committing some fault whenever they put forward a finger. "Digitum exsere, peccas."

IV. Crown Rights in Property.

The Domains of the Crown and its casual revenues were originally regarded as allotted to the Sovereign for public use; a maintenance for the establishments of peace and war, as well as for palaces, progresses, and largesses. In process of time, Supplies, under a variety of appellations, became indispensable for meeting the exigencies of the State, owing to the diminution of ancient revenues, and the accumulation and augmentation of modern wants. Afterwards, the Supplies came to be considered as the appropriate fund for defraying the general expences of the nation; the royal domains and casual revenues being treated as the peculium of the Sovereign in the capacity of proprietor.

It is obvious, that, in whatever way, or to whatever extent, the ancient revenue of the Crown may have been squandered, it is sound policy, under a monarchical government, to keep open the purses of the Community for an ample and continual support of the Royal Dignity; but Blackstone's argument of a quid pro quo in the case may appear untenable, when he writes— "The public patrimony, having, by improvident management, got into the hands of private Subjects, it is but reasonable that private contributions should supply the public service." This is to say, in other words, that inasmuch as Charles II. did not with his own teeth eat up the royal revenue received for perpetual public uses, but fed his mistresses and bastards with it, the present generation ought, in reason, to make compensation for what they vicariously enjoy by the mouths of the progenies of those mistresses and bastards. The question, which was illuminated by the pen of Junius, whether the timber in Whittlebury Forest was available for the navy, or was the property of the Duke of Grafton, turned on the construction of a grant of Charles II. to one of his bastards by an adulteress.

The Resumption of Crown-lands was, in the reign of Charles II., in 1678, made the subject of a motion in the House of Commons; a kind of measure, for which, in ancient times, there had been thirty Acts of Parliament; but, as the Parliamentary History relates, "on a division, the Resumption was laid aside." The particulars of the debate on the subject are curious.-It was argued that to resume Crown-lands granted since the 1st of James would "make an earthquake;" the Crown-lands, at the Restoration, were stated to have been of the value of £150,000 per annum. It was said, that there was always a distinction between the ancient patrimony of the Crown, and escheats, which were a casual revenue that the King had to give for reward of services. It appeared that the largest grants in the reign of Charles II. had been made to the Duke of Albermarle, and to the Earl of Sandwich, as it was said, " for his early repentance.' On its being alleged that a Member of the House, Sir Charles Herbert, was a large grantee, he stated that the King had granted him four manors of £400 per annum each, “Not a farthing of profit to me, as long as the Queen lives. I desired only a mark of my service, that is all."

In the reign of Charles II. it became a practice to make Supplies themselves part of the Crown's hereditary revenue, as in the instances of the Excise, Wine-licenses, and the Post Office, which included the exclusive right of letting post-horses for hire; besides tonnage and poundage, of which the King was made occupant for life. It appears from the recitals of a statute (22nd and 23rd Car. II. c. 6) that the duty from wine-licenses, which had been settled on the Duke of York by statute, had been purchased by the King for £24,000 per annum to the Duke and his heirs male, which bargain was confirmed by Parliament. Whilst the wine-licenses were in the Duke's hands, the demolition of brothels by the Apprentices occurred, by which, as the Duke complained, two brothel-keepers had their houses pulled down, who paid him each £15 a year for their wine-licenses.

In the great case of the Bankers, which long engaged the attention of the King's Bench, the Exchequer Chamber, and the Parliament, subsequently to the Revolution, it was ultimately decided that grants of Charles II. out of the hereditary excise were binding on the Crown in the time of William III.: these grants were in the nature of charges on posterity, by way of restitution, for the King's literal adoption of a suggestion of Falstaff to Prince Henry, "The first thing you do, rob me the Exchequer!" So Parliament, in its last Session, was occupied about transferring to the Consolidated Fund a grant of Charles II. out of the hereditary excise to the Earl of Bath and his heirs, and one to the Duke of Grafton and his heirs out of the revenue of the Post Office1.

The practice of annexing to the peculium of the Sovereign the proceeds of any tax was fraught with mischief, inasmuch as it proved a perpetual obstacle to reductions, or improvements of any kind which time and experience might dictate. Thus, when, in order to facilitate the communication of one part of the metropolis with another, an enterprising citizen had set up a penny post, it was adjudged an infraction of the Duke of York's monopoly. Like other hereditary revenue, taxes settled on the Crown have been squandered by our Sovereigns, especially those who have had no legitimate children, or who may have been at enmity with their presumptive successors, or whose habits may have been prodigal, or their government corrupt, or who may have been avaricious of fame for bountiful piety. All revenue which could

1 The modern statutes by which the Queen's revenue is regulated will be found in Bowyer's Commentaries, Ch. XIII. and XIV. The principal heads of the ordinary royal revenue in the reign of Charles II. were the Excise, the Customs, and Chimney or Hearth-money. To these are to be added the Post-office (settled on the Duke of York), the royal domains, the Duchies, forfeitures, fines, firstfruits, and tenths. Whatever the King could save by retrenching the expenditure of the public departments, was an addition to his privy purse. Mr Macaulay estimates the annual revenue of Charles II. at £1,400,000, independently, it is presumed, of Supplies, and Clandestinities.

be regarded as the Crown's peculium was, a priori, likely to be reduced to annihilation, as it would, in fact, have been reduced had not a threadbare remnant of it been saved by a statute of Anne. It was not, however, until the disannexation of the ancient and the casual revenues of the Crown from the Civil List, in the reign of George III., that the rights of the Sovereign in these species of property ceased to be detrimental to the rights and interests of the Subject.

Not only was the expense of the public establishments of peace and war, in the reign of Charles II., cast almost exclusively on the Supplies; but this drain on the Subject's purse was largely augmented by means of (above mentioned) misappropriations, and the practices of farming and of anticipating the Public Revenue. Mr Macaulay observes of the farm of hearthmoney, that, in consequence of it, "The Treasury was obliged to connive at outrages and exactions, such as have, in every age, made the name of Publican a proverb for all that is hateful." With regard to anticipations, they were the subject of frequent complaints and resolutions in Parliament during the reign of Charles II. On one occasion the King asked for a Supply expressly to discharge anticipations before the anticipated taxes had been granted. It appeared from a paper of the Lord Treasurer in 1675, that a revenue of £1,358,000 was clogged with anticipations to the amount of £866,954. The King, in an answer to an Address of the Commons against anticipations of the Customs, replied that "whatsoever he had been before, he would henceforward be a very good husband." The interest on anticipations, and that on the Goldsmiths' money seized in the Exchequer (which used to be paid until the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament), may, perhaps, be considered the origin of our national debt more correctly than the policy of government consequent on the Revolution. Mr Macaulay contends that William III. introduced a practice not of contracting, but of paying public debts.

The Forest Laws constituted an arbitrary and severe Code, which, in the reign of Charles II., trenched on the liberty of the Subject with regard to property. Blackstone mentions the rigorous proceedings of the Forest Courts in the time of Charles I., and passing over, without notice, the remarkable effect of the Commonwealth in purifying public law from time-honored malusages, he observes that, after the Restoration, a Court of JusticeSeat for the Forest was held before the Earl of Oxford pro formá only; and that, since the Revolution of 1688, the Forest Laws have fallen into total disuse. But it seems clear from Roger North's Life of Lord Keeper Guilford, to which Blackstone refers, that the Earl of Oxford's Justice-Seat was not pro formá only, but that the Forest Laws were the source of considerable oppression in the reign of Charles II. North writes, indeed, that a formal Justice-Seat of the Forests was proclaimed, but he adds that Judges were appointed to assist the Lord Chief Justice in Eyre, and Counsel for the King were declared, who "in all causes in which the King's title was not in question, had liberty to advise and plead; so good money, besides a gratuity and riding charges, was picked up. But it is not readily conceived what advantage thence came by gaining an idea of the ancient law in the immediate practice of it. The Judges were solemnly received by the Counties as on a Circuit, and thus all the forests on this side Trent were visited." North adds, that “the subject-matter is unpopular, and the Officers of the Forest are, on one side, corrupt, and yield to all abuses, and, on the other side, oppress and extort money of all they can, and, as if that were the end of their institution, mind nothing else1." An Act of Charles II. respecting Game contains a saving of the "forest laws, rights, powers, royalties and prerogatives."

1 The extant Placita of the Forests reach from the 10th John, 1208, to 37th Car. II. 1685. The Courts of the Forest had criminal as well as civil jurisdiction, particularly of the forestal offences of dog-draw, stable-stand, back-bear, and bloodyhand.