Parliament 431
The right of each House to carry on its preliminary dis-
cussions independently of the other and both independ-
ently of the king, and that the king was to have no con-
cern in a bill until the Houses had become a unit—axio-
matic principles of parliamentary government—were
being worked out under favouring Lancastrian conditions.
They were broken often under Tudors and Stuarts, but
there were fifteenth-century precedents for later parlia-
mentary historians to cite.
In leaving the subject of money bills, it should be added
that, before the end of the middle ages, the king had hit
upon two famous ways of dodging the principle, set forth
in 1340, that there could be no taxation without the con-
sent of Parliament. Forcedloans began with Richard II.;
they were, as the name implies, negotiated without the
option of the lender, and their payment was always im-
probable. In the reign of Edward IV., the benevolence
was invented. This was theoretically a free, but actually
a forced, gift taken by the king from the wealthier people
of the realm. Benevolences were often winked at by the
Commons, who felt that if the king got his money in this
way he would be less likely to burden the poorer classes
with regular taxation.
The difference between a forced loan and a benevolence
or free gift is not easy to grasp; for a loan taken at the king's
pleasure might also be repaid in his own good time, and with
a complaisant Parliament to back him the distinction entirely
disappeared.1
These devices were used to great effect by Tudors and
Stuarts and were supplemented by that last and most
famous dodge of constitutional taxation, the Stuart
to reject. For an excellent short account of this evolution, see Taswell-
Langmead, English Constitutional History, pp. 549-551. This complete con-
trol of money bills by the Commons is the key to much of the great epi-
sode of the Lloyd-George Budget and the Parliament Act, 1909-1911. See
W. and N., Problem VIII.
* Medley, English Constitutional History, pp. 577, 578.