Relationship Between the Mint and the Treasury

The Secretaries to the Treasury were the scribes or confidential secretaries employed by (in the seventeenth century) the Treasury Board, which met from one to six times a week – the more experienced the board, the less often it was likely to meet. During critical periods more frequent sessions were required.

In preparing the business for the Board, the secretaries had an opportunity to exert great influence upon policy: handling the original correspondence and meeting in person many of the individuals whose cases came before the board. They worked with actual figures of debts, taxes, and parliamentary estimates, so the members of the Board were inclined to accept the recommendations of the secretaries. They issued letters of direction which authorised making payments from the exchequer (and from which funds), and accepted bills of exchange according to current regulations (eg. fees).[1]

The Mint was able to draw on cash from the Treasury when the coffers were full. This can be seen when, on the 23rd January 1701, the Board read the memorial Newton had written (upon request) regarding the value of French and Spanish pistols: the King ordered the account to be sent to the Attorney General and a draft of proclamation forbidding any subjects to receive them for more than seventeen shillings a piece, upon the advice drawn from Newton’s assays.[2] An unsigned draft of this letter exists in a clerk’s hand, dated 20th January 1701.[3] This was also reflected in the Mint records, with an account of February 1701 recording £2000 being ‘Received from the Officers out of the Treasury Room to pay for Pistolls &c’, £1500 ‘out of the Exchequer to Mr Newton’s Account’ on the 4th, £3700 as the balance of Thomas Neale’s account and £1900 ‘received out of the Treasury Room’ on the 12th, amounting to £9700 in total.[4]

In many other cases, however, bills of exchange were used, revealed by the recording of an Exchequer or Treasury ‘fee’ in the accounts. In a memorandum of 1714, Newton stated that, by the Act for Encouragement of Coynage (1666), the salaries of the officers of the Mint, charges of providing maintenance and repairing Mint buildings and other necessaries was limited to £3000 per annum ‘for preventing extravagance’: £2600 for salaries and £400 for everything else, paid by the Warden.[5] ‘Special warrants’ had added £500 in temporary annual expenditure, and the Edinburgh Mint was given an allowance of £1200.[6] Any ‘overplus’ was ‘appropriated to the expence wast & charge of assaying melting down & coyning, & buying in of bullion to coyne’, paid by the Master out of the coinage duty.

The furnaces and tools were thus under the Master’s direction: he ‘repairs removes & rebuilds them without medling with the buildings or asking… leave of the other Officers & he places the charge of repairing them in his own Account... the reason of this distinction seems to be that the Master may be enabled to dispatch the coinage & make delivery with all convenient speed without... being retarded by the want of money… [and] the Warden & Master are enabled to make up their Accounts severally without depending upon one another.’ Newton wrote that the Master, as ‘Treasurers of the Mint’ also paid the fees at the Exchequer and Treasury upon receiving the coinage money, for passing the Accounts through the several Offices of the Exchequer, and the charges of trying the Pyx, including the fees for summoning the jury for the verdict: ‘The Pix is tried by the Assay & the charges thereof belong to that head. But the charge of a Dinner for the Jury being to great to come within the £3000 hath been hirtherto paid out of the civil list.’

This account included ‘charge of new gold furnaces; £64.13’; ‘Fees at the Exchequer & Treasury in receiving the coinage money: £15.3’; ‘Fees of passing through the several Officers of the Exchequer the Accompts of the Warden & Master for the Year 1711: £22.1.6’ and ‘The Auditors Fee: £84.’ Newton stated that the gold furnaces were necessary to be repaid for carrying on the coinage, so their cost and the cost of assaying and reducing the bullion to standard were ‘free from extravagance & just & unavoidable & the fees of the Exchequer & Treasury & other Offices were customary & necessary… all these expenses are placed in my accompt according to the course of the Mint & the Vouchers are good. And therefore all these charges I think to be allowed at present by the… Indenture above recited. And the Warden is to discharge himself of what has been imprest to him, & in his next Accompt to charge himself with the surplus, if any there be.’ In another draft of this account (there were several), Newton argued that major incidental expenses such as £160 for new trial plates and £120 for the last pyx trial should not be reckoned within the Mint’s budget limit.[7]

Newton had to be particularly careful about these accounts because in 1711 Mr Auditor Harley (brother of Robert Harley the new Prime Minister) had discovered that £23,000,000 was missing in the accounts of the previous governments. This led to a row about what ‘necessaries for assaying, melting down and coining’ meant in the original act: ‘Newton argued that when statutes were ambiguous old custom had the force of law’, and merely removed a bricklayers’ bill to insert in the 1713 account instead.[8] Such contestations alert a broader context of widespread auditing efforts within the government, the enforcement of which became a contentious (and dangerous) political tool in the period.[9]

Other examples of detailed expense breakdowns.[10]