l6 INTRODUCTORY. 



free, as I shall point out in the case of a remarkable petition 

 about the corn trade, which the king rejected. But a tenth or 

 a fifteenth was a direct tax on the goods and chattels, stock-in- 

 trade and tools excepted, which individuals possessed. Now, 

 were the assessment ever so just, and there is no reason to 

 doubt that some persons who could afford to conciliate the 

 assessors were lightly handled, it is clear that a direct tax will 

 always press with unequal severity upon those who have few or 

 many claims on them, whose property is little more than what 

 they need for bare subsistence or on those who are opulent, on 

 those whose prospects are ill and on those whose prospects are 

 good. It is not likely that benevolences were an unpopular 

 charge in the minds of most taxpayers in the fifteenth century, 

 seeing that they were an occasional property-tax, imposed on 

 the opulent ; and we may be perfectly sure that when Richard 

 the Third in his single parliament declared benevolences to 

 be henceforth illegal, he was much more bent on conciliating 

 the London merchants, in whose good will the strength of 

 the Yorkist faction lay, whom Buckingham and Shaw had 

 striven to win over to Richard's side, than in conceding that 

 which would be popular with the majority of his subjects. 



Nothing is more frequently alluded to by Gascoigne in his 

 comments on the administration of Suffolk and Somerset than 

 the dowerless advent of Margaret of Anjou, and the losses 

 which that unlucky union produced. Gascoigne tells a singular 

 story of this marriage, for which he vouches. He says that 

 when Suffolk negotiated it, the fact became known early to 

 Charles, that he imprisoned Margaret, as queen of England and 

 therefore his enemy, that he demanded the union of Anjou and 

 Maine as the price of her liberation, and that Suffolk, fearing for 

 his life if he returned without the wife for whom he had nego- 

 tiated, gave up the counties, and thus interposing hostile terri- 

 tory between Normandy and Guienne, necessitated the loss of 

 both. He adds that, had it not been for this unlucky accident 

 or act of unpatriotic selfishness, Charles would have gladly paid 

 a large compensation for the cession of part or the whole from 



