In addition to these private motives, there were political reasons to foment the anti-Jewish movement; common interests which bound all the hostile elements together. It was felt by both Lords and Commons that, but for the Jews’ ready money, Henry would not have been able to carry on his unpopular wars abroad, or his anti-constitutional policy at home, and to indulge that preference for Provençal and other foreign favourites which his English subjects resented so strongly. That the source of the King’s power to defy public opinion was rightly guessed is shown by the enormous sums which Henry extorted from the Jews at various times; in 1230, under the pretext that they clipped and adulterated the coin of the realm--a very common offence in those days[66]--they were made to pay into the Royal Exchequer one-third of their moveable property. The operation was repeated in 1239. In 1241, 20,000 marks were exacted from them; and two years after 60,000 marks--a sum equal to the whole yearly revenue of the crown--above 4000 marks being wrung from Aaron of York alone. In 1250 new oppression, on a charge of forgery, elicited 30,000 marks from the same wretched millionaire, and from 1252 to 1255 Henry robbed the Jews three times by such exquisite cruelty that the whole race, in despair, twice begged for permission to depart from England. But the King replied, “How can I remedy the oppressions you complain of? I am myself a beggar. I am spoiled, I am stripped of all my revenues”--referring to the attempt made by the Council to secure constitutional Government by the refusal of supplies--“I must have money from any hand, from any quarter, or by any means.” He then delivered them over to Richard, Earl of Cornwall, that he might persuade them to stay, or, in the words of Matthew Paris, “that those whom the one brother had flayed, the other might embowel.” The same witty chronicler informs us that these spoliations excited no pity for the victims in Henry’s Christian subjects, “because it is proved and is manifest, that they are continually convicted of forging charters, seals and coins,” and elsewhere he describes the Jews as “a sign for the nations, like Cain the accursed.”