EXTRA-PARLIAMENTARY EXACTION
1461-1603

With the coming of the Yorkist kings in 1461 there began a period lasting until the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, in which the taxing powers of Parliament were subtly assailed by monarchs who knew how to use the law to their own advantage, regardless of its intent. Yet the powers, attenuated though they were, remained to form the substance of vigorous opposition to the attacks of the Stuarts, when they should try to practice their theories of absolutism.

Under Edward IV, whose reign dates from 1461, the forms of taxation by authority of Parliament were indeed gone through with. In that respect his reign was typical of the period. His early taxation, levied while the struggle with the Lancastrians was still in progress, was not particularly heavy; but being laid by Parliaments sympathetic with the Yorkist cause, Edward had little difficulty in exerting supreme influence over it. Four years after his accession, he was given the subsidy on wool and tunnage and poundage for life.[263] Beside these, Parliament granted him frequent fifteenths and tenths. Not content, however, with the grants made by Parliament, he had recourse to a new form of extortion known by the euphemistic title of benevolence. The benevolence was a gift made to the king by individuals or groups of them, ostensibly in charity, but in reality under enforcement. It differed from the forced loan, the exaction of which is mentioned in the list of charges leading to the deposition of Richard II, in that by it the king incurred no obligation for repayment. Henry VIII in later years proved himself a genius Benevolences and forced loans at obtaining both of these means of income. Edward found also that the revival of obsolete statutes and the laying of fines for breaches of them could be turned to profit; the collection of ancient debts due to the crown, and the utilization of the royal power to advance his own mercantile interests, Edward pushed to the extreme in order to supplement the not infrequent regular grants of Parliament.

Dowell retells the story given in Hall’s Chronicle of Edward and a certain rich widow to whom he applied in person for a benevolence. In his younger days Edward was one of the handsomest men in the land, and the widow received his advances with favor. He asked her for a gift and she promptly gave him £20.

“By my troth,” says she, “for thy lovely countenance thou shalt have even twenty pounds.”

Edward, who had “looked for scarce half that sum, thanked her and lovinglie kissed her.” Thereupon the lady doubled the benevolence, paying him a second £20, either, as the Chronicler remarks, “because she esteemed the kiss of a king so precious a jewele” or “because the flavour of his breath did so comfort her stomach.” Such was a fifteenth-century conception of royal courtesy.[264]

Upon Edward’s death in 1483, the crown for a moment rested on the head of his young son, Edward V, only to be snatched away Richard III, 1483-1485 in favor of the lad’s uncle Richard III. Richard received from Parliament in 1484 a grant of tunnage and poundage and the subsidy on wool for life.[265] His death on Bosworth Field the next year gave the world no opportunity to see what use he would make of the freedom which Parliament thus gave him.

During the brief three years of Richard’s ascendancy, however, there occurred an assertion of right and its complementary statute which assume great importance in the light of later events.Prohibition of benevolences, 1484 When Richard was invited to become king, he was presented with a remarkable address, which, among other things, cited the benevolences of the late reign as “extorcions, ... agenst the Lawes of God and Man,” and as more intolerable than “jopardye of deth.”[266] At his only Parliament, held in 1484, benevolences were declared unlawful, and were to be “dampned and annulled forever.”[267]

Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, ascended the throne upon the successful issue of the battle of Bosworth. The wonder of the era which he introduced lies not in any increase in the powers of Parliament, but rather that they existed at all when the period closed. The one hundred and twenty years of the Tudor epoch exhibits no progress toward the realization of parliamentary supremacy; on the other hand, the trend was in the opposite direction. The Tudors were not tyrannical enough to rouse opposition to the fever heat as did John; they knew rather how to bridle their despotism in time to check revolt, and especially how to make unlawful acts assume the aspect of legality. Furthermore, the immense activity of commerce, the progress of literature, the religious reconstitution during the sixteenth century, were in themselves reasons for slow advance in matters of government; the stress of trade consequent upon the discovery of a new world, the absorbing interest in new subjects for thought, the intensity and magnitude of new religious conceptions, engaged the minds of men on subjects other than those of Parliament and king. As long as these worked in apparent harmony and the results did not greatly offend, men were content to let well enough alone. So it was that the Tudors, surrounding themselves with a new nobility attached to the throne by reasons of their very origin and continuance, were able to follow their own devices and raise money almost as seemed to them good.

In all the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s reign he called Parliament only seven times, and six of the seven Parliaments sat within the first eleven years of his kingship. Each was the occasion of a demand for money. At his first Parliament, that of 1485, he received a grant of tunnage and poundage and a subsidy on wool for life.[268] Parliaments of Henry VII The “new-found” subsidy Three years later, however, the consequences of heavy taxation were disastrous. Need arising for the enlistment of an army with which to aid the Duke of Brittany against the King of France, a tax was devised which not only exacted a tenth of incomes from freeholders, but applied as well to movables, laying imposition upon articles used in trade and even merchants’ stocks. This “new-found subsidy” proved so intolerable to the lower classes that a great insurrection broke out in the north against it.[269] The king with Tudor wisdom, remitted some £48,000 of the £75,000 which the tax was designed to raise, and Parliament gave him in return a fifteenth and tenth. In 1497, a similar rebellion occurred in Cornwall against a tax levied for the Scotch War.

With these examples of parliamentary taxation before him, Henry turned away to fields at once more profitable and less dangerous, at least in their immediate consequences.

He turned to the old expedient of the benevolence, despite the statute of Richard III prohibiting its imposition. The methods used in laying a benevolence are illustrated in the famous account by Lord Francis Bacon of the dilemma devised by Bishop Morton, Henry’s Chancellor, “to raise up the benevolence to a higher rate; and some called it his fork and some his crotch.Morton’s crotch For he had couched an article in the instructions to the commissioners who were to levy the benevolence, that if they met with any that were sparing, they should tell them that they must needs have, because they laid up; and if they were spenders, they must needs have, because it was seen in their port and manner of living; so neither kind came amiss.”[270] Parliament, subservient to the king, actually registered for the moment its approval of the practice of levying benevolences, when in 1492 it passed the “Shoring or Under-propping Act” making debts still owing on gifts promised to the king legally collectable.

The benevolence was not the only means by which the ingenious monarch increased his income. Like Edward IV, he revived obsolete statutes and rigorously exacted fines in consequence of every infraction of them; but worse than that was his perversion of every function of the courts of law into a means of extortion. His odious instruments in that work were Richard Empson and Edmund Dudly who later were made to suffer for the evil practices of the father in the reign of the son. Beside these forms of imposition, the king pushed to the extreme the exaction of feudal dues accruing to the crown.

Henry VIII succeeded to the crown in 1509. With his hand always on the pulse of the nation, he knew when he could carry his designs into execution and when he must wait for a fever to subside. His attitude toward taxation was not characterized by the same uniform regard for constitutional formalities that distinguished his other acts, nor was Parliament on the other hand quite as subservient to his will as in matters farther from their purses. His first Parliament showed its trust in him by granting tunnage and poundage for life, but with the distinct provision that it be not taken into precedent. Beside this, the Parliaments of 1513 and 1514 made generous grants of a poll-tax, of a fifteenth and tenth and of two subsidies of six pence in the pound.[271] Despite the magnitude of the grant, no opposition seems to have been provoked, an unfailing sign of increasing wealth.

At the Parliament of 1523, the first since 1515, Cardinal Wolsey committed a distinct breach of Parliamentary privilege. Under Henry IV it had been admitted by the king that both houses of Parliament were to commune apart, and that the king should have no knowledge of the progress of a grant until the two houses be of one accord.[272] Wolsey, as representative of the royal power, reversed the usual process. Going into the House of Commons with all his following, “with his maces, his pillars, his pole-axes, his cross, his hatte, and the great seale too,”—in the words of the speaker, Sir Thomas More,—he asked for no less than £800,000 and required that it be paid in four years; he suggested that it “be raised out of the fifth part of every man’s goods and lands.”

To the demand of the cardinal the commons maintained perfect silence. The speaker “with many probable arguments endeavoured to shew the cardinal that his manner of coming thither was neither expedient nor agreeable to the ancient liberties of that House.”[273] Wolsey thereupon departed in a rage. The next day the matter was argued by the commons and the contention was made that “though some men were well-monied, yet in general it was known that the fifth of men’s goods was not in plate or money, but in stock and cattle. And that to pay away all their coin would alter the whole frame and intercourse of things.”[274] For fifteen days the commons debated the question and at the end of that time granted to the king a graduated property tax, much smaller in amount and covering four years in the payment. Wolsey’s displeasure was very great and he made a second journey to the commons in the hope that he might induce them to be more generous. He told them that he “desired to reason with those who opposed his demands.” He was answered that “it was the order of that House to hear, and not to reason but amongst themselves.”[275] Thus rebuffed, the cardinal went away.

Henry did without Parliament for the next seven years, but he was not deprived thereby of money with which to carry on the business of government. In 1526, commissions were issued for the collection of a sixth from the goods of the laity and a fourth from the clergy.[276] The people immediately evinced their knowledge of the law and complained that the proceedings were illegal; the clergy led the movement asserting that “the King could take no man’s goods without the authority of Parliament.”[277] The people began to murmur and insurrection seemed imminent. “If men should geue their goodes by a Commission,” they said, “then wer it worse than the taxes of Fraunce, and so England should be bond and not free.”[278] In Suffolk rebellion actually broke out; in London and in Kent the people were in a ferment. Henry, being what he was and knowing the nature of his subjects, eased the tension by shoving the responsibility of the measure on to the shoulders of Wolsey,[279] and declared that he would receive no money save as an “amiable graunte,” which was collected in 1528, and was nothing more agreeable than a benevolence. To this the citizens of London raised objection on the ground of the statute of Richard III. The judges thereupon handed down an opinion that that statute, being the work of an usurper, was void. Thus did the courts evince their subservience to the crown, and showed themselves as open to royal influence as the tribunals of the Stuarts a hundred years later.[280] So in theory Henry’s attempt at arbitrary taxation was frustrated; in practice, however, the imposition, though its burden was transferred from the turbulent lower classes to the more amenable people of substance, merely underwent a change of name. The exaction was unparliamentary whether it was levied as a king’s tax or under the thin guise of a benevolence.

But Henry had other strings to his bow, and of these the forced loan was one which served him well. In 1522 commissioners were appointed throughout the kingdom to ascertain the value of every man’s possessions and to require a certain part for the king, on the understanding that they be repaid out of the grants from the next Parliament. The promise of repayment was under the king’s privy seal.[281] In 1544, forced loans were again exacted, this time from all persons rated at £50 and more per annum. Parliament, subservient to the king, far from protesting because of these arbitrary demands upon the pockets of the people, in two instances released the king from liability to payment. In 1529, Parliament “for themselves and all the whole body of the realm which they represent, freely, liberally, and absolutely, give and grant unto the King’s highness ... all and every sum and sums of money which to them and every of them, is, ought, or might be due by reason of any money ... advanced or paid by way of trust or loan.”[282] This caused much murmuring, but, as Hall’s Chronicle rightly puts it, “Ther was no remedy.” In 1544 a similar act of a servile Parliament not only gives the king the funds borrowed under the forced loan of 1542, but commands the refunding of sums already paid by him to his creditors in discharge of debts so incurred.[283]

The Reformation in England redounded to the financial benefit of the Crown. In 1532 the clergy were relieved by act of Parliament from the payment of annates or first fruits, the sums which the ordaining authorities exacted from those accorded any preferment in the church, and which amounted sometimes to as much as a year’s income from the benefice. The exactions were denounced as having risen by “an uncharitable custom, grounded upon no just or good title,” and through them “great and inestimable sums of money have been daily conveyed out of this realm, to the impoverishment of the same, and to the advantage of the court of Rome.”[284] The same Parliament, meeting for its fifth session on the 15th January, 1533-4, reËnacted the statute without the contingencies which had conditioned the other.[285] Closely following came a statute that deprived the Pope of his petty exactions which for generations he had drawn from the English Church. Thus were discontinued peter-pence, procurations, fruits, fees for dispensations, licenses, faculties and grants.[286] The sixth session of this Parliament, meeting at the end of the year 1534, turned the procedure into comedy by attaching to “the King’s imperial crown forever” the first-fruits and tenths of the annual income of all ecclesiastical benefices, the very payments which it had declared to be in conformity with an “uncharitable custom.”[287]

Furthermore, at the session of 1533-4, Parliament had laid very definite restrictions upon the clergy in the matter of regular taxation.[288] Since the early part of the fourteenth century, indeed, almost since the beginning of Parliament itself, the lesser clergy had attended the sessions with great irregularity, and had voted their taxes for the most part in provincial assemblies. Now, however, came the general prohibition that the clergy should not enact or execute ordinances binding upon themselves without the king’s license and without his approval when once they were made. Included within the meaning of this prohibition was the granting of taxes. From thenceforward until the time of Charles II, when, without any special enactment but by simple process of evolution, the clergy began to be taxed in the same manner and according to the same rate as the laity, clerical grants were submitted to Parliament for confirmation.

Henry VIII died in 1547. Notwithstanding the heavy taxation, parliamentary and unparliamentary, which had been exacted during his reign, he remained popular with the great majority of his subjects to his death. His many vices were counterbalanced by his successful wars, the heavy taxation by the growing trade of England, and his semi-independence of Parliament by most efficient administration.

After the lapse of eleven years, which in so far as they concern the evolution of the taxing power of Parliament, composed in effect an interregnum, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne of England. Elizabeth’s government was a despotism and was illegal; but it was so by sufferance, not because the nation was ignorant of its true character or because the people were unable to control it. When in later years the attempt was made to create a despotism against the voice of the people, the result was a Cromwell and his Charles I. Queen Elizabeth was loved by her subjects and they put their trust in her. The sympathy existing between queen and people could not be illustrated better than by the following anecdote, which suggests that under her rule benevolences were really made with the good will of the givers.

The queen, being at Coventry, is presented by the mayor with a purse heavily filled with gold.

“I have few such gifts, Mr. Mayor,” says the queen; “it is a hundred pounds in gold!”

“Please, your grace,” the mayor answers, “it is a great deal more we give you.”

“What is it?” asks the queen.

“It is,” the mayor replies, “the hearts of your loving subjects.”

And the queen makes answer, “We thank you, Mr. Mayor; it is a great deal more indeed.”[289]

Subsidies were granted in Parliament with liberality and readiness. Forced loans were indeed exacted from the wealthy, but Elizabeth took care to repay honorably and as promptly as she could. A means of revenue which relieved her from the frequent necessity of applying to Parliament was the granting of monopolies, based upon the right of the crown to assure to an inventor or orginator the exclusive benefits of his invention or innovation. By 1601, however, the royal power had encroached so far upon the rights of the individual that the grants of monopoly comprised exclusive control over many of the necessaries of life. The list which was read in the House of Commons in 1601, included:—currants, iron, powder, cards, transportation of leather, vinegar, sea-coal, lead, oil, starch, glass, and even salt. The matter had been first discussed in the Parliament of 1571, was brought up again in 1597, and in 1601 Elizabeth with the tact which she could summon on occasion, sent a message to the House to allay if possible the agitation which was going on there over the subject of monopolies. It gave satisfaction. “Understanding that divers patents” so ran the message, “which she had granted had been grievous to her subjects, some should be presently repealed, some superseded, and none put in execution but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of the people.”[290] Thus was this means of indirect taxation by the crown done away with, until the time when James I, putting his clumsy shoulder to the wheel, should seek to introduce it again.

Toward the close of the reign of Elizabeth there was another evidence of the growing realization on the part of the commons that their powers were not to be tampered with. In this instance, the vindication was not against the prerogative of the sovereign, but against an arrogation of power on the part of the House of Lords. The incident was based upon the decreasing liberality of the commons in the years after the Armada. They had risen nobly to the defense of the nation against the peril, but, with the passing of it, their generosity had faded. In 1593, it was represented that, though the queen had spent upon the war some £1,030,000 of her own, the grants of the commons persisted in being inadequate. A message was sent down from the lords which remarked upon the need for a supply and requested the appointment of a committee of conference. Sir Robert Cecil, reporting from the committee, stated that the lords would assent to no smaller grant than three entire subsidies.[291] The commons, on the other hand, had shown a disposition to grant no more than two. Francis Bacon stated the issue. He yielded to the subsidy, “but disliked,” he said, “that this house should join with the upper house in granting it. For the custom and privilege of this house hath always been, first to make offer of the subsidies from hence, then to the upper house; except it were that they present a bill unto this house, with desire of our assent thereto, and then to send it up again.”[292] The commons refused to have further conference with the lords, so determined were they to vindicate their right to originate money bills, by the vote 217 to 128. Notwithstanding this scrupulous adherence to principle, they accepted the suggestion and came forward with a grant of three subsidies, six tenths and six fifteenths.

The death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, brought to an end the Tudor period and cleared the throne for James Stuart. The Tudor era was one which can be passed lightly over in a strict account of progress toward parliamentary supremacy in taxation. In such a study the period of the Tudors is a bywater. Yet the fact that the principles enunciated in the years prior to their accession stayed alive despite the attacks of Tudor subtlety, points to a vitality sufficient to down the Stuarts, and to establish permanent parliamentary control over the laying of taxes.