The Sealing of the Bank of England's Charter, 1694, as Painted in 1905
The sealing of the Bank of England's charter on 27 July 1694, painted more than two centuries later by Lady Jane Lindsay. It is not a record of the day but of how the institution wished its beginning to look by 1905: sober, legal, and unremarkable — which is exactly what a bank founded to fund a war needed to seem.
The Bank of England was created to solve one problem: William III's government could not borrow enough to fight France. The subscribers lent £1.2 million to the Crown and received in return the right to issue notes against it, so that the loan became permanent and the debt became tradeable. That arrangement — a national debt no one expected to repay, serviced by taxation and owned by the public — is the real invention, and it outlived every war it paid for. Lady Jane Lindsay's painting was reproduced in a family history of the Houblons, whose kinsman was the Bank's first governor. See how the Bank of England's founding financed a new era.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
