Lionel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex

Abstract

Finance was possibly the single most important problem facing the early Stuarts. Conflict with Parliament and within the Council repeatedly came down to money, as with the debates on impositions in 1606 and on the Great Contract four years later, the Cockayne Project in 1614, the problems posed by intervention in the Palatinate in 1621 and all-out war against Spain in 1624 and the subsequent raising of forced loans to pay for the war which Parliament wanted but refused to finance. In the 1630s, the survival of the Personal Rule was threatened by Charles’s inability to pay for an army to fight the Scots, and his insolvency provided the occasion if not the cause of the opposition voiced in the Long Parliament. Few political crises between 1603 and 1640 were unrelated to the government’s chronic shortage of money and, after 1621, the particular pressure created by war. It is therefore not surprising that repeated efforts were made to improve royal finances under James I and Charles I, by creating new sources of income, exploiting existing ones more effectively, tightening up on administrative procedures and encouraging retrenchment.