Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 4.djvu/91

] Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey, with the immense merits of his scheme. They now submitted these merits, and the particularly attractive one to a young politician of raising himself by a happy mode of serving the government, and acquiring immediate distinction for practical sagacity. Montague was a young man of high family, but a younger brother's younger son—poor, clever, accomplished, and intensely ambitious. At Cambridge he had distinguished himself as a wit and a versifier; but he was now in the commons, and had made a rapid reputation as an orator and statesman by his management of the bill for regulating the trials for high treason. This man—vain, ostentatious, not too nice in his means of climbing, but with talents equal to the most daring enterprise, and who afterwards became better known as the earl of Halifax—at once saw the substantial character of Paterson's scheme, and took it up. Whilst he worked the affair in Parliament, Godfrey was to prepare the city for it.

Montague submitted the scheme to the committee of ways and means, and as they were at their wits' end to raise the required million, they caught at it eagerly. The proposed plan was to grant a charter to a company of capitalists, under the name of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. This company was to have authority to issue promissory notes, discount bills of exchange, and to deal in bullion and foreign securities. Their first act was to be to lend the government twelve hundred thousand pounds, at eight per cent., and to receive, as means of repayment, the proceeds of a new duty on tonnage, whence the bank at first received the name of the Tonnage Bank. The bill for establishing this bank was introduced ostensibly to parliament as a bill for imposing this new duty on tonnage; the charter of the proposed bank being granted in consideration of its making an immediate advance on the tonnage duty. In the commons it underwent many sallies of wit and sarcasm, as one of the thousand speculations of the time; but in the city, where its real character was at once perceived by the Lombard Street money-dealers, it was instantly assailed by a perfect storm of execration. It was declared to be a scheme for enabling the government to raise money at any moment and to any extent, independent of parliament, and thus to accomplish all that the Charleses and Jameses had ever aimed at. To silence this suspicion, Montague introduced a clause making it illegal, and amounting to forfeiture of its charter, for the bank to lend any money to government without the consent of the parliament. This, however, did not lay the tempest. It was now denounced as a republican institution borrowed from Holland and Genoa, and meant to undermine the monarchy;—that it was a great fact that banks and kings had never existed together.

Notwithstanding all opposition, however, the bill passed the commons; and though it met with a fresh and determined opposition in the lords, where it was declared to be a scheme of the usurers to enrich themselves at the expense of the aristocracy, on Caermarthen coolly asking them, if they threw out this bill, how they meant to pay the channel fleet, they passed it; and such was its success in the city, that in less than ten days the whole sum acquired by government was paid in. Such was the origin of that wonderful institution, the Bank of England, which has since then helped the country through crises such as no other country and prior age of the world ever saw; at the same time that, by its example, it has made banking as universal in the country as any other business, and has grown to such gigantic magnitude and power, that as Francis, in his "History of the Bank of England," observes, it began with only fifty-four persons employed in it, and has now nearly one thousand. It paid at first in salaries only four thousand three hundred pounds, and pays now upwards of two hundred and ten thousand pounds. Its capital, originally one million two hundred thousand pounds, has grown to twenty million pounds, and its circulation of notes about that on an average. Since the gold discoveries in Australia, the bullion in its cellars has at times exceeded twenty-one million pounds.

Immediately that the Bank of England bill had received the royal assent, William prorogued the parliament, and rewarded Montague for his introduction of the scheme of the bank, by making him chancellor of the exchequer. Shrewsbury was now induced to accept the seals, William having shown him that he was aware of his being tampered with by the agents of James, and demanded his acceptance of them as a pledge of his fidelity. To secure him effectually—for William knew well that nothing but interest would secure whigs—he conferred on him the vacant garter and a dukedom. Seymour was dismissed, and his place as a lord of the treasury was given to John Smith, a zealous whig, so that excepting Caermarthen, lord president, and Godolphin, first lord of the treasury, the cabinet was purely whig. Before leaving England, William also distributed promotions freely amongst his friends. Lord Charles Butler, brother to the duke of Ormond, was created lord Butler of England, and earl of Arran in Ireland; besides Shrewsbury being made a duke, the earl of Mulgrave, for his exertions in parliament in support of the king's views, was created marquis of Normandy, with a pension of three thousand a year; Henry Herbert was made baron Herbert of Cherbury; the earls of Bedford, Devon, and Clare were made dukes; old Caermarthen, though a tory, was created duke of Leeds; viscount Sidney, earl of Romney; viscount Newport, earl of Bedford.

William had closed the session of parliament on the 25th of April, and in a few days he was on board and sailing for Rotterdam. Before going, however, he had ventured to refuse offers of peace from Louis. That ambitious monarch, by his enormous efforts to vanquish the allies, had greatly exhausted his kingdom. Scarcely ever had France, in the worst times of her history, been reduced so low, and a succession of bad seasons and consequent famine had completed the misery of his people. He therefore employed the king of Denmark to make advances for a peace. He offered to surrender all pretensions to the Netherlands, and to agree to the duke of Bavaria succeeding to Flanders on the death of the king of Spain; but he made no offer of acknowledging William and Mary as rightful sovereigns of England. Many thought that we ought, on such conditions, to have made peace, and thus save our money and men annually consumed in Flanders. But the majority of both parliament and the English people knew Louis too well to be assured that the moment that he had recruited his finances