e goldsmiths also began now to receive rent and allow interest for
it. They gave receipts for the sums they received, and these receipts
were to all intents and purposes marketable as bank-notes.

Grown rich by these means, the goldsmiths were often able to help
Cromwell with money in advance on the revenues, a patriotic act for
which we may be sure they took good care not to suffer. When the great
national disgrace occurred--the Dutch sailed up the Medway and burned
some of our ships--there was a run upon the goldsmiths, but they stood
firm, and met all demands. The infamous seizure by Charles II. of
L1,300,000, deposited by the London goldsmiths in the Exchequer, all but
ruined these too confiding men, but clamour and pressure compelled the
royal embezzler to at last pay six per cent. on the sum appropriated. In
the last year of William's reign, interest was granted on the whole sum
at three per cent., and the debt still remains undischarged. At last a
Bank of England, which had been talked about and wished for by
commercial men ever since the year 1678, was actually started, and came
into operation.

That great financial genius, William Paterson, the founder of the Bank
of England, was born in 1658, of a good family, at Lochnaber, in
Dumfriesshire. He is supposed, in early life, to have preached among the
persecuted Covenanters. He lived a good deal in Holland, and is believed
to have been a wealthy merchant in New Providence (the Bahamas), and
seems to have shared in Sir William Phipps' successful undertaking of
raising a Spanish galleon with L300,000 worth of sunken treasure. It is
absurdly stated that he was at one time a buccaneer, and so gained a
knowledge of Darien and the ports of the Spanish main. That he knew and
obtained information from Captains Sharpe, Dampier, Wafer, and Sir
Henry Morgan (the taker of Panama), is probable. He worked zealously for
the Restoration of 1688, and he was the founder of the Darien scheme. He
advocated the union of Scotland, and the establishment of a Board of
Trade.

The project of a Bank of England seems to have been often discussed
during the Commonwealth, and was seriously proposed at the meeting of
the First Council of Trade at Mercers' Hall after the Restoration.
Paterson has himself described the first starting of the Bank, in his
"Proceedings at the Imaginary Wednesday's Club," 1717. The first
proposition of a Bank of England was made in July, 1691, when the
Governmen