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Sale 46
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Lot 366
Great Britain. Crown, 1723-SSC. S-3640; Dav-1346; ESC-114; KM-545.2. George I, 1714-1727. DECIMO on edge. SSC in angles. Sharply struck and well centered with excellent luster and beautiful, light to medium reddish gold and blue toning. An exceptionally high-grade example of a George I Crown, and virtually as struck. NGC graded MS-63.
King of Great Britain from 1714-1727, even more famously Elector of Hanover and veteran of the Spanish War of Succession, George I inherited the British throne by default, as spelled out in the provisions of the Act of Settlement -- which limited the occupant to Protestants only, and had selected his mother the Empress Sophia to be succeeding Queen of England. However, she died before the throne could pass to her, and thus it was left to George. He was personally unpopular with his new subjects because he spent little time in England (preferring his residence in Hanover), because of his German manners, because of his German mistresses, because of his treatment of his divorced wife, and because of his refusal to learn or speak English. And yet, curiously, he was embraced by the English nation, who collectively were well satisfied that he embodied stability, and in effect became a guarantee that the Roman Catholic Stuarts would not recapture the throne of Great Britian. Doesn't his portrait's demeanor on this coin just seem to capture the essence of his taciturn personality?
While politics took a muted place in the land thanks to the parliamentary law of succession, and religion no longer brought embattlement at home, George reigned at a time when the open seas were a lawless expanse, and bucaneers (sanctioned pirates) raided the shipping of contending countries. In the English navy, seamen ordinary and extraordinary were rewarded for capturing enemy ships with rations of the cargo. Most cargo was simply common goods. The prize all were after was specie -- gold and silver -- and in the case of English raiders gold and silver being brought home from the New World by Spanish galleons. Most famous among these prizes were the seizures of precious Spanish booty at Vigo Bay in 1702/3 by Queen Anne's navy, and the capture by Admiral Anson off the Philippines in 1745/6 of eleven Spanish ships full of bullion mined at Lima, Peru. The specie so captured was taken in the same ships, now bearing the English flag, back to Southampton port, and from there paraded to London with great fanfare, and hallmarked by the Royal Mint, famously to numismatists, to mark those great naval triumphs. Also in the news at the time was the silver "captured" by the Crown from the infamous South Seas Company of London, a ghost of an enterprise which caused one of the world's earliest stock market bubbles. The little actual value held by the company, which fleeced investors in the early 1720s, was seized and turned into English coinage, specially marked to demonstrate to a faint public that no such illegality would be tolerated with impunity. Few large silver crowns were made bearing the resulting SSC hallmark, and fewer still have survived that are equal to this fabulous memento of the times.
Estimated Value $4,000 - 5,000.
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