Encyclopędia Britannica's Guide to Shakespeare
Print Article

United Kingdom

History > The early Stuarts and the Commonwealth > James I (1603–25) > Finance and politics

To a king whose annual budget in Scotland was barely £50,000, England looked like the land of milk and honey. But in fact James I inherited serious financial problems, which his own liberality quickly compounded. Elizabeth had left a debt of more than £400,000, and James, with a wife and two sons, had much larger household expenses than the unmarried queen. Land and duties from customs were the major sources of royal revenue, and it was James's good fortune that the latter increased dramatically after the judges ruled in Bate's case (1606) that the king could make impositions on imported commodities without the consent of Parliament. Two years later, under the direction of James's able minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, impositions were levied on an expanded list of goods, and a revised book of rates was issued in 1608 that increased the level of duties. By these measures customs revenues grew by £70,000 per year.

But even this windfall was not enough to stem the effects of inflation on the one hand and James's own free spending on the other. By 1606 royal debt was more than £600,000, and the crown's financial ministers had turned their attention to prerogative income from wardships, purveyance, and the discovery of concealed lands (i.e., crown lands on which rents and dues were not being paid). The revival and rationalization of these ancient rights created an outcry. As early as 1604 Salisbury was examining proposals to commute these fiscal rights into an annual sum to be raised by a land tax. By 1610 negotiations began for the Great Contract between the king and his taxpaying subjects that aimed to raise £200,000 a year. But at the last moment both royal officials and leaders of the House of Commons backed away from the deal, the government believing that the sum was too low and the leaders of the Commons that a land tax was too unpopular. The failure of the Great Contract drove Salisbury to squeeze even more revenue out of the king's feudal rights, including the sale of titles. This policy violated the spirit of principles about property and personal liberty held by the governing classes and, along with impositions, was identified as a grievance during James's first Parliaments.

There was much suspicion that the Scottish king would not understand the procedures and privileges of an English Parliament, and this suspicion was reinforced by James's speeches in the first session of the Parliament of 1604–10. The conventional ban upon the selection of outlaws to the Commons led to the Buckinghamshire Election Case (1604). The Commons reversed a decision by the lord chancellor and ordered Francis Goodwin, an outlaw, to be seated in the House of Commons. James clumsily intervened in the proceedings, stating that the privileges of the Commons had been granted by the grace of the monarch, a pronouncement that stirred the embers of Elizabethan disputes over parliamentary privilege. Although a compromise solution to the case was found, from this time forward the Commons took an active role in scrutinizing the returns of its members. A standing committee on elections was formed, and the freedom of members from arrest during sessions was reasserted. Some wanted to go even further and present the king with a defense of the ancient rights of their house. But this so-called apology was the work of a minority and was never accepted by the whole House of Commons or presented to the king.

Back to top |
Contents of this article:
Photos
© 2013 Encyclopędia Britannica, Inc.