inconvenience to the public, the Jacobites managed to excite great alarm in the minds of the people. There was a widespread panic that there would be great personal losses and wrongs, and that all receipts of money would be stopped, and that there would be general distress. The malcontents attacked Montague and the other ministers in the house: the merchants demanded indemnification for the rise which guineas had taken, namely, from twenty shillings and sixpence to thirty shillings, in consequence of the scarcity of the silver coinage; for a guinea now, instead of purchasing twenty shillings' worth of their goods, would purchase one-third more; so that their stocks were reduced one-third in value till the silver coinage was again plentiful. Parliament, to remove this cause of complaint, inserted a clause in the bill, offering a premium on plate, fixing the price of a guinea at two-and-twenty shillings. Still, however, people imagined that guineas would be scarce, and so gold would rise, and hoarded them up, which made them scarce. But government worked manfully at the recoining. Mints were set up at York, Bristol, Exeter, and Chester as well as in London, and in less than twelve months the coinage was produced with such success that the English currency, which had been the worst, was now the best in Europe.
The bill for regulating the trials for high treason was again brought in, and having now been steadily refused by the lords unless with their clause for granting them the privilege of trying any of their order by the whole house of peers instead of by the court of the lord high steward, the commons now gave way, allowed the clause, and the bill passed. It was ordered to take effect on the 25th of March next, 1696.
A subject of strong national interest was now forced on parliament by William's inordinate desire to advance his Dutch favourites. He had made Ginckel, who had not been very disinterested in his Irish management, earl of Athlone, and Schomberg duke of Leinster; but Portland was his especial friend, and he sought to endow him right royally. Historians, excusing William for his excessive liberality, contend that these men were the most faithful friends that ever man had, which is, no doubt, a very good reason for his rewarding them; but it would have been more becoming had he done it, Dutchmen as they were, out of his own Dutch estates, and not out of the estates of the crown of England, especially when he was already annually complaining of the scantiness of his own allowance from the nation. Now, however, he went a step too far, for he gave to Portland the three lordships of Denbigh, Bamfield, and Yale, in Wales, which belonged to the crown, and which had once been given by queen Elizabeth to her favourite, Leicester, but which the high-spirited Welsh had forced her to recall. A deputation of Welshmen, headed by Sir William Williams, obtained an audience at the Treasury, and represented that these lands were part of the demesnes of the prince of Wales, and that royal honours were attached to them which could not be paid to any subject except the prince of Wales; that the revenue of them went to support the government of Wales, to pay the salaries of the judges and other officers.
These representations produced no effect on the determined mind of the Dutch king, but the warm blood of the Welsh soon made a more lively impression on his cold blood. They sent up a plain-spoken petition, which was presented to the commons by Mr. Price, a Welsh member, who declaimed in a style on this royal job which spared neither the Dutch nor their prince. He declared that these lands, by which the people of Wales were bound to do service to their owner as to a prince, could go to no subject, much less to a foreigner; that the king, of course, could not be expected to know these circumstances, being a foreigner, any more than the English knew his counsels, which he wished they did; that the ministers who sanctioned these grants were traitors to the laws and liberties of England for not having informed the king that it was contrary to the coronation oath of the kings of England to alienate the patrimony of the crown without the consent of parliament, but that ministers and courtiers who surrounded the throne were always nibbling at its estates, and encouraging these alienations for their own benefit; that the Dutch were undermining us in all ways. These lands were worth at least one hundred thousand pounds, and, besides the three lordships, they included other property worth three thousand pounds a year. They were filching away our crown property and our trade; they had joined with the Scotch to ruin our English commerce, and he attributed to them the destruction of our coinage. We saw foreigners thrust into all places of honour and profit, to the exclusion of Englishmen. They were made great barons, they were in the king's council, in the army, and they had become naturalised, and had grasped the best of our trade in the city. How, he asked, was England likely to flourish when we had these men both in the English and the Dutch councils? How was a prince of Wales to be supported when his estates were given to the Dutch? and when he came to the throne he would appear there like another John Lackland. In short, we were on the highway to become a Dutch colony.
Roused by this speech, the commons went in a body to Kensington, and presented a strong remonstrance on the subject. William received them coldly; told them that he was not aware that there were constitutional objections to this particular grant, and, therefore, would recall it; but that he had a kindness for lord Portland, who had deserved well of him, and, therefore, he would find some other way of showing his favour to him. Accordingly, he very soon conferred on him the manors of Grantham, Drakelow, Pevensey, East Greenwich, &c., in the counties of Lincoln, Cheshire, Sussex, and Kent, together with the honours of Penrith, in Cumberland, and other manors in Norfolk, York, and Lancashire. The extraordinary profuseness of these grants appeared as if intended to show the parliament that he would only give away the more for their remonstrance, and the murmuring at this lavish heaping of favours on a foreigner was universal. Portland, no more than his master, had taken any pains to ingratiate himself with the English; he was, like him, cold and retiring. William's popularity sunk rapidly, and even the house of lords took up the subject of the encroachment of the Dutch and Scotch on the commerce of the country. They requested a conference with the commons on the subject. It was insinuated that Portland had favoured the granting of the late charter to the Scotch for trading to India and Africa, and that it was
