In 1290, Edward 1 of England deported the Jews. In mediaevel times the national treasure was held by the king. Usury, the lending of money at interest, was in the hands of the Jews.

Monarchs therefore were prime targets. One of the first to go was King Charles 1 of England, in 1649, whose head plus permission for the Jews to re-enter England, was the price for financial aid to Cromwell.

It is relevant to mention that Oliver Cromwell's great uncle was Thomas Cromwell, the man who pushed through Henry VIII's divorce and the split from Rome, and who had trained "in the back-rooms of the money-lender and the usurer" in Venice. His sister's son, Richard Williams, took his mother's name in return for Hinchingbrooke, a Benedictine nunnery confiscated by Thomas Cromwell. Oliver, the son of Richard, further improved the family's fortunes by his marriage to the widow of the financier, Sir Horatio Palavicino, which perhaps explains his connivance, with the Jewish Sanhedrin over the execution of Charles I.

In 1656, in settlement of the second part of the deal, the Jews were allowed to return to England.

In 1693, subsequent to the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the estimated revenue was not equal to estimated expenditure. It was the bankers and Jews of Amsterdam who financed the invasion by William of Orange. The year 1692 had bequeathed a large deficit, partly due to the involvement of England in William of Orange's continental wars, and it seemed probable that the charge for 1693 would exceed by about five hundred thousand pounds the charge for 1692.

Thus it took no more than two generations after the return of the Jews to create a "National Debt".

Taxation, both direct and indirect, had been carried to an unprecedented point.

The situation and its apparent resolution is summed up in the following quote from Lord Macaulay's "History of England" written in 1848.:

... "It was necessary therefore to devise something. Something of which the effects are felt to this day in every part of the globe.

"There was nothing strange in the expedient to which the government had recourse. It was an expedient familiar during two centuries to the financiers of the continent...."

"On the 16th December 1692 the House of Commons made itself into a Committee of Ways and Means. It was proposed to raise a million by way of loans. The proposition was approved and it was ordered that a bill should be brought in.

"By this law new duties were imposed on beer and other liquor. These duties were to be kept in the Exchequer and were to form a fund on the credit of which a million was to be raised by life annuities. As the annuities dropped off the annuities were to be divided among the survivors until the number of survivors was reduced to seven.

"After that time whatever remained was to go to the public. It was therefore certain that the eighteenth century would be far advanced before the debt would finally be extinguished.

"Such was the origin of the National Debt. .... At every stage in the growth of that debt the nation had put up the same cry of anguish and despair and at every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted that bankruptcy and ruin was at hand. But still the debt kept on growing and still bankruptcy was as remote as ever.

"What they had failed to realise was that although they saw the debt grow, they forgot that other things grew as well as the debt. The effect of this system of funding proves that all credit depends on two things: on the power of the debtor to pay debts and on his inclination to pay them.

"...By the Lottery Loan as it was called one million was obtained but another million was wanted to bring the estimated revenue for the year 1694 up to a level of the estimated expenditure.

"At the time there were old men living who remembered when there were no banks in the City of London.

"But a new mode of paying and receiving money had come into fashion among the merchants of the capital.

"This new branch of business naturally fell into the hands of the goldsmiths who had vaults in which great masses of bullion could lie secure. It was at the shops of the goldsmiths of Lombard Street that all payment in coin was made. Other traders gave and received nothing but paper.

"This great change did not take place without much opposition. These usurers it was said played hazard with what had been earned by the industry and hoarded by the thrift of other men. Some predicted ruin to the monarchy. Some predicted ruin to liberty. Here they said is an instrument of tyranny more formidable than the Star Chamber. The whole wealth of the nation will be in the hands of the bank. The power of the purse, the one great security, will be transferred from the House of Commons to the Governor and Directors of the new Company.....

"The bill went through the House of Commons and although the House of Lords asserted it was intended to enrich usurers at the expense of the nobility, the Bank of England came into being and was founded in 1694."

By the 1700s the British Government's debt to the Bank of England was £140,000,000.

Fifty years after the Bank of England was chartered Amschel Moses Bauer (later Rothschild ) opened a counting house and, financing himself on money belonging to Prince William of Hesse, began to loan money to governments instead of people.

And so to France: France and bankruptcy.