Civil List Act 1760

The Civil List Act 1760 (1 Geo. 3 c. 1) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain passed upon the accession of George III.

Civil List Act 1760
Citation1 Geo. 3 c. 1
Territorial extentEngland and Wales; Scotland
Dates
Repealed1 April 2012
Other legislation
Repealed bySovereign Grant Act 2011
Status: Repealed

The Act transferred almost all Civil List revenues (mainly customs and excise) to Parliament. In the last year of George II's reign these had been worth £876,988. In return, the new King received a fixed, annual Civil List of £800,000.[1] Under George II the economy had grown and consequently the revenues increased. The fixed amount George III received was therefore a reduction in the Civil List.[2]

If the previous arrangement had been retained, George III's Civil List in 1777 would have been more than £1,000,000 and would have amounted to £1,812,308 in 1798.[3] The £800,000 stipulated in the Act was soon found to be inadequate and a Civil List crisis was only averted in the early 1760s because George II had built up savings worth £172,000 that George III was able to draw on.[4] By the end of the decade the Civil List arrears amounted to more than half a million pounds and the King had to apply to Parliament to pay it off.[5]

Notes
  1. E. A. Reitan, 'The Civil List in Eighteenth-Century British Politics: Parliamentary Supremacy versus the Independence of the Crown', The Historical Journal Vol. 9, No. 3 (1966), p. 323.
  2. Reitan, p. 323.
  3. Reitan, p. 323.
  4. Reitan, p. 324.
  5. Reitan, pp. 324-5.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.