Thus James, denied the relief he claimed, was forced on wretched expedients, selling patents for monopolies, craving benevolences, or free gifts, and such expedients; the monopolies had been usual in Elizabeth’s reign; yet all our historians agree, that his subjects were never grievously oppressed by such occasional levies; this was even the confession of the contemporaries of this monarch.  They were every day becoming wealthier by those acts of peace they despised the monarch for maintaining.  “The kingdom, since his reign began, was luxuriant in gold and silver, far above the scant of our fathers who lived before us,” are the words of a contemporary.[A] All flourished about the king, except the king himself.  James I. discovered how light and hollow was his boasted “prerogative-royal,” which, by its power of dissolving the Parliament, could only keep silent those who had already refused their aid.

[Footnote A:  Hacket’s “Life of Lord-Keeper Williams.”]

A wit of the day described the Parliaments of James by this ludicrous distich: 

  Many faults complained of, few things amended,
  A subsidy granted, the Parliament ended.

But this was rarely the fact.  Sometimes they addressed James I. by what the king called a “stinging petition;” or, when the minister, passing over in silence the motion of the Commons, pressed for supplies, the heads of a party replied, that to grant them were to put an end to Parliament.  But they practised expedients and contrivances, which comported as little with the dignity of an English senate, as with the majesty of the sovereign.

At a late hour, when not a third part of the house remained, and those who required a fuller house, amid darkness and confusion, were neither seen nor heard, they made a protest,—­of which the king approved as little of the ambiguous matter, as the surreptitious means; and it was then, that, with his own hand, he tore the leaf out of the journal.[A] In the sessions of 1614 the king was still more indignant at their proceedings.  He and the Scotch had been vilified by their invectives; and they were menaced by two lawyers, with a “Sicilian vespers, or a Parisian matins.”  They aimed to reduce the king to beggary, by calling in question a third part of his revenue, contesting his prerogative in levying his customs.  On this occasion I find that, publicly in the Banqueting-house at Whitehall, the king tore all their bills before their faces; and, as not a single act was passed, in the phrase of the day this was called an addle Parliament.[B] Such unhappy proceedings indicated the fatal divisions of the succeeding reign.  A meeting of a different complexion, once occurred in 1621, late in James’s reign.  The monopolies were then abolished.  The king and the prince shed reciprocal tears in the house; and the prince wept when he brought an affectionate message of thanks from the Commons.  The letter-writer says, “It is a day worthy to be kept holiday;