History of the British national debt both government borrowing and the national debt have risen dramatically, reaching around 70% of GDP by the end of 2012. The origins of the British national debt can be found during the reign of William III, who engaged a syndicate of City traders and merchants to offer for sale an issue of government debt. This syndicate soon evolved into the Bank of England, eventually financing the wars of the Duke of Marlborough and later Imperial conquests. The establishment of the bank was devised by Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, in 1694, to the plan which had been proposed by
Angevin kings of England the Cathedral", an exploration of Becket's death and Eliot's religious interpretation of it. During the Tudor period, popular representations of John emerged. He appeared as a "proto-Protestant martyr" in the anonymous play "The Troublesome Reign of King John" and John Bale's morality play "Kynge Johan", in which John attempts to save England from the "evil agents of the Roman Church". Shakespeare's anti-Catholic "King John" draws on "The Troublesome Reign", offering a "balanced, dual view of a complex monarch as both a proto-Protestant victim of Rome's machinations and as a weak, selfishly motivated ruler". Anthony Munday's plays "The Downfall and The