London - Edward Rutherfurd [213]
Only a short while before, he had stood before the tall, grey-bearded monarch, and the royal eyes had gazed steadily straight into his.
“I need you,” the king had said. “I need you for my parliament.” And the fishmonger had blushed, hardly able to believe the honour. A Barnikel in Parliament.
When King Edward I of England had decided to hold parliaments, as he called them, twice a year, and usually in Westminster, he displayed his usual cunning and sagacity. Remembering the humiliations of his father and grandfather, whose obstinacy brought them under the thumb of baronial councils, he had been much cleverer. No one would ever be able to say that Edward ruled without advice. Whenever there was a matter of special importance to decide, he summoned not only the council of barons but the other parties to be affected. If it concerned the Church, he summoned representatives of the clergy; if trade, then burghers from the towns; if general military service, then local knights. And sometimes all these together. Such parliaments also witnessed the dispensing of royal justice, of which the king in council was also the court of last resort. True, the king often made laws by himself too, with only his inner advisers. But he never went too far. He always had his parliaments as a sounding board.
Just as he used the lesser merchants to break the power of the mayor of London and his oligarchs, so, with his parliaments, the monarch could limit his feudal magnates – which he did time and again, by statutes – and to a lesser extent he could break the Church as well. And so in the reign of King Edward I of England, the great institution of Parliament first began to take shape: not – God forbid – to place power in the hands of the people, but to strengthen the long political arm of the king.
By chance, the day before, one of the London burgesses due to attend had fallen sick. “So I asked for you,” King Edward told Waldus with a smile.
Of course, there was a reason. Barnikel was no fool. If the king wanted merchants at this Parliament, it meant he wanted taxes from the towns. If he was ready to flatter a newly made alderman, he must want a lot. Well, so be it.
But he had asked for him, Barnikel, by name.
No wonder then if Waldus Barnikel was ready to celebrate that afternoon. And this was exactly what he next proposed to do. For just before he left to see the king, he too had received a message from Bankside. About a virgin. And it was with cheerful eagerness, therefore, that he hurried now upon his way.
Waldus Barnikel normally went to the Dog’s Head once a week. He had done so for nearly five years. As constant as he was regular, he always slept with one of the Dogget sisters.
Their name amused him because, quite unrelated to them, there was now a highly respectable but humourless goldsmith of the same name in the city. “Saw your cousins across the river,” Barnikel would tease him, from time to time.
He had been planning to go to Bankside today anyway. For, with typical clear-sightedness, King Edward had already understood the great truth which the history of nearly all future legislative assemblies would prove – that prostitutes and politicians are inevitably drawn together. “If I leave a lot of knights and burgesses hanging around in the city,” he observed, “they’re sure to go off whoring and get into trouble.” And so, when Parliament sat at Westminster, the Bankside brothels, at least officially, were closed. It might be some time, therefore, before he could go again.
As for the news of a virgin at the Dog’s Head, it was indeed amazing. “And I’ll have her,” he murmured with mounting excitement. He’d give the Dogget girl a present too, though, to keep her happy.
Only once, for a moment, did he pause. The broad, muddy lane from Westminster ran parallel with the river and less than half a mile from