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Coinage Demand Meant Using Machinery
 | By Michael D. Greaney, World Coin News
May 21, 2008 |
"The Lord Viscount Wentworth came to Ireland to governe the kingdom. Manie men feare."
Those two brief sentences from the July 23, 1633, entry in the diary of Sir Edward Denny, a Protestant planter in the southwest of Ireland, is the most succinct statement regarding how the people of Ireland - whatever their ethnicity or religion - viewed the appointment of Charles I Stuart's chief advisor as Lord Deputy of Ireland. It was, in a sense, the culmination of a career that put the acquisition of money and power (but mostly money) above all things. How Wentworth went from being one of the leaders of the opposition to the king's chief advisor is as convoluted as everything else about the Stuarts.
Wentworth began his rather checkered career in the reign of James I, when he entered parliament in 1614 as the member for Yorkshire in the "Addled Parliament" (so-called because of its ineffectiveness). He became widely known as an opponent of James, even to the extent of confronting Buckingham. In 1621 he gave an indication of his evolving theory of politics by personally supporting the war with Spain while publicly opposing it because he allegedly took umbrage at the king's denial of the rights and privileges of parliament.
In 1625 in Charles' first parliament, Wentworth again opposed the war with Spain, attempting the old parliamentary trick of supporting a motion to adjourn before any business could be carried out. A motion to adjourn is always in order, so moving to adjourn is a very effective, if drastic way to destroy your opponent by delaying everything.
Although anti-Catholic, Wentworth also opposed the war subsidies being proposed to support Buckingham in his campaign to relieve the Huguenots. This managed to give Buckingham, the king's chief advisor and favorite, a double black eye for trying to spend money to support a project of the king ... and failing to support the Protestant cause against the Catholics. As a result, when Charles dissolved parliament in November of 1625, Wentworth was one of the representatives appointed to the post of sheriff in order to prevent him from taking a seat when parliament met in 1626. This seems to have inspired Wentworth to make the best of a bad situation, and he evidently put on a good enough face to request to be appointed President of the Council of the North (a council of justices of the peace in Yorkshire) on Buckingham's recommendation.
Not only did Charles not appoint Wentworth president of the council, however, when the 1626 parliament was dissolved, the king dismissed Wentworth from the post of Justice of the Peace and terminated him as Custos Rotulorum of Yorkshire. This latter was an office he had filled since 1615, apparently because he refused to support the court in giving the king money without a grant from parliament. This was a rather significant slap in the face. The Custos Rotulorum - "Keeper of the Rolls" - was at this time and remains the highest civil office in an English county, charged with maintaining county records. It is probably not a coincidence that when Charles attempted to obtain a forced loan in 1627, Wentworth refused to go along with it, and was one of the men imprisoned to bring them to a more reasonable frame of mind.
In 1628 Wentworth was one of the more vociferous supporters of the Petition of Right, which reaffirmed (or tried to) some of the chief provisions of Magna Charta (except that bit in the first paragraph about the Church being immune from civil control). In what modern English historians regard as an unintelligible or ambiguous move, once Charles accepted the Petition, Wentworth became his strongest supporter ... even though Charles immediately began to ignore or subvert every one of its provisions. Astonishingly (to the modern English historian), this was done with the enthusiastic support of Wentworth himself, who declared, "The authority of a king is the keystone which closeth up the arch of order and government."1 Thomas Hobbes himself couldn't have said it any better. The Puritan party called Wentworth a traitor.
Irish historians are not confused. It is clear (to them at least) that Wentworth was motivated by a single desire: money. With Charles' support, opportunities for money-getting came fast and furious. After Buckingham was assassinated in 1628, Wentworth was finally appointed Lord President of the Council of the North. His duties were to administer the supreme Law Court of northern England. Soon after, on July 22, 1628, Wentworth was made Baron Wentworth. In this capacity he became one of the two principal advisors to the king during the infamous "Eleven-Year Tyranny" (or "the Personal Rule," depending on which side your sympathies lie) during which Charles refused to call a parliament. The Puritans might actually have had a sound basis for their accusations of treason - to the parliamentary cause, at least.
Not that Baron Wentworth was idle in his capacity as the supreme law of the land in the north of England. He proceeded to rule with such harshness in that traditionally Catholic area that it became a byword, his reputation spreading even to Ireland. In doing so, of course, he managed to raise substantial sums of money for the crown at the same time he feathered his own nest very nicely. This was by the simple expedient of always managing to interpret the law in whatever way paid the most money to the king (and to the Lord President of the Council of the North).
This, then, was the man to whom Charles went for advice when faced with a seemingly impossible situation. Wentworth was equal to the task, as will become immediately apparent.
In our last article we left Charles I Stuart on the horns of a dilemma. He had given his word several times that he would extend limited toleration to Catholics. Because he broke his word on this, he kept finding himself at war with his wife's family. He had assumed a heavy financial and political burden to support Protestants against Catholics on the continent, but because he was thereby perceived as somehow supporting the Catholic position, Parliament refused to grant him sufficient funds. Now the Catholics and moderate Protestants of Ireland were offering him £100,000 to induce him to keep his promises that he had already given several times, but the Puritans (who controlled parliament) were making counter-threats should he accept the money and keep his pledged word.
Charles consulted Thomas, Lord Wentworth as to what he should do. That worthy came up with a brilliant solution: the king should take the money and run, meanwhile lie through his teeth. Actually, what Wentworth advised was that the king should grant the "Graces" as his own personal act. He could then accept the money, but since he would be taking it as a private individual, he would have no power to put his private promise into effect as a public act. He could pretend to be personally in favor of granting toleration to Catholics, but at the same time find it inconsistent with his public duty.
Unfortunately for Charles, this position was contrary to both divine right theory and democracy. By divine right theory, there was no distinction between Charles the man and Charles the king. He could not, by his own theory of government, be privately in favor of and publicly opposed to something. The basis of democratic representative government, of course, was best stated a century or so later by the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke: "Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."2
Nevertheless, Charles signed the schedule of 51 Graces with his own hand, and subsequently received bonds from the Irish agents in London to the tune of £120,000 - £20,000 more than originally promised. This amount was to be paid in three annual installments of £40,000 each. Charles also agreed that a parliament should immediately be called in Ireland so that the Graces could be confirmed.
Unfortunately, at the same time Charles also secretly instructed Lord Falkland to ensure that the writs of election were not prepared properly so that a parliament could not be summoned. Laboring under the belief that Charles would keep his pledged word - whether as king or as the man Charles - a large number of Catholics contributed money for the first installment. The funds were paid to Charles through their agents, and they received in return a guarantee, personally-signed by the king, that an Irish parliament was in the process of being called, which would act immediately to confirm the Graces.
The writs of election were issued, but when returned were - surprise! - found to contain technical errors, rendering them invalid. Parliament could not be called. When the members of the General Assembly (and the people who had paid £40,000 and would soon make the second installment) protested, Charles simply put them off or ignored them.
Despite these financial shenanigans (or perhaps because of them) at least one significant reform was made in the coinage system. This was the reintroduction of milled coinage, a minting program running in tandem with the traditional hammered method of manufacture.
There had been at least one previous attempt to introduce minting machinery, during the reign of Elizabeth I, but protests from the mint workers that machinery would take away their jobs stifled the attempt to bring England up-to-date. Combined with the decline in the wool trade that England experienced in Tudor and Stuart times, the loss of jobs was potentially a disaster. This became evident in the late 18th century when the industrial revolution hit its stride.
Previous advances had benefited everyone who could afford the new technology. A horse collar or stirrups - both of which made phenomenal leaps in production possible - weren't expensive, and could even be made by anyone with a modicum of talent. In England in the late 18th century, however, something different happened. Inventors began having ideas for machinery that cost more than one ordinary person could afford.
One of the first important machines was the steam engine. Another was the power loom. While the horse collar allowed a horse to do the work of two or three human beings, the steam engine could do the work of many horses. That is why James Watt measured the power of his steam engine in terms of "horsepower" instead of "manpower." When a steam engine was attached to a power loom, it could produce more cloth in a day than a hand-weaver could produce in a lifetime.
Similarly, mint machinery could turn out many more coins than anyone doing it by hand-hammering. By this time, however (what with Charles' money troubles and increased commercial activity of the newly-rich merchant class) the question was how on earth to increase production dramatically. The earlier Elizabethan introduction of machinery threatened jobs, while that in the early 1600s created them ... up to a point (the point at which productive capacity exceeded demand).
The power loom brought many benefits. It made clothing much cheaper. It also made books much cheaper. At that time, most paper was made from linen or cotton rags. When cloth was expensive, people wore clothing until it fell apart and was good for nothing. When cloth became inexpensive, ordinary people could afford to have more than one new set of clothes every five or ten years. They could now have two or three new sets of clothes a year, and the old clothing could be made into paper. Books became more widely available, and more people learned to read.
The power loom also brought a big disaster. Previously, people working in their homes had woven all the cloth using looms they built themselves. Each person was the sole owner and the only worker. A weaver might take an apprentice to learn the craft, but very seldom would a weaver hire another weaver. Each weaver usually preferred to work for himself.
Most weavers, however, did not have the money to purchase the new power looms or the steam engines needed to run them. When rich men began buying the new machinery and producing thousands of yards of cloth per day instead of two or three yards per week, people bought the cheap cloth made by machines instead of the expensive cloth made by hand. Hand-weavers no longer had customers for their cloth.
The hand-weavers could have joined together, pooled their money or obtained a loan from a bank, and purchased the new machinery, repaying the loan when the machinery started making profits. There would thus have been many worker-owners of an expensive machine instead of one rich owner who did not operate the machinery himself.
Instead, many hand-weavers joined together, put on masks, and began wrecking the new machinery. To hide their identities so they would not be arrested, they began saying that a man named "Ned Ludd" was the leader. The people who went about wrecking machinery became known as "Luddites." There was, of course, no one named "Ned Ludd."
When steam machinery began to be used in France, workers did the same thing. They threw their wooden shoes into the machinery. Because the French word for wooden shoe is "sabot," wrecking machinery became known as "sabotage," another term we still use today.
Although "Luddite" has come to mean someone who is anti-technology, the original Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology that they didn't own. Had the weavers owned part of the new power looms, they would have received income when they could no longer sell the cloth they made by hand. Because they did not own the new machinery, however, the weavers had no way to make a living unless they went to work in one of the new factories. They made much less money than they had made as owners of their own businesses.
This is the same way that people today lose jobs due to "outsourcing." If all workers owned the companies for which they worked, it wouldn't matter if they were replaced by machines - because one of the most important rights of private property is the right to receive the income generated by what you own. Instead of wrecking the machinery, workers could begin doing jobs that no machine can do, the creative work of civilization. This is what Aristotle called "leisure work," and (while often more important than the work done on a job) sometimes does not generate income, but gives benefits to the whole of the common good.
If workers owned the companies for which they worked and had the full rights of private property, the company would make as much or more money than before, and the workers would receive a share of profits instead of wages. When workers own no part of the companies for which they work, however, they resent the foreign workers who are "stealing" their jobs (and who usually own as little of their companies as U.S. workers own of theirs), the same way the Luddites resented the new machinery (that they didn't own).
Violence got the Luddites nothing other than a bad name in history. Had they organized to become owners instead of to destroy the machinery, we would remember them as benefactors of humanity even greater than the inventors of the machinery. As it is, they provide nothing other than a bad example for people who should know better.
The Stuart introduction of minting machinery didn't eliminate the problem of machinery taking people's jobs. It simply sidestepped the issue. Had the demand for coinage stayed about the same as it had been in Elizabeth's day, there would have been protests. Instead, more workers had to be added ... just not as many as would have been necessary to meet demand had hand-production been continued as the sole method of manufacture. As it was, demand became so great that hand-production had to continue, even expand as the machinery couldn't keep up. Thus, when the French die-sinker Nicholas Briot came to England in 1631 to supervise the new mint machinery, it was viewed as a blessing rather than a curse.
Briot's first coinage came out in 1631, and continued for two years. Denominations were Pennies, Twopences (Halfgroats), Sixpences, Shillings, Half-crowns, and Crowns. (There were also gold coins, but these will be lumped together in a single article for all of Charles' regular gold issues.) The designs are virtually identical to the hammered issues, but the workmanship is finer and the execution far superior.
Compared to the hammered issues, prices are high, demonstrating that milled coinage was still viewed an ancillary to the earlier method of manufacture. Pennies start at about $25 in Very Good, and go up to around $325 in Extremely Fine. Twopences (Halfgroats) start at about $30 in Very Good, and go up to around $325 in Extremely fine, evidently making it easier for a "reign collector" (a collector attempting to secure one coin from each reign) to obtain a large coin at the same price.
Sixpences start at $55 in Very Good to $775 in Extremely Fine. Shillings - twelve pence - start at $90 in Very Good to $1,200 in Extremely Fine. Half-crowns (30 pence or 2 shillings sixpence) start at $150 in Very Good to $2,000 in Extremely Fine. Crowns (reflecting the denomination's popularity) run from $250 in Very Good to $2,800 in Extremely Fine.
Despite the fact that Charles clearly had no intention of fulfilling his promises to institute the fifty-one Graces, the Puritans were still sore wroth. Even worse, the current Lord Deputy, Lord Falkland, was (despite his obvious prejudice against the Catholics) perceived as favoring them. Consequently, when Lord Falkland made a false move in the matter of an alleged conspiracy by Phelim O'Byrne of Wicklow, the Lord Deputy was dismissed from his office. For the next four years the government was in the hands of the two Lords Justices in Dublin - those heading the illegal courts established in the reign of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.
This meant that the government was now under the thumbs of Robert Boyle (earl of Cork), and Adam Loftus, Viscount Ely, the son of the Church of Ireland's Archbishop of Dublin, who had made an incredible amount of money milking Ireland under Queen Elizabeth. Boyle held the post of Lord High Treasurer, while Ely filled that of Lord Chancellor. Between the two of them, they had a stranglehold on the political and economic machinery of the entire island, controlling virtually all the power and patronage of the Kingdom of Ireland. Both men affected to be Puritans, although in light of their personal lives this might not be an entirely supportable claim. Irish historians are virtually unanimous in their conclusion that their bigotry and rapacity was unequalled by any previous administration.
Their list of crimes mounted rapidly. In an event to be repeated many times over the next four years, on December 26, 1629, the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, Bulkley, and the Lord Mayor of the city (at the behest of the Lords Justices) broke into the Carmelite Chapel with a gang of soldiers, dispersed the congregation, desecrated the altar, and arrested the celebrants. The people themselves rescued the priests, and the Archbishop had "to take to his heels and cry out for help" to save himself.3
This same program was carried out wherever the power of the Lords Justices was sufficient to force itself on the local population. A Catholic seminary in Dublin was confiscated and turned over to Trinity College. The Lords Justices also confiscated 15 religious houses, mostly belonging to the Franciscans, on behalf of the crown, which probably saw little or nothing of the loot. The novices were forced overseas to complete their studies.4
Charles issued a rather weak reprimand to the Lords Justices, which slowed down the depredations, although it did not stop them. Finally, in 1633, the king appointed Wentworth Lord Deputy, apparently recommended to Charles on the basis of Wentworth's harshness exhibited in the north of England during his tenure as President of the Council of the North.
ENDNOTES
1Strafford's Letters.
2Speech to the Electors of Bristol, November 3, 1774.
3Mary Frances Cusack, The Illustrated History of Ireland From Early Times, 400 AD - 1800 AD (1868), p. 474.
4Ibid.
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