Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/397

] date, namely, in the reigns of king William and queen Anne. Bloomsbury, and the streets at the Seven Dials, were built up somewhat later, as also Leicester Fields, since the restoration of Charles II., as also almost all of St. James's and St. Anne's parishes, and a great part of St. Martin's and St. Giles's. I have met with several old persons in my younger days who remembered that there was but a single house, a cake-house, between the Mews-gate at Charing Cross and St. James's Palace-gate, where now stand the stately piles of St. James's Square, Pall Mall, and other fine streets. They also remembered the west side of St. Martin's Lane to have been a quickset hedge; yet High Holborn and Drury Lane were tilled with noblemen's and gentlemen's houses and gardens almost a hundred and fifty years ago. Those five streets of the south side of the Strand, running down to the river Thames, have all been built since the beginning of the seventeenth century upon the sites of noblemen's houses and gardens, who removed further westward, as their names denote. Even some parts within the bare of the city of Lounou remained unbuilt within about a hundred and fifty years past, particularly all the ground between Shoe Lane and Fewters, now Fetter Lane, so called, says Howell in his Londonopolis, from Fewters, an old appellation of idle people loitering there, as in a way leading to gardens; which, in Charles I.'s reign, and even some of them since, have been built up into streets, lanes, &c. Several other parts of the city have been rendered more populous by the removal of the nobility to Westminster, on the sites of whose former spacious houses and gardens whole streets, lanes, and courts have been added to the city since the death of queen Elizabeth."

The extension of the metropolis necessitate<l the introduction of hackney coaches, which first began to ply, but only twelve in number, in 1625. In 1634 sedan-chairs were introduced to relieve the streets of the rapidly increased number of hackney-coaches, and other carriages; and in 1635 a post-office for the kingdom was established, a foreign post having been for some years in existence. Li 1653 the post was farmed for ten thousand pounds a year.

NATIONAL REVENUE, MONEY, AND COINAGE.

The annual revenue of James I. has been calculated at about six hundred thousand pounds, yet he was always poor, and died leaving debts to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds. He was prodigal to his favourites, and wasteful in his habits. He left the estates of the crown, however, better than he found them, having raised their annual income from thirty-two thousand pounds to eighty thousand pounds, besides having sold lands to the amount of seven hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. He still prosecuted the exactions of purveyance, wardship, &c., to the great anoyanceannoyance [sic] of his subjects. On the occasion of his son being made a knight, he raised a tax on every knight's fee of twenty shillings, and on every twenty pounds of annual rent from lands held directly of the crown, thus raising twenty-one thousand eight hundred pounds; and on the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to the prince Palatine, he levied an aid of twenty thousand five hundred pounds, the last of these odious impositions which were demanded. The customs on his coming to the throne brought in one hundred and twenty-seven thousand pounds a year; but towards the end of his reign, showing the great increase of commerce, they amounted to one hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year. But this was the tonnage and poundage which was so hateful to the nation, and which James had greatly augmented by his own act and deed; an encroachment which caused parliament to refuse to his son Charles the usual grant of those duties for life; and his persistence in levying them, in spite of parliament, was one of the chief causes of his quarrel with that body, and the loss of his crown.

James was also a great trader in titles of nobility. His price for a barony was ten thousand pounds, for the title of viscount, twenty thousand pounds, and for that of an earl, thirty thousand pounds. He also invented the new title of baronet, and raised two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds by it, at the rate of one thousand and ninety-five pounds each baronetcy. From so dignified a source do many of our aristocracy derive their honours.

Charles, though he was driven to such fatal extremities to extort money from his subjects, Ls calculated to have realized the enormous revenue from 1637 to 1611 inclusive, of eight hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds, of which two hundred and ten thousand pounds arose from ship-money and other illegal sources. Both he and his father dealt in wholesale monopolies to their courtiers and others, the profits of which were so embezzled by those greedy and unprincipled men, that Clarendon says that of two hundred thousand pounds of such income in Charles's time, only one thousand five hundred pounds reached the royal treasury. Charles raised two hundred thousand pounds in 1626 by a forced loan, and another hundred thousand by exacting the fees or compensation for exemption from the assumption of knighthood by every person worth forty pounds a year.

The income and expenditure of the commonwealth are stated to have far exceeded those of any monarch who ever sate on the throne of these realms, and to have been not less than four million four hundred thousand pounds per annum. The post-office, as already stated, brought in ten thousand pounds per annum. A singular tax, called the Weekly Meal, or the price of a meal a week from each person, produced upwards of one hundred thousand pounds a year, or six hundred and eight thousand four hundred pounds in the six years during which it was levied. There was a weekly assessment for the support of the war, which rose from thirty-eight thousand pounds to one hundred and twenty thousand pounds per week, which was continued as a land-tax under the protectorate, producing from 1640 to 1659 no less than thirty-two million one hundred and seventy-two thousand three hundred and twenty-one pounds. The excise also owes its origin to this period, and produced, it is said, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Large sums were realised by the sales of crown and church lands. From the sale of crown lands, parks, &c., one million eight hundred and fifty-eight thousand pounds; from the sale of church lands, ten million pounds; from sequestration of the revenue of the clergy for four years, three million five hundred thousand pounds; eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds from the incomes of office sequestered for the public service; four million five hundred thousand pounds from the sequestration of private estates or compositions for them; one million pounds from compositions with delinquents in Ireland; three million five