d Tories were equally
fixed in the opinion that the liberality of Parliaments had been the
chief cause of the disasters of the last thirty years; that to
the liberality of the Parliament of 1660 was to be ascribed the
misgovernment of the Cabal; that to the liberality of the Parliament
of 1685 was to be ascribed the Declaration of Indulgence, and that the
Parliament of 1690 would be inexcusable if it did not profit by a long,
a painful, an unvarying experience. After much dispute a compromise
was made. That portion of the excise which had been settled for life on
James, and which was estimated at three hundred thousand pounds a year,
was settled on William and Mary for their joint and separate lives. It
was supposed that, with the hereditary revenue, and with three hundred
thousand a year more from the excise, their Majesties would have,
independent of parliamentary control, between seven and eight hundred
thousand a year. Out of this income was to be defrayed the charge both
of the royal household and of those civil offices of which a list had
been laid before the House. This income was therefore called the Civil
List. The expenses of the royal household are now entirely separated
from the expenses of the civil government; but, by a whimsical
perversion, the name of Civil List has remained attached to that portion
of the revenue which is appropriated to the expenses of the royal
household. It is still more strange that several neighbouring nations
should have thought this most unmeaning of all names worth borrowing.
Those duties of customs which had been settled for life on Charles and
James successively, and which, in the year before the Revolution, had
yielded six hundred thousand pounds, were granted to the Crown for a
term of only four years, [598]

William was by no means well pleased with this arrangement. He thought
it unjust and ungrateful in a people whose liberties he had saved to
bind him over to his good behaviour. "The gentlemen of England," he said
to Burnet, "trusted King James who was an enemy of their religion and of
their laws; and they will not trust me by whom their religion and their
laws have been preserved." Burnet answered very properly that there was
no mark of personal confidence which His Majesty was not entitled
to demand, but that this question was not a question of personal
confidence. The Estates of the Realm wished to establish a general
principle. They wished to set a precedent which mi