If you follow the Julian Calendar 12th October (or 23rd October under the Gregorian Calendar) marks the anniversary of a resounding victory by the Anglo-Dutch fleet over the forces of France and Spain. The English, with their Dutch allies, had originally sailed to try and establish a beach-head at Cadiz, from which they hoped to control troop movements into and out of the Mediterranean during the Spanish War of Succession. It was intended to be a stepping-off point for Allied attacks on the French, particularly on their naval base at Toulon. The landing attempt was a failure, but on his way back to England Admiral Rooke, in charge of the English fleet, got news of a large convoy of Spanish treasure ships, escorted by the French navy, and which had just landed at the port of Vigo on the Galician coast.

The French had originally planned to escort the merchantmen under their control  into Cadiz, where the bullion was normally unloaded and where there existed the support  needed for the job - customs officials, tally clerks, secure transportation, etc. News of the mission aimed at Cadiz by the Anglo-Dutch navies had persuaded the French to head instead for Vigo. Unloading was delayed because the infrastructure was not in place.

 Admiral Rooke, 1650 - 1709, painted by Michael Dahl

Rooke cornered the Franco-Spanish fleet in the harbour. The French admiral Château-Renault had moored two of his largest men-of-war the Bourbon, and the Esperance at either end of a boom stretched across the mouth of the harbour. Within the boom he had moored five other large men-of-war with their broadsides bearing upon the entrance. Rooke decided to allow Vice Admiral Thomas Hopsonn, in The Torbay,  to try and breach the boom. He succeeded, allowing the remaining 24 ships (14 English and ten Dutch) to follow through into the harbour. Meanwhile a landing party of 2000 men, led by Ormonde, managed to silence the shore battery leaving the 56 ships (22 of them Spanish, the rest French) at the mercy of the attackers. Not a single French or Spanish ship escaped - all were either captured or destroyed. The Spanish merchant fleet was wiped out, and thereafter they would be totally dependent upon the French for all communications with the Americas. The French suffered a humiliating defeat - Bourbon was captured by the Dutch and the 70-gun Esperance was driven ashore and scuttled. Château-Renault had the ignominy of watching his vessel the 76-gun Fort completely destroyed by fire. In all, the French lost 15 ships of the line, 2 frigates and one fire-ship.

In the aftermath of battle the English managed to capture whatever silver had not already been unloaded. Reports vary as to the amount of silver brought back to England. Sir Isaac Newton was Master of the Royal Mint at the time and he recorded having received roughly 4,500 pounds in weight  of silver ingots and a miniscule amount of gold. It was transported to the Tower, where the Mint was based, with great pageantry. The government seized upon it as a great propaganda victory and coins were struck with the word 'VIGO' beneath the head of the monarch (Queen Anne) to show where metal came from, in order to 'Continue to Posterity the Remembrance of that Glorious Action'.

The rare, beautiful, and extremely valuable five guinea coin dated 1703 with the word VIGO. There are only 15 known examples in private collections.Value? Well,about the same as my house! This image appears courtesy of http://www.coins-of-the-uk.co.uk/

More commonly the inscription appeared on silver coins of 1702 and 1703, particularly the shilling.

And so today let us raise a glass to Admiral Rooke: well done Sir! And to Vice-Admiral Hopsonn who, with a favourable wind and a huge amount of good fortune, broke through the boom and enabled the turkey shoot to take place.

Richard liked to make spot checks of the money held at his home in Bourton on the Water – and listed what each check revealed. Not once does he mention bank notes, although these would have been in general use towards the end of his life.

Instead we find that in February 1791 he had coins to the value of Thirty four pounds six shillings and three pence on the premises – with a buying power today of just under two thousand pounds, that is a lot of loose change! In practice the breakdown of the specific coins shows that much of this was attributable to a few high-value coins.

Richard mentions a Five Guinea piece from the reign of Charles II dated 1682, four gold guineas, nine half guineas, five quarter guineas and numerous (silver) crowns and half crowns. Not the sort of collection you would carry in your pocket while traipsing off to the local market! He also listed "two Jacobus, a Prussian ducat  and a gold touch piece for evil". The latter coin would have been an angel, having a face value of one third of a pound, and last minted in the reign of Charles Ist. Many of them were pierced so that they could be worn as a charm around the neck – to ward off the King’s Evil or scrofula.

A slightly earlier version of the five guinea coin, dated 1670.

The five Guinea coin would have been a beauty. It is the only gold coin to bear an inscription on the edge (“Decus et Tutamen” – as a decoration and a safeguard – the same inscription as is used  on the edge of modern one pound coins). This was a complete novelty at the time and the gold blanks, having been cut out from strips rolled using horse power,  were taken away from the Mint so that a secret process could be applied to them by a Frenchman named Pierre Blondeau. He would then return the blanks, duly edged, so that the impressions on the two faces of the coin could be applied using a hand-operated press. Pepys describes the process in his diary for 19^th May 1663.

And the value of such a coin today? Well over £9000 if it was in excellent condition. Unfortunately it never came down to me with Richard’s other possessions….

One of Richard's recipes starts with the guide note that you would need as much nutmeg as would fit on the head of a silver penny. Anyone living in the 18th Century would know that a silver penny was minute - smaller than the size of the a finger nail on your pinky finger! The diameter measured a mere 12 milimetres - just enough for a miniscule portrait of 'Good King George' on one side and the figure 'I' topped by a crown on the other. As explained in an earlier post the coin contained, at half a gram, exactly one penn'orth of silver.

One of the problems for the Mint, in working on such a tiny thin sliver of a coin, was to get the pressure right. Too much and the 'I' cut through the coin to leave poor George on the flip-side of the coin with a deep gash across his head! The design had to be changed in 1781 so that the figure 'I' was in low relief.

A set of Maundy Money coins from the reign of George III (dated 1818) to include the one penny.

Nowadays you might pick a single penny up from the reign of George III for between £15 and £40 depending on condition. What many people don't appreciate is that there are still silver pennies being minted, with the head of Queen Elizabeth II. They form part of every Maundy Money set distributed by the Monarch the day before  Good Friday. This tradition harks back to the time when the Monarch was supposed to wash the feet of the common people once a year - the token gift was symbolic and the ceremony always used to be held in London. Nowadays the  ceremony goes 'on tour' to different cathedrals. Technically the coins (a groat i.e. 4d, a threepenny piece, a tuppence and a penny) are all legal tender but in practice they are never released into circulation and instead are sold on to collectors, who are happy to part with around one hundred pounds for a set in unblemished condition.

 

Make a mistake with the authenticity a silver or copper coin in your change and it was unfortunate - but to do so with a gold coin was extremely expensive. Scattered throughout Richard’s diaries are references to underweight gold guineas, or to outright forgeries. He needed to be constantly vigilant.

Originally struck in the reign of Chalres II using gold from  Guinea in Africa, the coin had been intended to be worth one pound, but the quality of the gold meant that the coin traded at a premium and it quickly assumed a value of twenty one shillings. Guineas had been struck for virtually every year of the reign of George II and when George III came to the throne in 1760 he continued the tradition for the next forty years. It was only towards the end of the century, when gold prices started to rise as people felt the urge to hoard it, that the minting of the guinea was suspended. There was, it is true, an emergency issue in 1813 to enable Wellington’s army in the Pyrenees to be fed (the locals would only accept gold!). But apart from that the public had begun to accept paper money and it was left until the great re-coinage in 1817 (when  a combined gold and silver standard was abandoned in favour of a solely gold standard) that a gold pound coin re-appeared – this time as a sovereign of twenty shillings, compared with the 21 shillings of the old guinea.

The guineas minted between 1787 and 1799 are known as ‘spade guineas’ because the shield on the reverse of the coin is shaped like a miner’s shovel. They were particularly popular in the Victorian era as watch fobs. There were many forgeries though – some blatantly made of brass bearing inscriptions showing that they were designed for use as gaming counters, but doubtless some were palmed off on unsuspecting traders. Indeed many were deliberately minted with impossible dates (‘1701’ for a George III coin was self-evidently not genuine) or incorrect inscriptions (‘For use as a counter’) in the belief that this exonerated the person making the coins from being charged with a felony (which carried the death penalty).

This one is genuine!

Nowadays guineas are rarely encountered outside of the world of horse racing and, so Wikipedia would have us believe, the sale of rams! The buyer will pay an amount in guineas and the seller receives an equivalent amount in pounds with the difference going as commission to the auctioneer. We still of course have classic horse races such as the One  Thousand and Two Thousand Guineas, named after the prizes paid out 200 years ago. Nowadays the prize money is vastly more than this!

Pity the poor tradesman in the latter part of the 18th century: there had been a desperate shortage of silver and copper coinage in circulation, leading to a plethora of forgeries and unofficial tokens, particularly in copper. These trade tokens were often of use only in the town they were minted - so a token minted in Oxford, for instance, would not be regarded as legal tender in Bristol. Why the shortgage of official coins? Because of the obsession with the idea that the coins had to have an intrinsic value matching the face value. The relative value of gold to silver was supposed to be 1:20 - hence twenty (silver) shillings to the one (gold) pound. But the relative value of gold and silver kept fluctuating. Silver prices went through the roof and for many years the Royal Mint was reluctant to go out and buy silver at prevailing prices only to find itself making a loss on each coin. (The alternative would have been to make coins fluctuate in size in line with prevailing prices - but that would have made things impossible for tradesmen). It was bad enough that many coins had been in circulation since the reign of William and Mary a century before - leading to coins which were little more than shiny blanks. Fakes were common. It was O.K. for a while when Admiral Anson returned from plundering  Spanish bullion ships in the Pacific in 1746 - there was plenty of silver to go round. But traditional sources of silver dried up - the mines in the West Country were exhausted, and as a result of the Seven Years War the opportunity of buying ingots from traditional European sources dispppeared.

The siver penny was a tiny coin weighing half a gram - easily mislaid - but for traders there was worse to come: in 1797 the government authorised the minting of both a penny  and a  twopence coin in copper.

The twopence coin is by far the largest base metal coin ever issued in the UK, weighing in at two ounces (56.7 g) and measuring 41 mm diameter and 5 mm thick.To keep in line with the obsession for intrinsic value the one penny coin was exactly half its weight. Both coins were termed 'cartwheel coinage' - because of their size and the large flange around the edge of the coin. Most unusually the legend was impressed into the metal (as opposed to being raised). The coins were minted by Mathew Boulton at his Soho, Birmingham factory. Just imagine proferring a shilling for goods costing twopence, and getting five of these giants back in exchange! That would soon put a hole in your pocket...

The coin was found to be too heavy for regular use, and no more copper or bronze twopence coins were struck until decimilisation in 1971.

When Admiral Anson returned from his magnificent voyage of circumnavigation in 1744 it was already known that he had sacked a small town in Peru. What was not so apparent until his heavily laden ship entered port was that after his Peruvian escapade he had  headed off towards the Philippines in search of a much bigger prize – which he found  in 1743 when he encountered the Nuestra Señora de Covadonga off Cape Espiritu Santo. The ship had been bound for Spain and the Admiral gleefully relieved it of over one million pieces of eight – 1,313,843 to be precise.

The admiral returned to a hero’s welcome – and the Royal Mint issued coins bearing the word ‘LIMA’ under the king’s head to commemorate the voyage. The silver coins marked in this way were half crowns, shillings and sixpences. A large number of gold coins were also minted. 'LIMA' was a bit of a misnomer – perhaps the government wished to play down the blatant act of piracy by making out that the bullion originated in the Peruvian city. Certainly it had been a tradition for some time to show the provenance of the silver used in coins by having a different design feature – plumes between the royal shields on the reverse of the coin signified silver from Wales, roses from mines in the West of England, and so on.

The word LIMA can be seen below the portrait

'Lima' coins are often collected - Richard had a 'Lima shilling' in his possession when he died, and I still have it to this day in his leather purse.

Anson was a hugely wealthy man as a result of the voyage, and went on to a highly successful naval career and to introduce important reforms to the British Navy. He died in 1762.