False Economy - Alan Beattie [30]
None of the three unfortunate European monarchs managed to make his capital city anywhere near as quiescent. While none became quite as bloated as imperial Rome, the politics of the capital played a disproportionately large role in the governance of the country.
London's influence was well established by 1603, when James I, father of Charles I and first of the Stuart family of monarchs who succeeded the Tudors, came to the throne. It had more balance between politics and commerce than did Rome, the influence of each reinforcing the need for the other also to be present. The twin roles were neatly encapsulated in the city's geography. London was in fact two cities, the political center of Westminster to the west, and the commercial, consumer, and entertainment nucleus of the City of London to the east. (The lawyers, typically, inserted themselves between the two and have been there ever since. They were temporarily joined in the twentieth century by journalists, another, less privileged, class of hangers-on.) Westminster and the City were umbilically connected by the Strand, which today has been subsumed into densely urbanized central London but which was then a thoroughfare more than a high street, with open fields close by its northern side.
In 1606 the London bookshops carried a newly translated English edition of the Treatise Concerning the Causes of the Magnificence and Greatness of Cities by the Florentine diplomat Giovanni Botero. In it, Botero explained that the growth of a city was helped enormously by the "residency of the Prince therein," attracting "all such as aspire and thirst after offices and honours." In London's case he was half right. Commerce often depended on the crown, the term used to denote the constitutional executive power of the monarchy. But the crown needed the support of commerce.
By Stuart times, Parliament, which had previously met in a number of different cities, had settled almost exclusively on London. It exerted increasing control over the ability of the crown to raise taxes. James I and Charles I, who chafed against this constraint, resorted more and more to borrowing from the financiers of the City and selling exclusive licenses and monopolies to favorites. Almost anything that people really needed, and hence for which demand was less responsive to price, or "inelastic," could profitably be taxed: salt, wine, soap, even playing cards and dice. One favorite way was to restrict its sale to those holding a royal license.
My own home city of Chester, in northwest England, has a folk song that reflects the power, and the danger, of holding such a monopoly.
There was a jolly miller once lived on the River Dee.
He worked and sang from morn till night, no lark so blithe as he.
And this the burden of his song forever used to be:
I care for nobody, no, not I; and nobody cares for me.
With the prestigious and lucrative earldom of Chester—today's earl is Prince Charles, heir to the throne—came a grab bag of rights to raise money in various ways, granted by the monarch. They included the right to compel all locally grown grain to be ground at his mill. Evidently possessing a sound grasp of the microeconomics of monopoly pricing, the earl subcontracted to a single miller, who was able to charge farmers pretty much what he chose. The miller's lack of popularity among his customers and his utter unconcern about it, as recorded in the song, become easily explicable. So does