This income was therefore called the Civil List.

The expenses of the royal household are now entirely separated from the expenses of the civil government; but, by a whimsical perversion, the name of Civil List has remained attached to that portion of the revenue which is appropriated to the expenses of the royal household.

It is still more strange that several neighbouring nations should have thought this most unmeaning of all names worth borrowing.
Those duties of customs which had been settled for life on Charles and James successively, and which, in the year before the Revolution, had yielded six hundred thousand pounds, were granted to the Crown for a term of only four years, [598] William was by no means well pleased with this arrangement.

He thought it unjust and ungrateful in a people whose liberties he had saved to bind him over to his good behaviour.

"The gentlemen of England," he said to Burnet, "trusted King James who was an enemy of their religion and of their laws; and they will not trust me by whom their religion and their laws have been preserved." Burnet answered very properly that there was no mark of personal confidence which His Majesty was not entitled to demand, but that this question was not a question of personal confidence.