Lord Treasurer of England

“ To Godolphin, more than to any other one man, is due the preponderance of the Treasury control in public affairs. It was his administration, during the absence of Marlborough on the Continent, which created for the office of Lord Treasurer its paramount importance, and paved the way for Sir Robert Walpole's government of England under the title of First Lord of the Treasury. ”

“ The departments of state are very different from one another, both in historical origin and in legal organisation; and they have gone through transformations of all kinds, until the nomenclature has in some cases almost ceased to bear any relation to the facts. The title of an officer often gives no clear idea of his functions. The most striking case is that of the Treasury, whose regular chief, from the time of Henry VIII. to the death of Anne, was the Lord High Treasurer. Since 1714 the office has always been in commission ”

“ At this same session of Parliament, James, through the Lord Treasurer, offered to accept a composition for the incidents of feudal tenure, including the right of purveyance. By this so-called Great Contract, Parliament was to provide for an annual payment to the [250] king of £200,000. But the idea, which at first was distasteful to the commons, shortly became equally out of favor with the king. The amount of money required seemed excessive, and the commons feared that it might make the king independent of them. ”

“ Two thousand a year was hardly to be made in the Court of King's Bench, except by the crown lawyers. 59 It is evident, therefore, that an official man would have been well paid if he had received a fourth or fifth part of what would now be an adequate stipend. In fact, however, the stipends of the higher class of official men were as large as at present, and not seldom larger. The Lord Treasurer, for example, had eight thousand a year, and, when the Treasury was in commission, the junior Lords had sixteen hundred a year each. ”

“ There are also ladies that are subscribers; eminent foreigners are likewise admitted to be honorary members. At first they had a Treasurer, but now their money is placed in the Bank of England, in the names of the President and Vice-presidents, three whereof are impowered to draw any sum the Society shall order to be paid. ”

“ Let us begin with the word treasury. In the fourteenth century treasury meant simply a storehouse, or at its narrowest a storehouse of valuables. To us the “treasury” is the government department of finance, but under Edward I the state office of finance was the Exchequer, which, as we saw, was located normally at Westminster, but since 1298 at York. When at Westminster the Exchequer had a “treasury” or storehouse there also, yet in its absence it is not likely that it kept either valuables or money at Westminster. ”

“ The king is the authority for the taxes
The authority by which the impositions were laid was apparently solely that of the king. Speaking of the letter which Richard addressed to his mother and the justiciars, urging upon them the necessity for raising money for the ransom, the Chronicler says, “Upon the authority of this letter the king’s mother and the justiciars of England determined that all the clergy as well as the laity ought to give ... for the ransom of our lord the king.” ”

“ Sunt et hiis liberationes constitutæ dum scaccarium est, hoc est a die qua convocantur usque ad diem qua generalis secessio.... Vigil unum denarium. Ad lumen cujusque noctis circa thesaurum, obolum (i. 3) .
There is absolutely no escaping from these words: a watchman is only provided for the treasure “while the Exchequer is in session”; its treasury is temporary, not permanent. The whole passage, as it seems to me, is absolutely destructive of Mr. Hall’s hypothesis of “the existence of a permanent financial staff under the Treasurer and chamberlains of the Exchequer at Westminster.” ”

“ As a member of the senate, he assumed the purity of the patriot, complained of the absence of economy, and declared how much cheaper the public business might be accomplished. He teased the minister; he perplexed the Parliament; he puzzled the government; until, by giving him a job, the patriot was turned into a contractor, and from that hour he marked the public money as his own. If the First Lord of the Treasury were indolent, the contractor availed himself of his sloth; if ignorant, he taught him, and made the country pay for the lesson. ”

“ At present the state of their treasury sinks every day more and more in cash, and swells more and more in fictitious representation. When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence, but of want, the creature not of credit, but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. ”

“ The loss of Great Britain by discounts in raising money or by the use of depreciated paper was greater than that incurred by the United States. A leading English authority says that of the vast burden up to 1816, the "artificial enhancements due to discounts in raising money were so great that for every £100 received into the treasury a national debt of £173 was created."
No other wars than those of England and France can be compared with ours in point of expenditure. ”

“ The steadily growing importance of Westminster and the concurrent decadence of Winchester led, of course, eventually, to the shifting of the central Treasury, but at the time of the ‘Dialogus,’ in the days of Henry II., it is clear that the Exchequer was not looked on as the seat of a permanent Treasury. For the storage of treasure is always implied by the payment for the light of the night watchman; and as to the watchman and his light, the evidence of the ‘Dialogue’ is clear ”

“ Soon however the wars which sprang from the French Revolution, and which far exceeded in cost any that the world had ever seen, tasked the powers of public credit to the utmost. When the world was again at rest the funded debt of England amounted to eight hundred millions. If the most enlightened man had been told, in 1792, that, in 1815, the interest on eight hundred millions would be duly paid to the day at the Bank, he would have been as hard of belief as if he had been told that the government would be in possession of the lamp of Aladdin or of the purse of Fortunatus. ”

“ Erected upon the vital springs of national prosperity, wielding the mysterious power of the purse, the final arbiter in the disputes of every other office, a good fairy or a perverse devil, as ‘My Lords’ may choose, to every imaginative Secretary of State, the Treasury occupies in the polity of the United Kingdom a central and superior position. No school of thought is so strong or so enduring as that founded on the great traditions of Gladstonian and Peelite finance. Reckless Ministers are protected against themselves, violent Ministers are tamed, timid Ministers are supported and nursed. ”

“ If the First Lord of the Treasury really had scruples about betraying his trust, those scruples were soon so effectually removed that he very complacently continued, during six years, to eat the bread of one master, while secretly sending professions of attachment and promises of service to another. ”

“ William had already tried his power in the creation of a national debt: jobbing in the English funds and East India Stock succeeded; and the Royal Exchange became—what the Stock Exchange has been since 1700—the rendezvous of those who, having money, hoped to increase it, and of that yet more numerous and pretending class, who, having none themselves, try to gain it from those who have.
The charter granted by William to the Corporation of the Bank of England is the first instance of a debt bequeathed to posterity. Annuities had hitherto been the mode of raising supplies ”

“ The office of Grand Treasurer was first established in 1724, in consequence of a report of the Committee of Charity of the Grand Lodge of England. But no one was found to hold the trust until the 24th of June, 1727, when, at the request of the Grand Master, the appointment was accepted by Nathaniel Blackerby, Deputy Grand Master. The duties of the office do not at all differ from those of a corresponding one in every other society ”

“ The earl of Middlesex had been raised, by Buckingham’s interest, from the rank of a London merchant, to be treasurer of England; and, by his activity and address, seemed not unworthy of that preferment. But, as he incurred the displeasure of his patron, by scrupling or refusing some demands of money during the prince’s residence in Spain, that favorite vowed revenge, and employed all his credit among the commons to procure an impeachment of the treasurer. ”

“ The expenses of his government were to be charged upon the English treasury for the first two years, by the end of which he was expected to have completed the conquest of the island, and to be able to pay over an annual sum of five thousand marks to the royal treasurer. ”

“ Especially in money matters a man might fairly reason—'If the Government is right in trusting the Bank of England with the great balance of the nation, I cannot be wrong in trusting it with my little balance.' Second, The Bank of England had, till lately, the monopoly of limited liability in England. The common law of England knows nothing of any such principle. It is only possible by Royal Charter or Statute Law. ”

“ It is absolutely idle for the Financial Reform Association to think of effectually lowering the taxation of the country while twenty-eight millions are paid for interest; and it is to be feared that great evil will accompany whatever good they may achieve. That there are many offices which might be abolished; that it is a rule in England that the least worked should be best paid; that an extravagant system of barbaric grandeur exists; that the army and the navy, the pulpit and the bar, are conducted unwisely; and that great men are paid great salaries for doing nothing,—are indisputable ”

“ The surplus of the revenue amounted to over £4,000,000 sterling, owing largely to the income tax, which now the ministers proposed to reduce. The charter of the Bank of England was renewed in a form which modified the whole banking system in England. The banking business of the Bank was placed on the same footing with other institutions as to its power of issuing notes, which beyond a certain amount should depend on the amount of bullion in the Bank. ”

“ Are the gentlemen less able? Or is it that they have not the same zeal for King George as that honest citizen had for the queen? Or do they doubt the king being as sensible of the service? Or what is the matter that the public credit had rather met with injurious juggling and jobbing upon it, than real support, either from Exchange Alley, Birchin Lane, or some other places less noted? ”

“ Here is authority to the Secretary to transfer the public moneys from place to place, limited only by the bounds of the United States and its territories; and this clause of three lines of law puts to flight all the nonsense about the United States Bank being the treasury, and the Treasurer being the keeper of the public moneys, with which some politicians and newspaper writers have been worrying their brains for the last three months. ”

“ Three millions was indeed a considerable charge upon a revenue amounting to about £8,523,540. This was derived from four principal sources;—more than £3,800,000 from Excise and Malt Tax, £1,900,000 and over from the customs; £1,637,608 from the Land Tax, and the rest from the stamp duties and other small sources. The late war had cost the nation upwards of £30,000,000, and many financiers, not foreseeing the enormous development of the national resources which the next half century would produce, took a gloomy view of the financial position of England. ”

“ When issued in the discount of bills, they stand upon the principles of mercantile credit, and depend upon the goodness of the bills discounted. When issued upon the faith of taxes to be paid within the year, they stand upon the security of that payment, which is of a very complex nature, as any one may perceive. As long as the inhabitants of England consume exciseable goods, the excise will be paid: as long as trade goes on, customs will be paid: and as long as government subsists, the collateral security of the state will serve to make up all deficiencies in the amount of taxes. ”

“ All money paid into the treasury of the United States is subject to the draft of the treasurer; and, for the purpose of payment on the public account, the treasurer is authorized to draw on any of the depositaries as he may think most conducive to the public interest and the convenience of the public creditors. ”

“ Many postmasters in the West of England now petitioned the Treasury to the effect that they had been nearly ruined in the times of His Majesty King William, "through much spoiling of their horses by officers riding-post in the late blessed Revolution." Others grumble at the lowness of their salaries. ”

“ It might be said to be my first entrance into the world; and, excepting two or three of my fellow-countrywomen, there were no young unmarried women at these parties, as it was not the custom in France. We supped once with the treasurer of the province. His house was not large, but well furnished, and the supper, I remember, was thought to be remarkably fine, with respect both to the eye and the palate. The place of treasurer gave nobility, and of course the treasurers were rich, expensive, and not in the list of “good company,” though visited by everybody at these seasons. ”