Meeting the costs of government

One of the most important political differences between England and the other major European states of the sixteenth, and indeed much of the seventeenth centuries, lay in the financial resources available to its rulers. Compared with the revenues available to the French and Spanish monarchies, for instance, those of the English crown were pitiably small, and it has been estimated that in the 1630s Louis XIII of France may have enjoyed an income anything up to ten times as large as did Charles I (Nef, 1940, p. 129). Of course the English population was less than one third that of the French, but the disparity in national income was probably less marked, and the small size of their realm was not the main reason for the financial weakness of the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns. What was most important was that in England the consent of parliament was necessary for the levying of taxes, and although successive rulers attempted to evade this constitutional limitation on their power to raise revenue, and especially in the early seventeenth century achieved considerable success, they could not break it. Unlike their principal continental rivals, therefore, English governments could not pursue whatever policies they chose, irrespective of cost, and oblige their subjects to meet the expense.

It is true that taxation, however broadly defined, was not the government's only source of revenue, for the crown possessed extensive landed estates of its own, and in the early part of the sixteenth century these yielded approaching 40 per cent of its ordinary recurring income, perhaps £40,000 a year out of a total of almost £105,000 a year during 1502–5 (Wolffe, 1971, pp. 217–19).