circle of private
banks, some of considerable power.

[Sidenote: Early English banking.]

The state papers included in F. G. Hilton Price's _Handbook of London
Bankers_ (1876) contain some of the earliest records about the
establishment of banking in England. The first of these is a petition,
printed in the original Italian, to Queen Elizabeth, of Christopher
Hagenbuck and his partners in November 1581, representing "that he had
found out a method and form in which it will be possible to institute an
office into which shall enter every year a very large sum of money without
expense to your Majesty," so "that not only your Majesty will be able to be
always provided with whatever notable sum of money your Majesty may wish,
but by this means your State and people also; and it shall keep the country
in abundance and remove the extreme usuries that devour your Majesty and
your people." Hagenbuck proposed to explain his plan on condition that he
should receive "6% every year of the whole mass of money" received by the
office for twenty years. The queen agreed "to grant to the said Christopher
and partners 4% for a term of twenty years, and to confirm the said grant
under the great seal." The document is signed by Francis Walsingham, but
nothing further appears to have come of it. When we compare the date of
this document with that of the establishment of the Banco della Piazza di
Rialto at Venice, it is not unlikely that the idea of the establishment of
a bank was floating in the minds of people connected with business and had
become familiar to Hagenbuck from commerce with Venice. Other state papers
in 1621 and 1622 and again in 1662 and 1666 contain somewhat similar
proposals which however were never carried into practice.

The little _London Directory_, 1677, contains a list of goldsmiths
mentioned as keeping "running cashes." Of these firms described in 1677,
five houses were carrying on business in 1876. Three of these, or firms
immediately descended from them, Child & Co. of Temple Bar, Martin & Co. of
Lombard Street (as Martin's Bank, Ltd.), and Hoare & Co. of Fleet Street,
are still carrying on business. Barnetts, Hoare & Co. and Willis, Percival
& Co. have been absorbed since 1876, the first by Lloyds Bank (1884), the
second by the Capital and Counties (1878). Many of the goldsmiths carried
on a considerable business. Thus the books of Edward Blackwell, who was an
eminent goldsmith and banker in the reign of Charles