In the thirty years preceding the Armada--the sessions of Parliament being nine--Elizabeth applied for only eight subsidies, and of one of them a portion was remitted. By her economy she not only defrayed the expenses of government out of the ordinary revenue, which, at the end of the reign was about £300,000 a year, but paid off old debts. It was not till the twenty-fourth year of her reign that she discharged the last of her father’s debts, up to which time she had been paying interest on it. Subsequently she even accumulated a small reserve, which, as she told Parliament, was a most necessary thing if she was not to be driven to borrow on sudden emergency. But this reserve vanished immediately she became involved in the great war with Spain; and during the last fifteen years of her life, although she received twelve subsidies, she was always in difficulty for money. She had to sell crown lands to the value of £372,000. Parliament, which had voted the usual single subsidies without complaint, grumbled and pretended poverty when she asked for three and even four.[17] Bacon’s famous outburst (1593) about gentlemen having to sell their plate and farmers their brass pots to pay the tax, was a piece of claptrap. The nation was, relatively to former times, rolling in wealth. But the old belief had still considerable strength--that government being the affair of the King, not of his subjects, he should provide for its expenses out of his hereditary income, just as they paid their private expenses out of their private incomes; that he had no more claim to dip into their pockets than they had to dip into his; and that a subsidy, as its name imports, was an occasional and extraordinary assistance furnished as a matter not of duty but of good-will.