The Reign of James I - Government and Finance 1603–24 (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

The Reign of James I - Government and Finance 1603–24

Why James faced financial problems

By 1607 James had abandoned hopes of creating a constitutional union between England and Scotland. This failure stemmed partly from mounting financial problems facing the Crown. James's inability to recognise and address these issues consistently damaged his relationship with Parliament throughout his reign.

James's financial difficulties have attracted considerable criticism from contemporaries and historians. His generosity towards Scottish courtiers provoked resentment, though this formed only part of a broader pattern of extravagance involving quarrels over taxation and revenue. However, Elizabeth I had also experienced financial troubles, both before and after 1603, suggesting that these difficulties arose from fundamental structural weaknesses rather than personal failings alone.

Revenue and resources

The Crown's financial problems emerged from two interconnected factors.

1. Years of price inflation had rendered government income increasingly inadequate to meet expenses.
2. Additionally, James's financial management and certain aspects of his lifestyle demonstrated fiscal irresponsibility, transforming a difficult situation into a serious crisis.

Sources of royal income

According to political conventions of the period, the monarch was expected to "live of his own" during peacetime. This meant financing government and maintaining the royal household through ordinary revenue and customary duties granted at the beginning of each reign. By 1603, this had become impossible.

Ordinary Revenue derived from Crown lands (leased for rent but often on long-term agreements that failed to keep pace with inflation), and from feudal rights and prerogatives. These medieval remnants included:

• Wardship – the King's right to act as guardian for children of tenants who died before the child reached adulthood. The Crown could profit by administering estates and arranging profitable marriages and dowries.
• Marriage – the King's right to arrange marriages for female heirs of tenants or remarriage of widows.
• Livery – the King's right to receive payment from those who inherited land held from him in feudal tenancy.
• Purveyance – the King's right to purchase food and supplies for the Court at reduced prices.
• Monopolies – the King's right to grant exclusive rights to manufacture and sell particular goods.
• Justice – fines and court fees.

Customs duties included:

• Tunnage and Poundage – customs duties on wine and wool, normally granted to the King for life by his first Parliament.
• New impositions – import duties which the King was entitled to raise to protect English trade and industry.

Occasional sources included benevolences and forced loans (gifts and loans from individuals) and loans on credit.

Direct taxes were granted by Parliament and included:

• Tenths and fifteenths – a tax on movable goods except personal clothing paid by all
• Subsidies – a tax on income for landowners, office-holders and wage-earners, or on movable property for merchants, craftsmen and tenant-farmers, not levied on the poor
• Poll tax – a tax paid by individuals, rare
• Ship money – a tax levied in wartime from coastal areas for building ships

Why income proved inadequate

Several factors combined to make the Crown's income insufficient:

• Before 1600, price inflation combined with Elizabeth's sales of Crown land to finance the war with Spain had left ordinary revenue inadequate. James inherited a debt of approximately £100,000.
• As a family man, James's expenses exceeded Elizabeth's. He needed to maintain a wife and children, including a separate establishment for the Prince of Wales.
• Elizabeth had failed to update tax assessments in line with inflation. Combined with an inefficient collection system, this meant that even when Parliament granted extra taxes, the King received substantially less than intended.

Strategies for reform

Robert Cecil and impositions

Confronted by these difficulties, James's chief financial adviser Robert Cecil (created Earl of Salisbury in 1605) attempted various strategies. A legal ruling in 1606, when a merchant named Bates challenged the King's right to impose new customs duties, was used to issue a new Book of Rates in 1608.

This imposed new duties on some goods and increased payment rates on others. These impositions provoked deep resentment, with complaints raised in Parliament in 1610 and again in 1614. The issue transcended mere finance, carrying substantial implications for royal powers and the legal rights of both Parliaments and individual citizens.

The Great Contract

When monopolies sales were renewed (most had been abandoned by Elizabeth amidst considerable public rejection), further indignation arose among MPs. Though complaints were substantial, they also contributed to the failure of Cecil's more fundamental reform proposal: the Great Contract.

This plan would have enabled the King to levy from his subjects and tenants a regular parliamentary income of £200,000 annually. In return, he would relinquish some of the more irritating feudal dues – payments made by the nobility and gentry, a relic of the feudal system when they were seen as holding their land as tenants of the King. Had the plan succeeded, it would have placed Crown finances on sound footing.

Barriers to reform

James's personal responsibility

While most difficulties were unavoidable and stemmed as much from MPs' reluctance to face reality as from government errors, they were compounded significantly by James's behaviour. He substantially overestimated his new kingdom's wealth and proved consistently overgenerous towards his friends and favourites, to the extent of demonstrating financial irresponsibility.

Complaints that he exclusively favoured Scottish cronies were not entirely fair, but he proved particularly generous to some Scottish friends. In 1606, when Parliament granted three subsidies to settle his debts, James promptly distributed £44,000 to three Scottish friends. In 1611 he gave away £90,688, with £67,498 going to eleven Scotsmen. However, this formed only part of a broader problem relating to the King's lifestyle and his courtiers' behaviour.

James's love of hunting, his preference for the company of handsome young men, and his excessive eating and drinking established a tone that descended into corruption and scandal. Even efficient ministers like Cecil (Earl of Salisbury) lined their own pockets from government proceeds. The behaviour of Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk, who eventually became Lord Treasurer after Cecil's death in 1612, amounted to embezzlement.

The Addled Parliament crisis

Problems intensified in 1614 with the fiasco of the Addled Parliament – a term James himself used when he dissolved the 1614 parliament after the Commons failed to vote taxes and became embroiled in a bitter dispute with the Lords.

In an attempt by the powerful Court faction led by Thomas Howard to discredit possible rivals, rumours spread of government interference in elections, raising serious concerns among MPs about their rights and privileges. This was followed by complaints about extravagance at Court and increased use of impositions to finance it. Rival factions focused mainly on blaming each other, and their total failure to manage the Commons led eventually to conflict between the two Houses and procedural paralysis. James ended the session and dissolved Parliament in disgust, but the fault lay mainly with his own management of courtiers and councillors.

Court corruption and scandal

The nature of the problem

James's homosexual relationships and the Overbury scandal were associated with a Court criticised for sexual licence and involvement in murder. The political nation found it doubly insulting when the King asked them to finance these activities. Some of the problems reflected the King's personality and character, but others arose from fundamental weaknesses within the governmental system itself.

Numerous complaints arose about the general tone of James's Court, and the drunkenness and gluttony practised by the King and many courtiers. The King was seduced by hunting and gave himself to the occasion of enjoying young male company, of which he was equally fond. His open affection towards certain favourites raised questions as to whether he was actively homosexual.

Despite a marriage and large family, he clearly had homosexual tendencies, although it remains less clear whether he indulged them physically. The more established nobility particularly resented the power and wealth given to the favourites, who were placed above them in influence and status.

Robert Carr and the Overbury scandal

The first of these favourites was Robert Carr, a young Scot whom James created Earl of Somerset in 1613. He fell in love with Thomas Howard's daughter, Frances (then Countess of Essex), and a divorce was hastily arranged on the grounds that the Earl of Essex was impotent. This was probably untrue, but the Howards were anxious to secure a marriage with the King's favourite.

The marriage led to a huge scandal in 1616, when Carr and his wife were found guilty of involvement in the murder of his secretary, Sir Thomas Overbury, and imprisoned in the Tower. They were later pardoned by James but were banished from Court.

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

Carr was replaced in James's affections by the young George Villiers (later to become the Duke of Buckingham), who had been introduced to Court by a rival faction in 1613.

He was introduced to the King in 1613, in an attempt to undermine the influence of Robert Carr and the Howards. In 1614 he was appointed Cup-bearer to the King, and knighted and made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber (one of the Monarch's personal servants) in 1615. There is little doubt that his relationship with the King had homosexual elements, the extent of which are impossible to gauge. Buckingham undoubtedly exploited the King's sexual preferences, but private letters written to James by his "Steenie" reveal genuine affection.

Attempts to undermine him proved unsuccessful, as Cranfield discovered. Buckingham was skilled in the factional politics of the Court, and although he relieved the King of some of the burdens of government, he personified much that was wrong with the political system. Essentially, he was able to manipulate royal patronage in the interests of himself and a large number of needy relatives.

By 1618 Buckingham had taken control of royal patronage. The Howards therefore introduced a handsome rival, William Monson, to the King's circle, provoking Buckingham to destroy them. With plentiful evidence collected by his protégé, Lionel Cranfield, he brought charges of corruption against Suffolk and his uncle, the Earl of Nottingham, securing their dismissal from office (Suffolk's in 1619). Buckingham was, and remained, supreme.

The problem of patronage

The basic problem lay in the system of patronage by which the King was expected to reward those who served him. Most offices in government were unpaid and it was normal for ministers and advisers to be rewarded by the grant of pensions or, for example, the right to collect fines and payments related to particular government courts and departments. Hence there was little distinction between a valid payment for work carried out and a simple gift to a friend or favourite.

Impeachment had been developed by medieval Parliaments as a means of bringing royal advisers and members of the nobility to justice. They were called to trial before the House of Lords following a petition from the Commons. The device had been unused since 1459, but was revived in 1621 against the monopolists Mitchell and Mompesson, and Lord Chancellor Bacon for bribery. Thereafter the Commons began to apply it as a political weapon against unpopular ministers and advisers.

In 1621 Bacon was impeached by the Commons for taking bribes, and although pardoned by the King, he was dismissed from office, fined £40,000 and banned from sitting in Parliament.

Cranfield's attempts at reform

The nature of these problems is illustrated by the attempts to reform the King’s finances under Lionel Cranfield. In 1618 he became Master of the Court of Wards, later serving as Lord Treasurer and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He set up a series of interlocking commissions to examine royal finances, and by 1620 had reduced the King’s household expenses by over 50%. By 1621, it seemed that the King, courtiers, and MPs were finally cooperating to address the government’s problems.

However, this was only an illusion. Cranfield made some difference, but his rise to power depended on the influence of Buckingham, the King’s favourite, and the very factional rivalry and corruption at the heart of these problems. Part of Buckingham’s enthusiasm for reform lay in using it to bring down his rivals, the Howards.

By 1620 Buckingham had taken control of the whole system of royal patronage, relieving James of the burden of making appointments, and using it to reinforce his own power as well as to line the pockets of his large and needy family. While he encouraged Cranfield's efforts, he never allowed the new financial restraints to extend to himself, and the prosecution of Bacon in 1621 was partly managed by Buckingham to deflect attacks on his own power.

Cranfield's failure illustrates the complexity of the Crown's financial problems and the difficulty of reforming the system from within. It also indicates that the difficulties faced by James were more deep-seated than personal extravagance. It was not only that income was inadequate; it was also badly managed. Essentially, the English monarchy lacked both resources and the means to manage them effectively. Without a professional, salaried civil service, the King had to rely on patronage and pensions to reward his servants; unless carefully monitored and controlled, this invited corruption.

The effects of financial weakness

In these circumstances, the King had little choice but to ask Parliament for grants of taxation to supplement his income, and members were often ready to grant such aid. However, problems arose for two reasons.

MPs were likely to be aggravated if they felt that the Crown's financial difficulties arose from the King's extravagance or the greed of courtiers. The King was also driven to apply other financial strategies, such as impositions and monopolies, which caused further friction. While these were offensive in themselves, driving up prices and restricting trade, they also raised constitutional issues.

The significance of financial problems was therefore threefold:

1. they revealed serious problems within the structure of government;
2. they caused a deterioration of the relationship between James and the political nation;
3. they raised constitutional issues concerning the rights and prerogatives of Parliament and of the King.

In isolation, these problems could be dealt with by negotiation and compromise, but by 1621 political tension was increasing dangerously as a result of other problems relating to religion, foreign policy and war. In the parliamentary sessions of 1621 and 1624, these separate problems became interwoven in a way that made them much more difficult to handle, and created serious tensions between the rights and privileges claimed by Parliament and the King's exercise of his power and prerogatives.