False Economy - Alan Beattie [31]
License-holding was not exclusively a London phenomenon, nor even an urban one. But the richer merchants of London did benefit more than most from the sale of trade monopolies. This was risky both for them and the king. For many, the use of taxes and licenses by the crown and its small cabal of aristocratic allies reflected the malign influence of Catholicism and its rigid, alien hierarchy. After campaigns of religious persecution in the sixteenth century and the Catholic attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605, "papacy" had become shorthand for arbitrary exploitation and a general scapegoat for anything that went wrong. The prices charged by the Catholic-dominated Westminster
Soap Company, which held the London soap license, provoked street riots enlivened by the unlikely chanting of "No more Popish soap!"
Milking monopolies was especially dangerous in London. Its population was divided by extremes of wealth and swollen through migration. It went from around 50,000 in 1500, making it the fifteenth-biggest city in Europe, to 350,000 in 1650, second only to Paris. Londoners were crammed together into a city of cramped, stinking medieval streets. Proximity bred contempt. A century later, in 1746, Giacomo Casanova, on one of his libertine visits to London, recorded: "A man in court dress cannot walk the streets of London without being pelted with mud by the mob ... the flower of the nobility mingling in confusion with the vilest populace. ... The most wretched porter will dispute the wall with a Lord." It was said at the time that it was a mistake to confuse the babble of a London coffeehouse with the roar of the nation, but at a time when transport and communication were slow and expensive, the noise of the latter could often be drowned out by the former.
Rumor, anger, and the radical ideas of anti-papist Puritanism spread rapidly in this febrile, fetid atmosphere. One of Charles Is advisers said that Parliament's popularity among the London crowds "is their anchor-hold and only interest." The London mob—the word itself was invented in the seventeenth century—was regarded by many royalists with scorn and disdain, as much because of its propensity to carry disease as its predilection for violence. (Cheaper soap might have helped.)
Respect for its size and fear of its power might have been more appropriate than contempt for its sanitary standards. The London crowds did include unemployed, menial laborers, and apprentices—the latter, in their own view underpaid and overworked, being a particularly volatile bunch. But there were also a lot of smaller merchants and tradesmen, excluded from the charmed coterie that encircled the crown, and whose political goals extended to more than cheaper soap. Samuel Pepys, the diarist of seventeenth-century England, himself heard a crowd "bawling and calling in the street for a free parliament and money." At second hand, he reported: "It is said that they did in open streets yesterday, at Westminster, cry 'A parliament! A parliament!'And I do believe it will cost blood."
It did, indeed, cost blood. In elections in December 1641, Puritan radicals won control of the City Common Council, the local authority, and with it power over the City's militia. Together with the House of Commons, they set up a Committee of Safety (a term echoed a century and a half later during the French Revolution with Paris's Committee of Public Safety, an altogether bloodier body).
In January 1642, with conflict between crown and Parliament rising, Charles attempted to arrest five members of Parliament in person, only to find that, forewarned, they had escaped. The City militia protected the five the next day as they paraded triumphantly in central London. Charles was frightened out of the capital five days later, retreated to Nottingham to declare war, and spent the next seven years trying unsuccessfully to fight his way back. His return to the royal