The annual revenue of James I. has been calculated at about six hundred thousand pounds, yet he was always poor, and died leaving debts to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds. He was prodigal to his favourites, and wasteful in his habits. He left the estates of the Crown, however, better than he found them, having raised their annual income from thirty-two thousand pounds to eighty thousand pounds, besides having sold lands to the amount of seven hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds. He still prosecuted the exactions of purveyance, wardship, etc., to the great annoyance of his subjects. On the occasion of his son being made a knight, he raised a tax on every knight's fee of twenty shillings, and on every twenty pounds of annual rent from lands held directly of the Crown, thus raising twenty-one thousand eight hundred pounds. On the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine, he levied an aid of twenty thousand five hundred pounds, the last of these odious impositions which were demanded. The Customs on his coming to the throne brought in one hundred and twenty-seven thousand pounds a year; but towards the end of his reign, showing the great increase of commerce, they amounted to one hundred and ninety thousand pounds a year. But this was the tonnage and poundage which was so hateful to the nation, and which James had greatly augmented by his own act and deed; an encroachment which caused Parliament to refuse to his son Charles the usual grant of those duties for life; and his persistence in levying them, in spite of Parliament, was one of the chief causes of his quarrel with that body, and the loss of his crown. James was also a great trader in titles of nobility. His price for a _barony_ was ten thousand pounds, for the title of _viscount_, twenty thousand pounds, and for that of _earl_, thirty thousand pounds. He also invented the new title of _baronet_, and raised two hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds by it, at the rate of one thousand and ninety-five pounds each baronetcy. From so dignified a source do many of our aristocracy derive their honours. Charles, though he was driven to such fatal extremities to extort money from his subjects, is calculated to have realised the enormous revenue from 1637 to 1641 inclusive, of eight hundred and ninety-five thousand pounds, of which two hundred and ten thousand pounds arose from Ship-money and other illegal sources. Both he and his father dealt in wholesale monopolies to their courtiers and others, the profits of which were so embezzled by those greedy and unprincipled men, that Clarendon says that of two hundred thousand pounds of such income in Charles's time, only one thousand five hundred pounds reached the royal treasury. Charles raised two hundred thousand pounds in 1626 by a forced loan, and another hundred thousand by exacting the fees or compensation for exemption from the assumption of knighthood by every person worth forty pounds a year.