Here and There in London

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Is in the Strand—or in Westminster—and the contrast between its silence and stillness and the bustle of the streets is something wonderful. You feel as you enter as if you were in a charmed land. With Tennyson’s lotus-eaters you exclaim, “There is no joy but calm. Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?” Charles Lamb’s description of the South Sea House might have been penned for a Government Office. The place seems to belong not to the living present. The windows, double glazed, keep out the roar of the outside world. The chairs and tables, of massive mahogany, seem as if of the time of the ancients. The Turkey carpet has a smack of the primitive political Eden, ere man sinned, and Lord John Russell introduced his Reform Bill. This may be a railroad age, but it is not in a Government Office that that truth is recognised. The young men are generally reading the papers, or eating

lunch; the seniors are doing the same, but in a more dignified manner. In an office where there are several, to find a couple at real hard work from ten till four is, I fear, a rarity.

According to Mr. Knight, when Henry VIII. had stripped Wolsey of Whitehall, and other possessions, he constructed there, for the amusement of his leisure, a tennis-court, a bowling-green, and a cock-pit. The tennis-court and the bowling-green have left no traces. The cockpit went through a variety of transmutations, till it settled down into a treasury. In the reign of Anne, the lord high treasurer Godolphin sat three or four times a week at the cock-pit, “to determine and settle matters relating to the public treasure and revenues.” This was the old building fronting the banqueting house, which Mr. Barry has recently metamorphosed into a magnificent wing of his uniform edifice. The old office of Godolphin, however, is but a small part of the modern treasury. The offices of the more important functionaries are in the large building behind, which fronts the esplanade in St. James’s Park. Several offices were destroyed in 1733, in order to erect the present building facing the parade, the expense of which was estimated

at £9,000. The façade consists of a double basement of the Doric order, and a projection in the centre, on which are four Ionic pillars supporting an entablature and pediment.

Where the treasury of the kings of England had its abiding place—or, more properly, where its eidolon or Platonic idea lodged, before it took up its abode in the cock-pit—were hard to say. The exchequer, which in the reign of Edward I. was literally the king’s strong box, was, in his time, lodged in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. Sir Francis Palgrave says, that the earliest place of deposit for the royal treasures which can be traced is “that very ancient apartment, described as the ‘Treasure in the cloisters of the Abbey in Westminster, next the Chapter-house,’ and in which the pix is still contained. This building is a vaulted chamber, supported by a single pillar; and it must remain with the architectural antiquary to decide why a structure in the early Romanesque style, ranging with the massy semicircular arch in the south transept, acknowledged to be a portion of the structure raised by the Confessor, may not also have been erected in the reign of the last legitimate Anglo-Saxon king. In this treasury the regalia and

crown jewels were deposited, as well as the records. The ancient double oak doors, strongly grated and barred with iron, and locked with three keys, yet remain.”

The theory of the British treasury was much the same during the nomad period of its existence that it has continued to be in its settled and citizen-like life. There was from the beginning a treasurer, whose office it was to devise schemes for raising money, to manage the royal property to the best advantage, and to strike out the most economical and efficient modes of expenditure. He had even then the control of all the officers employed in collecting the customs and royal revenues, the disposal of offices in the customs throughout the kingdom, the nomination of escheators in the counties, and the leasing of crown lands. Then, as a check upon the malversion of this officer, there was the exchequer, the great conservator of the revenues of the nation. “The exchequer,” said Mr. Ellis, clerk of the pells, when examined before the finance commissioners, “is at least coeval with the Norman Conquest, and has been from its earliest institution looked to as a check upon the lord high treasurer, and a protection for the king, as

well as for the subject, in the custody, payment, and issue of the public money.”

This is still the broad outline of the treasury—of the finance department of the State of Great Britain. The enormous magnitude of the empire has caused the subordinate departments of customs, the mint, &c., to expand until they have attained an organisation, an individual importance, a history of their own. The different modes of transacting money-business, rendered necessary by its greater amount and more complicated nature, have altered the routine both of the treasury and the exchequer; the changed relations of king and parliament have subjected the treasury and exchequer to new control and superintendence. Still their mutual relations, and the part they play in the economy of the empire, remain essentially the same as in older times.

The lords commissioners of the treasury (for the office of lord high treasurer has for many years been put in commission) have their office at Whitehall, in the building whose history we have briefly traced. The exchequer, or more properly “the receipt of exchequer,” has its office at Whitehall Yard. But we must not descend to particulars. The only place in the wide world