pay their hearth money to the
day. When this happened, their furniture was distrained without mercy:
for the tax was farmed; and a farmer of taxes is, of all creditors,
proverbially the most rapacious. The collectors were loudly accused of
performing their unpopular duty with harshness and insolence. It was
said that, as soon as they appeared at the threshold of a cottage, the
children began to wail, and the old women ran to hide their earthenware.
Nay, the single bed of a poor family had sometimes been carried away
and sold. The net annual receipt from this tax was two hundred thousand
pounds. [40]

When to the three great sources of income which have been mentioned
we add the royal domains, then far more extensive than at present,
the first fruits and tenths, which had not yet been surrendered to the
Church, the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, the forfeitures, and the
fines, we shall find that the whole annual revenue of the crown may
be fairly estimated at about fourteen hundred thousand pounds. Of this
revenue part was hereditary; the rest had been granted to Charles for
life; and he was at liberty to lay out the whole exactly as he thought
fit. Whatever he could save by retrenching from the expenditure of
the public departments was an addition to his privy purse. Of the Post
Office more will hereafter be said. The profits of that establishment
had been appropriated by Parliament to the Duke of York.

The King's revenue was, or rather ought to have been, charged with the
payment of about eighty thousand pounds a year, the interest of the sum
fraudulently destined in the Exchequer by the Cabal. While Danby was at
the head of the finances, the creditors had received dividends, though
not with the strict punctuality of modern times: but those who had
succeeded him at the treasury had been less expert, or less solicitous
to maintain public faith. Since the victory won by the court over the
Whigs, not a farthing had been paid; and no redress was granted to the
sufferers, till a new dynasty had been many years on the throne. There
can be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meeting the
exigencies of the state by loans was imported into our island by
William the Third. What really dates from his reign is not the system
of borrowing, but the system of funding. From a period of immemorable
antiquity it had been the practice of every English government to
contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was t