James I Financial Problems

James I Financial Problems

1. Treasurers

   • Dorset
     • The first lord treasurer
     • The great farm
       • Sold off the rights to collect customs duties to different financiers
       • Secured a steady income from customs for the crown.

2. Feudal Laws

   • He had the right to buy food for the court at a discounted rate
     • Led to huge waste in the court
     • Also caused problems for local merchants
   • The king could sell off wardships of minors whos parents died with them too young to inherit.
     • Annoyed subjects, many families saved to make sure that if they died a family member could buy the wardship.
     • Wardships were valuable because whoever had the wardship could run the childs estate until they were old enough to do so themselves.
   • The king had the right to decide marriages with wealthy widows or female heirs of tennents.

3. Doomed Inheritance

   • James was also stuck with the results of the wars with spain, which lead to ship tax being moved in shore and anoyed subjects since this broke taxation laws.
     • There were court debts but they were more than covered by the war debt from Spain.
   • Elizabeth the first had been very stringent with the royal money, and left rather a lot of money in the treasury for James I.
   • Elizabeth had achieved her financial stability by selling off crown lands when needed, which would've earned James money.
     • She had also given a range of very long leases on large plots of land, so on a sixty year lease a piece of land worth thousands after ingflation would be rented at an Elizabethen rate.
   • Elizabeth had made many efforts to increase customs duties.

4. She also didn't give any pensions or grants of land to the leading nobels.

   • Underpayed officials had fallen into bribary and curruption.
   • This lead James I to have to be very generous to keep the lords on side.
     • James was often blamed for spending too much on his favorites, particularly since many of them were unpopular scotish nobels.They often got 4x what english counterparts did.

5. Favorites

   • James' favorites were often scotish nobility. This made English nobels jelous since these favorites tended to be on around 4x more than their english counterparts.
   • The ammounts he spent on favorites like Buckingham who were suspected to be his lovers also iritated some