God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [62]
As the summer progressed there were further disorders in London, which seem to have been fuelled by religious fears arising from Charles’s use of Convocation.55 The capital was intimately connected to the provinces by networks of trade, kinship and power; news and rumour travelled alongside these things. In Shelley, Essex, a villager regaled his neighbour with an account of the attack on Lambeth Palace and claimed that the soldiers of the militia, far from suppressing the rioters, would instead ‘fall upon’ those that were on the side of the bishops. He also predicted imminent risings against Laud’s favourites and supporters of the Bishops on the grounds that ‘there was not laws now’.56
Further out, on the evening of 25 July at about 5 p.m., William Hawley overtook Thomas Webb, a clothier from Devizes, on the road just outside Wantage. Friendly greetings and discussion of wool prices were interlaced with more painful topics. Webb had asked if there had been soldiers on the move in the area, this being the period of the buildup to the second Bishops” War, and this may have prompted Hawley into some unguarded political comment. Hauled before a local magistrate the next day, he had to answer to charges that he had said the apprentices had risen against Laud and that it would be a pitiful time, that Laud was the cause of the raising of the armies and that the King was ‘ruled’ by him. He had also attributed the riots to rumours that Laud had turned papist and indeed that it was well known that he was in fact a papist. Much of this was denied, of course, but so seriously was this taken that a report of the examination ended up on the desk of the Secretary of State, Francis Windebank.57
Mobilization in England in 1640 was even more reluctant than in the previous year. In many parts of the country the collection of ship money, which had slowed down in advance of the parliament, now seems to have collapsed entirely. This was selective inaction – it seems clear that other aspects of local government continued to operate.58 Financial difficulties led to disastrous expedients – the seizure of Spanish bullion in the Tower, the threat to issue brass money and the seizure of pepper belonging to London merchants for sale at about 30 per cent below its market value. These manoeuvres cost the crown friends abroad and in the City, although the brass money plan was so obviously bad for the economy that it may have been a threat to the City, intended to encourage the provision of a loan which would prevent the need for this drastic measure.59
Given the crown’s dependence on officeholders, the lack of consensus made mobilization very difficult, and morale was low. John Castle’s letters from court are filled with bad news – the reluctance of the City to lend money, and the attempts to bully it, the supply of ‘stinking’ victuals, the impossibility of setting an expedition out to sea, all combine with a sense of foreboding. The difficulties of raising troops were at least as bad as in the previous year because the Trained Bands were if anything more reluctant to serve and the substitution clause was more widely invoked.60 Shortly after the end of the parliament it was rumoured that ‘the people’ in Norfolk ‘like the sea will surely rise upon the first wind that blows upon them’. The same ‘ill news’ came from the west,