18—
The King in Council

As he turned his back on war and embraced a domestic happiness Charles could, with some justification, envisage a rosy future for himself and for his country. Economic conditions were on the whole favourable with the rate of inflation slowing down and prices rising less steeply than he could remember, while a general well-being among his more wealthy subjects was expressed in their willingness to invest in a wide variety of projects. The woollen industry, in particular, was responding to the marked improvement in trade which followed the end of hostilities with France and Spain and even the Mediterranean was receiving English cloth, sending back, in English ships, a plentiful supply of wine and oil, olives, dried fruit and raw silk. Moreover, as France and Spain drifted into a more open antagonism with each other and trade between them dwindled, England took advantage of the situation and reaped what Charles's sister termed an 'incredible profit' from the commerce that now flowed into English ports. Besides her own Mediterranean trade English ships took Spanish wool to Italy, Sicilian corn to North Italy and to Spain. Sugar from the West Indies was conveyed on the final stages of its journey from Portuguese and Spanish ports to the Mediterranean and to Northern Italy in English ships. English ships were hired by the Portuguese to bring sugar from Brazil to Europe. Even Venice was hiring English vessels. Charles had only to look down from his wife's palace at Greenwich onto the veritable forest of masts in the river below, or take one of his frequent journeys by barge down river past the bustling wharves that lined the Thames, to feel the beat of a commercial nation. Increased trade induced merchants, including the Merchant Adventurers, to put profit before principle and concede tonnage and poundage. Now was the time to make better bargains with the customs farmers. In 1634, guided by Weston, Charles increased the rent of the

Great Farm by £10,000 to £150,000 a year, and amalgamated three of the petty farms at an enhancement of £16,000 a year so that they brought him in £60,000 annually. At the same time, again with Weston at his elbow, he revised to his advantage the Book of Rates. In the same year, in return for a loan of £10,000, he confirmed the 'ancient privileges' of the Merchant Adventurers, which had been under attack from several parliaments.

His relations with the East India Company were less fortunate, which was a pity because, in spite of Dutch rivalry in the East Indies and antagonism at home, the Company continued to expand, and its import trade and re-export trade in pepper and spices, silks and calicoes, was very profitable. Its great galleys — 'like moving sea fortresses' — served the double purpose of war and trade. But neither Charles nor his father had felt it politic to take a firm line with the Dutch and to demand compensation for the massacre at Amboyna in 1623, and the loan of £10,000 for which he asked the Company in 1628 was refused. It was a form of retaliation when in 1635 Charles sold licences to Endymion Porter, Sir William Courteen and others to trade to Goa and parts of the East Indies, himself taking shares in the enterprise. He was careful to avoid an open breach with the East India Company by directing the new licences to areas where the Company's writ did not run and was therefore extremely angry when he thought that a petition presented to him the following spring concerned Courteen's ships. He snatched the document from the unfortunate envoy's hand and was appeased only when he realized it again related to Amboyna. He had, he told the man petulantly, always resolved to be righted concerning Amboyna. Charles's impatience when thwarted was becoming more noticeable. In this case it could have stemmed from his knowledge that his East Indian enterprise was ending in failure.

Other old-established Companies like the Greenland Company and the Russian Company also benefited from the peace, and Charles sold a charter to a new African Company in 1630, while taking his share of the profits of them all at his customs houses. From the West he was garnering a harvest of trade from the English settlers who were establishing themselves on the Eastern seaboards of America and in the West Indian islands, and from the traders who were bringing home tobacco and sugar from the Southern states, timber and ships' supplies from the Northern. England had been among the first to settle the New World. Virginia on the American mainland, Bermuda and other West Indian islands had been colonised by Englishmen. In

1620 the Mayflower had reached New England, and now the route to the West was being travelled not only by Puritans for conscience sake but increasingly by merchants and business men with money to invest, by adventurers who had no money but hoped to make some, and by English vagrants, bound apprentice by some local JP to learn such skills as the new lands might require. Carolina, named after Charles, Maryland, named after Henrietta-Maria, Monserrat, Antigua, were settled in one way or another in the expansive 'thirties. To earlier trading companies Charles added the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, and the Providence Island Company in 1636. The New World also met some of what he considered his obligations to his friends and servants, and lands he had never seen, and of which he had scant knowledge, were lightly given away to courtiers and adventurers, sometimes twice over.

Charles was fully aware of the profit he could reap from these distant lands. Tobacco, in particular, promised to be particularly rewarding. Charles disliked 'the weed' with an intensity no less than his father's, describing it as 'a vain and needless' commodity 'which ought to be used as a drug only and not so vainly and wantonly as an evil habit of late times has brought it to'. It was nevertheless reasonable, if only for the sake of the planters, that he should allow a limited import into England and that he himself should reap the maximum benefit from doing so. His actions showed an effort to combine all three points of view. In 1627 he appointed Commissioners to buy Virginia tobacco and sell it in England on his behalf; he limited its import, under licence, to the Port of London; he forbade both the import of foreign tobacco and the planting of tobacco in England. The legislation was confused but it brought Charles £9000 a year in licence fees, while the tobacco colonies gained from a virtual monopoly and took no notice of Charles's hints that they should turn to more worthy production: he was, he told them, 'much troubled that this plantation is wholly built upon smoke'.

There were other ways in which the Plantations were in a unique position to help the mother country. When Charles had asked his Commissioners for Trade in 1626 to advise him as to what 'maie best advaunce the Trade of Merchandize and not hinder us in our just profits', it was partly the Plantations he had in mind. James had already ordered that their tobacco should be landed in England before proceeding to other countries and that it should be carried only in English ships or those of the Plantations. Charles in 1633 underlined

the policy by forbidding aliens to engage in any direct trade with Virginia, the chief tobacco colony. The lucrative carrying trade would in this way be kept in English hands, English ships and English men would be trained and ready for war, and the customs returns would gain. In his attitude to the Plantations, particularly in navigation policy, Charles was in line with the most advanced economic thought of his time: he was following a policy begun by his father, which would be built up into a system under the rule of his son, and which later generations would know as Mercantilism.

Commercially, Charles could see himself ruler of an expanding, enterprising and wealthy nation reaching eastwards and westwards to new trade and fresh settlement. When he turned to industrial development he perceived a restless, innovating society already breaking the bonds of the old craft economy, using machinery and employing capital on a growing scale. As the demand for coal grew at home and abroad, increasing quantities of capital were being injected into the mining industry and from Newcastle alone some 400,000 tons of coal a year were being shipped — a twelvefold growth in a century. Iron, tin, and lead mines were becoming deeper, and their output increased, as capital provided new techniques suitable to larger-scale production; the great blast-furnaces for smelting ore in the iron districts were in themselves visual manifestations of the expansion that was taking place in the heavy industries.

There were factories with water-driven mills for making paper and hemp; the Mines Royal and the Society of the Mineral and Battery works, which Elizabeth I had established in an endeavour to produce brass and copper, were receiving fresh infusions of capital. There were large alum houses at Whitby, of which his father had been particularly proud, where many thousands of pounds were sunk in smelting machinery and many hundreds of workmen were employed. Round his capital city little factories were springing up and expanding as machine production began to oust the domestic worker in numerous enterprises such as brewing, soap-making, tanning, and the production of saltpetre. Above all, the woollen cloth industry, a highly organized, capitalist enterprise, still accounting for eighty per cent of the country's exports, remained its greatest asset, making all Europe, it was said, England's servant since it wore her livery.

In agriculture the disturbances caused by turning arable land and common grazing land into sheep runs were dying down and a new

equilibrium between arable farming and sheep farming was being achieved. The unenclosed strip-farming of the open-field villages found fewer advocates as a new scientific approach to agriculture, depending upon single ownership and enclosure, and stimulated by a growing demand, began to make headway. The yeoman was still the backbone of English farming. He was the owner-occupier, hardworking, good-living, unostentatiously prosperous — but perhaps he was a little less self-contained, a little more conscious that he was 'a gentleman in ore', a little more inclined to think of his coach on Sunday rather than his plough on Monday. Above him in the social hierarchy many gentry families were likewise thinking of the Great Estate, and if they sometimes were reduced to yeoman status there were others who, by judicious marriages and preferment at Court or in office, joined the aristocracy within a generation or two. The repetition, both in James's and Charles's reigns, of Proclamations commanding gentlemen to return to their homes in the country, indicates that a considerable number of them spent their time in and around the Court seeking, if not office itself, then some of the less lucrative spoils of office.

But there were many landowners of all ranks who remained in the country and concentrated upon improving their estates. Agricultural writers found a ready market for their books and there were many translations of Dutch and Flemish authors. The sowing of seed in regular rows instead of broadcast, and the use of fertilisers and manures were actively discussed. There were experiments with new crops such as rape for cattle feed and oil, saffron, woad and madder for dyeing. Potatoes and clover were being introduced as field crops, and both turnips and clover were being used experimentally as part of a three-year rotation that would replace the customary third fallow year. Advice was published on the raising of cattle and sheep, on the care of horses, on bee-keeping. The perennial question of the conservation of woodland was being widely discussed. Methods of drainage and water supply were assuming a new importance.

Behind the experimentation, the new techniques, the popularization, was a rising, vigorous population demanding food. Since the accession of James the population of England had risen from about 3,750,000 to some 5,500,000, nearly twice as fast as in the previous century, a growth particularly marked in the ports, the towns, and — above all — in London. Capital city, port, financial centre, seat of government, home of the courts of law, of art, and of fashion, the

normal abode of the Court, London was the magnet that drew trade and production, money and population into its orbit. Charles's London had reached a total population of some 600,000 people. Bristol was thriving on the opening of the Atlantic trade, and her rising population was somewhere around 25,000; Norwich and Exeter prospered on their textile manufacture; Newcastle as a port and the chief coal town was growing rapidly; but none could touch London for its bustling, overflowing exuberance. There was inevitably criticism but the rest of the country, by and large, saw where its advantage lay and did what was necessary to supply so opulent a market.

To keep London warm Newcastle colliers plied a constant coastal trade. To feed it corn came not only from Kent but from as far afield as East Anglia and Norfolk. Cattle on the hoof made their way from breeding grounds in the south-west to be fattened on nearer meadows before proceeding to the butchers of London. Poultry farms, pig farms, dairy farms, orchards and market gardens flourished round the capital city, stretching along the Thames and down into the fertile fields of Kent. There were apples in great variety, pears, cherries, plums, greengages, quinces, and mulberries from the trees which James, shortly after his accession, had caused to be planted near the capital and in each county town. Sir Walter Aston, who had been Ambassador to Spain in Charles's courtship days, was now Keeper of the Mulberry Gardens at St James's (and of the silk worms which were the reason for planting mulberries) at a stipend of £60 a year.^[1] Henrietta-Maria added to the abundance by sending to France for fruit trees to enrich the English orchards. Well-off Londoners prized particularly the delicate asparagus provided by nearby market gardens. The Thames itself, besides watering the gardens and orchards on its banks, provided its own delicacy in the form of salmon. Herrings — salted, smoked, or packed in salt — might come from Yarmouth, and were enjoyed by rich and poor alike; but the wealthy valued above all the salmon from London's river, the more so, perhaps, since of all the City's food the salmon alone failed to keep up with demand and in the 1630s its price was soaring.

On the whole economic conditions were so favourable that Charles failed to see why he could not wipe the slate clean and, free from wars and foreign commitments, start afresh. In ruling without a Parliament he would not be doing anything unusual. Henry VII held only seven Parliaments in a reign of twenty-four years. Elizabeth I had ruled

without a Parliament for periods of three-and-a-half, four, and four-and-a-half years, and had stretched intervals between sessions of a single Parliament to nearly five years. James had governed for as long as six-and-a-half years without a Parliament. History taught Charles that the summoning of Parliament had for the most part coincided with the monarch's financial needs — the warring Edward III had called forty-eight Parliaments in the fifty years of his reign — and this reinforced his determination to pay his debts and avoid war. He recognized the strength of Wentworth by making him Deputy Lieutenant of Ireland in January 1632, while not depriving him of the Council of the North. At home he would be advised by the great officers of state — the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Privy Seal, the two Secretaries of State, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and, above all, by the Lord Treasurer. They all had seats on his Privy Council which, besides its advisory function, was also his chief instrument of government and would promulgate the Orders in Council which would take the place of Acts of Parliament. He was accustomed to the workings of the Council, which he had attended assiduously in times of stress both as Prince and in the early years of his reign: in the crisis months of 1627 and 1629 he had attended practically weekly. Among other things he had learned the disadvantages of size and in the first five years of his personal rule Charles reduced the number of his Privy Council from 42 to 32. But even thirty people form an unwieldly vehicle for discussion, some Councillors naturally proved more useful or more congenial than others, and there developed an inner committee of the Privy Council, sometimes referred to as a 'junta' or 'cabinet council', where Charles and his closest associates could determine policy before putting it to the Council as a whole.

The Privy Council met normally on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, generally in the Council Chamber in Whitehall, but sometimes in Wallingford House, the seat of the Treasury and the residence of Weston.^[2] There were various standing Committees of the Council which Charles had appointed, or which he had continued from his father's reign. The standing Committee for Trade was important and Charles attended frequently, enlarging it to become the Committee for Trade and Plantations, and the importance of the colonies was further recognized in 1632 by the appointment of a Committee of Council on the New England Plantations, which became the Commission for Foreign Plantations in 1634. Reports came to Charles not only from these standing Committees but from various Departments

of State — from the Admiralty, in particular, at whose meetings he was, again, a frequent participant and whose reports he read carefully and annotated repeatedly. He extended his care to the Provinces of the Church, reading and making marginal comments on the Reports that came in from the Bishops. He kept his hand on foreign affairs to such a degree that Sir Thomas Roe was able to write to Wentworth in December 1634 that it was only the 'great temper, justice, and wisdom of his Majesty' that corrected and dispersed ill humours. He insisted on personal consultation in all matters. Edward Nicholas, the secretary to the Council, listed the points on which Charles was to be consulted and afterwards noted the results of the consultation: 'The King approves of this'; 'The King likes it well but . . .' His ministers knew they could consult him at almost any time on important issues, as when Henry Vane arrived at Hampton Court after six o'clock one evening on Palatine business. Weston was early instructed by Charles 'to believe nothing of importance until he speaks with his Majesty'.

The machinery of the law remained the same whether Parliament was sitting or not. Chancery, King's Bench, Common Pleas, Requests, continued their normal work; Justices of Assize made their circuits; the courts of Star Chamber and of High Commission, the Councils of the North and of the Marches of Wales maintained their authority. The Departments of State were no more efficient, no more corrupt, without a Parliament than with one, their staffs still remained dependent upon some form of perquisite or bribe to augment their salaries. In the localities, at the operative end of most laws or directives, it was still the JPs upon whom Charles would have to rely. They were men of diverse character, interest, and determination, most of them were of gentry or aristo-gentry stock, and they included many of the most influential members of Charles's last Parliament some of whom, including Sir John Eliot, were still in prison for the part they played in the dissolution. It was a disturbing thought that his government might be only as effective as these men made it. But, though Charles instituted several enquiries into central administration he left local government untouched.

Charles was prepared to thrust such thoughts into the background as he turned to the immediately pressing problem of his debts. The question was not quite so straightforward as at first appeared, partly because of the size of his commitments, which included some of his

father's debts as well as his own heavy war expenditure, partly because of the complicated system of borrowing and credit in which he was enmeshed. It was difficult to establish the full extent of his indebtedness, but it could have been of the order of £1,500,000, of which the faithful Burlamachi was claiming £500,000. Most of Charles's foreign transactions had gone through Philip Burlamachi, whose credit stood pledged all over Europe to meet Charles's needs. Burlamachi supported Mansfeld's expedition in this way, he paid Charles's subsidies to Christian of Denmark and other Princes, he transmitted to Germany sums of money voluntarily collected in England for the cause of the Princess Elizabeth, he paid for the Mantuan collection of pictures, he provided funds for foreign embassies, gave security to agents of the Crown abroad, paid pensions to the Palatine family as well as advancing money for men and equipment at home. Charles was fortunate in having in his service one of the great international financiers of the age whose word and whose credit were unquestioned from the time he advanced money for the little Duke's engines of war until he himself crashed in 1633.^[3]

On domestic loans Charles normally paid the current rate of interest, which was eight per cent after 1624. Borrowing was generally secured upon the receipts of the Exchequer in general or upon specific branches of the revenue, collectors being instructed to honour debts out of the proceeds of their collections before the money reached the Exchequer. In either case over-assignment was not unusual, nor were the persons who received money in this way necessarily those who made the loan in the first place. The tallies which represented debts often became a kind of currency in themselves, passing from hand to hand at a decreasing price until they reached a person who knew how to get them cashed at a favourable rate. It was difficult for Charles to know how many tallies were circulating against him. At the same time, with interest accumulating, the more he struggled the more securely he was enmeshed. By August 1630 future revenue stood mortgaged to the extent of nearly £278,000, with some revenues anticipated to 1637.^[4]

Charles and Weston faced the question squarely: Crown lands were given or sold on reasonable terms to recoup debtors, the City of London alone receiving nearly £350,000 worth in settlement of debts incurred by James. Holland, the King's friend, was promised a pension of £2000 a year for twenty-one years, possibly in respect of some £23,000 still due to him for his expenses in France when he was

wooing Henrietta-Maria on the King's behalf. Royal jewels passed to other creditors. Two men were satisfied with the imposition of a new duty of 4/- a chaldron on seacoal which they were allowed to manage until their debts had been met; others were promised the reversion of fines imposed in certain courts. In addition, about £100,000 was paid out in cash during 1630 and 1631, a great deal of which came from the customs' duties which, enhanced by Weston's new Book of Rates, were now Charles's most important source of revenue. They remained, also, a continued means of anticipating income and were Charles's chief source of borrowing in the 1630s. Burlamachi, in spite of some slightly questionable accounting, received his £500,000 in various forms, but it was not enough to save him from the effects of twenty years of financial juggling. When everything blew up in his face in 1633 Charles showed his customary concern for a man who had been faithful to him for more than a decade. He helped Burlamachi with money and gave him the administration of the alum farm. A few years later he appointed him Postmaster. But Burlamachi was too deeply enmeshed to pull himself clear and he died in penury some ten years later.

But, debts apart, how could Charles make ends meet without the subsidies which only a Parliament could sanction? He totted up his responsibilities: payments to staff and servants of various kinds, including those who served him in high office; he felt keenly his obligations both to their standards of life and to their pensions. He honoured his father's intentions (which were also his own) towards Buckingham by providing for Buckingham's wife and children. He helped Weston who, on accepting the Treasurer's white staff made it clear that he could not support the dignity of the office out of his own means. Charles gave him £10,000 in cash and made over to him such perquisites as the lease of the sugar farm, amounting to approximately £9000 a year, and a third part of the imposition upon coals, some £4000 annually. The Queen, with an extravagance and way of life dictated by her upbringing and her temperament, required well over £30,000 a year. Charles had already added lands in the Duchy of Lancaster to her jointure and in 1629 he included various parks nearer home at Greenwich, Oatlands, Isleworth, Edmonton and Twickenham, as well as the manor of Holdenby in Northamptonshire.

There was also a pleasant need for additional expenditure on the royal nursery, where Buckingham's children were now established with his own. He felt his obligations to his nephews and nieces and in

1629 extended to Repert and Elizabeth the pensions already paid to their mother and elder brother. The giving of presents was a part of life and in 1630 Charles presented the Savoy Ambassador with a gold tablet set with diamonds bearing a picture of himself and the Queen, valued at £500; in 1636 he and Henrietta-Maria gave horses worth £500 to her brother, the King of France, and made a similar present to his sister, Elizabeth. He himself, though he economized in dress, bought for £300 a ring set with a large, square diamond, and in 1634 he was fondling a 'great round rope of pearls' which had been imported duty free for his inspection. He paid £110 to Michael Crosse for copying pictures in Spain; early in 1631 he employed Inigo Jones to catalogue his Greek and Roman coins and medals; he counted himself fortunate in getting the French engraver, Nicholas Briot, to provide engravings for the English coinage and to produce such beautiful pieces as the medals which marked his Coronation and his claim to Dominion of the Seas.

In 1629 Charles sent the Gentileschis to Italy with a view to buying the picture collection of Signor Philip San Micheli, subject to the approval of Nicholas Lanier. Fortunately for his Exchequer Lanier advised against the purchase. Eight years later, however, Charles purchased the Italian collection of the German artist, Daniel Fröschl, who had been painter-in-ordinary to Rudolph II, thus adding twenty-three pictures to his collection, including six grisailles attributed to Caravaggio, and canvases by Titian and Guido Reni. He bought, as Rubens had recommended, the magnificent Raphael cartoons and sent them to his tapestry workers at Mortlake. True, what he bought or what he commissioned was not always a guide to what he paid. In 1638 payments were still being made to Rubens in respect of £3000 due to him for pictures sold to Charles 'long since'; the chain of gold which Charles sent him in March 1639 may have been in part recompense, but it may have been in acknowledgment of the Banqueting House paintings which were delivered in 1637. Charles welcomed, even urged, Anthony Van Dyck to reside in London as Court painter but Van Dyck's payments also lagged both in respect of his retainer and for the portraits he painted of the royal family. Gentileschi was still installed in York House in 1631 refusing to move until he had received what was owing to him, while the Duchess of Buckingham entreated the King to pay him so that she might have York House to herself again. Charles paid £200 to the artist who, in due course, moved on.

Other expenses were more difficult to justify. Even though

Weston was serving him well and the memory of Buckingham was green, was it necessary to give £3000 to Weston's daughter on her marriage to Lord Fielding, the Duke's nephew? Or £3000 to Lady Anne Fielding, the Duke's niece, on her marriage to Baptist Noel, Viscount Camden's heir, who, in gambling, lost in one day a nearly equivalent sum?^[5]

It was difficult to know where retrenchment should begin. Charles had nineteen palaces, castles and residences to keep up which required renovation, repairs and replacements, as well as a permanent nucleus of staff. Hunting at Newmarket, in the New Forest and elsewhere cost money even when entertainment was provided, as at Wilton, by the King's friends. But Charles's passion for the chase now equalled that of his father, and it kept him in health. Nor could the Queen's visits to the spas at Bath or Matlock be curtailed. He not only needed money for his pictures and works of art but, with Laud and Inigo Jones, he had schemes for beautifying his capital, including the rebuilding of St Paul's, which his father had begun. London's cathedral was in a ruinous state, its steeple had been destroyed by fire at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, ramshackle shops and houses leaned against its outer walls damaging the fabric and destroying the proportions of the nave. Inside it was given over to strollers and gossip-mongers and 'Paul's Walk' was the commonly accepted resort of anyone anxious to purvey or to receive news. The case of Francis Litton illustrates its condition. Litton came up from a remote village three miles from Bedford to London to be married and was apprehended by the High Commission for 'pissing against a pillar' in St Paul's. The bewildered countryman explained 'he knew not where he was' as he had never been in London before, and 'knew it not to be a church'; also he suffered from the stone and was unable to make water when needful yet at other times 'he could not hould but must needs ease himself'. The pillar of the church appeared to him nothing but the most convenient place for doing so. When he fell down on his knees and wept before the Commission, pleading that he was far from his friends, the court granted him bail and presumably released him.^[6]

When Laud, as Bishop of London, asked Charles in 1631 to continue the work his father had begun, Charles was only too ready to do so. He visited the Cathedral himself, appointed Commissioners to collect money for repairs, put Inigo Jones in charge of the overall plans. In spite of exhortation and Charles's own example of pledging £500 a year for three years, not much more then £5000 was collected

over the next two years, but Charles had already instructed the work to proceed and most of the houses built against the walls of the church had been demolished. There had been objections, but compensation had been paid, and the splendid proportions of the long nave were revealed. Jones's plans now included a classical portico at the west end of the church, and when Charles visited it in the summer of 1634 he was so pleased with the progress of the work that he undertook the whole of the western end at his own expense.

In other directions expenditure was more questionable: improvements to his manor of York; the conversion of a tennis court at Somerset House into a chapel for Henrietta-Maria; above all, the making of a new deer park between Richmond and Hampton Court. Much of the land involved was Charles's own, and a great deal of it was waste and rough woodland which would benefit from his plans. But many poor people held common rights in these areas and more substantial men held good, working farms interspersed with the waste. Charles's intention was to buy out these landlords and to put a brick wall round the whole of the area he acquired. Some landlords agreed to his terms, some held out, reluctant to abandon their homes and their estates, the poor were upset at losing their common rights. Most of Charles's ministers, including Laud and Cottington, disapproved of a scheme which would cost a lot of money and alienate many people. In the high-handed way in which he was now conducting all his affairs, Charles disregarded them. Cottington, however, was very outspoken and Charles's anger flared: he had caused brick to be burned for making the wall, he said, and was resolved to go on with the scheme. Laud assumed he had an ally in Cottington and when the application for money came before the Treasury Board stoutly opposed it. But Cottington, either because he wished to keep the King's favour, or because of his antipathy to Laud, spoke in favour of the grant: 'since the place was so convenient for the King's winter exercise, it would minimise his journeys', he said, 'and nobody ought to dissuade him from it'. Laud flew into a passion, telling Cottington that such men as he would ruin the King and cause him to lose the affections of his subjects. Cottington taunted him: 'Those who did not wish the King's health could not love him; and they who went about to hinder his taking recreation which preserved his health might be thought . . . guilty of the highest crimes.' He was not sure that it might not be high treason. Laud rushed to the King, but Charles merely laughed, at once perceiving Cottington's intent both to curry

favour with him and to tantalize Laud. 'My Lord', he said, 'you are deceived: Cottington is too hard on you,' and he told him of Cottington's opposition to his plans. Charles's New Park at Richmond was begun in 1636 and completed in 1638. But Charles forgave Laud more easily than he forgave Cottington for opposing him.^[7]