The Great Contract

I had intended to move on from Sir John Hungerford, but as I reviewed his bio, I ran across another committee assignment -- on a conference committee with the Lords (House of Lords) involving something called the Great Contract.  Sounds impressive enough, so I looked it up. 

I'll be trying here to summarize the information from the Encyclopedia Britannica, so any mistakes are purely my own. 

James I, just to review, was king in Scotland when Elizabeth I died, and he was next in succession to the English throne. Now we all know it takes money to run a country, but in a country where the rulers are supported by the public coffers, how much money coming in becomes a bit more personal. 

The budget for Scotland ran to about £50,000. England was bigger and needed more income, so James may have thought that when he took over, he'd have more to work with. Alas, Elizabeth had left a debt in excess of £400,000. Just running his household would cost more money than his single predecessor needed. 

A court case made it possible for James to place levies on imported goods without dealing with Parliament. His minister of finance, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, took on the task of expanding the list of goods that could be levied and revised the book of rates, which went up, of course. These measures produced an extra £70,000 a year. 

But the nation was experiencing inflation, and James liked spending money, so the debt grew by another couple of hundred thousand pounds. So in 1610 negotiations began to do something about the situation, a contract, crafted by Cecil, between the king and his subjects that would raise an extra £200,000 a year. 

Cecil proposed an annual sum to support the king in the style benefitting a king and eliminate the royal debt. The sums were staggering for the time.

For his part, James would give up some of his monarchical "rights" -- I would call them privileges -- that were ways in which the king was entitled to income from a variety of sources. . I didn't find an enumeration of what all these rights were. One issue, if I understand correctly, would have involved a practice in which the king could make wards of underaged inheritors of property and take much or all the income from the property for himself. Another issue is called "purveyance," which allowed the king to purchase goods below market price. And another would have abridged the discovery of concealed lands, that is lands that actually belonged to the crown that were producing income for lessees who weren't paying their rents and due share of the income. 

Cecil proposed a land tax to replace whatever income was lost by the king's concession, but as everyone began discussing the proposals, the inevitable divide opened up. The king's side insisted the amount that would be produced was too low, and Parliament, especially the House of Commons, said they'd heard from their constituents, who opposed the idea. 

In the end, the whole deal fell apart, and Cecil had to find new ways to wring money out of the king's entitlements. Like many leaders, James blamed the whole debacle on Cecil, and the king's relationship with his minister and Parliament were damaged in the process. 

Hungerford's bio doesn't indicate what his position was on the matter, but I'd like to think he represented the people of his district and opposed the measure. 

Image: detail from portraits of King James I. Public domain. In case I haven't mentioned it, this is the fella who gave us the King James Bible.