London - Edward Rutherfurd [208]
The cruelty of William’s little joke lay in the one fact he had withheld: the big decision he had just taken.
In a year’s time, he would not be there. The Bulls were leaving London. For good.
In a way it was not surprising. Even his father had said: “The city is becoming intolerable.” The problem for his father, apart from the rebellion, was contained in a single word. Immigrants. It was natural, in the booming prosperity of that century, that London should have swollen. But the stream of immigrants had turned into a flood: Italians, Spaniards, French and Flemings, Germans from the growing network of northern ports known as the Hansa, not to mention the merchants and artisans flocking in from the regions of England. Worse yet, with the exception of the Hansa men, who kept themselves apart, they were mixing and marrying with exactly the craftsmen who had been such a confounded nuisance under Montfort. “These vulgar upstarts and foreigners are crowding us out,” the old patrician claimed.
For William, the process was summed up by an event that took place a year before old King Henry died. The little steeple over St Mary-le-Bow had come down in a storm and smashed a nearby house the Bulls owned. Normally this would have been quickly repaired; but his father had hesitated, then decided to sell. A year later, together with three smaller houses of the Bulls, it was being shared by a dye-master from Picardy and a Cordova leather-seller from Spain. Then, in nearby Garlick Hill, some vulgar tanners had moved in. These were small things, yet a sign of the times. But the final blow had been when his own house, previously in the aristocratic parish of St Mary-le-Bow, had been made part of the tiny parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves. A mean little church, not worthy of the patrician Bulls. Nothing could disguise the fact that the family was in retreat.
If the long reign of Henry III had been bad for the family, the last twenty years under his son Edward had been a nightmare. No English king was ever more impressive than Edward I. Tall and powerful, with a noble face and a flowing beard, his only peculiarities were a drooping left eyelid and a lisp when he spoke. A vigorous law-giver and commander, he was both intelligent and cunning. The leopard, they called him. And having seen his father’s often pathetic rule, he was determined to impose his own, iron will. He was usually successful. Already he had subdued the Welsh, secured their land with huge castles, and given them their first, English Prince of Wales. Soon he would march north, to hammer the Scots as well. And if there was one body of men in his kingdom he disliked, it was the proud patrician aldermen of London who elected their own mayor and thought they could make kings.
His attack had been cunning. For what merchant could deny that Edward was his friend? His laws were just and good for trade. Debts were regulated, taxes simplified, with a new but reasonable duty on wool exports that could mostly be passed on to the foreign customers. “Yet look at what he’s quietly done to us patricians,” William would point out. “He’s pushed the best wine trade to fellows from Bordeaux; the biggest wool dealers are either Italians or men from the West Country.” And while his father had always made huge and profitable sales of luxury goods to the Wardrobe, as the royal purchasing office was called, William could not sell them a thing. “We’ve been sidestepped,” he bitterly concluded. “That leopard’s run round us.”
Yet even this was only the softening up. The real assault, which had begun ten years ago, was devastating. For suddenly, on the pretext of improving law and order, King Edward had dismissed the mayor and put in his own warden. The aldermen had been aghast. But they got no support from the Londoners. And then King Edward had set to work. A barrage of ordinances followed: records, courts, weights and measures – all reformed with Edward’s usual thoroughness.