the following day, August 31, to encourage the bringing in of money by making the Spanish real pass current at 4s. 8d., its true value in English coin. "The merchants will bring them in at this profit, though they can gain more for them in Holland, and they press for an immediate reply, as the Spanish fleet is coming in, and the money will be brought hither if the merchant can make a reasonable profit."
In September the clothworkers and dyers of London complained in a petition of their want of employment, and that many thousands of them were in the greatest distress. So great was the want in the country districts that a proclamation was issued ordering all persons of quality in London and Westminster to go to the country, and reside on their estates, for the relief of the poor in the dearth. In January 1623 fears of disturbance in Essex were rife, "because of poor clothworkers, the masters being unable to employ the men, and many who were thought the wealthiest were likely to become bankrupt." On the 7th of February the officers of the Mint reported to the Council that they found the value of the Spanish real of eight to be equal to 4s. 6 1⁄2d., as compared with the new shilling coin; and on the 4th of March following a proclamation was issued to make these Spanish reals current at 4s. 6d., "in hopes of bringing some of that coin to the Mint."
From this time onwards no further references, save one laconic remark in May 1623, "the poor do not complain much," occur in the State papers to this, one of
the acutest currency crises in our history; and we are left to follow the process of recovery and the dumb, inarticulate agony of the widespread ruin in sympathy and imagination merely. The details here given are taken entirely from the State papers, stolid and ungarnished, but the tale they tell is momentous and dire in its importance.
When consulted by the Privy Council, the various committees and delegates of the merchants attributed the crisis to the deceits practised in the manufacture of cloth, to the embargo on its sale, and other such causes, as well as to the scarcity of money, and the loss in exchange. The first suggestion is hardly worth a moment's consideration. Every testimony points to the fact that the crisis was as purely a monetary or currency crisis, as later crises have been distinguishedly credit crises. Between 1613 and 1621 hardly any silver monies were coined in the English Mint; for example, between 1617 and 1620 the total silver coinage was only £1070, whereas in the four succeeding years the silver coinage at the Tower Mint amounted to £205,500.
ENGLAND: JAMES I.
"From the year 1621," says one of the informers of 1638, to whose petition reference will be shortly made, "many goldsmiths and cashiers of London culled the weighty shillings and sixpences to make into plate, silver wire, and to other manufactures; for most of that time, we having wars with Spain, little or no silver came from thence; so likewise hath little or no silver from France in that time, and no
silver could be brought out of Holland by reason it went so high by the placard. For sterling silver passed in Holland for 4d. per ounce higher than it was made in our Mint, sterling being in Holland at 5s. 4d. per ounce, so that no silver could be imported from Holland to supply our Mint, which the goldsmiths and others perceiving presently fell a-culling the silver monies current, and the money being coined in the Mint at 5s. 2d., the goldsmiths, finers, and wire-drawers did raise it up to 5s. 3d. per ounce, and melted down into the weight of shillings and sixpences, and left none to pass betwixt man and man but light monies and clipped, and did exceed the rate of the Mint by giving for sterling 5s. 3d. per ounce, and 5s. 3 1⁄2d., and sometimes more; by which means there was no silver brought into the Mint for ten years to speak of but the silver which came from Wales. This will appear by the Mint books."
The testimony only confirms the previous inference. The whole reign of James I. was a period of inefficient attempts to rate the English coinage to the incessant rise in the continental coinages, of consequent drain of specie to the Netherlands, and of practical closing of the Mints at home. The cause, opportunity, channel, or machinery of the drain was the incessantly shifting, badly tariffed, imperfectly understood bimetallic system of the times; and the crisis of 1622 was only the most patent expression of its malignant action. It is doubtful whether the political effect of that crisis has been properly estimated by the consti
tutional student of the popular revolution under the Stuarts. Its commercial, currency, and economic and theoretic influence has certainly, and much more, been hitherto overlooked.