This post is part of a series on ‘Economic Aspects of the Constitution’. The other posts in the series will be available here.

When constitutional lawyers recall the Revolution of 1688 we tend to be better at remembering why Parliament wanted William III to replace James II than why William was so eager to ascend the English throne. If Parliament’s principal motive was religion, William’s was defence. He was as desperate to protect his Dutch territories from French attack as Parliament was to safeguard England from a Catholic monarch, and he saw the events of 1688 as the ideal opportunity to harness England’s military power to that end. This transformed England to a far greater degree than is now generally acknowledged by lawyers. 

For two and a half centuries (since the end of the Hundred Years War) England’s army had ceased to be a major military force in Europe. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century England’s army was not much more than one tenth the size of France’s. The Dutch army was only marginally smaller than the French and the Russian army was yet bigger. England’s was tiny by comparison. 

It was William’s accession which changed this. For half of the next hundred years England (after 1707, Britain) was at war, first in Europe and later in America. The Nine Years War lasted from 1688-97; the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702-13; the War of Austrian Succession from 1739-48; the Seven Years War from 1756-63; and the American War of Independence from 1775-83. 

War, of course, had to be paid for. William’s ministers had only two means of raising revenue—via taxation and via the public debt—and both grew in unprecedented ways from the 1690s. By the middle of the eighteenth century Britain had become the most heavily taxed nation in Europe. The rise of the public debt was even more remarkable, the Bank of England having been created in 1694 to manage it. It stood at £16.7 million in 1697, at £50 million in 1720, at £76 million in 1748, at £133 million in 1763 (ie, it almost doubled during the Seven Years War), and at £245 million in 1783 (ie, it almost doubled again during the American War of Independence).  

The spending was extraordinary, but it was the wars of the eighteenth century that made Britain into the international powerhouse it became. By 1713 Britain was the world’s supreme maritime power (her navy was unrivalled). At the same time, Britain’s access to global trade routes was unparalleled. As PGM Dickson has written (in The Financial Revolution in England (1976)), “by the eve of the Seven Years War, London was … the leading world centre of foreign trade, dealings in jewels and gold, provision of insurance cover, and the flotation of public loans”. And all of this in a period when, as Dickson put it, “victory might confidently have been expected by the French, whose resources in population, natural wealth and military organisation were far greater than those of England”. 

How did these successes—and the “financial revolution” which enabled them—affect the changing British constitution? Let us consider taxation first, before turning to the public debt. 

We know, of course, that it was a condition of William and Mary ascending the throne that there could be no taxation without parliamentary consent. Such is enshrined in article IV of the Bill of Rights 1689, having been demanded multiple times by the parliaments of the seventeenth century (not least in the Petition of Right (1628) and in the Act declaring the levying of ship-money to be illegal (1641)). A further sign of Parliament’s ongoing concerns—even into the eighteenth century—about powers over taxation is that, in the reigns of William III and Queen Anne, Parliament insisted it was the land tax, rather than customs and excise duties, which should be increased. At first blush this appears counter-intuitive, as both Houses of Parliament were stuffed with men liable to pay the land tax. But the explanation lies in the fact that the Crown did not control its collection, and it was thus seen as posing less of a threat to the Commons. The policy was not reversed until the time of Sir Robert Walpole when, from the 1720s, excise duties were imposed on a broader range of goods and products and at higher rates. Walpole’s preference for relying on the excise came not least from knowing that it would be professionally collected (unlike the more unreliable land tax). It is a core finding of John Brewer’s leading work, The Sinews of Power (1989), that the excise was remarkably well managed, highly centralised, and widely praised for its “regularity and vigilance”. 

These developments in taxation had at least three constitutional implications, relating to the professionalisation of the public service, to the exclusion of public servants from the House of Commons, and to the accountability of ministers to Parliament. We can consider each in turn. 

On the public service, the first thing to notice is its size. Whereas it has been estimated that in the mid seventeenth century there were about 1200 public servants working in central government, by 1690 there were some 2500 officials working in the fiscal bureaucracy alone (see Brewer’s The Sinews of Power). By 1755 this number was 6500 and by 1783 it had risen to 8200—and these numbers record only permanent staff (there were, in addition, thousands of “casuals”). The second thing to notice is its professionalism. Brewer argues that “the most egregious instances of venality and corruption” were held in check by two factors—that Britain could raise revenue without having to resort to the sale of offices, and that the House of Commons took seriously the work of holding public spending to account. 

Public servants such as land tax collectors, salt tax commissioners, and commissioners for customs and excise were excluded from the House of Commons. Such measures did not eradicate the Crown’s influence in (or over) the Commons: but they surely curbed it. As importantly, the partial separation of politics and bureaucracy was welcomed by officials who wanted to work for the state without having to become embroiled in party politics. The separation of powers between government and parliament may be but partial in the UK and, even now, may not be a justiciable principle other than in extremis (see Miller/Cherry) but it has been a fixture of Britain’s institutional arrangements since at least the eighteenth century. 

The price Parliament exacted for supporting William’s (and Anne’s and the Hanoverians’) wars—and their financing—was to subject their operations to what Brewer has called “unparalleled surveillance”. Parliament became not only the watchdog of the state, but the forum in which policy—even foreign policy—was debated. It mattered not that the Bill of Rights 1689 said nothing about parliamentary accountability of foreign policy, which remained in law a matter firmly of Royal Prerogative. And it mattered not that there was no history of Parliament being free to question the Crown’s exercise of foreign or military policy (witness Queen Elizabeth’s contempt in the 1580s for parliamentarians like Peter Wentworth who sought to defy her on such issues). What did matter is that the Crown was made financially dependent on Parliament and had therefore no choice but to call frequent meetings of Parliament. Such developments were not driven by the abstract triumph of Whig constitutional theory: they were the result of raw politics. William and his successors could not pursue their wars without money, and Parliament would not supply the money unless it had a say over policy. 

To start with, these matters were contested fiercely—so fiercely indeed that many feared the “rage of party” would plunge the country back into civil war. That “whig v tory” would become “roundhead v cavalier redux” was predicted by domestic observers and foreign correspondents alike. The notion that the “financial revolution” spawned a new constitutional order after 1690 is not an interpretation of the past imposed on it only by twentieth-century historians—contemporaries saw matters in such terms as events unfolded. Tory propagandists such as Jonathan Swift, for example, decried the fact that the new means of paying for William’s and Anne’s wars shifted power from the landed to a new monied elite of creditors and “stock-jobbers”. Bolingbroke amplified such concerns as he sought in the 1730s to fashion an official Opposition to Walpole’s administration. It was not until the 1740s that the new constitutional order started to become more generally accepted, across the political spectrum. 

We owe much of this shift from resistance to acceptance—and certainly more than constitutional lawyers tend now to remember—to David Hume. His political essays (first published in 1741) and his essays on economics (1752) sought to cut through and end the “rage of party”. That Penguin have this year published a superb new edition of Hume’s Complete Essays (brilliantly edited by David Womersley) may encourage readers—hopefully some constitutional lawyers among them—to re-engage with these enthralling works. Certainly I hope so. For one thing, it was Hume who made Blackstone possible. When Blackstone published the first volume of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (in 1765, the volume which treats constitutional law), no authoritative account of the English constitution had been published for nearly two centuries, since Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (1583). Everything written about the constitution between the death of Elizabeth and volume one of Blackstone’s Commentaries was partisan. Even a common lawyer as great as Sir Edward Coke could not write an authoritative account of the constitution, caught as he was in the webs and weeds of politics. 

Hume, in contrast to Swift and Bolingbroke, was relaxed about how the new constitutional order had shifted power from the landed to the monied. Indeed, he welcome it (as Adam Smith would, too). What Hume called “luxury” did not beget idleness, as Swift and Bolingbroke had feared, but progress and growth: with greater economic freedom, Hume argued, came greater security for our political freedom. In an oft-quoted line from an essay, Of Refinement in the Arts, first published in 1752, Hume wrote that “industry, knowledge and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and are found … to be peculiar to the more polished and … luxurious ages”. 

Hume’s Essays are characterised by moderation. He sought to blend and weave together the best of the ancient with the advantages of the modern. He saw truths in both Whig and Tory accounts (he also saw nonsense in both, which he left unceremoniously on the cutting-room floor). His Essays are exercises in studied impartiality. (James Harris, in his Hume: An Intellectual Biography (2015) offers a masterly overview.) But there was one exception: the one element of the new order to which Hume could never accommodate himself was the public debt. In Of Public Credit(1752) he wrote that the mortgaging of the country’s future was “ruinous” and that “either the nation must destroy public credit, or public credit will destroy the nation”. Adam Smith would later agree: in the final chapter of The Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith described the public debt as “oppressive”, “ruinous”, “improvident”, and risking outright “bankruptcy”. Prime ministers and chancellors in the twenty-first century have found that their room for manoeuvre may be constrained by the bond markets—we saw it in dramatic form with Truss and Kwarteng as we may be seeing it now with market jitters about Burnham and Miliband. These are modern manifestations of a feature of our constitutional affairs which has been with us since the eighteenth century. 

Two conclusions may be drawn from these observations. The first relates to the constitutional principle “no taxation without representation”. This principle has a broader reach than simply the notion that parliamentary consent is required for the Crown to tax its subjects. As we have seen, the professionalisation of the public service, its separation from Parliament, and the growth and development of ministerial accountability to Parliament are all among its institutional ramifications. But we should not get carried away. The principle is at the same time a narrow one. Put the emphasis on “taxation” rather than on “representation”. Legislation without representation may be fine: it is only taxation without representation that poses problems. Burke saw this clearly in his famous speeches on American taxation (1775) and on conciliation with the colonies (1776). Binding the Americans with trade laws he had no issue with, even when such rules do “confine, and … do greatly narrow” their market. But such laws are sharply to be distinguished from laws imposing taxation. The US Supreme Court made much the same point in its ruling in February (in Learning Resources v Trump) that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 conferred no power on the President to impose trade tariffs. All manner of regulatory powers are conferred on the President by that Act, said the Court, but not the power to tax. 

A final conclusion may be less to do with “economic aspects of the constitution” and more to do with the historical methodology deployed here to reflect on money and constitutional affairs. Whig historiography, that progress is somehow assured and that liberty is our natural condition, is closely connected to common law myth-making. It is a myth in particular that, were specific enactments to be repealed, it would not matter very much, as the deep reservoir of common law liberty will still be there to protect us. This is as bogus as the claim, once beloved of Whig historians, that all the Bill of Rights 1689 did was to crystallise that which had long been already in place, in the constitutional ether, in the mists of the ages, since time out of mind. Freedom has to be fought for. None of it can be taken for granted. In the past, it was Parliament that fought for it. David Hume saw, not only in his Essays but also in his History of England (1762), that there is no such thing as an ancient constitution of common law liberty. Thinking about the constitution historically, whether we focus on its economic aspects or any others, makes that plain. 

Adam Tomkins is John Millar Professor of Public Law, University of Glasgow

(Suggested citation: A. Tomkins, ‘Money and the Making of the British Constitution’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (4th June 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))