hat delicacy which he
had formerly maintained. By himself or his ministers he entered into a
particular detail, both of the alliances which he had formed, and of the
military operations which he had projected.[*]

* Dugdale, p. 25, 26.

He told the parliament, that, by a promise of subsidies, he had engaged
the king of Denmark to take part in the war; that this monarch intended
to enter Germany by the north, and to rouse to arms those princes who
impatiently longed for an opportunity of asserting the liberty of the
empire; that Mansfeldt had undertaken to penetrate with an English army
into the Palatinate, and by that quarter to excite the members of the
evangelical unions that the states must be supported in the unequal
warfare which they maintained with Spain; that no less a sum than seven
hundred thousand pounds a year had been found, by computation, requisite
for all these purposes; that the maintenance of the fleet, and the
defence of Ireland, demanded an annual expense of four hundred thousand
pounds; that he himself had already exhausted and anticipated, in the
public service, his whole revenue, and had scarcely left sufficient
for the daily subsistence of himself and his family;[*] that on his
accession to the crown, he found a debt of above three hundred thousand
pounds, contracted by his father in support of the palatine; and that
while prince of Wales, he had himself contracted debts, notwithstanding
his great frugality, to the amount of seventy thousand pounds, which he
had expended entirely on naval and military armaments. After mentioning
all these facts, the king even condescended to use entreaties. He said,
that this request was the first that he had ever made them: that he was
young, and in the commencement of his reign; and if he now met with kind
and dutiful usage, it would endear to him the use of parliaments, and
would forever preserve an entire harmony between him and his people.[**]

To these reasons the commons remained inexorable. Notwithstanding that
the king's measures, on the supposition of a foreign war, which they had
constantly demanded, were altogether unexceptionable, they obstinately
refused any further aid. Some members, favorable to the court, having
insisted on an addition of two fifteenths to the former supply, even
this pittance was refused;[***] though it was known that a fleet and
army were lying at Portsmouth, in great want of pay and provisions;
and that Buckingham, the