Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/189

FINANCE 179 fact, the Book of Rates had very much this effect. Practically there was no parliament between* 1610 and 1621, for the parliament of 1611 was dissolved without passing a bill or making a grant. But in the latter part of this period, owing to the skill and energy of Cranfield, the first of English financiers, the king was relieved from his debts, and put in possession of a revenue which was independent of parliamentary supply under ordinary circumstances. The election of 1621 was simply due to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, and the disastrous condition to which the king s son-in-law was reduced. Another expedient by which the crown strove to in crease its fiscal receipts was the grant of monopolies. It seems that the creation of a trading company, and the accord of special privileges to those who founded a market in those regions which were opened up to trade by the discovery of the Cape passage and the New World, was deemed to be incontestably the province of the crown. The houses of parliament could not have ventured on criticizing the action of a chartered company, much less have pretended to define its privileges. Now the papal see had granted to Spain the whole of the New World, or at least such parts of it as were in any way inviting, and had made a similar grant to Portugal of the district which lay on the road to India. By the death of Cardinal Henry in 1580, the succession of Portugal passed to Philip II., who thus united under one rule the West and the East. But the Dutch were now engaged in the War of Inde pendence, and were assisted by the English, though war had not actually broken out between England and Spain. The war came at last, and the Eastern possessions of Spain were obviously the most convenient spot in which the power of Spain might be attacked. There was every reason, then, in according trade privileges to a company which had to contend against the power of Spain, to build forts and factories in which trade could be secured and extended, and to deal discreetly with rivals who were associated with Protestant England by a common European interest, but were sooner or later to come into collision in more distant regions. The massacre of Amtoyna was the beginning of those differences which culminated in the wars with Holland during the protectorate and after the mon archy was restored. On December 31, 1600, the first East India Company was created by charter. So far was the revenue from being the better for this charter that the queen granted the company an exemption from customs duties for the first four of their voyages. From the undisputed power of granting charters for the monopoly of foreign trade there was only a step to the grant of monopolies to the home trade, though of course always on the plea that the monopoly was really a control which it was in the public interest to exercise. It is well known that, when these monopolies caused discontent, Elizabeth graciously cancelled them. They were renewed by James, were again the subject of remonstrance, and were abandoned by the king with so little conciliation that the surrender of the practice gave no great ground for gratitude. The other fiscal expedients which James adopted were the creation of a new title which was conferred by purchase, the sale of peerages, and the rigorous exaction of feudal rights. In the parliament of 1610 an attempt was made to cancel these rights by commuting them for a fixed payment, which, if the scheme had been accepted, would have taken the form of a quit rent on all estates held on military service by tenants of the crown. But the scheme failed, probably as much from a disinclination on the part of the parliament to aid the prerogative by granting the king a fired revenue, as from any dispute over the amount of the commutation. The whole subject has been ably and judiciously treated by Mr Gardiner, whose conscientious and painstaking histories of the earlier Stuart period are of the utmost value to the student of finance and politics. Hitherto, the history of English finance has been that of the process by which the Government attempted, with more or less success, to derive a revenue from direct taxa tion. Cecil and James I. discovered that a fruitful source of increased revenue was to be found in the customs and a new book of rates, and the Commons as clearly saw that in this fiscal expedient lay the whole issue of the debate between parliamentary control and the royal preroga tive. The struggle began with the accession of Charles. The independence and privileges of parliament, the desire to obtain certain guarantees for that .kind of church government which represented the dominant feeling of most Englishmen, were the objects of those who constituted the parliamentary opposition to the court; but the machinery by which these results were to be effected was finance. No one can understand the politics of the first fifteen years of Charles I. s reign who does not detect that the parliament intended to bring the king to terms by stinting the revenue. The struggle began with the first parliament of Charles. The parliamentary leaders imagined that they had won the victory when they secured the Petition of Eight. The king interpreted that concession in another way, and was supported by legal advice in the view which he took. During the long interval between the third and fifth parlia ments of Charles, the king tried every expedient by which to raise a revenue. Clarendon s statement that the country was peculiarly prosperous between 1629 and 1640 is undoubtedly correct. But the country determined not to let Charles have his way, and the resistance to his financial expedients was only the prelude to those measures which the Long Parliament at once adopted when it met. During the period which intervened between the dis missal of the third and the summons of the fourth parlia ment, Charles adopted various fiscal expedients in order to fill up the deficiency of his finances. They were all, except the rates levied on imports and exports, forms of direct taxa tion. Such were the compositions in lieu of knighthood, the annual payments made by chartered monopolies, the resumption of lands which were said to be encroachments on the royal forests, the fines of the Star Chamber, and in particular the fine of .70,000 imposed on the city of London, and lastly ship-money. In the earliest times, the maritime towns, and especially the ports in the south-east of England, were liable to be charged with the duty of the national defence at sea. The privileges of the Cinque Ports were connected with this duty of defence, and it appears that the sailors of these ports needed very little persuasion to undertake a duty in which privateering differed little from piracy. Sometimes these irregular forces did good service. The victory of the Cinque Ports over Eustace the Monk in 1216 had even more important results than the battle of Lincoln. The navy of Philip of Valois was annihilated at the battle of Sluys by the same kind of force, and Edward III. was freed from rivalry on sea. In later times the piratical ventures of Hawkins and Drake had royal patronage, and it is said that some of the families who purchased titles from James I. notably the Riches had gained their wealth by expe dients very similar to those which were familiar to the Algerines, and that their expeditions were as equivocal as those of the Mediterranean pirates. Not a few men who had won their wealth as buccaneers spent a calm and respectable old age in England. There was no hardship felt in the demand occasionally made by the crown, that the seaboard towns and counties must defend the realm at sea. The first writs of ship-money in 1634 were levied on the