reached under his predecessor in time of war.
The Commons voted a sum which was large enough to meet the royal debt.
The fixed charges of the Crown they held should be met by its ordinary
revenues; but James had no mind to bring his expenditure down to the
level of Elizabeth's. The growth of English commerce offered a means of
recruiting his treasury which seemed to lie within the limits of
customary law; and of this he availed himself. The right of the Crown to
levy impositions on exports and imports other than those of wool,
leather, and tin, had been the last financial prerogative for which the
Edwards had struggled. They had been forced indeed to abandon it; but
the tradition of such a right lingered on at the royal council-board;
and under the Tudors the practice had been to some slight extent
revived. A duty on imports had been imposed in one or two instances by
Mary, and this impost had been extended by Elizabeth to currants and
wine. These instances however were too trivial and exceptional to break
in upon the general usage; but a more dangerous precedent had been
growing up in the duties which the great trading companies, such as
those to the Levant and to the Indies, were allowed to exact from
merchants, in exchange--as was held--for the protection they afforded
them in far-off and dangerous seas. The Levant Company was now
dissolved, and James seized on the duties it had levied as lapsing
naturally to the Crown.

[Sidenote: Bates's case.]

The Parliament at once protested against these impositions; but the
prospect of a fresh struggle with the Commons told less with the king
than the prospect of a revenue which might free him from dependence on
the Commons altogether. His fanatical belief in the rights and power of
the Crown hindered all sober judgement of such a question. James cared
quite as much to assert his absolute authority as to fill his treasury.
In the course of 1606 therefore the case of a Levant merchant called
Bates, who refused to pay the imposition, was brought before the
Exchequer Chamber. The judgement of the court justified the king's
confidence in his claim. It went far beyond the original bounds of the
case itself, or the right of the Crown to levy on the ground of
protection the dues which had been levied on that ground by the leading
companies. It asserted the king's right to levy what customs duties he
would. "All customs," said the judges, "are the effects of foreign
commerce; but al