James I dictates the composition of the Commons, 1604
He wasted no time in getting things started. In the proclamation by which he summoned his first Parliament, he assumed the power of dictating what manner of men should compose it, and directed that his Court of Chancery should decide whether or not the certificates of election fulfilled the royal conditions, “and if any shall be found to be made contrarie to this proclamation, the same is to be rejected as unlawful and insufficient.”[295] The commons, however, shortly after their convening, vindicated their privilege in the case of Goodwin and Fortescue, and succeeded in maintaining thereafter their right to decide upon the legality of returns.[296] In their “Apology of the House of Commons, made to the king, touching their Privileges,” nearly at the close of this session, the commons complained against the monopolies possessed by the great trading companies in the face of many statutes to the contrary, and the oppressive exercise of the ancient prerogative of purveyance.[297]
James receives tunnage and poundage for life
In the department of regular taxation, however, James at first adopted a conciliatory attitude. On the 26th June, 1604, James sent to the commons a letter “written with his own hand but corrected as to the spelling,” in which he expressed his pleasure as to a subsidy.[298] He stated his confidence in their good-will, assuring them “in the word of a King” that he would “be so far from taking it unkindly, their not offering” to him a subsidy, and that he would “only interpret it to proceed from the care they have, that our people should not have any occasion of distaste.” James’s letter accomplished for him what may well have been his purpose; the commons immediately granted to him tunnage and poundage for the space of his life.[299]
Royal poverty
At the two subsequent sessions of 1605-6 and 1606-7 there was constant friction between king and commons, yet there were no very remarkable assertions of royal prerogative or of parliamentary privilege. At the session of 1605, Parliament granted the king three entire subsidies and six fifteenths, designed principally to meet the royal indebtedness, some of which held over since the time of Elizabeth.[300] After the prorogation, James called no session of Parliament until the 9th February, 1609-10.
But James could not meet his obligations with the ordinary revenues of the crown. He was spending between £500,000 and £600,000 a year, and his income was in the neighborhood of £400,000; his annual deficit, therefore, was not far from £150,000.[301] James was obliged to turn elsewhere, and the consequence of his action was the famous Bate Case, the decision in which was a step toward freeing the king from parliamentary control over his revenues.
In 1603, in answer to the agitation against the great monopolies, an Eastern trading The Bate Case company, known as the Levant Company, surrendered its charter. This company, amongst other privileges, had enjoyed the right of collecting a duty on currants from other merchants trading in them, and paid to the crown in return for the franchise £4,000 a year. When, therefore, the company yielded up its charter, the crown was the loser by £4,000 annually. In order to make up for the loss, the crown itself proceeded to lay a duty on currants.[302] In 1605, the Levant Company again received a charter, but James levied upon it, nevertheless, his duty on currants, the rate being five shillings on the hundred-weight over and above that granted to him by Parliament in its tunnage and poundage bill. It was a merchant of the Levant Company, John Bate, who raised the question of the legality of the imposition. The case was taken to the Court of Exchequer for decision. Had the barons confined themselves to the strict laws of the matter, there would not have been great ground for objection to their decision. Precedent drawn from the time of the Tudors and statutes of the same period, were capable of being brought forward in a fair adjudication of the case, and would have substantiated the contention of the crown, thus returning customs exactions, nearly to the situation of 1300.[303] The fact that the four barons decided the case unanimously against John Bate could not, therefore, be reasonably reprehended. But they permitted themselves to slip off into philosophical generalizations which struck the people as absolutist in tenor.
Opinions of the Barons in the Bate Case