Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/118

104 sent a detachment of horse from Brussels and the neighbouring garrisons to amuse the French in the vicinity of Charleroi, and this ruse succeeding, they suddenly marched, with a powerful force, well supplied with cannon, mortars, and ammunition, upon Givet. They commenced a furious cannonade upon the place, and in a few hours destroyed the whole of the stores and ammunition collected there. This was a truly brilliant and effective exploit, conceived and executed more in the spirit of Louis himself than of the allies, and utterly crippling him in that quarter for that campaign.

On the 1st of May Signors Soranzo and Venier arrived from Venice to acknowledge William as rightful king of England, and had gracious audience of him. Under these flattering circumstances, William embarked on the 7th at Margate, and landed at Orange-Polder in the evening. But the affair of Givet remained the only important affair in the campaign of 1696. William, indeed, put himself at the head of his army, which lay near Ghent, and Villeroi and Boufflers were already in the field, but neither army had the means of proceeding to active operations. The destruction of the magazines of Givet had swept away the provisions and ammunition of the French army. Three or four millions of rations for the men, and all the provender of the horses, had perished, and France was in no condition to replace them. She was exhausted, and her people famishing. William was equally helpless, but from a different cause. England was never more flourishing, and parliament had voted him most ample supplies; but the order to call in the old money and issue new had completely paralysed the national currency. True, there had been several millions of silver poured into the Treasury to be taken as taxes, or to be exchanged for new milled money; but the new money, notwithstanding all the exertions at the different mints in London, Bristol, York, Exeter, and Norwich, did not produce the new money in anything like the necessary speed to meet the demands of William in payment of his army, and of the English public in discharging its daily liabilities. In Flanders, therefore, both William and the French were compelled to lie still.

At home the confusion and distress were indescribable, and lasted all the year. In the spring and till autumn it was a complete national agony. The last day for the payment of the clipped coin into the Treasury was the 4th of May. There was a violent rush as that day approached to the exchequer to pay in the old coin and get new. But there was very little new ready, and all old coin that was not clipped was compelled to be allowed to remain out some time longer. Notwithstanding this, the deficiency of circulating medium was so great that even men of large estate had to give promissory notes for paying old debts, and take credit for procuring the necessaries of life. The notes of the new Bank of England and of the Lombard Street money-changers gave also considerable relief; but the whole amount of notes and coin did not suffice to carry on the business of the nation. Numbers of work-people of all kinds were turned off because their employers had not money to pay them with. The shopkeepers could not afford to give credit to every one, and, as their trade stagnated in consequence, they were compelled to sacrifice their commodities to raise the necessary sums to satisfy their own creditors. There was a heavy demand on the poor rates, and the magistrates had orders to have sufficient force in readiness to keep down rioting. This distress was aggravated by those who had new milled money, hoarding it up lest they should get no more of it, or in expectation that its scarcity would raise its value enormously, and that they could pay their debts to a great advantage, or purchase what they wanted at still greater advantage.

The Jacobites were delighted with this state of things, and did all they could to inflame the people against the government, which they said had thus needlessly plunged the nation in such extreme suffering. There were numbers of exciting tracts issued for this purpose, and especially by a depraved priest named Grascombe, who urged the people to kill the members of parliament who had advocated the calling in of the silver coin. To make the calamity perfect, the land-bank had proved as complete a bubble as Montague and other men of discernment had declared it would. The landed gentry wanted to borrow from it, not to invest in it; its shares remained untaken; and it found, when the government demanded the two million six hundred thousand pounds which it had pledged itself to advance, that its coffers were empty; and it ceased to exist, or rather to pretend to have any life in it.

The bursting of the land-bank bubble was severely trying to the new Bank of England. The failure of the one alarmed the public as to the stability of the other, and the Jacobites and the Lombard Street rival money-lenders lent their cordial aid to increase the panic. The Lombard Street bankers made a vigorous run upon the bank. They collected all its paper that they could lay hands on, and demanded instant payment in hard cash. Immediately after the 4th of May, when the government had taken in the bulk of the money and had issued out very little, they made a dead set against the bank. One goldsmith alone presented thirty thousand pounds in notes. The bank resolved to refuse the payment of the notes thus obviously presented in order to ruin it, and then the Lombard Street bankers exultingly announced everywhere that the boasted new institution was insolvent. But the bank, leaving the Lombard Street goldsmiths to seek a remedy at law, continued to give cash for all notes presented by the fair creditors, and the public continued to support them in this system, and condemned the selfish money-dealers. Montague also contrived to relieve the tightness to a considerable extent by availing himself of a clause in the act of the land-bank, empowering government to issue a new species of promissory notes, bearing interest on security of the annual taxes. These bills, called now and henceforward "exchequer bills," were issued from a hundred pounds to five pounds, and were everywhere received with avidity. They also urged on the mints in the production of the new coinage, and to facilitate this they made Sir Isaac Newton master of the mint, who exerted himself in his important office with extraordinary zeal and patriotism.

In August, William sent Portland over from Flanders to bring him money for the subsistence of his troops by some means. The failure of the land-bank made his demand appear hopeless; but the government applied to the Bank of England, and, notwithstanding its own embarrassments,