distinct notions of
total amounts; he was once so shocked at the sight of the money he had
granted away, lying in heaps on a table, that he instantly reduced it to
half the sum. It appears that Parliament never granted even the ordinary
supplies they had given to his predecessors; his chief revenue was drawn
from the customs; yet his debts, of which I find an account in the
Parliamentary History, after a reign of twenty-one years, did not amount
to 200,000_l._[A] This monarch could not have been so wasteful of his
revenues as it is presumed. James I. was always generous, and left
scarcely any debts. He must have lived amidst many self-deprivations; nor
was this difficult to practise for this king, for he was a philosopher,
indifferent to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of royalty.
Whenever he threw himself into the arms of his Parliament, they left him
without a feeling of his distress. In one of his speeches he says--

"In the last Parliament I laid open the true thoughts of my heart; but I
may say, with our Saviour, 'I have piped to you, and you have not danced;
I have mourned, and you have not lamented.' I have reigned eighteen years,
in which time you have had peace, and I have received far less supply than
hath been given to any king since the Conquest."

[Footnote A: "Parliamentary History," vol. v. p. 147.]

Thus James, denied the relief he claimed, was forced on wretched
expedients, selling patents for monopolies, craving benevolences, or free
gifts, and such expedients; the monopolies had been usual in Elizabeth's
reign; yet all our historians agree, that his subjects were never
grievously oppressed by such occasional levies; this was even the
confession of the contemporaries of this monarch. They were every day
becoming wealthier by those acts of peace they despised the monarch for
maintaining. "The kingdom, since his reign began, was luxuriant in gold
and silver, far above the scant of our fathers who lived before us," are
the words of a contemporary.[A] All flourished about the king, except the
king himself. James I. discovered how light and hollow was his boasted
"prerogative-royal," which, by its power of dissolving the Parliament,
could only keep silent those who had already refused their aid.

[Footnote A: Hacket's "Life of Lord-Keeper Williams."]

A wit of the day described the Parliaments of James by this ludicrous
distich:

Many faults complained of, few things amended,
A subsi