es were rated for their sluggishness
in payment. Two counties, those of Hereford and Stafford, sent not a
penny to the last.

[Sidenote: Increase of the Peerage.]

In his distress for money the king was driven to expedients which
widened the breach between the gentry and the Crown. He had refused to
part with the feudal rights which came down to him from the Middle Ages,
such as his right to the wardship of young heirs and the marriage of
heiresses. These were now recklessly used as a means of extortion.
Similar abuses of the prerogative alienated the merchant class. London,
the main seat of their trade and wealth, was growing fast; and its
growth roused terror in the government. In 1611 a proclamation forbade
any increase of buildings. But the proclamation remained inoperative
till it was seized as a means of extortion. A Commission was issued in
1614 with power to fine all who had disobeyed the king's injunctions,
and by its means a considerable sum was gathered into the treasury. All
that remained to be done was to alienate the nobles, and this James
succeeded in doing by a measure in which political design went hand in
hand with the needs of his finance. The Tudors had watched the baronage
with jealousy, but they had made no attempt to degrade it. The nobles
were sent to the prison and the block, but their rank and honours
remained dignities which the Crown was chary to bestow even on the
noblest of its servants. During the forty-five years of her reign
Elizabeth raised but seven persons to the peerage, and with the
exception of Burleigh all of these were of historic descent. The number
of lay peers indeed had hardly changed for two centuries; they were
about fifty at the accession of Henry the Fifth and counted but sixty at
the accession of James. In so small an assembly, where the Crown could
count on the unwavering support of ministers, courtiers, and bishops,
the royal influence had through the last hundred years been generally
supreme. But among the lords of the "old blood," as those whose honours
dated from as far back as the Plantagenets were called, there lingered a
spirit of haughty independence which, if it had quailed before the
Tudors, showed signs of bolder life now the Tudors had gone. It was the
policy of James to raise up a new nobility more dependent on the court,
a nobility that might serve as a bridle on the older lords, while the
increase in the numbers of the baronage which their creation broug