History of the British national debt History of the British national debt The history of the British national debt can be traced back to the reign of William III, who engaged a syndicate of City traders and merchants to offer for sale an issue of government debt, which evolved into the Bank of England. In 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, British government debt reached a peak of £1 billion (that was more than 200% of GDP). At the beginning of the 20th century the national debt had been gradually reduced to around 30 percent of GDP. However, during World War I the British
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