The English and Welsh Customs administration during the 1690s was in transformation. Staff numbers were steadily increasing, new regulations governed port business, and systematic coastal policing became part of Customs responsibilities. Rather than relating simply to internal institutional developments, this transformation is intricately linked to broader trends of that decade. The reign of Mary II and William III witnessed profound and lasting changes in the nature of the British state. Such changes are typically identified in relation to constitutional developments, European power politics, and fiscal-military policies.Footnote 1 The manner of the pair's succession tipped the constitution toward a balanced course with the ascension of Parliament and the birth of party politics. The revolution settlement, moreover, forced Britain to commit to continued engagement in continental and colonial theaters of war and European dynastic politics. The costs of such commitment in turn provoked domestic changes that are generally taken to signal the rise of the fiscal-military state, such as increasing volumes of economic legislation, newly formed or re-formed bodies of financial and fiscal organization, and a growing civil and military administration. The revenue departments of Customs and Excise are usually considered to be at the heart of such changes. The Excise is in fact regarded as a model case of administrative reform firmly tending toward fiscal efficiency and modern bureaucracy. The Customs, on the other hand, has generally been seen to fall short of such standards both in terms of revenue returns and administrative efficiency.Footnote 2 Yet the overall trend of its institutional development, with rising numbers of staff, a newly formed preventive service for coastal policing, and growing dimensions of fiscal duties, was still considered to contribute to the fiscal-military overhaul of English government structures, its capability for European commitment, and the related trend toward monarchical accountability.Footnote 3
While the transformation of the Customs is itself undisputed, its significance and consequences are not. In a challenge to the fiscal-military interpretation of the Customs championed by John Brewer and partly reiterated by William Ashworth, a growing body of literature has recently debated the alleged inefficiency of the Customs relative to the Excise. Julian Hoppit and Spike Sweeting have argued that revenue returns from the Customs have been systematically underestimated.Footnote 4 Moreover, various case studies demonstrate that the Customs administration was much less corrupt than formerly assumed and that administrative reforms indeed worked toward a more competent and accountable bureaucratic apparatus. Additionally, Patrick Walsh has shown that general assumptions about the alleged inefficiency of the English and Welsh Customs, even if correct, are not necessarily valid for Ireland, where the Customs continued to be the most profitable fiscal branch.Footnote 5 Such work evidently contributes to a rehabilitation of the Customs and its performance in the fiscal apparatus. Perhaps ironically, however, such revaluations of older empirical work on the fiscal-military state ultimately strengthen its validity as an interpretation. With the Customs placed on a more equal footing with the Excise in the quest for fiscal efficiency and bureaucratization, the Customs sits even more comfortably in the fiscal-military narrative.Footnote 6 What risks being lost in such a view are elements and tendencies that diverge from or even contradict the general thrust toward the fiscal-military state in that crucial decade.
One perspective from which the fiscal-military narrative can indeed be questioned is that of the one truly momentous alteration of the Customs during the 1690s: the establishment of the preventive service, which was a designated coastal police force. Without falling back on claims of the relative fiscal and administrative inefficiency of the Customs, one of my aims in this article is to locate the preventive service beyond exclusively fiscal rationales. Rather than serving primarily or exclusively fiscal ends, I argue, considerable parts of the administration were geared toward mercantile interests. At the same time, many policies answered the need of the fragile Williamite regime for internal security or resulted from constitutional struggles between crown and Parliament. In other words, the Customs, unlike the Excise, was not solely an arena of fiscal activity but was tied to much broader economic and political agendas.Footnote 7 Losing sight of these agendas seriously distorts our understanding of the Customs in this period. Yet in order to uncover this broader context of Customs activities and preventive policing during the 1690s, a better understanding of the events and the underlying motives is needed than is currently available.Footnote 8 Thus my second, related aim in this article is to establish basic clarity regarding the early years of the preventive service. Although the preventive service was a constant feature of coastal activities for well over a hundred years, the when and how and why of its beginnings remain surprisingly hazy. Ultimately, the genesis of the Customs’ coastal policing branch and the issue of internal security suggest a more complicated picture of how the fiscal-military state came into being.
The Wool Ban and Coastal Policing under Charles II and James II
Government attention to coastal matters during the reign of Mary and William was intense. Various executive departments, in addition to the Court, conducted surveys of England's coasts from as early as 1690. These surveys continued throughout the decade and resulted in numerous plans and schemes for better guarding and policing the coast. Parliament was equally as eager in passing legislation that targeted coastal activities such as smuggling. A first act had already been passed in 1689, with at least four more acts to come within the decade.Footnote 9 Aside from the fervor of such activity, what is truly surprising is how starkly it contrasts with that of the years prior to 1689. Certainly, James II's administration had devoted much time and energy to Customs reforms as far as this related to regular port business. Coastal policing, however, remained excluded from such concerns.Footnote 10 The common explanation for this neglect prior to 1689 and the subsequent policy change is typically found in relation to tariffs. Comparably low import duties during the previous reigns abruptly ended with British engagement in the Nine Years’ War. Spurred by the costs of war, tariffs spiked. This increase, along with the import ban on French goods and the general disruption of trade, prompted a sudden rise in smuggling activities and therefore necessitated stricter coastal policing.Footnote 11 In relation to policies relative to overall Customs activity, this explanation obviously holds some validity, yet it only partly explains the markedly different attitudes to coastal policing. Most of the schemes for coastal policing and the vast majority of parliamentary legislation during William's reign targeted the prohibited exportation of wool. This ban, however, had been in place for decades and so cannot on its own explain the sudden obsession with coastal prevention. Because wool was entirely banned from exportation, moreover, the policing of wool smuggling was not likely to produce larger revenue returns, at least not in any direct fashion.Footnote 12 Yet if differences in tariffs alone cannot account for the stark contrast in attitudes toward coastal policing, what can?
During the reigns of Charles II and James II, government showed little interest in coastal policing. It had no need to. As Michael Braddick has shown, Customs activities after the Restoration provided the crown with steady returns. A comparably small number of Customs officials largely confined to the main ports and their dependent members and creeks levied the duties enacted by Parliament.Footnote 13 That the revenue collected by the Customs was voted for Charles II and again for James II by Parliament for life obviously meant that the monarchs took an active interest in the system's efficiency.Footnote 14 The exportation of wool and, by extension, coastal policing, however, did not figure large on their agenda. To be sure, the export ban, previously in force by royal proclamation only, was enacted in 1660 and further tightened in 1662.Footnote 15 But while parliamentary debate during the 1670s was hot, no further act followed during the next twenty-seven years, and James II confined himself to two royal proclamations, restating older provisions.Footnote 16 More importantly, on the level of everyday Customs activities, no administrative measures were introduced nor, it seems, considered.Footnote 17 This is all the more telling when other areas of Customs business did not escape attention. The 1680s witnessed intense efforts to reform regular Customs operations in the English and Welsh ports. Apart from matters of political loyalty that repeatedly sparked concerns about the Customs, these efforts were aimed at stricter efficiency in the ports, which would in turn result in larger shares of revenue returned into the Exchequer.Footnote 18
In the absence of government initiative, the wool ban and the policing of the shores was predominantly left to private hands. For the period to 1671, this was reflected in the overall structure of the administration. During most of the period until 1671, the Customs were farmed out to contractors in return for fixed rents. Any incentives for the improvement of the Customs lay firmly with the farmers.Footnote 19 Yet even after the Customs resorted to governmental management, the export ban continued to be a matter of private interest. Similar to certain periods in the sixteenth century, coastal policing in the second half of the seventeenth century remained in the hands of the occasional informer or the self-interested entrepreneur.Footnote 20 All the crown and Parliament did was to grant rewards for their service. As these rewards came in the form of moieties of seized and condemned goods, both the energy and costs of such enforcement remained conveniently outsourced.
A closer look at such private enforcement reveals two factors that help explain the government's reluctance to systematically engage with the enforcement of the ban: first, coastal policing was unlikely to produce large returns, and second, the preoccupation with the wool ban reflected the vested interest of only a certain section of the merchant community and the wool manufacturers. Both points are illustrated by the case of William Carter.Footnote 21
Carter was a clothier by trade, born around 1630. As early as 1667, he started to petition for better enforcement of the wool ban.Footnote 22 He also published several tracts defending the ban on economic grounds.Footnote 23 Over the years, his zeal attracted much attention from the authorities, and his opinion was occasionally also heard in Parliament and at Court.Footnote 24 In other quarters, he was ridiculed as “Wool-Carter.”Footnote 25 What makes Carter somewhat unusual among the many pamphleteers for the mercantile interest in the wool ban is his commitment to action. Starting in 1669, he was busy preventing the exportation of wool by employing a network of informers, riders, and ships to perform a rudimentary policing operation.Footnote 26
To some degree, such private activity for enforcing the ban was successful.Footnote 27 Running of wool was prevented and the nation's wealth maintained. In less abstract terms, however, economic success was far less certain. On a personal financial level, Carter was, if one believes his petitions, truly left out of pocket. In 1689, he claimed to have lost his estate and a profitable trade over expenses.Footnote 28 Preventive action indeed incurred considerable costs. An account from 1687 to 1689 details expenditures totaling £380.Footnote 29 Another account from 1691 puts his expenses for the previous twenty years at £1180.Footnote 30 In several petitions to the Treasury, he claimed to be “still unpaid several hundred pounds,” while “still spending my money dayly in this affaire.”Footnote 31 Such spending was incurred on several counts. They include his personal travel expenses between London and the coasts of Kent and Sussex, monies disbursed to his agents, and the costs of prosecuting seizures in the Court of Exchequer. These accounts, moreover, did not include any salary for his “Labours and Paynes.”Footnote 32 These “Paynes” included heavy debts.Footnote 33 His personal situation, apparent from his petitions, was desperate.
Fortunately for Carter, central authorities showed compassion. Between November 1689 and May 1690, he received almost a thousand pounds for his troubles. Presumably, this was because the Treasury and the Customs Board recognized the value of his work.Footnote 34 Yet the Customs commissioners in particular stressed that it “was never intended that his charge was to be borne by the King.” Instead, Carter was to finance his operations out of shares of prosecuted seizures and by what the merchants had promised him. It was only because such promises were not forthcoming and he had run himself into debt for what they considered valuable service that they recommended to alleviate his troubles.Footnote 35 Clearly, such conditions were very unfavorable. Expenses were likely to outstrip potential rewards, which in turn depended on uncertain court cases. Indeed, Carter indicated that he at least was “finding none ready to adventure in this affaire (upon these discouraging terms).”Footnote 36
In the face of such odds, the government's reluctance to enforce the wool ban is understandable. To be sure, Parliament acknowledged early on that depending on private initiative in such matters was imperfect. The House of Lords had recommended in 1669 that the management of these things should ideally be undertaken by Christ's Hospital in London “because the charge for employing persons effectually to prevent this growing evil is too great for any private person.”Footnote 37 Yet when Christ's declined, no centrally organized attempt followed until 1690. Financially, it was simply unattractive to do so. Unlike regular port staff in the Customs who were often funded not by salaries but by merchants’ fees, and who levied duties on imports and exports as a matter of course, the Customs commissioners could easily learn from Carter's experiences that preventive service on the coast was likely to be a heavy investment in staff and court proceedings with only occasional and uncertain returns.Footnote 38 As a result, Customs returns were likely to decrease, not increase, with the undertaking of systematic coastal policing.
The government's reluctance was reinforced by the fact that petitions for the wool ban reflected a particularly outspoken but no less partial interest of only a specific section of the woolen trade. As Bowden has shown, the wool ban rested on the assumption that continental manufacturing was in desperate need of British wool and that the leakage of such wool to the continent gave continental cloth manufacturers advantages over their English counterparts. This assumption was wrong: English and Irish wool was not superior to continental wool; nonetheless, the wool ban did profit certain sections of the English woolen interest. Whereas wool growers such as those in Kent and Sussex, where few clothiers were left around 1700, would have welcomed open trade routes to the continent and were clearly willing to seek those routes even under the ban, the manufacturers, clothiers, and traders of woolen manufacture, concentrated especially in the West Country, liked the ban because it kept domestic prices for raw materials low. It was clothiers and merchants such as Carter, therefore, who defended the wool ban at all costs. His pamphlets were part of a “sustained and organized propaganda” that attempted to make the clothiers’ partial interests a matter of national interest.Footnote 39
To support their case, propaganda in support of the wool ban usually referred to its economic benefits in a mercantilist fashion. By way of this policy, trade was protected and the entire nation was to profit.Footnote 40 Lobbying of Parliament and the Court relied on similar arguments.Footnote 41 The often thinly veiled hidden agenda of these appeals to the benefit of the nation and the common good was in fact to underscore the direct relevance of the policy for the crown's revenue. Carter was, not accidentally, a key promoter of this particular vested interest. In his 1669 work, England's Interest Asserted, he devoted much space to illustrating the damage of wool exportation to the nation and more particularly to the merchants, all the while laying particular stress on the losses to the king's revenue, which he estimated to be £100,000 a year. The king was indeed suffering the most, “because so great a Revenue comes directly into him upon the Trade, occasioned thereby.”Footnote 42 Proceeds of the woolen manufacture, Carter claimed, accounted for three-quarters of the Customs returns. Moreover, as he stated in one of his petitions, “it doth not only give life to all Trades but a Value to all Lands in England by which means all other Branches of his Majesties Revenue are proportionably increased.”Footnote 43 Evidently a keen observer of domestic politics, Carter even pushed this argument one step further in the midst of the Nine Years’ War. In his 1695 pamphlet Usurpations of France, he expressly linked the proceeds of the woolen manufacture to the ability of a nation to wage war.Footnote 44 The aim of such lobbying was to convince the Court that the policing of the wool ban was ultimately in the government's fiscal and the king's financial interest. At the same time, his effort was a blatant attempt to bring the government in line with what primarily constituted partisan interests.Footnote 45
For the administrations of Charles II and James II, such strategies did not work. Though Parliament produced many failed bills regarding the wool business, actual legislation was negligible, and so were James's lifeless proclamations.Footnote 46 Beyond the prescriptive level, the record was even bleaker, as except for a few Customs ships, there was no systematic effort at coastal policing.Footnote 47 On the contrary, a number of coastal offices were suspended (or “sunk”), with reference to how much was thereby saved to the king's revenue.Footnote 48 The unwillingness of the Court to invest was unmistakably expressed as late as August 1688. In February, the Privy Council discussed a petition from several wool traders who had entered into an association funded by voluntary contributions whose aim was to prevent the exportation of wool. Since the men appointed for the task were not legally empowered to actually seize any wool, they asked for a commission to that effect.Footnote 49 Privy Council approved such measures in June and confirmed the commission by proclamation in August.Footnote 50 Its provisions are a striking reminder of the government's attitude: As “the method taken for prevention of the great abuses therein [that is, in exportation of wool] have not hitherto mett with answerable success,” an association of clothiers and traders was empowered to enforce the ban and were authorized to collect private funds to this end. The king, for his part, was “not doubting but our Loving Subjects will cheerfully and readily assist and promote so usefull and publick a work.”Footnote 51 Unmistakably, this policy put the admittedly “publick work” of coastal policing once again squarely into the hands of those who stood to profit from it. Since the king's revenue appeared secure without such measures, additional policing only amounted to additional costs.
Pressures for Customs Reforms under Mary II and William III
Things changed rapidly after Mary and William succeeded to the English crown. The first session of Parliament of their reign passed an act “for the better preventing the exportation of wool” that created improved legal and practical measures for coastal prevention in 1689.Footnote 52 In June of the same year, the crews of the Dover Customs smacks were significantly increased.Footnote 53 Throughout the following winter and spring, surveys of the English south coast revealed the inadequacy of the administrative setup and witnessed the appointment of several riding officers for patrolling and guarding the coasts of Kent and Sussex.Footnote 54 The trend continued throughout William's reign. This shift in the attitude toward coastal policing requires explanation. It can be found, I argue, in the combination of three distinct trends that, though only marginally related, all favored the emergence of a preventive coastal police force. The economic impact of the war and its fiscal demands obviously cannot be fully eliminated from this equation. Secondly, the constitutional upper hand that Parliament was intent to maintain in the wake of the Declaration of Rights was another dynamic, for it significantly strengthened the influence of the wool interest on government policies. A third factor was political sensitivities at Court and in the executive that were specific to William's regime and its perceived instability: its responses to Jacobitism and the threat to internal security.
In comparison to the relative economic stability and prosperity of previous reigns, England's plunge into European conflict hailed an era of relatively lean years. As Brodie Waddell has shown, the years after the regime change witnessed considerable “economic distress.”Footnote 55 Merchants and traders were the most heavily afflicted, but with ensuing increases in the prices of necessities and a worsening currency crisis, “people in every corner of the country felt the pinch of hardship.”Footnote 56 The war was the main cause of these developments. Apart from the disruption of trade routes, both foreign and coastal, the war's hungry need for cash pushed Parliament and the Treasury to look for new sources of income. The war consumed an extraordinary 79 percent of government expenditures.Footnote 57 Government loans, the establishment of the Bank of England, and the creation of public debt were one way of creating new income.Footnote 58 Another was squeezing more money out of traditional sources of revenue. Thus, schemes for extending the Excise, increases in the land tax, and fresh Customs duties all contributed to wartime spending.Footnote 59 It ended the era of comparably low levels of Customs duties, introducing a growing network of high and complicated tariffs.Footnote 60 Aside from their toll on merchants’ purses, these charges also created more administrative work for customhouse staff. Moreover, the combination of high tariffs and relative economic distress was an ideal stimulator for illicit trade.Footnote 61 Both trends required additions to the establishments of the ports. According to Brewer, Customs staff increased from 1,313 in 1690 to 1,839 in 1708.Footnote 62 More precisely, for the reign of William, establishment lists have Customs staff at 1,202 in 1688 and 1,727 in 1702.Footnote 63 Moreover, the war also required adaptions in the way that coastal policing was organized. In June 1690, the Dover Customs smacks that had been strengthened in the previous year were replaced by riding officers, since coastal cruising was unfeasible during the war. Incidentally, this also saved money.Footnote 64 All things considered, fiscal necessities resulted in administrative growth in the Customs and impacted ideas of coastal policing.
Straightforward though it may seem, this explanation leaves some explanatory gaps when it comes to the preventive service. Despite concerns over increases in smuggling during the war, numbers of preventive officers stagnated until 1697, and concerted schemes of coastal prevention only emerged near the end of the war.Footnote 65 In the meantime, these efforts continued to be tentative and piecemeal. Such efforts, moreover, remained tied to the wool interest. Officers established for coastal duties in 1699 were officiating “for the wooll business.”Footnote 66 The connection between the wool ban and the fiscal necessities of the war effort, however, was a loose one at best. The Wool Act of 1689 is a good example. Rather than serving the executive's fiscal needs, it highlights the constitutional significance of Parliament and the reinforcement of certain mercantile interests.
The Bill “for the better Prevention of the Exportation of Wool” was first read in the Commons on 14 March 1689.Footnote 67 This was just weeks after the passing of the Declaration of Rights and shortly before the coronation of Mary and William in April. Moreover, though it was foreseeable by that stage, it was also before the declaration of war with France in May. Even if the act received royal assent only in August, after England had entered the war, its content bore no signs of that circumstance.Footnote 68 Rather, it was a direct continuation of the interests of clothiers and wool manufacturers expressed at the end of James's reign, inasmuch as the main provisions of the act are strikingly similar to the 1688 commission granted by James.Footnote 69 Both created a Wool Commission of merchants to enforce the ban. The act, moreover, formed part of a larger trend. As Tim Keirn and Perri Gauci have shown, the wool lobby—already vocal during previous reigns—gained a strong influence on Parliament after the Glorious Revolution. During the 1690s, Parliament was flooded with mercantile projects by traders, clothiers, and wool factors, with as many as eighty-two textile bills considered during the decade.Footnote 70 This was in part due to the economic crisis, but Parliament was also in a better position after 1689 to participate in the formulation of government policies. For one, Parliament was more accessible, as it was sitting more frequently, and this was of course part of its enhanced power. At the same time, the quasi-contractual nature of the revolution settlement combined with William's fiscal needs gave Parliament new leverage. It was immediately used with a view to the king's revenue when Parliament broke with tradition and refused to grant him the income from the Customs for life.Footnote 71 The struggle over William's finances was certainly the most prominent case of parliamentary confidence, but it was visible elsewhere as well. For as similar as the 1689 Wool Act was to the 1688 commission in terms of content, there was one striking difference. Whereas the latter was granted by the monarch, the Wool Act was statutory legislation. Yet the individuals named in the commission for executing the Wool Act were not only merchants but to a certain extent also MPs. Even if the Wool Commission created by the 1689 Wool Act did not take any practical action until after the war, this still constituted a serious infringement of Parliament on the executive side of government.Footnote 72 Constitutional issues aside, however, the 1689 Wool Act—as direct an expression of the wool interests as one can imagine—did lead to new measures of coastal policing with, according to some claims, as many as three hundred riding officers around 1699.Footnote 73 As it was during previous reigns, therefore, mercantile support of the wool ban continued to be an important factor for coastal policing.
Mounting fiscal and mercantile pressures thus put the issue of coastal prevention on the executive's agenda. This trend was strongly reinforced by a third factor, namely, the obsession with internal security. The legitimacy of William's succession was, by everyone's standards, dubious, and the exiled James II continued to maintain his superior—legally speaking—claim to the English throne.Footnote 74 This situation would have been less of a problem had not the issue of succession possessed a shared line of antagonism with the battle lines of the Nine Years’ War. After all, it was France, the war enemy of the League of Augsburg, that supported James's claim. In other words, the Jacobite threat was not a matter of a few exiled noblemen but could potentially rely on the strength of the French army—even if James's Irish expedition in 1689 illustrated early on what the limits to such support were. Beyond external issues, allegiances to the exiled king were also a matter of concern on domestic grounds, as some parts of the English elite and some segments of the army evidently harbored feelings of loyalty to him. Oaths of allegiance, quickly introduced by the Williamite regime, only served to abate fears of Jacobites to some extent. This was especially so because Jacobite threats of invasion and insurgence often failed to materialize, as when the English and Dutch navies lost control of the channel after the defeat at Beachy Head in 1690, again in the winter 1691–92, and in the aftermath of the assassination plot.Footnote 75 In the absence of clear indicators of the real extent of domestic and foreign opposition to William's rule, the extent of the Jacobite threat remained a matter of conjecture, thereby nurturing “a world of gossip, suspicion, and secrecy.”Footnote 76 As Hoppit has emphasized, it was “the perceived and not the real scale of the Jacobite threat to William's regime that mattered”; William was “forever worried by the possibility of plots, risings, and invasions.”Footnote 77
In this political climate, much attention was inevitably fixed on the English southeast coast. To some extent, this was a logical response, for it was through the Essex, Kent, and Sussex ports that most traffic with the continent—open and clandestine, loyal and treasonous—was channeled. For all the government knew, there was—as informants reported to the Earl of Nottingham in 1692—no place on that coast “that is not infested with ill minded people to the Government.”Footnote 78 It was here, therefore, that any attempt at preventing Jacobite designs was most promising. At least to a certain degree, however, attention to the domestic scene was also a makeshift response. Presumably William and his secretaries of state would have preferred to surveil Jacobite invasion schemes closer to their breeding ground at the Court of St. Germain. William's intelligence service was, however, comparably weak and ineffective.Footnote 79 In view of this deficiency, authorities focused their attention more closely on the domestic scene, which served the additional purposes of ascertaining the loyalty of officials at critical posts along the coast and providing—to use modern parlance—counterintelligence.
Throughout the first years of his reign, when William's grasp on the executive was still tenuous, such sensitivities were quickly picked up upon by mercenaries, informers, and adventurers of often dubious reputation, who unfailingly sensed the insecurities of the Williamite regime.Footnote 80 Among them is William Carter. At first sight, Carter seemingly only continued his preventive activity. Apart from his vigorous petitioning of the Treasury for payment of his debts, he continued to enforce the wool ban. In December 1690, he was granted for his efforts the assistance of four men with horses. In the same month, he was busy on the coast of Kent. In February and March 1691, Carter was ordered to be protected and encouraged in his activity by Privy Council and was even appointed messenger extraordinary for the prevention of wool smuggling.Footnote 81 Such endorsement of Carter's activity by the authorities was in line with his services in the 1680s, and yet it still looks odd, seeing that there were misgivings at the Treasury for continuing him further in government service.Footnote 82 Apparently, Carter had sensed the changing preferences at Court and had quickly adapted. In a petition to the king in the spring of 1691, he had shifted the weight of his argument from the exclusive focus on the problem of wool that his earlier writings displayed to an express concern with French and Jacobite designs. Despite efforts to prevent this, he maintained, the French king held correspondence with “Ill affected” English subjects, while “Dangerous Corresponding” was carried on that provided ample opportunities for disaffected persons to come and go in and out of England as they pleased.Footnote 83 Whether he was interested in such activity or not, Carter was clearly willing to make his case by whatever means available and had easily picked up on suspected links between smuggling and Jacobitism. Beginning in spring 1691, he was employed as an agent of the Earl of Nottingham during the earl's first tenure as secretary of state. In this role, Carter commissioned agents to conduct journeys into France and to provide Nottingham with intelligence about the French fleets and garrisons.Footnote 84 As Rachel Weil has noted, Carter effectively tried to frame wool smuggling as a “security issue” to further his own interests, albeit with varying degrees of success.Footnote 85
To the authorities, such an ambiguous position may have been less troubling than Weil suggests, for to the men in office and their agents on the ground, smuggling and traitorous correspondence were two sides of the same coin that could, ideally, be countered by the same methods. Both Paul Hopkins and Paul Monod have noted that in contemporary imagination—if not always in reality—the hatching of Jacobite plots and the running of contraband were inextricably linked.Footnote 86 To stop the latter was to seriously weaken opportunities for the former, many observers believed. And yet the degree to which contemporary responses and practical institutional solutions to such problems seamlessly mixed both issues has so far escaped attention. To many contemporary observers, these were not separate issues. For them, fighting the smuggling trade provided the government with a grasp on something real as a means to prevent something more serious, yet much more elusive. This is not to say that such men did not, as Carter obviously did, have their own agendas in proposing schemes of prevention. Yet beyond those individual interests and on a more abstract level, the genesis of schemes for systematic coastal prevention can unmistakably be found in counterintelligence schemes. Both were fixated on ideas of prevention and coastal surveillance.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Richard Kingston. Previously studied for his role as a notorious figure in Jacobite intelligence, he has many connections to ideas of coastal prevention.Footnote 87 According to Hopkins, Kingston was “the best agent the Government ever had,” whereas Weil has highlighted his dodgy profile.Footnote 88 He worked for several highly placed officials around William, such as his trusted advisor, the Earl of Portland, and several of the secretaries of state such as Nottingham, the Duke of Shrewsbury, John Trenchard, and William Trumbull. In this role, he infiltrated Jacobite networks and provided intelligence of their activities to the government.Footnote 89 In July 1695, he was, however, also sent on a tour to inspect the English south coast from London to Brighton. Chiefly this was “to settle your Honour [i.e., Nottingham] a correspondence there,”Footnote 90 yet he also reported on the loyalty of the officers and the state of the forts along the coast, both of which appeared to him “much perverted.” Jacobite plots were so advanced, he claimed, that only “the extraordinary care of the Government can prevent it.” Such issues he directly related to the smuggling trade that neither the Customs officers nor the dragoons stationed on that coast were, he asserted, able or willing to prevent. Those smugglers in fact “glory in being called Jacobites” and “drive this common trade of smugling persons as well as goods.”Footnote 91 In his assessment, therefore, smuggling and treason were closely related. This perception also informed his proposals for a solution.
Already in 1692, the Earl of Portland had forwarded to the hand of Nottingham “suggestions for an intelligence service” that were probably Kingston's. Among other things, he proposed a watch on the roads toward the borders of Scotland “as also on the sea-coasts, from Gravesend along, what lyes towards France,” which could be effected cheaply, if the revenue officers could be made to undertake such things.Footnote 92 In another set of proposals for Secretary of State William Trumbull from 1695, Kingston and a Captain Barron developed a more elaborate way of policing that same stretch of coast.Footnote 93 A ship was to be stationed at Gravesend to search all ships, including English and Dutch men-of-war. With this, “great service” would be performed, “both in respect of the better security of his Majesties Customs and the more effectually preventing the escape of dangerous persons.” Moreover, as it was obvious that both evils flourished due to the “negligence or disaffection” of the Customs officers, it was necessary to encourage these officers with rewards, remind them of their duties, and further to “cause frequent surveys upon the coast” and a “strict inspection” of such officers. The civil magistrates needed to be encouraged to support such duties where possible, troops needed to be stationed on the seacoast, and ships had to be ordered to cruise coastal waters. Above all, such a setup required—as a form of supervision and control—a superior officer in charge of these operations. This newly formed office ought to “have the Character of Surveyor General of the Coast of Kent and Sussex.” All these measures were—rather emphatically—meant “for the better obstructing the owling trade and this other of Intelligence which for the most part are inseparable.”Footnote 94
To be clear, the significance of these proposals does not lie in the practical measures they proposed. Some of that, in the form of orders, personnel, and tactics, was already in place. In September 1690, William had ordered that officers of the Customs should not suffer persons to come and go into and out of England without passes.Footnote 95 The Wool Acts, moreover, provided that Customs officers were to prevent the running of goods, and these commands had been revived by way of royal proclamation.Footnote 96 Privy Council had also ordered justices of the peace to enforce these laws, and had advised the Admiralty to have ships cruise on the south coast in February 1690 and again in August.Footnote 97 From as early as 1690, there was talk of involving the militia in the defense of the coast.Footnote 98 It was ordered, moreover, that companies of dragoons should be stationed at various posts along the coast such as Romney Marsh.Footnote 99 Nottingham engaged personally in this task, using Abraham Stock, the postmaster at Dover and his trusted agent, to devise the best ways of placing these soldiers. Specifically, these dragoons were to assist the Customs officers in Kent.Footnote 100 Moreover, in many of these measures the same blurring of the lines between coastal prevention and counterintelligence is visible. The few riding officers already on coast duty since spring 1690 were ordered in 1696 to help find three suspected persons on the coast. They were, however, to keep this a secret and to “give it out” that they were after “seizing of goods not persons.”Footnote 101 There are in fact a number of individuals whose service for the government sat somewhere between the two tasks. Carter is one example, and so is Stock, who, aside from his service as postmaster and trusted informer to Nottingham, also provided the latter with intelligence regarding movements of the French fleets or carried out more specific tasks such as an inquiry into suspicious tampering with the Dungeness lighthouse.Footnote 102 Telling is also the case of John Macky, a Scotsman, who informed Nottingham and Portland of the French invasion plans in 1692. As a reward, he was made riding surveyor on the coast near Harwich to discover and apprehend “dangerous persons.” Some years later, he was put in charge of the Dover packet service.Footnote 103 On the whole, it is clear that some elements of what Barron and Kingston had in mind were already in place by 1695. But their ideas signaled the necessity for a new approach that government officials could not overlook. Macky in fact proposed a similar scheme for coastal surveillance to Trumbull in 1695. Again concerned chiefly with the prevention of “Correspondence with France,” his ideas were intricately connected to wool smuggling, for he suggested that because of the obvious connections between the crimes, the Wool Bill being discussed in Parliament should include provisions against correspondence. Apart from more vigorous legal penalties and a systematic surveillance of passengers, he too felt that customhouse officers were well placed to implement such provisions.Footnote 104
What the schemes from 1695—perhaps unintentionally—suggested was the necessity for a systematic, centrally organized approach to coastal surveillance. The current state of things was piecemeal, and it was dependent on the activities of a number of officials in different executive departments and with different informal agents. This was neither systematic nor accountable. Internal rivalries and party interests flourished.Footnote 105 Agents hired as spies often connived at smuggling, while others played a double game or ruthlessly pursued private interests.Footnote 106 Even Kingston and Barron agreed that this made for an ineffective approach. The second point that their proposals inadvertently stressed was that there was indeed no department better placed to serve both the interest of the revenue and the interest of internal security than the Customs. Not by accident, Trumbull, receiver of these schemes, forwarded them to the Treasury within days, suggesting that an “effectual course” with a view to the Customs should be considered.Footnote 107
“A More than Ordinary Watch upon the Coasts”
Given that in the quest to prevent Jacobite plots many eyes were fixed on the coast, it is no surprise that much pointed to the Customs. After all, fiscal pressures and lobbying for the wool interest—pressures coexistent with anxieties about internal security—pointed in the very same direction. And yet to think that the apprehension of suspected persons and the interception of Jacobite spies was a natural task of the Customs sits awkwardly with an understanding of the Customs as a primarily fiscal agency. It is important to stress, therefore, that already before 1689 this was not the case. Given that revenue is the only quantifiable Customs activity, it is tempting to reduce its activity (and efficiency) to numbers. Contemporaries, however, and historians like Elizabeth Hoon, Braddick, and even Brewer, were (if grudgingly) aware that the Customs was more than that.Footnote 108 Even in terms of economic policies, the implementation of trade laws, Navigation Acts, embargos and quarantines fell into Customs duties. Beyond the economic sphere, Customs officers assisted the press gangs or apprehended criminals. Most importantly, the Customs was an agency that employed hundreds of royal officers around the coasts of the kingdom, and both their loyalty to the crown and their influence in local affairs carried much weight. To be sure, the prevention of traitorous correspondence was an entirely different matter, and it is dubious that many would have seen this as a natural task of the Customs before William's reign. Yet William and his administration became increasingly persuaded that Jacobite plots were a problem at least partly linked to the coast and to the smuggling trade. Because of this link, schemes for preventing traitorous correspondence could hardly do without a reference to the officers of the Customs, conveniently placed in all the ports along the coast. The question is rather why, against this background, the Customs were not, in the first years of William's reign, at the center of efforts for coastal surveillance.
The answer is that William and his advisors did not believe the Customs to be very reliable. According to Weil, the Customs was a “weak link in England's defense against Jacobite infiltration.”Footnote 109 This unreliability was perhaps especially the case in the southeast, as local Customs officers were likely to be sympathetic to local trading interests entirely disrupted by the war with France—a disruption from which many local ports never recovered. Because Customs officers in general were also subjects with their own views on loyalty, moreover, the Customs administration—inherited, as other parts of the executive, from the previous monarch—caused much concern about sheltering Jacobites. In this regard, it was similar to concerns about the Post Office.Footnote 110 Godolphin, lord of the treasury for much of William's reign, expressed the opinion in 1694 that “the commission of the Customs cannot be made worse than it is at present.” There were board members who were corrupt or could credibly be linked to Jacobite sympathies. Similar concerns were expressed regarding parts of the wider Customs administration, and unsurprisingly, given that some commissioners had a known “bias towards employing under-officers disaffected to your [i.e., William's] government.”Footnote 111 Shrewsbury also believed that these under-offices were “filled generally with the most declared Jacobites of the country” and that therefore a change was “absolutely necessary in point of state.”Footnote 112 True as this was in the summer of 1694, the ensuing purge of the Customs posts must have improved William's opinion of its administration. To be sure, the purge was also a product of raging party conflict, as Godolphin observed.Footnote 113 And even after 1694 the Customs was not held in the highest of esteems in some quarters. Kingston, for his part, had little faith in the organization, suggesting to Nottingham that matters left to the Customs would inevitably be “slubberd over and come to nothing.”Footnote 114 Yet the trust placed in the administration in the following years suggests that the purge at least partly restored the faith in the Customs’ reliability.
In a way, therefore, the conditions for systematic coastal policing were only met by 1695. To some extent, the new situation clearly also reflects the changing party-political influences at the center of the government. Coastal measures were certainly discussed during Nottingham's tenure as secretary of state, not least the ones by Kingston, but it is worth noting that only when these same proposals came into Trumbull's hands in 1695 did the executive proceed to act on them. By 1695, moreover, the Customs, like most of the executive, was securely in the hands of the Whig Junto, which displayed much more eagerness to act against the threat of Jacobite infiltration and invasion than previous Tory ministers.Footnote 115 Although the executive was slow at first in stepping up its efforts, a new approach was gradually emerging. In 1696, Parliament passed a second Wool Act. It mainly increased the penalties on illicit trade without adding new practical measures, and yet it also made a passing mention of “a correspondence with France” that the smuggling trade encouraged.Footnote 116 In December 1696, provisions for a “more than Ordinary Watch upon the coasts of Kent & Sussex” were made “by the King's express Command” and ostensibly as a direct reaction to the schemes forwarded by Trumbull. The purpose of these provisions was “to prevent the Communication and passage of Intelligence and passengers to and from France.”Footnote 117 In January 1697, five new riding officers were appointed on the Kent coast “for preventing of Trade & correspondence with France.”Footnote 118 In February, Henry Baker, one of the solicitors of the Treasury, was appointed by the Treasury to supervise preventive measures against the wool trade on the Kent and Sussex coasts.Footnote 119 Just a few days later, early in March, Baker received an additional order from Trumbull. Here, the running of wool was once again understood to be an indicator of something more sinister. Baker was to prevent the “dangerous correspondence with the King's enemies” who used the illicit coastal traffic for their own designs.Footnote 120 Over the next months, Baker surveyed the coast repeatedly.Footnote 121 New riding officers were appointed, stricter orders given, and additional ships set on coastal cruises, until finally, in the autumn of 1699, a new systematic setup was introduced.Footnote 122
This new setup was—in its bureaucratic shape and geographic layout—ostensibly influenced by both security concerns and the wool interest. Henry Baker was appointed as surveyor general of the Coasts Kent and Sussex by King William—a title and station first conceived in the counterintelligence schemes from 1695.Footnote 123 And just as these schemes had advocated, the cordon of altogether more than fifty riding officers placed along the entire Kent and Sussex coast from Gravesend to Chichester was put under strict supervision and frequent surveys by especially appointed supervisors. In addition to the Customs ship at Gravesend, moreover, another three vessels were appointed to cruises at Dover, Rye, and Shoreham—again, an idea first voiced in the 1695 proposals by Kingston and Barron.Footnote 124 Solutions overtly meant for the enforcement of anti-smuggling legislation in 1698 and 1699 thus bore striking resemblances to ideas first formulated in counterintelligence schemes of 1695.
Similar concessions to the enforcement of the wool ban and the preoccupation with internal security are also reflected in the geographic layout of this new scheme. While reforms were afoot in Kent and Sussex, the Board of Customs and the Treasury also started to survey other parts of England and Wales. Among the first regions, the Scottish borders were reviewed by the collectors at Berwick and Carlisle.Footnote 125 Formerly, the borders were inspected by officers of the Customs and Excise men of the respective collections. In February 1698, a surveyor had been appointed to supervise these efforts; now this was complemented with another set of riding officers.Footnote 126 Around the same time, the western ports—Portsmouth, Southampton, the Isle of Wight, Weymouth, Exeter, and the ports all the way down the Devon coast and around the Cornish peninsula including Dartmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, Penzance, and St. Ives—were put under stricter guard. In September 1699, additions were made on the Lincolnshire coast;Footnote 127 in December, additional officers were appointed in the ports from Beaumaris in northern Wales to Carlisle on the borders;Footnote 128 in November 1701, the coast from Newcastle to Bridlington also received extra preventive officers for the “better Guard of the several Rivers, Bays & Creeks”;Footnote 129 finally, occasional appointments were also made in Hampshire, Dorset, Devon, and Norfolk.Footnote 130 All these officers were complemented by a new scheme of fourteen Customs ships for the entire Welsh and English coastline that were to guard—rather Anglo-centrically—“the whole Coast of England.”Footnote 131
With these measures, the Customs commissioners and the Treasury perhaps reacted to concerns expressed by Henry Baker and the Board of Trade that the successful suppression of smuggling in Kent and Sussex was likely to push the smugglers elsewhere.Footnote 132 A closer look at such appointments reveals, however, that the bulk of government spending in these reforms remained concentrated on Kent, Sussex, and the Scottish Borders. The scheme for a comprehensive watch by Customs ships was not, at this stage, implemented beyond Kent and Sussex.Footnote 133 Appointments in the West, East Anglia, and Wales, moreover, tended to be cosmetic: rather than new appointments, these regions either saw existing funds reallocated to preventive officers or were granted officers who combined preventive tasks with port business.Footnote 134 The reforms, in other words, remained concentrated on those regions in the south and the far north that were linked to the illicit export of wool. These were the same regions, moreover, that were havens of Jacobite sentiments among the landed gentry and conveniently placed for traitorous correspondence, as Monod has shown.Footnote 135
When the new scheme for a “more than Ordinary Watch upon the coasts” came to full fruition over the course of 1699, there is no clear statement why this was done. The wool ban and the Jacobite threat seamlessly mixed or were used interchangeably as the main purpose of the coastal police. Just as Carter had done before, the wool manufacturers and traders cited the Jacobite threat as an additional reason for enforcing the wool ban. And the woolen lobby in Parliament was certainly unrelenting; after 1696, another three Wool Acts were passed.Footnote 136 Moreover, the Board of Trade, evaluating English trade balances and the importance of the wool trade, readily agreed that something needed to be done to prevent the losses to the kingdom's wealth.Footnote 137 Visible increases in smuggling and illegal trade with French goods supported such a view. The import ban on certain French goods after 1695 in fact further increased the profitability of smuggling, for it provided illicit exporters of wool with a valuable cargo for their return journey to England.Footnote 138 These developments also help explain why the end of the war in 1697 and the end of the immediate threat of military invasion did not stop the push for institutional reforms in the Customs with a view to the coast: the initiative, born in the midst of war, had taken on a life of its own and could convincingly be linked to fiscal and mercantile interests not immediately connected to the war.
The Jacobite threat, on the other hand, did not immediately disappear with the end of the war either. James II was still alive and, in the absence of security in the question of succession, his claim to the throne continued to be a threat. Tensions with France, moreover, never entirely abated between Ryswick and the death of Charles II of Spain.Footnote 139 It is likely, therefore, that William and his government continued to be worried about Jacobite plots and invasion plans with a view to Kent and Sussex. The unsuccessful yet no less frightening Jacobite plot of 1696 to assassinate the king and the uncovering of a seemingly enormous Huguenot smuggling network in 1698 could easily be understood as calling for more systematic efforts at preventing traitorous correspondence with the king's enemies.Footnote 140 Tellingly, it was only in Kent and Sussex that the preventive service of the Customs was consistently complemented by Admiralty cruisers and troops of dragoons.Footnote 141 If smuggling was the foremost concern in government circles, then notorious regions such as East Anglia—open to clandestine trade from the Dutch Republic—would not have been excluded from the strict coastal crackdown visible in Kent and Sussex. On the surface, such measures still answered the need to fight the owling trade. After all, the geographical focus on Kent and Sussex also served the interest of the “wool interest,” as it subjected a region with many wool growers—naturally interested in an additional market overseas—to the interest of clothiers mainly in the southwest and East Anglia who needed cheap wool for domestic manufacturing.Footnote 142 And yet the instructions to Baker, his detailed accounts, and the occasional comment in the Treasury and the Board of Customs illustrate that “intelligence and correspondence with France” continued to be an important concern after 1697.Footnote 143
It is impossible then, in the final analysis, to isolate fiscal pressures, the wool ban, or the Jacobite threat as the sole cause for institutional reforms, especially when the evidence is circumstantial, and statements tend to be equivocal. The wool lobby was happy to link its own concerns to political sensitivities in the executive. The ministers, on the other hand, appeared more than willing to grasp an opportunity that had the benefit of pleasing the merchants and traders and their representatives in Parliament, which carried the (however faint) additional hope, expressed by the Board of Trade, of increasing English trade balances and presented itself at the same time as a convenient tool for heightening their own sense of security vis-à-vis Jacobitism.
Conclusion
In the quarter ending midsummer 1688—the last months of James's reign—the number of preventive officers in the Customs department was 3.4 percent in relation to the total numbers of Customs staff.Footnote 144 In the quarter ending midsummer 1697—in the months before the Peace of Ryswick, when fighting had stopped—those same numbers are not very different: preventive numbers were at 3.7 percent. Moreover, the overall growth of the Customs department was similar to the modest growth in preventive staff, as the figures in table 1 show. The real divergence follows after 1697. In the quarter ending midsummer 1702—just after William's death in March—preventive staff made for 13.1 percent of the numbers and 16.4 percent of the costs of the Customs establishment. This increase is even more striking if one excludes the London establishment—with its costly central office—from the equation: compared to the overall outport numbers, the preventive service accounted for 17 percent of the numbers and 24.6 percent of the costs. To put it differently, while the department had grown from 1,202 officials in 1688 to 1,727 officials in 1702, the preventive staff accounted for more than 35 percent of that growth. From a few riding surveyors and Customs smacks in 1688, numbering forty-one in total, the service had swollen to 227 officers in 1702. Striking as these numbers are, they are a conservative estimate. For reasons of clarity, they include only officers solely devoted to coastal duties and do not account for the growing number of port officers equipped with horses and boats to perform additional coastal duties. Also, they include only Customs staff registered on the official establishment list and do not account for the large number of officers paid by incident.Footnote 145 The real proportions were, if anything, higher. After William's reign, the numbers still show a modest rise, but those at the end of Anne's reign—in 1714—indicate a stagnation of growth both in total and preventive staff.
Table 1 Customs staff numbers and costs, 1685–1714
° Total costs for the respective midsummer quarter, rounded sums in £. Whenever proportions of preventive costs exclusively to outport costs are given in the text, the costs of the smacks on the London establishment (typically at Gravesend) are excluded.
All the above figures are drawn from TNA CUST18/19, 18/25, 18/40, 18/59, 18/105.
While bare figures reveal little about the causes of such developments, the numbers still support my arguments. The reign of William saw profound changes to the revenue service of the Customs, most notably the establishment of a preventive coastal police within the span of just a few years. The correlation of this development to the war and to fiscal demands, however, is far from straightforward. For one thing, the decisive changes occurred after the war. Secondly, preventive staff was costly and therefore prone to diminish Customs returns. Of the overall rise in establishment costs from 1688 to 1702, preventive staff accounted for 42 percent. Consistently, the establishment lists show that preventive staff—with highly salaried riding officers and costly Customs smacks—was much more expensive in relation to their numbers than port staff. Their share of costs is always higher than their proportion in numbers.Footnote 146 Moreover, they were much less productive in fiscal terms than regular port staff. They did not collect duties. Returns, if any, came in the form of penalties on the import or export of prohibited or highly taxed goods, but these were contingent on successful condemnation in the Exchequer, itself a costly and uncertain procedure. Given that smuggling in the 1690s concerned mainly the import of French goods and the export of wool, both of which were prohibited, Customs returns by way of legal import or export were still not going to rise even if the preventive service was successful in its task. Fiscally, the preventive service did not pay off. The general attitude of the Treasury after 1698—when changes were inevitably underway—supports this view. They were extremely reluctant to expend more than strictly necessary for the service. They repeatedly declined to establish a systematic Customs cruisers scheme due to its cost.Footnote 147 They stubbornly haggled with Baker over the costs of his scheme of riding officers and attempted to cut the costs at all corners.Footnote 148 From their point of view, this was only sensible. When Baker's reduced scheme was finally adopted, it still cost £4,880 per annum, roughly 8 percent of the entire establishment in 1699.Footnote 149 To be sure, Baker made substantial seizures and was fairly successful in court,Footnote 150 but the money necessarily extended toward prosecution and the uncertainty of returns still made for an unreliable base of income.
Contrary to the general view of the Customs in this period, therefore, changes in the department cannot solely be attributed to fiscal pressures. More tariffs certainly accentuated the need for stricter enforcement, which in turn required more staff. The heavy investment in a coastal police that accounted for over a third of the overall growth in the Customs and whose fiscal balance was prone to be negative must, as this article has shown, be attributed to a combination of other factors. The woolen interest—bolstered, as it was, by a strengthened Parliament—and concerns at Court and in the highest political offices about the dangers of Jacobite infiltration each contributed to reforms in the revenue departments. To isolate one of these factors as decisive remains difficult. Perhaps intentionally, statements from each interested party tended to be equivocal: just as the clothiers and wool manufacturers claimed that such efforts would also improve the internal security of the Williamite regime, politicians at court recognized that creating a coastal police against elements subverting the regime had the additional benefit of pleasing an important fraction of the merchant community and an important interest group in Parliament. With the realization, around 1695, that stricter coastal policing was politically called for—driven home by the events of 1696 and 1698—the subsequent dedication of resources to Kent, Sussex, and the Scottish Borders reflected both concerns equally. The exact shape of this new branch of the Customs was clearly modeled on schemes first conceived in counterintelligence plans, and for a time, this may have been the overriding concern in the executive. But the government was prudent enough to see the opportunity for killing two birds with one stone.
All this is not to say that coastal policing did not benefit fiscal objectives in the long run. When smuggling shifted—by the eighteenth century—to goods such as tea, tobacco, or brandy, the government's revenue was much more directly at stake.Footnote 151 At the moment of its inception, however, other motives prevailed, and these initial motives frequently resurfaced during subsequent decades.Footnote 152 Bearing this background in mind ultimately helps to see the preventive service and the Customs in a different light. Rather than portraying the Customs as an economically inadequate and fiscally deficient agency when measured against fiscal-military parameters, its failure to meet those standards perhaps calls for a questioning of these parameters. Any reduction to solely fiscal concerns understates the range of activities of a supposedly fiscal agency such as the Customs and, by extension, oversimplifies the complexities of the origins of the fiscal-military state. After all, even during the 1690s, the growth of state institutions was possible where no additional revenue was to be achieved and where such growth went directly against the dominant urge for a positive fiscal balance sheet.
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