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Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night.
God said "Let Newton Be" and all was light. —Alexander Pope
In 1685 James II was proclaimed King of England. An aggressive Catholic, he immediately began to consolidate his power and "catholicize" some of England's thoroughly Protestant institutions, including the universities. In 1688 his second wife—who, unlike his first, was also Catholic— gave birth to a son. Chafing under Catholic rule and horrified at the thought of a succession of Catholic kings, the historically antagonistic Whigs and Tories briefly set aside their differences and conspired to get this untoward papist off their throne. A "bipartisan" committee invited King James' son-in-law, a Dutch prince who spoke no English, to "invade" and depose his uncle. His qualifications to occupy the throne of England? He was Protestant.
The manufactured "invasion" turned out to be both bloodless and "glorious." England was now free to return her full attention to the ongoing war with France—a costly project that began to drain the Royal Treasury. England's coffers gradually became depleted, and by 1696 the strain had begun to show. But there was another financial crisis looming, potentially even more dangerous. England's financial foundations were being nibbled away from within by economic termites, destabilizing the currency through counterfeiting and coin clipping.
Counterfeiting was relatively easy in those days. The techniques for producing coins in England had hardly changed since the Middle Ages, and quality control was so bad that coins could vary in weight substantially. The simple images that were stamped on the coins were crude and easy to copy onto counterfeit coins made of different or diluted raw materials, while the lack of rolled edges—standard for modern coins—facilitated the age-old crime of clipping: the practice of cutting slivers off the edges of the coins to be melted down and sold, leaving the central part of the coin sufficiently intact to serve, albeit suspiciously, as currency.
Hence, at a time when the economic demands of the war demanded a robust economy, the deteriorating quality of its coins was destroying England's faith in its currency. Workers, whose weekly pay was a bag of coins largely counterfeit or clipped beyond recognition, were rioting; shopkeepers were inflating their prices to compensate for the counterfeit coins they anticipated receiving for their goods. Bartering, basically gone since the Middle Ages, had returned. A financial collapse would undo the accomplishments of the Glorious Revolution and, God forbid, the Stuarts might recover the throne. Something had to be done.
The solution proposed by England's chancellor, Charles Montagu, was recoinage: the process of reminting existing coins, most of which dated from Elizabethan times and some from 150 years earlier, during the time of Edward VI. The crown would recall the coins currently in circulation and exchange them—the legitimate ones—for a new currency. It was a bold solution to a massive problem.
To administer the recoinage project, Montagu appointed a personal friend as warden of the royal mint, a position recently vacated by the promotion of the previous occupant. Montagu promised that the job would pay "five or six hundred pounds per annum" and would not "require more attendance than you can spare." The position was offered as a political plum—good salary, little work. Recoinage, once initiated, should proceed more or less automatically, or so Montagu imagined.
The new warden, however, was not in search of a sinecure. He liked challenging problems and immediately attacked his new job with an extraordinary vigor. He streamlined the physical production of the coins, saving large quantities of both time and money. He calculated that suppliers had been overcharging for unprocessed ore and brought those expenses into line. He fired lazy workers and made the others work hard. He worked 16 hours a day himself as he transformed the London mint into a model of productivity. The presses, powered by scores of horses and three hundred men, ran in two shifts, from 4 a.m. to midnight, six days a week. In June of 1697 alone, for example, the mint turned out over 360,000 pounds. The shiny new coins flowed like a blood transfusion into the dying economy, and England began to recover.
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