Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/90

76 But no bill in the session occasioned such a disturbance as one for naturalising foreign protestants. The introducers of this measure said that there were great numbers of foreign protestants who had been expelled France by the bigotry of Louis, or ruined in Germany and Flanders by his devastating arms, and that it would be a politic and at the same time humane measure to allow them to bring their arts and trades to England, where men were wanted to cultivate the waste lands to supply the costs of war; that we had been signally benefited by the introduction of the Flemings and French Huguenots, who had Introduced cloth and silk weaving, and other beneficial handicraft arts. The bill appeared to meet with no opposition till the third reading, when a perfect tempest broke forth; and it was denounced as a scheme for introducing a swarm of Dutchmen, to creep into all sorts of offices and privileges to the rejection of Englishmen. Dutchmen would re-enact the lord-Danes; they would flock over in swarms from the Holland marshes, and go up into every man's house and kneading-trough, as they had already done in the palace. Sir John Knight, formerly mayor of Bristol, was pre-eminently insulting to the Dutch monarch by his virulent harangue, and desired the sergeant-at-arms to open the door of the house, that they might first kick the bill out of the house, and then kick the Dutch out of the kingdom.

This speech was instantly issued by the unlicensed press, and spread by tens of thousands all over the kingdom. The people were roused by it to such a pitch of fury as had not been seen since the revolution. Sir John was declared to be the saviour of the nation; but when the ministers complained of the outrageous and seditious nature of this printed speech, the house likewise resented it in no measured terms, and the Bristol knight, a man of coarse and bullying disposition, denied all knowledge of it in that form, and so was excused, but the speech itself was ordered to be burnt by the hangman, and the bill dropped.

The year 1693 terminated with a transaction which was as disgraceful to the government as many of the arbitrary measures which disgusted the nation with the Stuarts. The people of Ireland complained of the lords justices there, lord Coningsby and Sir Charles Porter, abusing their powers, and oppressing the natives grievously for their own selfish ends. Lord Bellamont, a member of the privy council, exhibited articles of impeachment against them in the house of commons. The house listened at first with undisguised indignation to the details of cruelty and misery which were laid before it; but to the surprise of all, they suddenly came to a resolution that, "considering the state of Ireland at the time, they did not think it fit to ground an impeachment upon them." That this resolution, so opposed to the manifest feeling of the house, was suggested from court, which had now its majority in the house, was immediately confirmed by the dismissal of Lord Bellamont, and the pardon of Coningsby and Porter. This, unfortunately, was the uniform custom of William. Amid all the benefits which he conferred on England, it cannot be denied that he always screened the malversations and oppressions of his officers. This was only too well shown by the impunity of the murderers of Glencoe, by the refusal to listen to the charges of peculation and extortion of Ginckell and Coningsby before in Ireland; and now again, in the same country, of Coningsby and Porter—dismissing, not the criminals, but the exposer of them.

The year 1694 opened with fresh disasters at sea. Sir Francis Wheeler, lately returned from the unsuccessful expedition to the West Indies, was sent to convoy the Mediterranean fleet, and to bring back the Smyrna homebound merchantmen. In the bay of Gibraltar, in February, he was overtaken by a terrible storm, and his vessels, not being able to make their anchors bite, were many of them driven ashore and perished. He himself went down with all his men in the Sussex, and two other ships of the line and three ketches were lost. The rest of the fleet was so shattered that, instead of pursuing the voyage, they put into Cadiz to refit, and at the same time to avoid the French, who were cruising about under Chateau-Renaud and Gabaret.

The last act of this parliamentary session proved the most important of all; it was the establishment of the Bank of England. Banking, now so universal, was but of very recent introduction to England. The Lombard Jews had a bank in Italy as early as 808; Venice had its bank in 1157; Geneva in 1345; Barcelona in 1401. In Genoa, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Rotterdam there had long been banks, but in England men had continued, till within a very short time previous to this period, to hoard and pay out their own money from their own strong boxes. The goldsmiths of Lombard Street had of late become bankers, and people began to pay by orders on them, and travellers to take orders from them on foreign banks. It was now beginning to be strongly agitated to establish joint-stock banks, and there were various speculative heads at work with plans for them. One Hugh Chamberlayne and his coadjutor, John Briscoe, published a scheme of a land-bank, by which gentlemen were to give security for their notes on their land; on the principle that land was as real and substantial property as gold. But the extravagant and unsound views as to the actual value of land which they promulgated ruined their credit. Because an estate was worth twenty thousand pounds at twenty years' purchase, they argued that it was worth that every twenty years, and, therefore, could be immediately convertible at the same rate for any number of years—as if they could put a hundred years' purchase in the first twenty, and raise the hundred years' value, or one hundred thousand pounds, on it at once.

There was, however, a more sober and shrewd projector, William Paterson, a calculating Scotchman, who in 1691 had laid before government a plan for a national bank on sound and feasible principles. His scheme had received little attention, but now, though a million of money was raised by the lottery, another million was needed, and Paterson secured the attention of Charles Montague, a rising statesman, to his scheme. Paterson represented that the government might easily relieve itself of the difficulty of raising this money, and of all future similar difficulties, by establishing a national bank, at the same time that it conferred the most important advantages on the public at large. He had already firmly impressed Michael Godfrey, an eminent London merchant, and the brother of the