Bankes knew something about the perils and opportunities of monopolies from the experience of his in-laws the Heckstetters. To work the mines around Keswick under their grant from Elizabeth, they built a large enterprise that usually ran a deficit; by 1600, after thirty-seven years of digging, the Heckstetters and their investors had lost £27,000, including £4,000 paid as “royalties” to royal Elizabeth. But they made a good profit from sublicensing their rights and operating auxiliary services like taverns for their workers.80 As Attorney General, Bankes dealt with several projects for which his knowledge of mining in Keswick would have been useful: extracting copper from Cornwall and salt from seawater, and improving mills, forges, and laundry houses. One of every five inventions patented between 1620 and 1640 dealt with pumping, drainage, and other technologies necessary in mining.81
A truly Bohemian inventor, Sir John Christopher van Berg, a refugee from Moravia, requested a monopoly to sell improved bellows, waterworks, mills, surveying instruments, wagons, carts, coaches, wheelbarrows, horse litters, corn threshers, and dredging machines. The Crown referred the petition to Bankes, who, having consulted “those who were better experienced in this faculty,” decided that Berg’s inventions might be “useful and beneficial to the Commonwealth.” He recommended a privilege for fourteen years, which was granted.82 Other technological projects that came across Bankes’s desk included manufacturing clay pipes, mathematical instruments, sword blades, beads and bangles, glass and glasses; distilling strong waters, manuring soil, cutting timber, digging turf, and, of course, draining fens.83 Some of these measures resulted in the destruction of human habitat and drove people from the countryside. Fen dwellers appealed to Bankes because of his reputation for “faithful care, and vigilancy.”84 They were disappointed. Bankes had to back the fen drainers, among them Sir John Monson of Lincolnshire, who acknowledged Bankes’s help with the gift of a dead buck, because “your worth hath forbid me presentinge you with any thinge of value.”85
If he had a sense of humor, for which some unpersuasive evidence exists, Sir John must have smiled over the red herrings of Thomas Davys. The law required that barrels of white herrings be examined or gauged (at 2.25 pence/barrel) so that unscrupulous packers would not insert rotten fish in the middle of the container. Red herrings changed hands without gauging. “By neglect whereof [Davys observed] much deceit was daily used by the sellers of red herrings, by mingling and putting in shotten herrings, gorged herrings, plucks, stinking and corrupt herrings…among the good.” Bankes was ordered to stick his nose into the business. Davys got a monopoly to examine the red at the same rate as the white, for an annual payment of £4.86 Other attractive schemes sent to Bankes for advice included collecting old bones (for an annual rent of £50), exporting used bones, shoes, leather, and horns (£30), gathering and selling cuttle shells (very useful to apothecaries), searching ships, shops, and warehouses for contraband or defective leather, and unplugging sewers.87 Further evidence of Bankes’s exposure to technical matters other than the law exists in his notes on coinage, salt, tobacco, and brewing. Nor did he ignore the perennial problem of the calendar. He drew up a proclamation for beginning the year on 1 January, as did most of civilized Europe, rather than on 25 March, as in ancient times, but he failed. Many people still believed that calendar reform was a papal plot.88
Requests for monopolies from courtiers seldom concerned products or processes as useful to the Commonwealth as policing red herrings. When that enterprising gentleman of the bedchamber Endymion Porter and his associates asked for a monopoly on making white writing paper, he was helping the public as well as himself, since, according to Solicitor General Littleton, who had filled up reams of it, “paper made in this country is very bad;” but when he asked for the farm of taxes, duties, and uncollected fines for half of whatever he could squeeze out of them, he was mainly helping himself.89 The insatiable Porter obtained monopolies to inspect silk goods containing gold or silver threads; recover excess fees charged by insurers; hunt down misappropriated Irish livings; collect wine duties in several ports; and, public spirited at last, employ, at low wages, convicts reprieved from sentence of death. He also floated companies to compete with Dutch fishermen (in partnership with Tobie Matthew and Buckingham’s widow), with the East India Company, and with fen drainers. None of these last enterprises flourished. But Porter did very well from the wardship of his insane brother-in-law.90
Royal servants further down the food chain also petitioned for a share of whatever fees, fines, unclaimed property, property of outlaws, and forfeits they could discover. The king’s surgeon and pastry cook teamed up to ask for the benefit of a bond forfeited by a lusty old yeoman of Gloucester, who, despite receiving canonical admonition not to “consort with” his wife’s son’s daughter, did so. In the same public spirit, a groom of the Privy Chamber petitioned for the authority to snatch the £4,000 he reckoned belonged to an expat recusant who had become a Jesuit, and to share the proceeds, after expenses, with the Crown, nine parts for him to one for it.91 The wet nurse of the infant Duke of York asked for a grant for thirty-one years to check the quality of silk stockings.92 Without a standing police force, the needy Crown had not only to tolerate, but even to encourage, greedy freelancers to collect fines and forfeits on terms unfavorable to it. Bankes deplored the use of these pursuivants, whose tendency to blackmail diminished the king’s dignity as well as his income. The multitude of vexatious little monopolies he sanctioned contributed modestly to the royal finances. In 1640 the total from wine, tobacco, soap, and playing cards was around £75,000, about an eighth of what the monopolists made.93
Mr Attorney’s business extended to several people who appear in these pages. One early assignment was to devise means to enforce a monopoly on soap granted to Arundel, Weston, Cottington, Porter, and others. Because most of the projectors were crypto-Catholics, their product was known as papal soap. It was so bad it could not launder money. Ordinary people seeking the cleanliness next to godliness returned illegally to Puritan brands until, in 1637, the projectors had to sell up, for a comfortable £43,000. Glass monopolists offering spectacle lenses through which they could not see the way forward ended similarly.94 The mad idea of limiting beer brewers in England to twenty did not advance far enough to fail. Vintners proved an easier target; Bankes extracted £30,000 a year from them to continue their business as usual.95
The super-rich Earl of Arundel was always pushing for perks in his need for ready money. Around 1620 he had received a monopoly to collect a tax on currants, a bellwether to other excise duties the Crown imposed without the consent of parliament. Since the English consumed huge quantities of “Corinth grapes,” some £2m a year around 1610, when the duty fell from an exorbitant 5s. 6d. to 3s. 4d. a hundredweight (cwt). Under pressure from importers, James dropped the tax to 2s. 6d./cwt and sold the farm to Arundel for a rent of £1,100 p.a. That would have brought the earl some £2,500 less the expenses of collection were there not the curious difficulty that his monopoly, being of the product, conflicted with that of the Levant Company, which applied to the area of their production. Charles diminished the farm’s value further by reducing the tax to 1s. 3d. and the rent to £1,000. Bankes had to see to the details. He was also to draw up a grant to Arundel and others of eight large parcels of land in New England similar in form to one then recently issued for Mauritius and all adjacent islands east of Madagascar.96
For the archbishop and the king, Bankes tried to abate the stench from breweries that drove them from their gardens. For Sir Kenelm Digby, he drew up a favorable contract for a new way to farm greenwax in places where the Crown was not harvesting its due—greenwax signifying nothing arable but certain fines and forfeitures.97 For the royal physicians Theodore Mayerne and Thomas Candeman, he arranged a patent for distilling alcohol and vinegar.98 As Attorney General, Bankes saw all the worst monopolistic practices and the corruption they caused. Although he may have tried to reduce them, he had perforce to draw up the charters that enable
d them. As a former opposition MP who had sat in the parliament that passed the Statute of Monopolies, he must often have deplored the system that encouraged them.99
Monopolies, farms, and the chartered companies presented Bankes with political as well as ethical difficulties. Relations among the Crown, City, and Commons provide an example. The last parliaments of James went after the City’s chartered companies (with Bankes’s approval), whereas the last of Charles’s cooperated with them (with Bankes’s help), in both cases over illegal exactions and impositions. The turnaround came during the Bishops’ Wars, when, to improve relations, Charles dismantled some monopolies the companies opposed. As the Long Parliament grew more radical, alarmed City fathers turned toward Charles’s cause without, however, raising his credit rating.100 It required skill and tact to handle these shifting allegiances and also conflicts between the Crown and the City over recognition of new corporations and between the City and the Church over raising clerical salaries.101
Among the most serious crimes in Bankes’s book was sedition. That explains the severity of his response to an appeal to set aside a high-court judgment engineered, so the appellants alleged, by the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal. Bankes regarded the attack on his colleague the Keeper as a very grave offense, “of a high and transcendent nature.” Why was the crime so heinous? “[F]alse rumours and unjust accusations which concern great officers and peers of the realm trench upon the King himself in his royal government.” Perhaps mindful of Andrewes’s doctrine against “touching” the king, Mr Attorney recommended whipping as punishment.102 He remained on the same high ground when prosecuting one John Ray, accused of exporting a prohibited commodity, fuller’s earth, and avoiding customs by claiming to ship goods within England that were destined for Holland. Bankes threw the book at him. The cloth trade, “the adamant that draws all other trade and merchandising,” required fuller’s earth; selling it abroad advanced foreign interests and lowered the price of English goods. Hence Ray’s crimes amounted to sedition. “The King in his piety and goodness desires to advance the wealth of his people and comfort their labours.” Evading customs struck traitorously at the main source of royal revenue. Ray’s punishment was severe: a fine of £2,000 and exposure in the pillory.103
Sedition included defamatory writings or spoken words directed at government officials, judges, and ministers of the established church. “Touch not my anointed!” It made no difference whether the allegations contained in the seditious acts were true or whether the party allegedly libeled had died. With some imagination, almost any non-conforming utterance could be deemed seditious, as, for example, the advice of a preacher that Christians should not eat pork, which scandalized James and his bishops, and earned the reformer a fine and imprisonment.104
Bankes considered sedition to be particularly serious when urged with religious authority, as in the preaching of the reverend George Walker. Embroidering Genesis 3:17, in which God evicts Adam from Eden, Walker concluded that, since no one is perfect, “inferiors [have a right] to examine and dispute the commands of their superiors.” And, if examination revealed unjust orders, inferiors had the right to resist officers trying to carry them out. Countenancing this Puritan doctrine would turn the universe upside down. Bankes had no patience with Walker’s sort of Copernican revolution. He wanted exemplary punishment, which Walker escaped by denying that he had written the offending sermons.105
Encouraged by the seriousness with which Crown officers regarded every whiff of sedition, sneaks made a living reporting small talk. An incautious statement at the pub overheard by one of these “caterpillars of the Republic” (as Bankes called them) could bring a loose talker into tight places. So one Gerard Wright found himself in court for observing, correctly, that the king wanted “a good headpiece, for he giveth too much creditt & beliefe to his Nobilitie & beleeveth any thing they speake.” Our old friend Archie the Fool was foolish indeed when in his cups he accused His Grace My Lord of Canterbury of being a “monk, a rogue, and a traitor.” Fools had more license than others to tell truths that might irritate the mighty. His Grace the Archbishop, feeling lenient, only had Archie banished from court.106
Among Bankes’s papers is a request from a J. Mayne, dated Christchurch, 6 April 1636, for continuation of an allowance. Jasper Mayne, of Christ Church, Oxford, was a literary man and a poet. He could not depend on his family for financial support because their substantial wealth had melted away in recusancy fines; hence his appeal to Bankes and the interest of Bankes’s contribution to his upkeep. Mayne’s fortunes improved just as England’s declined, in 1639, when he received a benefice and staged a farce, The Citye Match, before the king and queen. They liked it, although its plot was but a scaffold on which to hang sacred cows: revels at the Inns of Court, “rank Puritans,” red herrings, Prynne. A character refers to Cleyn’s expensive tapestries (“some Dutch peece weaved at Mooreclack”); another jokes about the riches of barristers; a third makes free with T&P. They do not spare the king’s lascivious Titians.107 Bankes’s patronage does not imply that he enjoyed Mayne’s foolery, which applied to him too, but it is possible.
Bankes had more independence as Attorney General than his obligations to follow ministerial orders and defend the royal prerogative would suggest. The king and Privy Council sent many of the quantities of petitions they received to him for settlement; and, even when asked only for advice, he could influence if not determine the outcome. Sometimes he pursued his own policy, as when he allowed the forbidden export of bullion in exchange for a large fine, which he put into the Treasury; a well-intentioned peccadillo for which Charles cheerfully exonerated him, “telling him that he was his friend, and although he had many enemies [the Queen’s coterie?] yet so long as he was his friend, they could do him no harm.” Nonetheless, Bankes had to be careful. As the government’s chief prosecutor, he had to adjust his diligence to the fluctuating royal will, which, as in the case of the recusancy laws, might place him between Charles’s orders and the law of the land. When not engaged on royal business, however, he might practice as he pleased; at which he did so well that by 1639 his estates in Dorset were yielding £5,000 a year. Against his income he had the expense of running his own staff and office, even for the king’s business. After seven years as Attorney General, he was wealthy and well regarded, tired of having to defend the king’s dubious actions, and ready for the highest standard step in his career path, to Lord Keeper or Chief Justice of Common Pleas.108 The latter office was perhaps the most lucrative in the judicial system, as it brought not only fees (for example, a seventh part of the profits of the court’s paper work) but also control of clerkships saleable at high prices.109
Chief Justice
A senior judicial appointee had to be a serjeant-at-law and leave his home Inn for the serjeants’.110 Bankes’s valedictory speech at his separation from Gray’s in January 1641 begins with the expected expression of inextinguishable affection for colleagues and gratitude to the Inn; Bankes will not be like Vespasian, who declined to know comrades from his humble past after taking over the Roman Empire. Like the emperor, the new Chief Justice had come far: “though my beginnings were but small, yet my latter end hath been greatlie increased” (Figure 16). This bit of biography Bankes had in common with Job, from whose story he took it (Job 8:7). Bankes had copied out part of Andrewes’s sermon on Job 19: 23–5, one of the bishop’s best, which rings many curious changes on Job’s desire to publish his later woes. “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock forever!” That Bankes wished to associate himself with the formerly prosperous Job is arresting. Did he foresee, in 1641, the dreadful consequences of the foolhardy policies of Charles and Laud that he had helped to put in place? And did he wish, as impotently as Job, that he could publish this warning in leaden letters embedded in stone?
Figure 16 Gilbert Jackson, Sir John Bankes (c.1640), “greatlie increased,” in the robes of Chief Justice
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More prosaically, Bankes admonished the men of Gray’s Inn to work hard at their profession, as he had, for success comes only with “great labour and difficultie.” More pertinently, he warned that no one would prosper unless everyone cooperated in maintaining order and good government. Slipping easily from Job’s double to Charles’s lawyer, Bankes declared, “noe companie or multitude can subsist together without order and in order there must be a Superiour and an Inferiour.” The Commonwealth relied on men of law and reason to train learned judges for its service. “We ought by our good examples to give lawes of rules, order, and obedience.”111
In calling on the men of Gray’s Inn to go forth and preserve law and order, Bankes was speaking to the times. Lawyers had been the prime instruments of Charles’s personal rule: the king acting through the judiciary having replaced the king acting with parliament. Judges had given verdicts, as in the Hampden case, against the liberties of the people, and prerogative courts like Star Chamber helped Charles impose his will. In dissolving parliament in 1629, Charles had condemned the Commons for its presumption in reviewing the behavior of his chief justices and accusing them of proffering “wicked counsel.” The climate when Bankes joined the judiciary at Common Pleas may be indicated by the articles of impeachment then raining down on Sir Robert Berkeley, a justice of King’s Bench, for his decisions on ship money and other impositions, for refusing to hear objections to Laudian practices, and so on, thus “traitorously and wickedly [intending] to alienate the hearts of his Majesty’s liege people from his Majesty…and to subvert the fundamental laws and established government of his Majesty’s realm of England.”112
The Ghost of Galileo Page 12
