The court of St. James’s seemed satisfied; yet more closely watched our measures.
The government’s attention was for some time taken up with books; the French, than whom perhaps no people in Europe are more restrained in their speeches, sillily affect to be the first in their thoughts. They print their notions on what comes uppermost, and the government is ever the first thing to fall under their pen. It is said that this licentiousness is owing to the above restraint; and I have heard that were not so many authors sent to the Bastile, Paris would not swarm with them as it does.
Very few of these seditious writings will bear reading, some of them are not so much as worth a lettre de cachet. To make the authors of mere trash the King’s pensioners, is doing them too much honour.
Though the assembly of the clergy granted every thing required, it did not give every thing. On which the court sent a remonstrance to that body, which it answered with another remonstrance; but herein it so little observed the bounds of moderation, that the King dissolved the assembly, and confined the bishops to their dioceses. The next day a courtier said in the King’s anti-chamber, “that they ought to be sent out of the kingdom, and priests put in their places:” this act of prerogative so humbled the prelates, that they offered to comply with all his Majesty’s pleasure.
A nobleman said to the King, Sir, if your Majesty will be no more troubled with the clergy’s remonstrances, a sure way will be, to forbid the bishops coming to Paris; they will assent to the free gifts, or to any terms, only allow them to live there.
However, this affair of the bishops disturbed the King; and one day he said to me, with some emotion, They are perpetually vexing me. No sooner have I raised a poor ecclesiastic to a dignity of a hundred thousand livres a year, than he sets up for a leading man among the clergy, and votes against the free gift. Sir, said I to him, methinks there is a way of satisfying all. The crown should, on the death of the present possessor, appropriate to itself half of the revenue of the larger benefices. This would be no tax on any one. There is not a subject in France, designed for the church, who would not think himself under the highest obligations to your Majesty, in conferring on him an abbey, or a bishopric, with a revenue less, by half, than what the present possessor makes of it. I take upon me to bring about the composition; I make no doubt but that I shall find, in the kingdom, two hundred ecclesiastics, who will gladly set their hands to such an agreement.
This diminution cannot be accounted unjust, your Majesty having the nomination to all the large benefices in the kingdom; and the giver is always master of his gifts. No complaint lies against a Prince, who, instead of a hundred and twenty thousand livres a year, which he can bestow on one of his subjects, gives him sixty thousand, &c. &c.
These few words, spoken only cursorily, were, a few days after, followed by an express memorial addressed to the Count de St. Florentine, and which he presented to the King.
M E M O R I A L
On the inequality of the taxes raised on
the Clergy.
“It is a received maxim in economics, that a geometrical equality in the levying of taxes lessens the weight of them. A burden borne by all the members of a body is always light.