they were not likely afterwards to resign this right; and, accordingly, after the restoration they exercised that right as excessively their own, only introducing the name of the lords as consenting parties, as in all other statutes. So jealously did they protect this right, that they would not permit the lords to originate or to alter during the passage of a money bill through their house, any grant or amount of grant. In 1661 they threw out a bill which the lords sent down to them for the paving of Westminster, and in 1671 they protested against the lords altering the rate of a tax upon sugar. The lords made considerable resistance to this, but were compelled to give way, and the right of originating all taxation continues to reside in the commons, though ministers there propose those taxes to them.
The exercise of the function of taxation became more complete in the commons by the fact of the clergy, who had hitherto granted their own supplies in convocation, in the fourth year of Charles II. voluntarily giving up this right, and leaving the commons to tax them as part of the general community, being allowed in return to vote as well as the laity for knights of the shire—a privilege which they still retain.
The mode of appropriating the supplies to specific purposes became also general in Charles II.'s time. The more frequent practice previous to the Long Parliament had been to vote the money, and leave the monarch to expend it at his discretion; but the Long Parliament specified the objects for which they granted their money; and though Cromwell would not submit to any such restraints from his parliament, during Charles II.'s reign the practice became very common. James, who was as arbitrary as his father regarding taxation, rejected any appropriation clause in grants to him, but they were afterwards adopted under William II., and from that period it became the custom to appropriate every amount granted yearly to its specific object. During the reign of Charles II.—that is, in 1672 and 1673—the parliamentary franchise was extended to the county and city of Durham, and to the borough of Newark, by royal charter. These were the last alterations of the representation which took place till the union with Scotland.
A circumstance which has had a great effect on the maintenance of our liberties and the preservation of authentic records of public transactions, was the general resolution passed by the commons in 1680, for the printing of its votes and proceedings. This practice was introduced by the Long Parliament, but became regular and continued from this period. But the great event of this period, as it regards taxation, is that which we have already spoken of in considerable detail—the transfer of the burden of the land to the people, by giving the king the excise upon beer, ale, and other liquors sold within the kingdom for ever, in lieu of the old feudal services attached to the lands of the aristocracy. Hence this tax now became styled the hereditary excise. At the time of its being thus granted it produced only about £300,000 a year, but has now grown to more than £16,000,000. Contemporaneously with the easing of the landed aristocracy of their natural burdens, and transferring the burden to the people at large, commenced the national debt; the sum of £1,200,000 which Charles I. defrauded the London merchants of by the abrupt closing of the exchequer, standing as the first item.
Besides the excise, Charles received the grant of tonnage and poundage for life—that is, the customs' duties—which then only brought in about £400,000 a year; a tax on hearths, amounting to £170,000; on stamps, imposed for the first time in 1671; and he derived from crown lands about £100,000; from the forest of Dean, £5,000; from the duchy of Cornwall, £12,000; and from other sources, £55,000. He received large sums from the king of France, sold Dunkirk to France for £400,000, and, from one source or another, is calculated to have had about £1,800,000 per annum, which, however, did not suffice for his mistresses and other extravagances.
This is the period when the debtor and credit account of our revenue really commences, and the history of the revenue, therefore, properly dates from. At the time of the expulsion of James, the sources of revenue from the national taxation had wonderfully increased, showing a rapid advance in national prosperity. The customs now produced £600,000 per annum, the excise, £666,000; the hearth-money, £245,000; the post-offices, £65,000; wine licences, £10,000; new duties on wine and vinegar, £173,000; duties on sugar and tobacco, £149,000; and on French silks and foreign linens nearly £94,000. Altogether, James's income is calculated at more than two millions sterling. No monarch need have been more happy or powerful had he had the wisdom to see it, and remain contented with constitutional authority.
RELIGION.
The struggles of the church we have sufficiently traced in our recent chapters. With the restoration it came back to full power and possession of its revenues and honours, and held them firmly against all rivals till James menaced them with the recall of the Romish hierarchy, when, joining with the alarmed public, it compelled the monarch himself to fly, and continued on its own vantage-ground. The only notice of religious phenomena at this period demanded of us is rather what regards the sects which became conspicuous at this period.
The leading sects, the presbyterians the independents, and the baptists—then called anabaptists—differed little in their faith. They were all of the Calvinistic school, whilst the episcopal church was already divided by the contending parties of Calvinists and Arminians. We have related at full the struggles of the presbyterians, English and Scotch, for the possession of the establishment in England to the exclusion of all other faiths. The triumph of the independents, with more liberal views, through Cromwell and the army, and the expulsion of both these parties from the national pulpits following on the restoration. The baptists, though many of them were high in the army and the state during the commonwealth, never displayed the political ambition of the other two great denominations. They cut, indeed, no figure in the secular affairs of the nation, but they were most honourably distinguished by their assertion of the right of private opinion. They were as tolerant of religious liberty as the independents, or more so, from whom they differed only in their views of the rite of baptism. Their early history in this country was adorned by the appearance in
