William appears to have entertained no doubt that this great revenue, as well as all the power and prerogative of the Crown, became vested in himself as King of England, or at least ought to be instantly settled by parliament according to the usual method.[168] There could indeed be no pretence for disputing his right to the hereditary excise, though this seems to have been questioned in debate; but the Commons soon displayed a considerable reluctance to grant the temporary revenue for the king's life. This had been done for several centuries in the first parliament of every reign. But the accounts, for which they called on this occasion, exhibited so considerable an increase of the receipts on one hand, so alarming a disposition of the expenditure on the other, that they deemed it expedient to restrain a liberality, which was not only likely to go beyond their intention, but to place them, at least in future times, too much within the power of the Crown. Its average expenses appeared to have been £1,700,000. Of this £610,000 was the charge of the late king's army, and £83,493 of the ordnance. Nearly £90,000 was set under the suspicious head of secret service, imprested to Mr. Guy, secretary of the treasury.[169] Thus it was evident that, far from sinking below the proper level, as had been the general complaint of the court in the Stuart reigns, the revenue was greatly and dangerously above it; and its excess might either be consumed in unnecessary luxury, or diverted to the worse purposes of despotism and corruption. They had indeed just declared a standing army to be illegal. But there could be no such security for the observance of this declaration as the want of means in the Crown to maintain one. Their experience of the interminable contention about supply, which had been fought with various success between the kings of England and their parliaments for some hundred years, dictated a course to which they wisely and steadily adhered, and to which, perhaps above all other changes at this revolution, the augmented authority of the House of Commons must be ascribed.