gold of
scientific truth found by the two philosophers was mingled by the two
statesmen with just that quantity of alloy which was necessary for
the working. It would be curious to study the many plans which were
propounded, discussed and rejected, some as inefficacious, some as
unjust, some as too costly, some as too hazardous, till at length a
plan was devised of which the wisdom was proved by the best evidence,
complete success.

Newton has left to posterity no exposition of his opinions touching
the currency. But the tracts of Locke on this subject are happily still
extant; and it may be doubted whether in any of his writings, even in
those ingenious and deeply meditated chapters on language which form
perhaps the most valuable part of the Essay on the Human Understanding,
the force of his mind appears more conspicuously. Whether he had ever
been acquainted with Dudley North is not known. In moral character
the two men bore little resemblance to each other. They belonged to
different parties. Indeed, had not Locke taken shelter from tyranny in
Holland, it is by no means impossible that he might have been sent to
Tyburn by a jury which Dudley North had packed. Intellectually, however,
there was much in common between the Tory and the Whig. They had
laboriously thought out, each for himself, a theory of political
economy, substantially the same with that which Adam Smith afterwards
expounded. Nay, in some respects the theory of Locke and North was more
complete and symmetrical than that of their illustrious successor. Adam
Smith has often been justly blamed for maintaining, in direct opposition
to all his own principles, that the rate of interest ought to be
regulated by the State; and he is the more blamable because, long before
he was born, both Locke and North had taught that it was as absurd to
make laws fixing the price of money as to make laws fixing the price of
cutlery or of broadcloth. [639]

Dudley North died in 1693. A short time before his death he published,
without his name, a small tract which contains a concise sketch of a
plan for the restoration of the currency. This plan appears to have been
substantially the same with that which was afterwards fully developed
and ably defended by Locke.

One question, which was doubtless the subject of many anxious
deliberations, was whether any thing should be done while the war
lasted. In whatever way the restoration of the coin might be effected,
great sacrifices must be made, the whole community or by a part of the
community. And to call for such sacrifices at a time when the nation was
already paying taxes such as, ten years before, no financier would have
thought it possible to raise, was undoubtedly a course full of danger.
Timorous politicians were for delay; but the deliberate conviction of
the great Whig leaders was that something must be hazarded, or that
every thing was lost. Montague, in particular, is said to have expressed
in strong language his determination to kill or cure. If indeed there
had been any hope that the evil would merely continue to be what it was,
it might have been wise to defer till the return of peace an experiment
which must severely try the strength of the body politic. But the evil
was one which daily made progress almost visible to the eye. There might
have been a recoinage in 1691 with half the risk which must be run
in 1696; and, great as would be the risk in 1696, that risk would be
doubled if the coinage were postponed till 1698.

Those politicians whose voice was for delay gave less trouble than
another set of politicians, who were for a general and immediate
recoinage, but who insisted that the new shilling should be worth only
ninepence or ninepence halfpenny. At the head of this party was William
Lowndes, Secretary of the Treasury, and member of Parliament for the
borough of Seaford, a most respectable and industrious public servant,
but much more versed in the details of his office than in the higher
parts of political philosophy. He was not in the least aware that a
piece of metal with the King's head on it was a commodity of which the
price was governed by the same laws which govern the price of a piece of
metal fashioned into a spoon or a buckle, and that it was no more in
the power of Parliament to make the kingdom richer by calling a crown
a pound than to make the kingdom larger by calling a furlong a mile.
He seriously believed, incredible as it may seem, that, if the ounce
of silver were divided into seven shillings instead of five, foreign
nations would sell us their wines and their silks for a smaller number
of ounces. He had a considerable following, composed partly of dull men
who really believed what he told them, and partly of shrewd men who were
perfectly willing to be authorised by law to pay a hundred pounds with
eighty. Had his arguments prevailed, the evils of a vast confiscation
would have been added to all the other evils which afflicted the nation;
public credit, still in its tender and sickly infancy, would have been
destroyed; and there would have been much risk of a general mutiny of
the fleet and army. Happily Lowndes was completely refuted by Locke in
a paper drawn up for the use of Somers. Somers was delighted with this
little treatise, and desired that it might be printed. It speedily
became the text book of all the most enlightened politicians in the
kingdom, and may still be read with pleasure and profit. The effect of
Locke's forcible and perspicuous reasoning is greatly heightened by his
evident anxiety to get at the truth, and by the singularly generous
and graceful courtesy with which he treats an antagonist of powers far
inferior to his own. Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, described the
controversy well by saying that the point in dispute was whether five
was six or only five. [640]

Thus far Somers and Montague entirely agreed with Locke; but as to the
manner in which the restoration of the currency ought to be effected
there was some difference of opinion. Locke recommended, as Dudley North
had recommended, that the King should by proclamation fix a near day
after which the hammered money should in all payments pass only by
weight. The advantages of this plan were doubtless great and obvious. It
was most simple, and, at the same time, most efficient. What searching,
fining, branding, hanging, burning, had failed to do would be done in an
instant. The clipping of the hammered pieces, the melting of the milled
pieces would cease. Great quantities of good coin would come forth from
secret drawers and from behind the panels of wainscots. The mutilated
silver would gradually flow into the mint, and would come forth again in
a form which would make mutilation impossible. In a short time the
whole currency of the realm would be in a sound state, and, during the
progress of this great change, there would never at any moment be any
scarcity of money.

These were weighty considerations; and to the joint authority of North
and Locke on such a question great respect is due. Yet it must be owned
that their plan was open to one serious objection, which did not indeed
altogether escape their notice, but of which they seem to have thought
too lightly. The restoration of the currency was a benefit to the whole
community. On what principle then was the expense of restoring the
currency to be borne by a part of the community? It was most desirable
doubtless that the words pound and shilling should again have a fixed
signification, that every man should know what his contracts meant and
what his property was worth. But was it just to attain this excellent
end by means of which the effect would be that every farmer who had
put by a hundred pounds to pay his rent, every trader who had scraped
together a hundred pounds to meet his acceptances, would find his
hundred pounds reduced in a moment to fifty or sixty? It was not
the fault of such a farmer or of such a trader that his crowns and
halfcrowns were not of full weight. The government itself was to blame.
The evil which the State had caused the State was bound to repair, and
it would evidently have been wrong to throw the charge of the reparation
on a particular class, merely because that class was so situated that
it could conveniently be pillaged. It would have been as reasonable to
require the timber merchants to bear the whole cost of fitting out the
Channel fleet, or the gunsmiths to bear the whole cost of supplying arms
to the regiments in Flanders, as to restore the currency of the kingdom
at the expense of those individuals in whose hands the clipped sliver
happened at a particular moment to be.

Locke declared that he regretted the loss which, if his advice were
taken, would fall on the holders of the short money. But it appeared to
him that the nation must make a choice between evils. And in truth it
was much easier to lay down the general proposition that the expenses
of restoring the currency ought to be borne by the public than to devise
any mode in which they could without extreme inconvenience and danger be
so borne. Was it to be announced that every person who should within a
term of a year or half a year carry to the mint a clipped crown should
receive in exchange for it a milled crown, and that the difference
between the value of the two pieces should be made good out of the
public purse? That would be to offer a premium for clipping. The shears
would be more busy than ever. The short money would every day become
shorter. The difference which the taxpayers would have to make good
would probably be greater by a million at the end of the term than
at the beginning; and the whole of this million would go to reward
malefactors. If the time allowed for the bringing in of the hammered
coin were much shortened, the danger of further clipping would be
proportionally diminished; but another danger would be incurred. The
silver would flow into the mint so much faster than it could possibly
flow out, that there must during some months be a grievous scarcity of
money.

A singularly bold and ingenious expedient occurred to Somers and was
approved by William. It was that a proclamation should be prepared with
great secresy, and published at once in all parts of the kingdom. This
proclamation was to announce that hammered coins would thenceforth pass
only by weight. But every possessor of such coins was to be invited to
deliver them up within three days, in a sealed packet, to the public
authorities. The coins were to be examined, numbered, weighed, and
returned to the owner with a promissory note entitling him to receive
from the Treasury at a future time the difference between the actual
quantity of silver in his pieces and the quantity of silver which,
according to the standard, those pieces ought to have contained. [641]
Had this plan been adopted an immediate stop would have been put to
the clipping, the melting and the exporting; and the expense of the
restoration of the currency would have been borne, as was right, by the
public. The inconvenience arising from a scarcity of money would have
been of very short duration; for the mutilated pieces would have been
detained only till they could be told and weighed; they would then have
been sent back into circulation, and the recoinage would have taken
place gradually and without any perceptible suspension or disturbance
of trade. But against these great advantages were to be set off hazards,
which Somers was prepared to brave, but from which it is not strange
that politicians of less elevated character should have shrunk. The
course which he recommended to his colleagues was indeed the safest for
the country, but was by no means the safest for themselves. His plan
could not be successful unless the execution were sudden; the execution
could not be sudden if the previous sanction of Parliament were asked
and obtained; and to take a step of such fearful importance without
the previous sanction of Parliament was to run the risk of censure,
impeachment, imprisonment, ruin. The King and the Lord Keeper were
alone in the Council. Even Montague quailed; and it was determined to do
nothing without the authority of the legislature. Montague undertook to
submit to the Commons a scheme, which was not indeed without dangers and
inconveniences, but which was probably the best which he could hope to
carry.

On the twenty-second of November the Houses met. Foley was on that
day again chosen Speaker. On the following day he was presented and
approved. The King opened the session with a speech very skilfully
framed. He congratulated his hearers on the success of the campaign on
the Continent. That success he attributed, in language which must have
gratified their feelings, to the bravery of the English army. He spoke
of the evils which had arisen from the deplorable state of the coin, and
of the necessity of applying a speedy remedy. He intimated very plainly
his opinion that the expense of restoring the currency ought to be borne
by the State; but he declared that he referred the whole matter to the
wisdom of his Great Council. Before he concluded he addressed himself
particularly to the newly elected House of Commons, and warmly expressed
his approbation of the excellent choice which his people had made. The
speech was received with a low but very significant hum of assent both
from above and from below the bar, and was as favourably received by the
public as by the Parliament. [642] In the Commons an address of thanks
was moved by Wharton, faintly opposed by Musgrave, adopted without a
division, and carried up by the whole House to Kensington. At the palace
the loyalty of the crowd of gentlemen showed itself in a way which
would now be thought hardly consistent with senatorial gravity. When
refreshments were handed round in the antechamber, the Speaker filled
his glass, and proposed two toasts, the health of King William, and
confusion to King Lewis; and both were drunk with loud acclamations. Yet
near observers could perceive that, though the representatives of the
nation were as a body zealous for civil liberty and for the Protestant
religion, and though they were prepared to endure every thing rather
than see their country again reduced to vassalage, they were anxious and
dispirited. All were thinking of the state of the coin; all were saying
that something must be done; and all acknowledged that they did not know
what could be done. "I am afraid," said a member who expressed what many
felt, "that the nation can bear neither the disease nor the cure. " [643]

There was indeed a minority by which the difficulties and dangers of
that crisis were seen with malignant delight; and of that minority the
keenest, boldest and most factious leader was Howe, whom poverty had
made more acrimonious than ever.