Crown finance is relatively well-studied from a structural standpoint. Traditionally parliamentary taxation has been separated from prerogative revenue and prerogative revenue further divided into customs, lands and the profits of assorted regalities. On the expenditure side, the offices of state, household and royal bounty are most commonly highlighted as areas for cost-cutting. Jacobean governors used a similar framework, but were a good deal less concerned with paradigms once description ended and policy-making began. It is perhaps more profitable to follow that lead, eschew a structural approach and consider finance as a matter of governance. Hence the issues are how governors sought to mobilise economic wealth, transform it into financial resources for the crown and spend it productively. This agenda required political action and it argues strongly that finance should be constructed as an intersection of politics, personalities, ideas and economic means. This chapter will examine governors' conceptions of finance, in particular what texts of the humanist curriculum and contemporary thought taught them about the politics of finance. Under James, ideas met practice in the projecting movement. The result was that Jacobean finance evolved into a project writ large.

The curriculum for governors and the political dimensions of finance

James VI's tutors possessed three of the most influential pedagogical manuals for the education of governors: The boke named the governor (1531) by Thomas Elyot; Jean Luis Vives's De tradendis disciplinis (1531); and Roger Ascham's The scholemaster (1570). Elyot and Vives laid out the humanist curriculum for governors: ‘grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy constituted for every Tudor humanist the essence of the studia humanitatis’.