Our present discontents are precisely those of half a millennium ago

Taxed beyond Endurance 

By A. Daniels

For reasons neither interesting nor necessary to go into, I was reading Sir Thomas More’s History of Richard III the other day. I came across a passage that will have a certain resonance today among Britain’s taxpayers. It comes from the Duke of Buckingham’s speech to the Aldermen of London, in which he tries to raise their enthusiasm for Richard, then merely Duke of Gloucester, to be proclaimed King:

For who was there of you all that would reckon himself lord of his own goods, among so many snares and traps as were set therefor, among so much pillaging and plundering, among so many taxes and tallages, of which there was never end and often time no need, or if any were, it rather grew of riot and unreasonable waste than any necessary or honourable charge?             

So that there was daily plundered from good men and honourable, great substance of goods, to be lavished among unthrifts so extravagantly that Fifteenths sufficed not, nor any usual names of known taxes; but under the easy name of “benevolences and goodwill,” the commissioners of every man so much took, as no man with his good will would have given. As though the name of benevolence had signified that every man should pay, not what himself of his good will was pleased to grant, but what the King of his good will was pleased to take. Who never asked little, but every thing was raised above the measure: amercements turned into fines, fines into ransoms, small trespass to misprision, misprision into treason.

I could not but think on reading this of the French use of the word ‘solidarity,’ whose main meaning is now high taxation for redistribution (not least to itself) by a vast and dependent bureaucracy. 

Here I should add that Richard III promised to behave differently from his predecessor Edward IV, who had raised forced contributions from property-holders for his scheme of waging wear in France, from which in the event only a small elite of favourites around him benefitted. He called these  forced contributions ‘benevolences;’ Richard III outlawed them, but soon found himself obliged to solicit forced ‘loans.’ Whether he would ever have repaid them the Battle of Bosworth Field rendered unknowable; but it is likely that if every they had been repaid, it would have been in debased currency.

There is a strange consolation in knowing that our present discontents are precisely those of half a millennium ago.