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. ”

“ Lord Treasurer Danby increased the royal revenue wonderfully. The Stop of the Exchequer, a breach of faith which convulsed the city, scarcely sufficed to shock the national credit. The growth of trade and commerce was completely changing the aspect of England, and wealth increased rapidly. Able and painstaking men such as Sir Joseph Williamson, Sir William Temple, Henry Coventry, Sir Leoline Jenkins, and in a lesser degree Samuel Pepys and the Earl of Conway, conducted the changeful administration of affairs with industry and circumspection. ”

“ In addition to this they have enormous estates all over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales; they have offices beyond number, with a salary attached to each, and they have allowances for everything under heaven. If the tax-payer breathes it costs him something, for the nobility have revenues based upon everything.
The Royal household is a curiosity. There’s the Lord Steward, who draws two thousand pounds a year; the Lord Treasurer and Comptroller, nine hundred pounds each; Master of the Household, twenty one hundred and fifty-eight pounds ”

“ 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. ”

“ But to see statesmen turn dealers, and men of honor stoop to the chicanery of jobbing; to see men at the offices in the morning, at the P—— house about noon, at the cabinet at night, and at Exchange Alley in the proper intervals, what new phenomena are these? What fatal things may these shining planets (like the late great light) foretell to the state and to the public; for when statesmen turn jobbers, the state may be jobbed.
It may be true that a treasurer or cash-keeper may be trusted with more money than he is worth, and many times it is so ”

“ 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. ”

“ When a Lord Treasurer or a First Lord of the Treasury is not master of his own province, it suffices if the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a man of business, and capable of conducting the revenue, of172 planning supplies, and of executing the mechanic duties of that high post. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What, he asked, would become of the Bank of England, or of every banking house in the kingdom, or of all debtors who were liable to pay upon demand all that they owed? Would not all transactions of commerce be suspended, and the whole country present one scene of confusion, and consternation, and ruin, when the house of commons proclaimed to all who had debts due to them, that if they did not collect them on the instant, they would assuredly be losers to the amount of five per cent.? ”

“ And whether that which increaseth the current credit of a nation may not be said to increase its stock?
233 Whether the credit of the public funds be not a mine of gold to England? And whether any step that should lessen this credit ought not to be dreaded?
234 Whether such credit be not the principal advantage that England hath over France? I may add, over every other country in Europe?
235 Whether by this the public is not become possessed of the wealth of foreigners as well as natives? And whether England be not in some sort the treasury of Christendom? ”

“ In countries where trade is established, industry flourishing, credit extensive, circulation copious and rapid, as in England, banks upon mortgage, however useful they may prove for other purposes, would not answer the demands of the trade of London, and the service of government, so well as the bank of England. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Sect. 1. The treasurer of the Commonwealth is hereby authorized and instructed to issue scrip, or certificates of debt, in the name and in [74] behalf of the Commonwealth, and under his signature and the seal of the Commonwealth, for the sum of two millions of dollars, which may be expressed in the currency of Great Britain, and may be payable to the bearer thereof in London, and bearing an interest of five per cent. per annum, payable semi-annually in London, on the first days of April and October ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 first foreign loan was negotiated in ’Change Alley in 1706. The victories of the Duke of Marlborough had raised the pride of the English people; and even ’Change Alley possessed a somewhat similar feeling. When, therefore, his Grace proposed a loan of £500,000 to the Emperor, for eight years, at 8 per cent., on the security of the Silesian revenue, it was received with acclamation, and was filled in a few days by the first commercial names of England. ”

“ And since a Plentiful Currency will be so great a Cause of advancing this Province in Trade and Riches, and increasing the Number of its People; which, tho' it will not sensibly lessen the Inhabitants of Great Britain, will occasion a much greater Vent and Demand for their Commodities here; and allowing that the Crown is the more powerful for its Subjects increasing in Wealth and Number, I cannot think it the Interest of England to oppose us in making as great a Sum of Paper Money here, as we, who are the best Judges of our own Necessities, find convenient. ”

“ In Great Britain, the annual land and malt taxes are regularly anticipated every year, by virtue of a borrowing clause constantly inserted into the acts which impose them. The bank of England generally advances at an interest, which, since the Revolution, has varied from eight to three per cent., the sums of which those taxes are granted, and receives payment as their produce gradually comes in. ”

“ Whether it would not very much increase Trading, and be highly advantageous to the King’s Majesty, to have money plentiful in the Land, and greatly benefit the Common-Weale, if money in England was in some measure made sutable or equal, to the weight and fineness of money in other Lands, and whether this would not be a great means of bringing in money from other Lands, and then keep it in the Kingdome being brought in ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A national bank, when rightly constituted, may however be safely indulged in more extensive methods of circulating their paper than upon land security. The bank of England is allowed by charter to issue notes for discounting bills of exchange, it may trade in gold and silver, may advance money to government upon the security of taxes imposed and levied within the year. ”

“ From the twelfth century wool had been the one great export of England, and the one great source of wealth for nobles, churchmen, farmers, even kings. So important was its sale that statesmen very early saw the necessity of securing for the national Exchequer a share in the profits of the main national trade; and in aid of the royal treasury they devised in the first half of the thirteenth century a system which was quite peculiar to England, the organization of the Staple. ”

“ The more the people traded abroad, the greater were the proceeds of the customs; the more they consumed, the greater the proceeds of the excise; now the chief items of the royal revenue. All the sources of national wealth originated in the Long Parliament and the Commonwealth, for the transfers of the customs and excise were first made then, and only resumed after the Restoration. ”

“ 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. It was in truth a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. ”

“ In 1402, we find the parliament enacting, in the spirit of former statutes, that all merchants, whether strangers or denizens, importing commodities from abroad, and selling them in the country for English money, "shall bestow the same money upon other merchandise of England, for to carry the same out of the realm of England, without carrying any gold or silver in coin, plate, or mass, out of the said realm, upon pain of forfeiture of the same, saving always their reasonable costs." ”

“ Throughout a great part of the nineteenth century the influence of the commercial classes was strong, the government was conducted on strict business principles, and the Treasury as the representative of those principles was the keystone of the administrative arch, or to change the metaphor, the axle on which the machinery of the state revolved. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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.” ”