constitutionally exercised for the public benefit, on the advice of responsible ministers, have provoked no attempts at restraint; and the personal power of the Sovereign, as distinguished from the power of the regal office, having been restrained within due limits, the ancient jealousy of the Crown, inherited from the struggles of our ancestors, may now almost be said to have died out. It was at the Revolution that a limitation was for the Revenues of first time imposed upon the personal expenditure of the the Crown. Sovereign. Previously it had been customary for the Parliament, at the commencement of each reign, to grant to the King the ordinary Crown revenues, consisting of (1) the hereditary revenues of the Crown itself, viz., the rents of Crown lands, the feudal rights (surrendered by Charles II. in 1660, in exchange for the excise duties), the proceeds of the post-office and wine licences; and (2) the produce of taxes voted to the King for life. The annual revenue of Charles II. from these sources was sometimes a little above, sometimes a little below, the sum of £1,200,000, which was fixed by Parliament as the ordinary revenue of the Crown; that of James II. amounted on an average to £1,500,964 a year, out of which the King was expected, in time of peace, to support the royal dignity and civil government and also the public defence. But whatever remained after payment of these necessary expenses of the government was at the King's absolute disposal; in addition to which Charles II. did not hesitate to apply to his own privy purse large sums of money which had been specially appropriated by Parliament for the purposes of the war. At the accession of William and Mary, however, Parliament fixed the annual revenue of the Crown, in time of peace, at £1,200,000, of which about 700,000 (derived from the here- The 'Civil ditary revenues of the Crown, and from a part of the excise duties) was separately appropriated to what was afterwards called the King's 'Civil List,' comprising the personal expenses of the King, the support of the royal household, and also the payment of civil offices and pensions, which were more fairly chargeable to the remaining portion of List.' the Crown revenue devoted to the strictly public expenditure of the State. The principle that the King's regular and domestic expenses should be restricted to a fixed annual sum distinct from the other departments of public expenditure, was adhered to in succeeding reigns, and down to the accession of George II. the Civil List was maintained at £700,000. Both Anne and George I., however, incurred debts, the former of 1,200,000, the latter of £1,000,000, which were discharged by Parliament by loans charged upon the Civil List itself. The Civil List of George II. was fixed at a minimum of £800,000, Parliament undertaking that if the hereditary revenues should produce less than that sum, it would make up the deficiency-a liability which it discharged in 1746, by paying off a Civil List debt of £456,000. But the direct control of Parliament over the personal expenses of the King was first acquired on the accession of George III., who surrendered to the nation his life interest in the hereditary revenues, and all claim to any surplus which might accrue from them, in return for a fixed Civil List of £800,000 (increased in 1777 to £900,000) 'for the support of his household, and the honour and dignity of the Crown.' In addition, however, to the fixed Civil List, George III. enjoyed a considerable further income, derived from the droits of the Crown and Admiralty and other sources, which was wholly independent of Parliamentary control; and yet, notwithstanding the King's economical and even parsimonious mode of living, and the removal, from time to time, from the Civil List of various charges which were unconnected with the personal comfort and dignity of the Sovereign, his struggle to establish the ascendency of the Crown by systematic bribery of members of Parliament with places, pensions, and direct gifts of money, compelled him to make repeated applications to the nation for payment of debts upon the Civil List. Altogether, the arrears paid off by Parliament during his reign-exclusive of a debt of £300,000 charged on the Civil List in 1782, when its expenditure was curtailed and split up into separate classes-amounted to a total of £3,398,000.1 William IV. on his accession surrendered not only the hereditary revenues, but all the other sources of revenue which had been enjoyed by his predecessors; receiving in return a Civil List of £510,000, which was at the same time relieved from most of the charges which more properly belonged to the civil government of the State. The Civil List of Queen Victoria was settled, on the same principles, at the annual sum of £385,000; and while the removal of civil charges has freed the Crown from any suspicion of indirect influences, the improved administration of the present Sovereign and her two immediate predecessors has rendered it unnecessary to apply to Parliament during their reigns for the discharge of debts upon the Civil List. lands. The surrender of the Crown lands to be disposed of by Crown Parliament, like the other revenues of the State, for the public service-begun by George III. and now 'by a custom as strong as law' repeated by each sovereign at the beginning of his reign-is one instance among others of the return in modern constitutional usage to the simpler principles of the older constitution. We have seen, in an earlier chapter, how the folkland, the land of the nation, which could not be alienated without the consent of the Witan, gradually changed into Terra Regis, the land of the King, to be dealt with according to his personal pleasure. Continually augmented by feudal escheats and forfeitures, the Crown lands were as continually diminished by improvident grants to the royal favourites and followers. Attempts were made to check this abuse from time to time, but without effect, and Charles I. still further diminished the royal patrimony by extensive sales and mortgages. His example was followed by the Parliaments of the Commonwealth; and although at the Restoration these latter sales were declared void, Charles II. soon squandered 1 Report on Civil List, 1815, p. 4; May, Const. Hist. i. 243. Private property of the Sovereign. the estates which had been restored to the Crown, and in three years reduced their annual income from £217,000 to £100,000. James II. and William III. were equally liberal and improvident, and, on the accession of Queen Anne, it was found by Parliament that the Crown lands had been so reduced that the net income from them scarcely exceeded the rent-roll of a squire. To preserve what still remained, an Act was passed (1 Anne, c. 8, s. 5) which, after sadly reciting that the necessary expenses of supporting the Crown, or the greater part of them, were formerly defrayed by a land revenue, which had, from time to time, been impaired by the grants of former kings and queens, so that her Majesty's land revenues could then. afford very little towards the support of her government,' prohibited absolute grants entirely, and prescribed stringent conditions as to the length of term and rentals of all future leases. Thus the small remnant of the land which had once been the land of the people was saved from utter dissipation, and since its restoration to the nation by George III. 'the Terra Regis of the Norman has once more become the folkland of the days of our earliest freedom.' 2 This change has been accompanied by the restoration to the Crown of a right which it had lost during its uncontrolled tenure of the hereditary estates. During the days when the folkland was really the land of the people, the King, equally with a subject, had enjoyed the right of inheriting, purchasing, devising, and otherwise disposing of lands which were his own private property. But when the kingship had become more strictly hereditary, and the lands of the nation came to be regarded as the property of the King, the person and the office of the King were The Crown lands received some augmentation from forfeitures after the rebellions of 1715 and 1745; but during the first 25 years of Geo. III. they produced a net average rental of little more than £6,000 a year. Improved administration and the rise in the value of land have since rendered them much more productive. In 1798 they were valued at £201,250 a year; in 1812 at £283, 160; in 1820 they actually yielded £114,852; in 1830 they produced £373,770; and in 1860 they returned an income of £416,530, exceeding the Civil List granted to the Queen. May, Const. Hist. i. 255. 3 Supra, p. 15. Freeman, Growth of Eng. Const. p. 134. held to be so thoroughly identified that his private estates were merged in the royal demesne and made incapable of alienation by will. After the restoration of the Crown lands to the nation, it was felt to be reasonable 'that a restriction which belonged to a past state of things should be swept away, and that sovereigns who had surrendered an usurped power which they ought never to have held should be restored to the enjoyment of a natural right which ought never to have been taken from them." Accordingly the Sovereign has again been invested with the right of acquiring and disposing of private property in the same manner as any other member of the nation. II. The House of Lords. (II.) The House of Lords. Peers. Since the Revolution, the House of Peers-the lineal representative of the old Great Councils and the older Witenagemôts —has undergone changes in its numbers, composition, and political weight and influence, greater even than the changes which, during the same period, have so materially affected the practical exercise of the authority of the Crown in government and legislation. In the Parliament of 1454, the last held before the outbreak of the Number of Wars of the Roses, the number of lay peers who attended was 53. In 1485, only 29 received writs of summons to the first Parliament of Henry VII. The greatest number summoned by Henry VIII. was 51, which had increased at the death of Elizabeth to 59. In the meantime, by the suppression of the monasteries and the consequent removal from the Upper House of about 36 abbots and priors, the spiritual peerage (including 5 of the new sees created by Henry VIII.) had been reduced to the number of 26, at which it has ever since remained. crease under The four Stewart kings created 193 new peers, but Rapid inas during their reigns 99 peerages became extinct, the the Stewart number of the peerage at the Revolution of 1688 actually kings. Freeman, Growth of Eng. Const. p. 136; and see Allen, Royal Prerogative, p. 154. See 39 & 40 Geo. III. c. 88; 4 Geo. IV. c. 18; 25 & 26 Vict. c. 37. Supra, p. 336. Supra, p. 383 n. |