CHAP. I. the United Kingdom. A little more than one hundred govern It required, however, a long series of lessons before the people of England learned that the only guarantee for the constitutional rule of a sovereign lay in the retention of the power of the purse by the people: and that, so long as the revenues were granted absolutely to a king, the king would be free to govern in his own way. The worst evils of the old financial system were reproduced on the restoration of Charles II., and some of them were, in fact, intensified by the Parliament of the day. A CHAP. I. The Ex Parliament of landlords was naturally anxious to relieve the land of the country from the burden of feudal incidents, and Charles II. offered to abandon the emoluments of signiory for 100,000l. a year. The feudal incidents had constituted a landlord's burden, and justice therefore required that the compensating impost should be raised by a direct tax on land. Unfortunately, however, the Parliament had before it the example of an excise. The excise had originally been introduced in Holland, where cise. no article was either too insignificant or too costly to escape the impost of the exciseman. Half seriously, half in jest, it was stated that in that country the dish of fish and its sauce had paid the duty thirty times before it was sent up to the table. It was certain that a tax, so universal in its application and so productive in its results, would be ultimately extended to other countries, and both royalists and parliamentarians had, as a matter of fact, recourse to it during the Civil War. Both parties, indeed, were loud in their declarations that the tax should be terminated at the close of the war. All unpopular taxes, when first proposed, are usually granted under a similar promise. The promise, when the nation is accustomed to the burden, is forgotten: the usefulness of the tax alone is remembered. So was it with the excise. At the Restoration the landlords desired to escape from some disagreeable burdens. The king was ready to relieve them if he were only compensated. Justice required that the compensation should be found in a tax on land. Interest suggested the expediency of shifting the burden on to the consumer. By a very narrow majority of only two votes the latter alternative was preferred, and a moiety of the excise was settled on the crown. The bargain, however unjust to the people, proved profitable to the king. The moiety of the excise increased rapidly in value, till, at the close of Charles II.'s reign, it yielded three times the sum for which the CHAP. king had originally offered to surrender his claim to the feudal incidents. I. The Cus toms. In the days of the Stuarts the excise formed the most important branch of the king's revenue. The customs duties were, however, far more ancient, and hardly less profitable. Some authorities have derived the name from the antiquity of the tax-the 'custom' or use, which formally gave it to the king. Customs, under the name of prisage and butlerage, were paid to the kings of England after the Conquest. Prisage was the right of purchasing, at the moderate price of 20s. a tun, one tenth of the wine imported in English vessels into England. Butlerage was a duty of 2s. a tun on every tun of wine, to which foreign importers, in consideration of their exemption from prisage, were liable. Both these duties dated from the reign of Richard I. The customs, to use the word in its larger and usual sense, were of later origin. The custuma antiqua et magna comprised the export duties on the three staple commodities of the kingdom, wool, skins, and leather. The custuma parva et nova, or tunnage and poundage, as they were commonly called, duties on every tun of wine imported or every pound of merchandise exported, were originally imposed on aliens only, though they were subsequently exacted also from British citizens. The lesser customs could only be levied with the consent of Parliament; the greater customs were the inherent right of the crown. When Edward I. promised to take no customs from merchants without the consent of the realm, he added the significant words, saving to us and our heirs the customs on wool, skins, and leather, formerly granted to us by the commonalty aforesaid.' But after the Restoration, when the rates of the great customs had been increased, the whole of the customs duties were placed on a common footing, The derivation is so given in Johnson's Dict.; the old Norman French coustume being the immediate root of the word. and were all of them included in the permanent Revenue СНАР. of the crown. 1. Branches The customs were farmed by John for 1,000 marks, or 2,000l. a year. In the reign of his successor they amounted to 6,000l. But the amount was said to be injurious to trade. In 1590 Elizabeth raised the farm, which was then held by Sir Thomas Smith, from 14,000l.1 to 50,000l. a year. But the yield of the duties rose rapidly afterwards. On James I.'s accession it amounted to 127,000l.; and, at the close of his reign, it had reached 190,000l.2 It is stated, though probably incorrectly, that, at the outbreak of the Civil War, it had been increased to 500,000l. It was estimated at the period of the Revolution at 577,000l. a year. At the Other time of the Revolution the entire revenue of the State of the Reonly slightly exceeded 1,600,000l. a year. The customs venue. and the excise together contributed very nearly 1,200,000l. of this amount. The only other branches of importance were the hearth money and the Post Office. The former produced 200,000l.; the latter about 55,000l. a year.3 Hearth money was a very ancient tax, but a very unpopular one. It is mentioned in Domesday Book under the name of fumage or fuage, and consequently must have existed before the Conquest. It had, however, long fallen into disuse, when it was revived after the restoration of Charles II. It was a tax of 28. on each hearth on all houses paying to church and poor; and was of course very burdensome to the poorer householders. It was 1 The amount is given by Philips as 13,0007.,and by Camden as 14,000. Naunton simply says that the amount was doubled; and Sinclair, from whom these references are taken, conceives that the 14,000l. of Camden is a mistake in the translation, and that 24,000l. ought to have been written. Vide Hist. of Revenue, 3rd ed. vol. i. p. 207, note. 2 Hist. of Revenue, vol. i. pp. 100, 104, 235, 324, 326. McCulloch, ad verb. Customs. McCulloch on Taxation, p. 227. Hume's Hist. of England, vol. v. p. 474. 3 These figures are taken from Commons Journals, 1688, pp. 37, 38. They are given differently in the return of 1869, where the temporary and expired revenue is included. CHAP. abolished, at William III.'s own instance, immediately after the Revolution.1 I. The Re venue not settled in 1689. Such is a brief review of the revenue of this country at the period at which it may first be said to have had a revenue. Almost the first act of the Convention Parliament, after the Revolution of 1688, was to consider whether the revenue had devolved on William and Mary. No one, as Macaulay has pointed out, doubted that the lands and hereditaments of the crown had passed with the crown to the new sovereigns." But the income, derivable from the lands and hereditaments of the crown, was inconsiderable in comparison with that which was drawn from the customs and excise. William himself was pardonably anxious to obtain uncontrolled possession of the whole of this revenue. Holt, who almost immediately afterwards was made chief justice of the King's Bench; Pollexfen, who, after serving for a few weeks as attorneygeneral, was made chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas; Treby, who succeeded Pollexfen as attorneygeneral-all took the king's side. They maintained that the revenue was subjected to the same regulations as private property; that, having been granted to James for the purposes of government during his life, it could not be alienated from that purpose, or follow him after he had deserted his public trust; but that, while he lived, it belonged to the person substituted in his official state.'s Fortunately for the country, a greater man than any of these three saw through the legal technicalities in which they were assiduously wrapping up the subject. Somers, who had already become the life, the soul, the spirit' of the Whig party, argued for there seems to be no doubt that Macaulay and Campbell have supplied a correct interpretation of the purport of a speech which has come 3 Somerville, Political Transactions, pp. 267, 268. Campbell's Lives of Chief Justices, vol. ii. p. 133. |