One of the most interesting coinages for Colonial America came in the 1720s, when William Wood obtained permission from the king to strike coins in England for shipment to America. The story is a tangled one of a royal mistress, murder, bribery, and coins that were ridiculed by one of the most famous English writers.
Coins were a rare commodity in the early American colonies, primarily because the London government made little effort to supply the colonists with ready money. In all fairness to the British, however, coined money was seldom plentiful in Britain either. The Americans began using paper money as early as the 1690s in an effort to provide some form of currency to the public but, like most such attempts, the issues had a tendency to depreciate rather quickly.
The coins struck for America in the 1720s by entrepreneur William Wood had their distant beginnings in the small German duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, better known as the Electorate of Hanover. In 1714 Queen Anne of England died without leaving an heir and the throne passed to her German relation in Hanover, Georg (George) Ludwig.
Georg’s father was Ernst August and he had ruled Hanover until his death in 1698. The successor was Georg, who had married Sophia Dorotea in 1682 but the marriage was not exactly a pleasant one; Sophia had an eye for other male companionship, notably
