CHAPTER XLI.

THE ENGLISH AT HAVRE.

N the face of enormous difficulties Elizabeth and her

IN

ministers had restored England to its rank in Europe. They had baffled Spain, wrested Scotland from the Guises, and played with accomplished dexterity on the rivalries and jealousies of the Romanist powers. By skill and good fortune they had brought the Catholics at home to an almost desperate submission; and now, with the country armed to the teeth, they were subsidizing a Protestant rebellion in France, and fastening themselves once more upon the French soil.

The expenses of so aggressive and dangerous a policy had been great, yet Elizabeth's talent for economy had saved her from deep involvements; and while courtiers whined over her parsimony, the burden of public debt bequeathed by Mary had received no increase, and was even somewhat diminished. The wounds were still green which twenty years of religious and social confusion had inflicted on the commonwealth; but here too there were visible symptoms of amendment: above all,

VOL. VII.

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the poisonous gangrene of the currency, the shame and scandal of the late reigns, had been completely healed.

No measure in Elizabeth's reign has received more deserved praise than the reformation of the coinage. The applause indeed has at times overpassed her merit; for some historians have represented it as accomplished at the cost of the Crown; whereas the expense, even to the calling in and recoining the base money, was borne to the last penny by the country. Elizabeth and her advisers deserve the credit only of having looked in the face, and of having found the means of dealing with, a complicated and most difficult problem.

When the ministers of Edward the Sixth arrived at last at the conviction that the value of a shilling depended on the amount of pure silver contained in it, and that the base money therefore with which the country had been flooded must be called down to its natural level, the people it was roughly calculated had lost something over a million pounds. An accurate computation however was impossible, for the issues of the Government, large as they were, had been exceeded by those of private coining establishments in England and abroad, where the pure coin left in circulation was melted down and debased.

The evil had been rather increased than diminished by the first efforts at reformation. The current money was called down to an approach to its value in bullion, and it was then left in circulation under the impression that it would no longer be pernicious; but the pure

shillings of Edward's last years could not live beside the bad, and still continued either to leave the country or to be made away with by the coiners. The good resolutions of further reform with which Mary commenced her reign disappeared as her finances became straitened; the doctrinal virtues superseded the moral; and relapsing upon her father's and her brother's evil precedents, she poured out a fresh shower of money containing but three ounces of silver with nine of alloy, and attempted to force it once more on the people at its nominal value.

The coining system acquired at once fresh impetus; and Elizabeth on coming to the throne found prices everywhere in confusion. Amidst the variety of standards and the multitude of coins recognized by the law, the common business of life was almost at a stand-still. Of current silver there was such as remained of Edward's pure shillings, containing eleven ounces and two pennyweights of silver in the pound; the shillings of the first year of Mary containing ten ounces; and the old shillings of Henry the Eighth containing eleven

ounces.

Of testers or sixpences, the coin in common use, there were four sorts: the tester of eight ounces of silver in the pound, the tester of six, the tester of four, and the tester of three; with groats, rose pence, and other small coins, of which the purity varied in the same proportion. The testers of eight, six, and four ounces had been issued originally as shillings, and had been called down to sixpences. These three kinds were all of equal value, 'for

that which lacked in fineness exceeded in weight,"1 and they were really worth fourpence halfpenny. The fourth kind, the tester of three ounces, was worth only twopence halfpenny; but the worst passed current with the best' in the payment of the statute wages of the artisan or labourer. The working man was robbed without knowing how or why, while the tradesmen and farmers, aware that a sixpence was not a sixpence, defied the feeble laws which attempted to regulate the prices of produce, charged for their goods on a random scale, and secured themselves against loss by the breadth of margin which they claimed against the consumer.

The earliest extant paper on the subject in the reign of Elizabeth is the composition of the Queen herself. With the rise in prices the landowners generally had doubled their rents, while the rents of the Crown lands had remained unchanged. The ounce of silver in the currency of the Plantagenets, instead of being coined into the five shillings of later usage, had been divided only into a quarter of a mark, or three shillings and four pence. Elizabeth proposed to return to the earlier scale, and retaining the same nominal rent of which she found herself in receipt, to allow 'the tenants of improved rents to answer their lords after the rate of the abatement of value for every pound a mark;" while

1 Paper on Coinage: endorsed | able to perform almost every way as in Cecil's hand, Mr Stanley's opin- much with the mark as he was with ion: Domestic MSS., Elizabeth, vol. the pound.'-(Opinion of her Maxiii. jesty for reducing the state of the coin, 1559): Domestic MSS. Elizabeth.

2. Wherein,' she said, 'the lord shall not be much hindered, being