was committed; and if we
may credit the historian [k], they had formed the plan of other
limitations, as well as of associations to maintain them, which would
have reduced the king to be an absolute cipher; and have held the
crown in perpetual pupilage and dependence. The king, to satisfy
them, would agree to nothing but a renewal of the charter, and a
general permission to excommunicate all the violaters of it; and he
received no supply, except a scutage of twenty shillings on each
knight's fee, for the marriage of his eldest daughter to the King of
Scotland; a burden which was expressly annexed to their feudal
tenures.
[FN [k] M. Paris, p. 432.]

Four years after, in a full Parliament, when Henry demanded a new
supply, he was openly reproached with a breach of his word, and the
frequent violations of the charter. He was asked, whether he did not
blush to desire any aid from his people, whom he professedly hated and
despised, to whom, on all occasions, he preferred aliens and
foreigners, and who groaned under the oppressions which he either
permitted or exercised over them. He was told that, besides
disparaging his nobility, by forcing them to contract unequal and mean
marriages with strangers, no rank of men was so low as to escape
vexatious from him or his ministers; that even the victuals consumed
in his household, the clothes which himself and his servants wore,
still more the wine which they used, were all taken by violence from
the lawful owners, and no compensation was ever made them for the
injury; that foreign merchants, to the great prejudice and infamy of
the kingdom, shunned the English harbours, as if they were possessed
by pirates, and the commerce with all nations was thus cut off by
these acts of violence; that loss was added to loss, and injury to
injury, while the merchants, who had been despoiled of their goods,
were also obliged to carry them at their own charge to whatever place
the king was pleased to appoint them; that even the poor fishermen on
the coast could not escape his oppressions and those of his courtiers;
and finding that they had not full liberty to dispose of their
commodities in the English market, were frequently constrained to
carry them to foreign ports, and to hazard all the perils of the
ocean, rather than those which awaited them from his oppressive
emissaries; and that his very religion was a ground of complaint to
his subjects, while they observed, that the waxen tapers