The Crown Lands and the Financial Dilemma in Stuart England

One of the few remaining points of agreement among Stuart scholars is that the Crown's political difficulties, especially the conduct of foreign affairs and wars, stemmed in large part from inadequate revenues. The Crown's “ordinary income”—so named by scholars but not by law or tradition—was eroded in the early seventeenth century by inflation, royal extravagance, and increased demands upon government. The bulk of the ordinary income came from the Crown lands whose traditional structures and management were unable to compensate for inflation. B. P. Wolffe has shown that medieval monarchs had never viewed Crown lands as a source of revenue in the same manner as parliamentary taxes or the customs. Rather, Crown lands were used primarily for the uneconomical purpose of providing royal bounty to political elites. Wallace MacCaffrey has argued that the royal clients in the bounty system shifted during the Tudor era from the feudal barons to an emerging state bureaucracy. Moreover, by the seventeenth century the list of clients grew again to include members of Parliament, especially the Commons which increasingly held the fate of royal finances in their hands. Finally, Linda Levy Peck has emphasized another profoundly entrenched English attitude, modeled after classical Roman authorities: the Crown must husband its resources against waste or corruption lest it become impoverished and the body politic decay. A monarch without ample treasure could command neither private (i.e., clients) nor public (i.e., national policy) authority.