Tea at Trianon: A History of the Bank of England

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 1, 2018

A History of the Bank of England

From The New York Review of Books:

The Bank of England is one of Britain’s distinct contributions to history. It was chartered in 1694 to lend money to King William for war on France, when a company of London merchants received from Parliament the right to take deposits in coin from the public and to issue receipts or “Bank notes.” The bank financed a summer’s fighting in the Low Countries, gave the business district of London, known as the City, a currency for trade, and lowered the rate of interest for private citizens.

In the next century, the Bank of England developed for Crown and Parliament sources of credit that permitted Britain, during 115 years of intermittent warfare, to contain and then defeat France and to amass, in Bengal and Canada, the makings of an overseas empire. Through “discounts,” or unsecured lending to merchants and bankers, the bank provided the City with cash and influenced rates of lending and profit, and thus the course of trade. In the war that followed the French Revolution of 1789, it was forced to stop paying its banknotes in gold and silver; it had issued more notes than it had gold with which to back them. Across the Channel, for want of a public bank of his own, King Louis XVI of France lost his kingdom and his head.

In the nineteenth century the Bank of England became the fulcrum of a worldwide system based on gold and known as “the bill on London.” Over a succession of City crises at approximately ten-year intervals, it took on the character and functions of a modern central bank. By World War I, it was propping up an empire living beyond its means. In conjunction with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the German Reichsbank, the Bank of England’s longest-serving governor, Montagu Norman, sought to develop a club of central banks that would impose on the chaos of international commerce and the caprices of government a pecuniary common law. In reality, the Bank of England had to fight ever-greater runs on sterling until, in 1992, it was routed and sterling was taken out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the forerunner of the euro. (Read more.)