to the country. The land
tax was reduced from four shillings in the pound to three. But nine
expensive campaigns had left a heavy arrear behind them; and it was
plain that the public burdens must, even in the time of peace, be such
as, before the Revolution, would have been thought more than sufficient
to support a vigorous war. A country gentleman was in no very good
humour, when he compared the sums which were now exacted from him with
those which he had been in the habit of paying under the last two kings;
his discontent became stronger when he compared his own situation
with that of courtiers, and above all of Dutch courtiers, who had been
enriched by grants of Crown property; and both interest and envy made
him willing to listen to politicians who assured him that, if those
grants were resumed, he might be relieved from another shilling.

The arguments against such a resumption were not likely to be heard with
favour by a popular assembly composed of taxpayers, but to statesmen and
legislators will seem unanswerable.

There can be no doubt that the Sovereign was, by the old polity of the
realm, competent to give or let the domains of the Crown in such manner
as seemed good to him. No statute defined the length of the term which
he might grant, or the amount of the rent which he must reserve. He
might part with the fee simple of a forest extending over a hundred
square miles in consideration of a tribute of a brace of hawks to be
delivered annually to his falconer, or of a napkin of fine linen to be
laid on the royal table at the coronation banquet. In fact, there had
been hardly a reign since the Conquest, in which great estates had not
been bestowed by our princes on favoured subjects. Anciently, indeed,
what had been lavishly given was not seldom violently taken away.
Several laws for the resumption of Crown lands were passed by the
Parliaments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of those laws the
last was that which, in the year 1485, immediately after the battle of
Bosworth, annulled the donations of the kings of the House of York. More
than two hundred years had since elapsed without any Resumption Act.
An estate derived from the royal liberality had long been universally
thought as secure as an estate which had descended from father to son
since the compilation of Domesday Book. No title was considered as more
perfect than that of the Russells to Woburn, given by Henry the Eighth
to the first Earl of