When the Commons were not in good humour with Elizabeth, or James, they contrived three methods of inactivity, running the time to waste—­nihil agendo, or aliud agendo, or male agendo; doing nothing, doing something else, or doing evilly.[A] In one of these irksome moments, waiting for subsidies, Elizabeth anxiously inquired of the Speaker, “What had passed in the Lower House?” He replied, “If it please your Majesty—­ seven weeks.”  On one of those occasions, when the queen broke into a passion when they urged her to a settlement of the succession, one of the deputies of the Commons informed her Majesty, that “the Commons would never speak about a subsidy, or any other matter whatever; and that hitherto nothing but the most trivial discussions had passed in parliament:  which was, therefore, a great assembly rendered entirely useless,—­and all were desirous of returning home."[B]

[Footnote A:  I find this description in a MS. letter of the times.]

[Footnote B:  From a MS. letter of the French ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon, to Charles IX., then at the court of London, in my possession.]

But the more easy and open nature of James I. endured greater hardships:  with the habit of studious men, the king had an utter carelessness of money and a generosity of temper, which Hacket, in his Life of the Lord-Keeper Williams, has described.  “The king was wont to give like a king, and for the most part to keep one act of liberality warm with the covering of another.”  He seemed to have had no distinct notions of total amounts; he was once so shocked at the sight of the money he had granted away, lying in heaps on a table, that he instantly reduced it to half the sum.  It appears that Parliament never granted even the ordinary supplies they had given to his predecessors; his chief revenue was drawn from the customs; yet his debts, of which I find an account in the Parliamentary History, after a reign of twenty-one years, did not amount to 200,000_l._[A] This monarch could not have been so wasteful of his revenues as it is presumed.  James I. was always generous, and left scarcely any debts.  He must have lived amidst many self-deprivations; nor was this difficult to practise for this king, for he was a philosopher, indifferent to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of royalty.  Whenever he threw himself into the arms of his Parliament, they left him without a feeling of his distress.  In one of his speeches he says—­

“In the last Parliament I laid open the true thoughts of my heart; but I may say, with our Saviour, ’I have piped to you, and you have not danced; I have mourned, and you have not lamented.’  I have reigned eighteen years, in which time you have had peace, and I have received far less supply than hath been given to any king since the Conquest.”

[Footnote A:  “Parliamentary History,” vol. v. p. 147.]