Under Elizabeth, the allowance made to Queen's Sergeants was £26 6_s._ 8_d._ for fee, reward, and robes; and £20. for his services whenever a Queen's Sergeant travelled circuit as Justice of Assize. The fee for her Solicitor General was £50. When Francis Bacon was created King's Counsel to James I., an annual salary of forty pounds was assigned to him from the royal purse; and down to William IV.'s time, King's Counsel received a stipend of £40 a year, and an allowance for stationery. Under the last mentioned monarch, however, the stipend and allowance were both withdrawn; and at present the status of a Q.C. is purely an affair of professional precedence, to which no fixed emolument is attached.
But a list of the fees, paid from the royal purse to each judge or crown lawyer under James I., would afford no indication as to the incomes enjoyed by the leading members of the bench and bar at that period. The salaries paid to those officers were merely retaining fees, and their chief remuneration consisted of a large number of smaller fees. Like the judges of prior reigns, King James's judges were forbidden to accept _presents_ from actual suitors; but no suitor could obtain a hearing from any one of them, until he had paid into court certain fees, of which the fattest was a sum of money for the judge's personal use. At one time many persons labored under an erroneous impression, that as judges were forbidden to accept presents from actual suitors, the honest judge of past times had no revenue besides his specified salary and allowance. Like the king's judges, the king's counsellors frequently made great incomes by fees, though their nominal salaries were invariably insignificant. At a time when Francis Bacon was James's Attorney General, and received no more than £81 6_s._ 8_d._ for his yearly salary, he made £6000 per annum in his profession; and of that income--a royal income in those days--the greater portion consisted of fees paid to him for attending to the king's business. "I shall now," Bacon wrote to the king, "again make oblation to your Majesty,--first of my heart, then of my service; thirdly, of my place of Attorney, which I think is honestly worth £6000 per annum; and fourthly, of my place in the Star Chamber, which is worth £1600 per annum, and with the favor and countenance of a Chancellor, much more." Coke had made a still larger income during his tenure of the Attorney's place, the fees from his private official practice amounting to no loss a sum than seven thousand pounds in a single year.