Revenues of the Crown.

Royalty, after all, is an expensive government! What is a king without an aristocracy and a priesthood? and what are any of these, unless supported in splendour and magnificence? It is a system in which men are sought to be governed by the senses rather than the understanding, and is more adapted to a barbarous than civilized state. Pageantry and ceremony, the parade of crowns and coronets, of gold keys, sticks, white wands, and black rods; of ermine and lawn, and maces and wigs;—these are the chief attributes of monarchy. They are more appropriate to the state of the king of the Birmans or of the Ashantees than the sovereign of an European community. They cease to inspire respect when men become enlightened, when they have learnt that the real object of government is to confer the greatest happiness on the people at the least expense: but it is a beggarly greatness, an absurd system, that would perpetuate these fooleries amidst an impoverished population,—amidst debts, and taxes, and pauperism.

In treating of the revenues of the crown it will be important to observe the distinction between the ancient patrimony of the sovereign, denominated the hereditary revenues, and the modern parliamentary grant, substituted in lieu of them, called the Civil List. Of the nature of the latter—the various charges upon it in the maintenance of the king’s household and other disbursements—of its extravagant amount during the profligate reign of George IV. and of the total burthen entailed by the royal expenditure on the people, we shall treat in the next chapter. In the present we shall confine ourselves to an exposition of the amount, the application, and management of the hereditary revenues; consisting of the landed possessions of the Crown, of Admiralty droits, Gibraltar duties, Leeward-Island duties, the property of persons dying intestate without heirs, forfeiture in courts of justice, the incomes of bishoprics during vacancies, surplus of the Scotch civil list, profit on waifs, shipwrecks, treasure-trove, and other minor sources. The other branches of the hereditary revenue, arising from the excise, wine licenses, and post-office, it does not fall within our purpose to investigate; they have been carried to the general account of taxes, and disbursed, we believe, as honestly as other portions of the public income.

Parliament having granted a specific annuity, out of the taxes, for the support of the dignity of the Crown, the public was led to believe, during the two last reigns, that the produce of the hereditary revenues had been appropriated to the wants of the state. This, it will be shown in the sequel, was a complete and egregious delusion. It will be seen that the ancient revenues of the Crown were left at the uncontrolled disposal of ministers. That they were chiefly expended in objects personal to themselves, the king, or royal family; in pensions and grants to their parliamentary supporters, their relatives, and adherents; in the purchase of tithe and church-patronage; in occasional charitable donations, ostentatiously granted, under pretext of mitigating the sufferings of distressed artizans and manufacturers; in payments into the privy purse, for the more lavish support of court prodigality; in the building and pulling down of palaces; in payments for defraying the expense of the royal household, and other outgoings, which ought to have been defrayed out of the civil list: in short, it will be seen that, for seventy years, the public was not only burthened with an enormous provision for a civil list, but, by an extraordinary kind of Tory management, failed to derive any advantage from those funds, in lieu of which a civil list had been specially granted.

For obvious reasons, the leading men in the House of Commons always manifested great reluctance to touch on these subjects. Although it is well known that, allowance being made for difference in the value of money, and the charges transferred to other funds, the income of George IV. exceeded that of his predecessor by more than half a million, not one of the people’s advocates—not even the more ostentatious patriots—Brougham, Hume, Russell, or Graham—ever brought the shameless extravagance fairly before the country. It is possible, as we have hinted, there may have existed reasons for this complacence towards royal profusion. In spite of the encroachments of the Oligarchy, a king of England possesses great power, and has abundant means of rewarding expectants and supporters: he is not only the fountain of honour, but enjoys, nearly, all the patronage in church and state; and the more virtuous aspirants in public life may have felt reluctant to shipwreck all hope of once basking in the sunshine of the court. However, we feel no restraint from these considerations. Moreover we consider the sovereign, like other state functionaries, only the servant of the public: and the public sustaining a great burthen on his account, under the pretext that the duties of his office are essential to the welfare of the people, they have clearly a right to be informed of the amount and mode of his outgoings. In what follows it will be seen what a lavish expenditure has been tolerated during a period when successive ministers have been loud and vehement in professing a desire to reduce every establishment to the lowest possible scale, and when it has been often openly and boastingly alleged that economy and retrenchment had been carried to the utmost limit compatible with national service. Our exposition will also throw light on the workings of the borough-government in its highest departments, and uncover many streamlets of corruption which meandered through the upper stratum of our boasted Constitution.

The new disposition made of the hereditary revenues by the Civil List Act of 1831, and which continues in force during the life of the king, we shall notice in its proper place; at present we shall give a brief exposition of those ancient endowments of the monarchy which long formed a principal source of ministerial influence and parliamentary corruption. First of the