London - Edward Rutherfurd [386]
Money. He asked the city of London for a loan. No one would lend. Strafford told the merchants: “If we need to we’ll get cash by cutting the coinage.” As for the city’s refusal: “Double the demand, sire,” he suggested to the king in the Londoners’ hearing, “and hang a few aldermen. That’ll do it.”
“If only the king had listened to me,” Julius lamented to his brother, “about how to raise debt, he would not have been in this position now.” But he was. Seeing his weakness, the canny Scots occupied the north of England and would not go away until paid a huge indemnity. Charles therefore had to call Parliament again; and in the autumn of 1640, they were ready for him.
“These parliament men,” Henry angrily declared, “are dangerous radicals – no better than traitors. They’re in league with the Scots.” Of course they were. But traitors they were not, and hardly even radicals. They were mostly country gentlemen of substance who were appalled at Charles’s government. One, a senior fellow named Hampden, intended to lead a crusade against Ship Money. Another, a squire from East Anglia named Oliver Cromwell – a distant kinsman, as it happened, of Secretary Thomas Cromwell who had dissolved the monasteries a century before – up to Parliament for the first time, was shocked by what he saw as a godless court. But most important of all, the leader of the pack, was a master tactician called Pym.
“Pym’s reasoning is very simple,” a stout gentleman informed Julius one day in the Royal Exchange. “As long as the Scots sit tight up north – and they’ve promised us they will – and we refuse him any money down here, King Charles is trapped in a vice. Can’t do anything.” He chuckled. “So you see, it’s time to squeeze him now.”
And squeeze they did. The king’s right to customs, stripped away; Parliament must be called every three years; the present Parliament to sit as long as its members saw fit; the Ulster settlement to be returned to the Londoners. One by one these Acts were passed, humiliating Charles. By November, Strafford had been sent to the Tower; within a month, Archbishop Laud as well.
Yet, as the Parliament went about this grim business in the spring of 1641, Julius was not alarmed. Parliaments had crossed kings for centuries, whenever they dared; caused favourites to fall, even deprived monarchs of their mistresses! The situation was bad, but hardly desperate. Indeed, strangely enough, the sense of disquiet that he did feel came not from the doings of the great men in Parliament, but from a far more humble source, in his own little parish of St Lawrence Silversleeves.
It was not long after the Parliament had begun. Julius remembered the day vividly because William Prynne had just been released from jail and a huge crowd had been leading the earless Puritan hero in triumph through the streets. The shouts of the crowd were still ringing in his ears when, to his surprise, he learned that Gideon Carpenter was at the door; and he was even more puzzled when Gideon, looking at him steadily, showed him a large scroll of paper and asked him: “Do you want to sign?”
“Sign what?” Julius had demanded.
“It’s a petition. We have nearly fifteen thousand signatures. For the abolition of bishops and all their works, root and branch.” And Gideon pointed to the mass of signatures he had collected.
Julius had heard of this petition. Started by Pennington, a vigorous Puritan on the common council, and encouraged by the Presbyterian Scots envoys who had recently arrived in London, it had been signed by many who had hated Laud and his Church. But whatever the king’s troubles with Parliament, Julius could not imagine King Charles even deigning to look at such a document. “Why bring it to me?” he had asked, only to receive