dise, except that they might deal in bills of exchange, and in buying and selling of bullion, gold, or silver, and in selling of any goods or merchandise which should be pledged to them for money lent thereon, and might also sell the produce of their own lands. This act received the royal assent on the 25th of April, 1694; the subscription for the 1,200,000l. was completed in ten days, twenty-five per cent., or a fourth of the whole sum, being paid down; and the royal charter of incorporation was executed on the 27th of July following. It gave to the establishment the same constitution which it still retains, under a governor, deputy governor, and twenty-four directors, of whom Paterson was one. The new institution, though loudly clamoured against for some time, principally by interested parties, soon proved its usefulness to the general conviction. "The advantages," says Burnet, " that the king and all concerned in tallies had from the Bank were soon so sensibly felt that all people saw into the secret reasons that made the enemies of the constitution set themselves with so much earnestness against it."[1] Paterson himself ascribes to it no less an effect than the successful termination of the war:—"The erection of this famous Bank," says he, " not only relieved the ministerial managers from their frequent processions into the city for borrowing of money on the best and nearest public securities at an interest of ten or twelve per cent, per annum, but likewise gave life and currency to double or treble the value of its capital in other branches of public credit ; and so, under God, became the principal means of the success of the campaign in the following year, 1695, as particularly in reducing the important fortress of Namur, the first material step towards the peace concluded at Ryswick in the year 1697."
A great operation in which the Bank, almost as soon as it had been set up, was called upon to assist the government and the country was the entire re-coinage of the silver money, which was undertaken in 1696. The
- ↑ Own Time, ii. 125.
