STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

803

reign of Charles the Second, have much exceeded twenty chap.thousand pounds. *

In this frugality there was nothing laudable. Charles was, Greatas usual, niggardly in the wrong place, and munificent in the ministerswrong place. The public service was starved that courtiers tiers,might be pampered. The expense of the navy, of the ord-nance, of pensions to needy old officers, of missions toforeign courts, must seem small indeed to the present genera-tion. But the personal favourites of the sovereign, his mi-nisters, and the creatures of those ministers, were gorgedwith public money. Their salaries and pensions, when com-pared with the incomes of the nobility, the gentry, the com-mercial and professional men of that age, will appear enor-mous. The greatest estates in the kingdom then very littleexceeded twenty thousand a year. The Duke of Ormond hadtwenty-two thousand a year.** The Duke of Buckingham,before his extravagance had impaired his great property, hadnineteen thousand six hundred a year.*** George Monk, Dukeof Albemarle, who had been rewarded for his eminent serviceswith immense grants of crown land, and who had been no-torious both for covetousness and for parsimony, left fifteenthousand a year of real estate, and sixty thousand pounds inmoney which probably yielded seven per cent.f These threeDukes were supposed to be three of the very richest subjectsin England. The Archbishop of Canterbury can hardly havehad five thousand a year.ft The average income of a temporal

* James the Second sent Envoys to Spain, Sweden, and Denmark;yet in his reign the diplomatic expenditure was little more than 30,0001.a year. See the Commons’ Journals, March20. 168|. Chamberlayne'sSlate of England, 1684, 1G86.

** Carte’s Life of Ormond.

**’ Pepys’s Diary, Feb. 14. lG6j|,

+ See the Report of the Bath and Montague case, which was decidedby Lord Keeper Somers, in December, 1G93.

+t During three quarters of a year, beginning from Christmas 1G89,the revenues of the see of Canterbury were received by an officer ap-pointed by the crown. That officer’s accounts are now in the British