‘Mr. Wigglesworth from public accounts attended at the door’
Commons’ handling of financial reporting and analysis in the first session of the Seventeenth Parliament, however, did not evolve from a conscious commitment to follow best practices.
On 15 December 1790 members made 12 different ‘calls’ for financial data. ‘Mr. Wigglesworth from the Office for Auditing the Public Accounts’ attending ‘at the Door’, was called in to deliver the information - duly attested - that members had ordered.61 The data stretched back to 1785 - when Pitt replaced North’s Commissioners for Public Accounts with his appointees. Pitt’s appointees were not under any duty to report to the House of Commons, as noted in Chapter 3, this volume.62 In 1791 the House of Commons found itself obliged to launch the necessary catch-up project. (These events would repeat themselves in 1797.) When it had received and digested the information that Pitt’s administration effectively withheld from the House over that interval, the House of ComÂmons ordered this information printed in the Journals. The 67 pages were decidedly thin stuff.By March 1797 another interval of reporting and analysis went missing in action. Gathering, analysing and printing the missing three years’ financial data required two and a half years. The effort began on 10 March 1797,
when Commons appointed a Select Committee ‘to examine and state the Total Amount of the Public Debts, and of the Interest and Charges attending the same, as they stood on the 5th of January 1797’. The Committee duly reported the increase in public debt incurred since 5 January 1793.63
And likewise of the Amount of the Produce, for each of the Four Years preceding the 5th of January 1797, of the Permanent Taxes which existed previous to the 5th of January 1793; and of the Produce of the several Taxes provided for defraying the increased Charge of the Public Debt, within the said Period; and to report their Observations thereon to the House:64
Producing ‘The State of the Nation’ was no easy task.
By 19 July 1797, the House had printed its Eighth Report. The Select Committee was then turnÂing attention to the ‘Commissioners of Public Accounts in the years 1780 and 1781’ in the course of examining the work of the Tax Office. By 26 June 1798, Commons had in hand its Twenty-Third Report on ‘The Public Revenue for the Year 1797’. This report detailed funding national debt back to 1793. The last numbered Thirty-Sixth Report - in 159 pages - brought in an ‘account of the present Establishment of the Office of His Majesty’s Secretary of War’.London publisher H. D. Symonds reprinted these reports (others covered prisons, hospitals and other government functions) in four volumes. PubliÂcation began in 1798. In his opening volume of the series, Symonds bound the first seven of the Select Committee’s reports. Symonds tempted the readÂer’s interest by suggesting that the Select Committee’s ‘investigations’ would enable
every Individual interested in the Public Funds [to] see the Funded Debt - what remains of the Public Debt unfunded - and the Resources of the Country to discharge the Claims of the public Creditor. He will see the produce of every Article of Revenue liable to impost - Foreign, and for Home Consumption - with their Variations at different Periods.65
While members of the House of Commons nodded, Pitt took full advantage, obliging the Bank of England to honour bills drawn on its credit. In short, he commandeered the resources of the Bank to fund the national security agenda for three years leading up to February 1797. By one estimate, these extraordinary drawings of bullion and specie amounted to £40,000,000.66 The resulting collapse of investor confidence in the nation’s banknotes set off a run on country banks, followed by public demands on the Bank of England’s holdings of specie. The Privy Council took confidence boosting measures in an emergency meeting convened on Sunday, 26 February 1797.
After the Bank of England attempted to calm its way out of the crisis - hoping someone else would take the blame for the debacle - directors were forced‘The average price of peace and war’ 113 to confess the hard truth. ‘It is the unanimous opinion of the Board, that it is indispensably necessary for the publick Service that the Directors of the Bank of England should forebear issuing any Cash in Payment until the Sense of Parliament can be taken on the subject’.67
These events claimed the interest of historians during the next century. ‘The transactions and state of the Bank of England, as detailed in this secÂtion, bring its history down to that eventful and important period when the peculiar nature of its connexion with the government first openly develops itself’.68 In July 1796, for example, the Bank’s refusal to continue serving as Pitt’s piggy-bank
was only overcome by the positive assurance of Mr. Pitt that it would be impossible to avoid the most serious and distressing embarrassments to the public service, unless an advance to the extent of £800,000 were made. The Bank yielded, but only under the strongest protest, declaring that nothing but the extreme pressure and exigency of the case could in any shape justify the directors in acceding.69