ctive charge, military and
naval, can scarcely have exceeded ten thousand pounds a year. It now
exceeds ten thousand pounds a day.

Of the expense of civil government only a small portion was defrayed by
the crown. The great majority of the functionaries whose business was to
administer justice and preserve order either gave their services to the
public gratuitously, or were remunerated in a manner which caused no
drain on the revenue of the state. The Sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen
of the towns, the country gentlemen who were in the commission of the
peace, the headboroughs, bailiffs, and petty constables, cost the King
nothing. The superior courts of law were chiefly supported by fees.

Our relations with foreign courts had been put on the most economical
footing. The only diplomatic agent who had the title of Ambassador
resided at Constantinople, and was partly supported by the Turkish
Company. Even at the court of Versailles England had only an Envoy; and
she had not even an Envoy at the Spanish, Swedish, and Danish courts.
The whole expense under this head cannot, in the last year of the reign
of Charles the Second, have much exceeded twenty thousand pounds. [53]

In this frugality there was nothing laudable. Charles was, as usual,
niggardly in the wrong place, and munificent in the wrong place. The
public service was starved that courtiers might be pampered. The expense
of the navy, of the ordnance, of pensions to needy old officers, of
missions to foreign courts, must seem small indeed to the present
generation. But the personal favourites of the sovereign, his ministers,
and the creatures of those ministers, were gorged with public money.
Their salaries and pensions, when compared with the incomes of the
nobility, the gentry, the commercial and professional men of that age,
will appear enormous. The greatest estates in the kingdom then
very little exceeded twenty thousand a year. The Duke of Ormond had
twenty-two thousand a year. [54] The Duke of Buckingham, before his
extravagance had impaired his great property, had nineteen thousand
six hundred a year. [55] George Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who had been
rewarded for his eminent services with immense grants of crown land,
and who had been notorious both for covetousness and for parsimony, left
fifteen thousand a year of real estate, and sixty thousand pounds in
money which probably yielded seven per cent. [56] These three Dukes
were supposed to be three of the