Royal Debts and Expenditure During the Late Reigns.

The state of the civil list has varied so much during the reigns of George III. and IV., that it may be useful to give a brief sketch of the total amount of public money applied to the support of this department of expenditure, and in extricating the Crown and the members of the royal family from pecuniary embarrassments.

At the commencement of the reign of George III. the king accepted the fixed sum of £800,000 per annum in lieu of the hereditary, temporary, and other revenues. This sum was successively augmented by parliament as follows:

In 1804, when £60,000 was added, the civil list was relieved of annual charges to the amount of £82,000. The debts of the king, paid by parliament, were as follows:

Parliament granted, towards the extraordinary expenses of 1814, £100,000, making £3,213,061; and in January, 1815, there was a further debt on the civil list to the amount of £421,355. To these grants to the king must be added the monies granted to the royal family, and to defray those charges of which the civil list had been relieved, amounting to £9,561,396. Besides which there was applied, either in aid of the civil list, or to liquidate arrears thereon, £1,653,717 out of the hereditary revenues. So far brings the royal expenditure to January, 1815. In the following year the civil list expenditure amounted to £1,480,000; making the total expenditure, from the accession of George III. to January, 1816, £64,740,032.

This brings us down to the period when there was a general parliamentary investigation of the civil list; and when it was settled on the basis on which it continued, without material alteration, till the recent demise of the Crown. As we have before explained the profuse character of lord Castlereagh’s settlement, and the vast augmentation the civil list received, we shall not repeat our statement, further than by recapitulating the chief provisions.

In 1816 the civil list was relieved of public charges to the amount of £255,768, and the future provision for it was fixed at the sum of £1,083,729. £100,000 more was granted for the support of the establishment of George III. at Windsor-Castle, and £10,000 per annum to Queen Charlotte, afterwards continued to the Duke of York, for superintendence. In the same year £60,000 was voted for the establishment of the Princess Charlotte and Prince Coburg. With the exception of the saving of £10,000, by the premature death of the Princess of Wales, in 1817, all these arrangements continued until the accession of George IV. in 1820, when the civil list was fixed at £1,057,000, and so continued to the end of that monarch’s reign.

Having obtained the ordinary charges of the civil list, we next inquire, what extraordinary aids flowed into this insatiable gulph. Like his predecessor, George IV. was constantly receiving, in addition to his regular income, refreshers out of the Admiralty droits, Gibraltar duties, and other branches of the hereditary revenues, either in aid of the privy purse, to defray travelling expenses among his lieges, or to meet extra outgoings in the household. Besides these, many items ordinarily inserted in that annual budget of miscellanies, the civil list contingencies, ought in justice to be placed to the account of the sovereign. Then, again, what masses of money have been swamped in the royal palaces. Upwards of £600,000 has been already granted for the repair and improvement of the Pimlico residence. On Windsor-castle the sum already expended amounts to £894,500; and £190,670 more is requisite to finish this gothic barbarism. It is said that the pavilion at Brighton cost a million of money; and on the cottage in the Great Park half a million was expended. For the two last facts we have no official authority, but they are traits of extravagance not improbable in a king who, in one year, spent £5000 and more in the single article of robes; whose stud of horses, though he seldom journeyed beyond the limits of his own pleasure-grounds, was upwards of 200; and whose old clothes, white kid inexpressibles with white satin linings included, after his death, actually sold in the heap for £15,000! Such are the blessings conferred by a monarch of taste, who, through the agency of servile ministers and a patient people, obtained ample means to gratify his most fantastic desires.

Nothing has been yet said of the burthen imposed by the younger branches of the royal family. The pensions of these are paid out of the consolidated fund, and form a distinct charge from the civil list. The annuities payable at the time of the late demise, exclusive of military pay and official emoluments, amounted to £248,500 per annum.

Every change in the personal relations of the royal family entails additional expense on the community, whether it be a marriage, a christening, or a burial. In the first case, there is a grant for an outfit; in the second, a grant for support and education; and in the last, a provision for the servants of the deceased. The public is now paying upwards £30,000 per annum for the servants of George III., Queen Charlotte, and Queen Caroline. In 1825 an annuity of £6000 a-year was granted to the Duke of Cumberland, to support and educate his son, Prince George-Frederick-Alexander-Charles-Ernest-Augustus of Cumberland, (gracious heaven, what a long name this child has got); in the same year a like annuity to the Duchess of Kent, for Alexandrina-Victoria, which, in 1831, was augmented to her royal highness by an additional grant of £10,000. One might suppose these high personages had never been married, and the fact of having offspring was among the accidents of life for which they were totally unprovided.

People naturally wonder what becomes of the heaps of money abstracted from them in taxes; they are, in fact, only imperfectly acquainted with the costliness of the institutions under which they live, and the profusion with which the produce of their industry and skill is lavished: we shall, however, endeavour to open their eyes on these subjects. Let us see, then, what has been the total cost of the two last reigns; after the preceding explanations the reader will be better able to comprehend and verify the subjoined recapitulation.

The pensions and official emoluments of the royal dukes, from first entering into public life to the year 1815, are not included; and there are various fees and perquisites of which they were in the receipt, and annuities to the princesses on the Irish civil list, of which we have not been able to obtain authentic returns. The total amount of the incomes of the king and royal family, for the last seventy years, cannot have been less than £100,000,000 sterling, making the average expenditure of a single family £1,428,571 per annum.

The people of England have been so long familiarized to the lavish expenditure of their rulers, that we fear they are unable to appreciate the importance of one hundred millions of money. The best way to bring the mind rightly to estimate the magnitude of this sum, is, to reflect for a moment on the amount of evil it might have averted, or the good it might have accomplished, had it been judiciously appropriated to the attainment of objects of national utility. An annual revenue of £1,428,571 is equal to one-third of all the sums levied in poor-rates during the two reigns, and would maintain two millions of poor people. By the saving of such a sum how many trumpery taxes might have been repealed, which harass and impede the industrious citizen! What a fund it would form to mitigate the sufferings constantly recurring from changes in the seasons and the vicissitudes of commerce! It is calculated that the annual application of a quarter of a million would enable to emigrate the whole of the redundant industry yearly accumulating from the progress of population. How much more, then might be effected by the application of £1,428,571 per annum. What an impulse it would give to our mercantile navy, by creating employment for shipping in the conveyance of settlers:—what stores—what implements of agriculture, and other necessaries, it would furnish to families! Internal industry would be stimulated; new communities founded; the waste and desolate parts of the earth reclaimed and peopled; and by opening new channels of employment and demand, some of the evils, which most embitter our social state, alleviated.

A republican, perhaps, would contend that nearly the whole of the hundred millions might have been saved to the community, and point to the people of the United States of America for an example of frugal government. Their king only costs five thousand a-year, instead of a million; and their other functionaries are equally cheap and reasonable. As for lords of the bed-chamber, grooms of the stole, master of the hawks, master of the robes, and other masters and lords, they have none of these things. And where is the loss they have sustained? Their government never appeared deficient in dignity or efficiency at home or abroad; and the duties of the executive magistracy have been discharged quite as well as in this country.

There is much truth in this; but the British people seem to have a taste for monarchy, and it is a point now hardly disputed, that every community has a right to choose its own form of government. It is true our chief magistrate is not the most efficient of public servants; neither fighting the battles of the country, conducting its negotiations, nor personally exercising judicial administration. Still, we do not consider him quite so useless in his station as “the gilded globe on the dome of St. Paul’s,” to which the capital “of the Corinthian column” has been rather absurdly compared. Every society must have a head—a king, president, or dictator; and, in fixing the amount of his revenue, it is necessary to have regard to the state and income of his subjects. A richly endowed church and aristocracy demand a richly endowed king to match: simultaneously with the curtailment of the income of the monarch ought the revenues of the priesthood and nobility to be curtailed, by the abolition of tithes, the repeal of corn-laws, and a more equal partition of national burthens.

The superior income of the sovereign, however, does not comprise all the advantages he enjoys over his lieges. The king pays no house-rent or taxes; and if he travels he pays no turnpikes. If he marries there is an outfit; if he has a child there is a portion; if he dies he is buried at the public charge, his widow receives £100,000 a year out of the taxes, and has two splendid mansions wherein to mourn her loss. Thus all the relations and vicissitudes of life are so amply provided for that one is at a loss to conceive what the king can have to pay, or on what objects his immense income can be expended. Here is certainly a mystery. The conclusion seems to be, that the functions of the regal office have degenerated into etiquette; and the exalted individuals who discharge them have become, as one of the number observed, little more than a ceremony, whose duties are nominal, and whose outgoings—great though they be—consist only of trappings, attendance, and pageantry.

In what, for example, consist the duties of a king of the old European fashion?—At first sight they appear great and manifold: he holds courts and levees—opens and prorogues parliament—chooses ministers of state—examines and signs all public grants and documents. These functions appear quite sufficient to occupy the attention of one individual; but if we examine them more closely, we shall find they are vain, shadowy, and unimportant.

What, for instance, is a court?—A pageant, a farce, in which a train of useless officers, gaudily attired, assemble, and those who have obtained an appointment, a pension, or place, express their gratitude by kissing the royal hands!

What is a levee?—A larger muster, a presentation of titled mendicants and others, who move in procession before the king: they bow, and he bows, and sometimes smiles; they pass on, another and another, as “great a fool as t’ other;”—and this is a levee.

How does the king authenticate public documents? He writes W. R., or W. Rex, at the top or bottom of a piece of parchment, vellum, or paper: this was done by a machine in the last reign, and many were in hopes that it would have been retained, and a similar contrivance extended to other regal functions, by which the monarch would have been able to retire on half-pay, or with a superannuation allowance.

What is the opening of parliament?—The king going in great state to the house of peers; reading about a dozen lines prepared for him by his ministers, containing nothing either rich or rare, and then returning in the same state.

What is a prorogation?—Much the same as the last; with this difference, that the rogues are sent to kill partridges, instead of being called together to talk, and talk, and nothing but talk.

How does the king choose his ministers? He does not choose them at all; they are chosen by a majority of the parliament, which is chosen by one hundred and fifty-four individuals called boroughmongers, who have been chosen by God knows whom, but who appear to have been a visitation inflicted on the people as a punishment for apathy and gullibility.

Are not kings the fathers of their people?—They are so called, but they are very unlike fathers, since, instead of feeding and protecting their children, their children feed and protect them.

Kings are called the sovereigns of their respective states?—They are so styled, certainly, but this is another fiction of feudality and priest-craft. The sovereignty is in the people; and, as every day affords experimental proof of the truth of this position, there are now few to call it in question.

Such is a catechism of the duties and attributes of what may be denominated feudal kings: as to citizen kings, our experience of them is yet too limited to decide whether or no they are an improvement. But of the elder sort it may be truly affirmed they have little claim on the gratitude of mankind: formerly they were great destroyers of their species, and latterly they have been great consumers of victual. “When we see,” says Rabelais, “the print of Garagantua, that has a mouth as large as an oven, and swallows at one meal twelve hundred pounds of bread, twenty oxen, a hundred sheep, six hundred fowls, fifteen hundred horses, two thousand quails, a thousand barrels of wine, six hundred peaches, five hundred pine-apples, &c. &c. who does not say—That is the mouth of a King?”