29th.  Up and by coach with Sir W. Pen to Charing Cross, and there I ’light, and to Sir Phillip Warwick to visit him and discourse with him about navy business, which I did at large and he most largely with me, not only about the navy but about the general Revenue of England, above two hours, I think, many staying all the while without, but he seemed to take pains to let me either understand the affairs of the Revenue or else to be a witness of his pains and care in stating it.  He showed me indeed many excellent collections of the State of the Revenue in former Kings and the late times, and the present.  He showed me how the very Assessments between 1643 and 1659, which were taxes (besides Excise, Customes, Sequestrations, Decimations, King and Queene’s and Church Lands, or any thing else but just the Assessments), come to above fifteen millions.  He showed me a discourse of his concerning the Revenues of this and foreign States.  How that of Spayne was great, but divided with his kingdoms, and so came to little.  How that of France did, and do much exceed ours before for quantity; and that it is at the will of the Prince to tax what he will upon his people; which is not here.  That the Hollanders have the best manner of tax, which is only upon the expence of provisions, by an excise; and do conclude that no other tax is proper for England but a pound-rate, or excise upon the expence of provisions.  He showed me every particular sort of payment away of money, since the King’s coming in, to this day; and told me, from one to one, how little he hath received of profit from most of them; and I believe him truly.  That the L1,200,000 which the Parliament with so much ado did first vote to give the King, and since hath been reexamined by several committees of the present Parliament, is yet above L300,000 short of making up really to the King the L1,200,000, as by particulars he showed me.

[A committee was appointed in September, 1660, to consider the subject of the King’s revenue, and they “reported to the Commons that the average revenue of Charles I., from 1637 to 1641 inclusive, had been L895,819, and the average expenditure about L1,110,000.  At that time prices were lower and the country less burthened with navy and garrisons, among which latter Dunkirk alone now cost more than L100,000 a year.  It appeared, therefore, that the least sum to which the King could be expected to ‘conform his expense’ was L1,200,000.”  Burnet writes, “It was believed that if two millions had been asked he could have carried it.  But he (Clarendon) had no mind to put the King out of the necessity of having recourse to his Parliament.”—­Lister’s Life of Clarendon, vol. ii., pp. 22, 23.]

And in my Lord Treasurer’s excellent letter to the King upon this subject, he tells the King how it was the spending more than the revenue that did give the first occasion of his father’s ruine, and did since to the rebels; who, he says, just like