The chief advance in the reign of the new king lay not in a fuller control by Parliament in the matter of laying taxation; that would scarcely have been possible. But it lay rather in a differentiation of powers within Parliament itself, leading to a more complete supervision of taxation by the House of Commons. Initiation of tax levies in the House of Commons, 1407 Since the end of Edward III’s reign the theory had been practiced that the commons should exercise a decisive power over the levy of taxes, as illustrated in the levy of the poll-tax of 1380.
The form of making a grant, “made by the commons with the assent of the lords spiritual and temporal” first occurred in the grants to Richard II in 1395.[257] Votes of money previous to that year were made in conjunction with the House of Lords. The phrase was repeated in the grants of 1401 and 1402.
In 1407 came the assertion that to the commons not only belonged decisive power, but that they alone had the faculty of originating taxation. It came not as a direct demand for the yielding of a principle, but as an implication that the practice already existed, and as such it gains in strength.
The trend of events leading up to the significant reference is interesting. In 1407 the lords had held a debate in the king’s presence respecting the condition of the kingdom, and had determined upon the number of subsidies needful for national defense. Henry, for the moment forgetting his politics, in a peremptory tone requested the commons to send a delegation to the House of Lords “to hear and to report to their companions that which they should have in command of our lord the king.” The commons sent a committee of twelve in response to the request; they heard that “it was the will of our said lord the King they should report to the rest of their companions” the determination of the lords, and that, “they should see to it that they conformed most nearly to the purpose of the Lords aforesaid.” When the delegates returned, their report was received by the commons as being an infringement upon their liberties. The king, hearing of the temper of the commons, reassuming immediately his habit of the politician, “declares, by the advice and consent of the lords in manner following,” that it is lawful for both houses to commune apart by themselves “of the state of the realm and of the remedy necessary for the same.” So far the king has merely recognized the need for separate deliberations by the two houses; the phrase which implies the existence in the House of Commons of the power to initiate taxation is this: “Any grant by the commons granted, and by the lords assented to.”[258] Thus is admitted by implication the order in which a grant should be made by the two houses. In the same communication the king renounces any right which he might previously have held to know the amount or conditions of a prospective grant until both houses should be of one mind. The grant which eased so sweeping an admission from the king was generous.[259] It consisted of a fifteenth and a half and a tenth and a half, a subsidy on wool, and tunnage and poundage for two years.[260]
In 1410 Henry asked Parliament for permission to collect a tenth and a fifteenth annually, whenever Parliament should not be sitting. Had the request been granted, the result for a frugal monarch would have been hardly less than independence of parliamentary control. He was refused. Without the frequent necessity of calling a Parliament, Henry’s last years, instead of their smooth constitutional trend, might readily have had as tragic a story as those of Richard II. He died in 1413.
Henry V, 1413-1422
His son Henry V came to the throne without dispute, and for a brief nine years fired the souls of the English people with zest of conquest and pride of race. A warrior, the mediæval ideal of a king, he was yet noble of mind and soul. Had his brilliant career not so suddenly flickered and gone out, he might have won a place beside Edward I; as it was, the constitutional history of his reign reveals no struggle between people and monarch over the sordid wherewithal to fight his battles; both sides apparently honored the other. The taxation during his reign was heavy, but it was voted gladly to the king who could use it as a means to victory at Agincourt. Henry V, whom his people loved enough to make legendary participant in their revellings, died in France, 31st August, 1422.
Henry VI, 1422-1461
Henry VI was almost as unfortunate in his birth as in his death, and his life seemed to bring him nothing but disaster. He was barely a year old when his father died, his troubled reign saw the Wars of the Roses, and tradition has it that he died by the hand of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, afterward king. Weak in health, the possessor of a mind which in boyhood showed the feverish precocity that foreshadows an unbalanced maturity, he was nevertheless generous, temperate, mild, and devoted.
The early part of his reign gives one of the few instances chronicled under the Lancastrian kings of an attack upon constitutional usages in taxation. In 1425 while the Duke of Bedford and Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester were acting virtually as regents to their nephew the young king, Bedford together with various other lords announced in Parliament that a certain subsidy, which had been appropriated for a particular purpose, should be levied for the king’s use notwithstanding the conditions attaching to it; they advanced an opinion of the justices favoring their action. The commons vindicated their right, however, in the same Parliament; they made a fresh grant, restating the former conditions, with this explicit addition,Declaration for appropriation of supplies “No part thereof be beset ne dispendid to no othir use, but oonly in and for the defense of the seid roialme.”[261]