Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/188

 178 FINANCE Yorkist ascendency. That it was exceedingly unpopular is shown by an Act of Richard III. s single parliament, in which benevolences were declared illegal. The successors of the usurper pretended to treat this statute as inoperative since it was enacted during au illegal government. Henry VII. and his successors constantly supplemented their revenues by benevolences. Chancellor Morton s fork, by which parsimonious and expensive opulence were equally invited to aid the king s necessities, the one out of savings, the other out of expenditure, is well known. The practice continued down to the eve of the Long Parliament, if indeed it can be said to have ceased, as far as the Royalist party was concerned, before the final collapse of Charles I. s fortunes at Naseby. It was a commonplace with the courtiers of the day that the king might, if he wished, take the subject s wealth without asking leave. On the other hand, they who refused professed that they were restrained from giving by the anathemas of the Great Charter, by which those were denounced who violated any of the provisions which the Great Charter contained, and notably that by which common assent must be accorded to taxation. Anticipations of revenue by loans were common. The foolish project of Henry III., which was set on foot in order to secure the throue of Sicily for his second son, more accurately in order to enable the pope to crush the reigning members of the house of Swabia, loaded the king with debt, and, forcing him to consult his nobles as to the means of liquidating his obligations, gave an occasion for Simon de Montfort s abortive political and financial reforms. The long wars of Edward III. compelled him to make loans, and ultimately to repudiate his debts; and we are told that his bankruptcy brought down some of the most opulent financial houses in Florence. Henry VIII., who squandered the enormous treasure which his father had accumulated, and afterwards the great personal estates of the church, and finally its lands, reputed, and perhaps with reason, to have been, in the wealthiest age of its existence, one-third of the fertile land in the kingdom, constantly incurred large debts, from which he was relieved by his obsequious parliaments. Charles and his son incurred debts which were never paid, and Macaulay does not misstate the case when he says that public debt was not incurred for the first time at the Revolution ; what did happen was the satisfaction of the obligation to pay the interest and, if possible, the principal. One of the financial expedients of the Middle Ages, and indeed of much later times, was a depreciation of the cur rency by means of issues which, nominally of the same value with an older issue, were intrinsically below it. This is not the place in which one might point out how disastrous and suicidal a policy it is to tamper with the currency, how mischievously the forces of Government are employed when they undertake this kind of fraud, and how enduring are the calamities which result from so great a political crime. Not a little of the stability and progress of Eng land has been due to the fact that dishonesty on the part of Government in dealing falsely with the currency has been a very rare offence, has, indeed, been committed only within a short but continuous period. The evil, however, which the action caused to England, even for so short a time, was so great that it reduced this country from the position of a first-rate to that of a third-rate power in Europe for more than a century. At the close of the 13th century, the pound sterling con tained what its name imported, a pound weight of silver, of 1 1 2 fineness, the penny, which was the commonest coin, containing the 240th part of a pound. Between this period and the first quarter of the 16th century, the penny was reduced to oue-third of its ancient weight. But there is reason to believe, from direct and indirect evidence, that it was the practice to pay by weight and not by tale. It is inconceivable that the crown would, for the sake of a temporary gain, have sacrificed the fixed or quit rents, which constituted, after the beginning of the 15th century, the greater part of the revenues raised from crown lands and regalian rights. Besides, the evidence of prices is con clusive as to the alternatives that the value of silver must either have quadrupled in the 15th century, or that pay ments must have been made by weight, for during three- fourths of the 15th century the prices of the necessaries of life are much lower than they are in the 14th. During the whole of this period, however, the coinage was kept to its customary standard of fineness, and therefore no un certainty was induced upon pecuniary transactions. In 1543 Henry VIII. commenced an issue of base coin. At first the alloy was only one-sixth of the silver ; but in 1545 a second issue was put into circulation, in which the alloy was one-half, and in 1546 a third issue only contained one-third of silver. Henry died on January 28, 1547. The guardians of his son continued the practice during the first five years of his reign, coining money in 1547 which was only one-third fine, in 1549 of one-half fineness, and in 1551 of only one-fourth fineness. An attempt was made at the conclusion of this reign to issue a coinage of genuine quality, but as the base money continued in circula tion, the attempt was futile. Mary was anxious to restore the ancient standard, but found it impossible to do so. Elizabeth called in her father s and brother s base money at a low fixed rate, which gave her a considerable profit, and put into circulation money of the old character and quality. This was effected in 1560, so that England suffered from the evils of a base currency for seventeen years. The effect was disastrous in the highest degree, for it impoverished the nation, and for a long time disabled it from filling that place in Europe which it had occupied for centuries before. Among the sources of the royal revenue, the ancient customs of tonnage and poundage occupied an incon siderable place. These were dues levied upon exports and imports, and seem to have been yielded from the earliest times. They are justified on the ground that the sovereign was under the obligation of maintaining the police of the narrow seas. Attempts of a more or less successful kind were made for the purpose of securing this part of the revenue by limiting exports and imports to certain towns, and particularly by fixing the market of exports in particular localities, known as towns of the staple. Thus, for a long time, Calais was by law the sole market of English wool, and the &quot;West of England tin was sold at Bodmin and some other Cornish towns. Towards the latter end of the 16th century the growth of foreign trade was rapid and considerable. But the old dues on exports and imports, which had been granted to the crown on the occasion of each accession from the 15th century, were small and inelastic. An attempt was therefore made to revise them, and in 1608 Cecil, James I. s minister, drew up a new book of rates. It is well known that these new taxes, for the imposition of which many plausible reasons were alleged, were the commencement of that quarrel between king and parliament which culminated in the civil war. The law courts decided in favour of the crown, and it does not appear that at this time the special scandal of the Stuart government, the practice, namely, of displacing such judges as gave deci sions on points of constitutional law or public justice that were distasteful to the sovereign, had commenced. But, on the other hand, it was seen clearly enough that, if the crown could, at its own discretion, impose what taxes it pleased on trade, the checks which parliament might impose on the administration would be annihilated. In point of