Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [398]
“The family’s well placed,” he claimed cheerfully. All that was needed now to succeed was money.
He had tried to provide it.
First he invested in wool, buying quantities through an agent from local farmers for the export market. He invested heavily. But as a Flemish merchant complained to him:
“The trouble with English wool is that by the time you’ve paid the king’s tax on it, your raw wool costs almost the same as finished cloth.” This was indeed the effect of the fact that the king levied customs on raw wool but not on finished cloth: while the cloth trade boomed, the wool trade was now only profitable for the huge merchants of the Staple and after a few years of steady losses, Godfrey gave it up.
Then he tried to import wine from Gascony. This was a failure too. For after the successes of Joan of Arc had inspired the French to fight, and since the parochial English Parliament had kept the king short of funds for the war, year by year England’s share of France had been whittled away until finally, to Godfrey’s despair, the possessions in Gascony which had always been England’s stronghold had been lost as well. For a few months in 1453, he was full of hope when the great commander Talbot led an expedition to take Gascony back again. Salisbury even contributed fifty marks towards the cost. But Talbot was killed and the vineyards of Bordeaux were never to be in English hands again.
His trade with Gascony was at an end.
“I’ll never be a merchant,” he admitted, half with pride, half ruefully. And though he was only forty-two, it was to his son that he turned and said: “It’s up to you to save the family now.”
If he laid the task upon his son rather than himself, however, at least he knew what the boy must do.
“The law and Parliament,” he said. “That’s your way forward.”
In principle this idea was sound. More than ever before the sons of the gentry and the merchant classes were attending the schools where an excellent education for laymen, as well as priests, was available. Oliver had been sent to the school in Winchester established by the great chancellor Bishop Wykeham the century before; he had also spent two years at the recently founded King’s College in Cambridge. He was an intelligent boy with the capacity to be a good lawyer; his only fault was that he was lazy. But if he worked, Eustace told him, there were certain to be opportunities for him in the service of the king or of one of the magnates who kept their own courts of retainers and placemen.
As for Parliament, there was the place really to further the family fortunes. The character of that body was changing. There were restrictions on the electors in each shire now – only those freeholders who could show an income of forty shillings a year might vote. It had become an arena for complex power-broking. The representatives of the boroughs and shires might not always be burgesses and local knights: more and more were outsiders, professional men in the pay of a magnate.
“God knows, John of Gaunt used to pack Parliament,” Eustace remarked. “But young men like you are making a career out of being placemen there now.”
A good example of the cynical processes at work lay right beside the city. For the half-deserted castle on Old Sarum hill had still retained its former right to send two members to the Parliament.
“Why, in the Parliament of fifty-three,” Godfrey pointed out to his son, “the two members for Old Sarum were a pair of London merchants – total strangers.” And so the ancient hillfort had begun its long career as a convenient token constituency for the use of ambitious parliamentary men.
Sometimes, when he thought of his ancestors, these manoeuvrings depressed Godfrey.
“In the old days,” he said sadly to his wife, “we fought.”
But those days were long past. Warfare, too had changed. Even before Agincourt, his own grandfather had complained of the new cannon that were changing the old spirit of gentlemanly warfare. And besides, the new plate armour that was worn by any man of rank was far beyond Eustace’s purse even if