[Footnote 1:  The Civil List at this time comprehended a great number of charges, such as those of which Burke speaks, that had nothing to do with the sovereign personally.  They were slowly removed, the judicial and diplomatic charges being transferred on the accession of William IV.] The royal household was a gigantic nest of costly jobbery and purposeless profusion.  It retained all “the cumbrous charge of a Gothic establishment,” though all its usage and accommodation had “shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance.”  The outlay was enormous.  The expenditure on the court tables only was a thing unfathomable.  Waste was the rule in every branch of it.  There was an office for the Great Wardrobe, another office of the Robes, a third of the Groom of the Stole.  For these three useless offices there were three useless treasurers.  They all laid a heavy burden on the taxpayer, in order to supply a bribe to the member of Parliament.  The plain remedy was to annihilate the subordinate treasuries.  “Take away,” was Burke’s demand, “the whole establishment of detail in the household:  the Treasurer, the Comptroller, the Cofferer of the Household, the Treasurer of the Chamber, the Master of the Household, the whole Board of Green Cloth; a vast number of subordinate offices in the department of the Steward of the Household; the whole establishment of the Great Wardrobe; the Removing Wardrobe; the Jewel Office; the Robes; the Board of Works.”  The abolition of this confused and costly system would not only diminish expense and promote efficiency; it would do still more excellent service in destroying the roots of parliamentary corruption.  “Under other governments a question of expense is only a question of economy, and it is nothing more; with us, in every question of expense, there is always a mixture of constitutional considerations.”

Places and pensions, though the worst, were not by any means the only stumbling-block in the way of pure and well-ordered government.  The administration of the estates of the Crown,—­the Principality, the Duchy of Cornwall, the Duchy of Lancaster, the County Palatine of Chester,—­was an elaborate system of obscure and unprofitable expenditure.  Wales had to herself eight judges, while no more than twelve sufficed to perform the whole business of justice in England, a country ten times as large and a hundred times as opulent.  Wales, and each of the duchies, had its own exchequer.  Every one of these principalities, said Burke, has the apparatus of a kingdom, for the jurisdiction over a few private estates; it has the formality and charge of the Exchequer of Great Britain, for collecting the rents of a country squire.  They were the field, in his expressive phrase, of mock jurisdictions and mimic revenues, of difficult trifles and laborious fooleries.  “It was but the other day that that pert factious fellow, the Duke of Lancaster, presumed to fly in the face of his liege lord, our gracious sovereign—­presumed