It was not until the year 1624, after the rupture of the Spanish treaty, that Buckingham could have been fully aware of all the responsibilities of his post. There were then great complaints of want of shipping; the Spanish nation, it was said, setting out one of the finest fleets that had ever been seen.[279] To meet the terrors of what Buckingham termed “the pretended Spanish invasion,” he drew up a list of propositions, whereby the pride of the enemy was to be lowered, and the supremacy of England maintained. First, as the plan went, the enemy “was to be entertained in successive fleets upon his own coasts, which were to destroy his shipping, to intercept his provisions, to hinder him from gathering a heading whereat to possess some place of accompt.” Footnote 279: Inedited Letter from Sir J. Hippesley, Jan. 19, 1625. Calendar, vol. cxxxix., No. 18. Secondly, the Spaniard was to be assailed in the West Indies;--to intercept his fleets, to invade his possessions, to fortify garrisons, and to establish there government confederacies. This, as Buckingham planned, was to be undertaken, at the common charge of the kingdom, by a company “incorporated for the West, as there already is for the East;” and the naval force was to consist of a fleet composed of two ships of the line, eighteen ships, and two pinnaces of the merchant adventurers. The King’s ships were to be manned with twenty seamen and fifty soldiers, the merchants’ with sixty seamen and one hundred soldiers, the pinnaces with twenty seamen. To this armament was to be added twenty Newcastle ships, each with thirty seamen and one hundred soldiers apiece, making in all 2,120 seamen and 3,900 landsmen. Parliament was to be applied to in each estate for a general subscription. The nobility at the rate of 100_l._ a man, to be paid in two years--this, it was computed, would amount to 4,900_l._ (60,000_l._); the gentry and yeomen, 150,000_l._; the cities and corporate towns, 24,000_l._; the six confederate companies of merchants, including the East India “companies, may,” as the author of this plan remarked, “well contribute.”[280] To the principle of this scheme of Buckingham’s may be traced the origin of many subsequent discontents. In his ardour for achieving the power of England, or perhaps, in part, for avenging affronts which he might consider as almost personal, he forgot all constitutional rights. The remark of Bolingbroke occurs to the mind, on reading this plan of arbitrary and almost indiscriminate taxation. Buckingham, says that writer, “had, in his own days, and he hath in ours, the demerits of beginning a struggle between prerogative and privilege, and of establishing a sort of warfare between the prince and the people.”[281] Footnote 280: Domestic State Papers, inedited, dated April 14, 1625. Footnote 281: Remarks on History, vol. ii., p. 220, Letter XX.