nt of Camden is difficult or
impossible to be reconciled to the state of the customs in
the beginning of the subsequent reign, as they appear in the
journals of the commons. See Hist. of James, chap. 46.

This improvement of the revenue was owing to the suggestions of one
Caermarthen; and was opposed by Burleigh, Leicester, and Walsingham:
but the queen's perseverance overcame all their opposition. The great
undertakings which she executed with so narrow a revenue, and with such
small supplies from her people, prove the mighty effects of wisdom and
economy. She received from the parliament, during the course of her
whole reign, only twenty subsidies and thirty-nine fifteenths. I pretend
not to determine exactly the amount of these supplies; because the value
of a subsidy was continually falling; and in the end of her reign it
amounted only to eighty thousand pounds,[*] though in the beginning it
had been a hundred and twenty thousand. If we suppose that the supplies
granted Elizabeth during a reign of forty-five years amounted to three
millions, we shall not probably be much wide of the truth.[**] This sum
makes only sixty-six thousand six hundred and sixty-six pounds a year;
and it is surprising, that while the queen's demands were so moderate,
and her expenses so well regulated, she should ever have found any
difficulty in obtaining a supply from parliament, or be reduced to make
sale of the crown lands. But such was the extreme, I had almost said,
absurd parsimony of the parliaments during that period.

* D'Ewes, p. 630.

* Lord Salisbury computed these supplies only at two
millions eight hundred thousand pounds, Journ. 17th Feb.
1609. King James was certainly mistaken when he estimated
the queen's annual supplies at one hundred and thirty-seven
thousand pounds. Franklyn, p. 44. It is curious to observe
that the minister, in the war begun in 1754, was in some
periods allowed to lavish in two months as great a sum as
was granted by parliament to Queen Elizabeth in forty-five
years. The extreme frivolous object of the late war, and the
great importance of hers, set this matter in still a
stronger light. Money too, we may observe, was in most
particulars of the same value in both periods: she paid
eight pence a day to every foot soldier. But our late
delusions have much exceeded any thing known in history, not
even excepti