Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:Drake Waterhouse

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The man Daniel Waterhouse thinks of as Dad. has been a pamphleteer, tax-protesting God fearing Dissenter Preacher, smuggler, and influence behind Oliver Cromwell. Drake is the marked symbol of the Barker movement which also psychically scar his youngest son. A drake is a dragon pup.

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Community entry - Drake Waterhouse

Drake was a smuggler and a Barker. He smuggled because he was anti-tax, which seems part of his religious makeup. He was a printer of pamphlets, and was punished for it. Archbishop Laud influenced the Star Chamber in cutting off his ears and nose.

The Petition of Right

Charles I dissolved Parliament, and being unable to raise money without Parliament, the king assembled a new one in 1628. Among the members elected was Oliver Cromwell. The new Parliament drew up the Petition of Right in 1628, and Charles accepted it as a concession to get his subsidy. Amongst other things the Petition referred to the Magna Carta and said that a citizen should have: (a) freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment (b) freedom from non-parliamentary taxation (c) freedom from the enforced billeting of troops, and (d) freedom from martial law.

However, Charles was determined to rule without summoning another Parliament, and this required him to devise new means of raising extraordinary revenue. Among the most controversial of these was the revival and extension of ship money. This tax had been levied in the medieval era on seaports, but Charles extended it to inland counties as well. As a levy for the Royal Navy, ship money was, according to Charles and his supporters, needed for the defence of the realm therefore within the legitimate scope of the royal prerogative.

Ship Money

Ship money was a tax, the levy of which by Charles I. of England without the consent of parliament was one of the causes of the English Civil War. The Plantagenet kings of England had exercised the right of requiring the maritime towns and counties to furnish ships in time of war; and the liability was sometimes commuted for a money payment. Notwithstanding that several statutes of Edward I and Edward III had made it illegal for the crown to exact any taxes without the consent of parliament, the prerogative of levying ship money in time of war had never fallen wholly into abeyance, and in 1619 James I aroused no popular opposition by levying £40,000 of ship money on London and £8550 on other seaport towns. The fleet of Charles I during the first three years of his reign was, says Samuel Rawson Gardiner, " largely composed of vessels demanded from the port towns and maritime counties. The idea of universal ship money to be levied in every county in England seemed to him to be merely a further extension of the old principle."

Accordingly, in February 1628, Charles issued writs requiring £173,000 to be returned to the exchequer by the March 1 for the provision of a fleet to secure the country against French invasion and for the protection of commerce, and every county in England was assessed for payment. This was the first occasion when the demand for ship money aroused serious opposition. Lord Northampton, lord-lieutenant of Warwickshire, and the earl of Banbury in Berkshire, refused to assist in collecting the money; and Charles withdrew the writs.

It will be seen, then, that the statement of Henry Hallam that in 1634 William Noy, the attorney-general, unearthed in the Tower of London old records of ship money as a tax disused and forgotten for centuries has no real foundation. It was, it is true, the suggestion of Noy that a further resort should be had to this expedient for raising money when, in 1634, Charles made a secret treaty with Philip IV of Spain to assist him against the Dutch; and Noy set himself to investigate such ancient legal learning as was in existence in support of the demand. The king having obtained an opinion in favour of the legality of the writ from Lord Keeper Coventry and the earl of Manchester, the writ was issued in October 1634 and directed to the justices of London and other sea ports, requiring them to provide a certain number of ships of war of a prescribed tonnage and equipment, or their equivalent in money, and empowering them to assess the inhabitants for payment of the tax according to their substance. The distinctive feature of the writ of 1634 was that it was issued, contrary to all precedent, in time of peace.

Charles desired to conceal the true aim of his policy, which he knew would be detested by the country, and he accordingly alleged as a pretext for the impost the danger to commerce from pirates, and the general condition of unrest in Europe. The citizens of London immediately claimed exemption under their charter, while other towns argued as to the amount of their assessment; but no resistance on constitutional grounds appears to have been offered to the validity of the writ, and a sum of £104,000 was collected. On August 4,1635 a second writ of ship money was issued, directed on this occasion, as in the revoked writ of 1628, to the sheriffs and justices of inland as well as of maritime counties and towns, demanding the sum of £208,000, which was to be obtained by assessment on personal as well as real property, payment to be enforced by distress. This demand excited growing popular discontent, which now began to see in it a determination on the part of the king to dispense altogether with parliamentary government. Charles, therefore, obtained a written opinion, signed by ten out of twelve judges consulted, to the effect that in time of national danger, of which the crown was the sole judge, ship money might legally be levied on all parts of the country by writ under the great seal.

The issue of a third writ of ship money on the 9th of October 1636 made it evident that the ancient restrictions, which limited the levying of the tax to the maritime parts of the kingdom and to times of war or imminent national danger, had been finally swept away, and that the king intended to convert it into a permanent and general form of taxation without parliamentary sanction. The judges again, at Charles's request, gave an opinion favourable to the prerogative, which was read by Coventry in the Star Chamber and by the judges on assize. Payment was, however, refused by Lord Saye and by John Hampden, a wealthy Buckinghamshire landowner. The case against the latter (Rex v. Hampden, 3 State Trials, 825) was heard before all the judges in the Exchequer Chamber, Hampden being defended by Oliver St John.

Hampden narrowly lost the case, and ship money continued to be levied, provoking yet more opposition, until, overtaken by events, it was repealed by the Long Parliament. The tax had not been approved by Parliament, however, and a number of prominent men refused to pay it on these grounds. Reprisals against Sir John Eliot, one of the prime movers behind the Petition of Right, and the prosecution of William Prynne and John Hampden (who were fined after losing their case 7-5 for refusing to pay ship money, taking a stand against the legality of the tax) aroused widespread indignation. Charles' use of the Court of Star Chamber in this issue also served to anger many, as the court had always been seen as the citizenry's last appeal against the monarch's power, and was now apparently being used against them.

The Eleven Years' Tyranny

Charles I managed to avoid a Parliament for a decade, a time known as the "Eleven Years' Tyranny". This policy broke down when he provoked a series of disastrous and expensive wars against the Scots: the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640.

Charles believed in a pomp-and-ceremony version of the Church of England, a feeling held by his main political advisor, Archbishop William Laud. Laud had become the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 and started a series of reforms in the Church to make it more ceremonial, starting with the replacement of the wooden communion tables with stone altars. Puritans accused Laud of trying to reintroduce Catholicism, and when they complained Laud had them arrested. In 1637 John Bastwick, Henry Burton and William Prynne had their ears cut off for writing pamphlets attacking Laud's views - a rare penalty for gentlemen to suffer, and one that aroused anger.

The first "gentleman" commemorated on an existing monument was John Daundelyon of Margate (died circa 1445); the first gentleman to enter the House of Commons, hitherto composed mainly of "valets", was William Weston, "gentylman"; but even in the latter half of the 15th century the order was not clearly established. As to the connection of gentilesse with the official grant or recognition of coat-armour, that is a profitable fiction invented and upheld by the heralds; for coat-armour was but the badge assumed by gentlemen to distinguish them in battle, and many gentlemen of long descent never had occasion to assume it, and never did. This fiction, however, had its effect; and by the 16th century, as has been already pointed out, the official view had become clearly established that "gentlemen" constituted a distinct order, and that the badge of this distinction was the heralds' recognition of the right to bear arms. It is unfortunate that this view, which is quite unhistorical and contradicted by the present practice of many undoubtedly "gentle" families of long descent, has of late years been given a wide currency in popular manuals of heraldry.

To make matters worse, Laud and Charles both agreed that a necessary first step to true unification of Scotland and England was to introduce a common prayer book. The Scots reacted explosively when it was introduced in the spring of 1638, and sought to purge bishops from the Scots church altogether. It took a year, but Charles raised an army in 1639 and sent it north to end the rebellion. After a disastrous skirmish he decided to seek a truce, the Pacification of Berwick, and was humiliated by being forced to agree not only to not to interfere with religion in Scotland, but to pay the Scottish war expenses as well.

William Prynne and the Stimagata Laudis

William Prynne (1600 - October 24, 1669) was a Puritan opponent of the church policy of Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Born at Swanswick, near Bath, Somerset, he died at London. After graduating in law from Oxford Universty, he began a series of attacks on the current Arminian high church policies of the government, and on the (by Puritan standards) lax morals prevalant at Court. Being, like many Puritans, strongly opposed to stage plays, he included in his turgid Histriomastix a denunciation of actresses which was widely felt to be an attack of Queen Henrietta Maria. He was tried in the Star Chamber in 1633 and sentenced to imprisonment and the removal of part of his ears. He was, however, able to continue his activities from prison, and was sentenced in 1637 to the removal of the rest of his ears and to be branded with letters S L (seditious libeller). He affected that these in fact stood for Stigmata Laudis (the marks of Laud).

He was released by the Long Parliament, and supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War. He was able to have the satisfaction of overseeing the trial of Laud, which eventually ended in the latter's execution. The tide of opinion was moving fast, and Prynne, having been at the forefront of radical opposition, now found himself a conservative figure, defending Presbyterianism against the Independents favoured by Oliver Cromwell and the army.

He became a thorn in Cromwell's side, and was imprisoned from 1650 to 1653 for his opposition to military government. Eventually, he supported the restoration of Charles II, and was rewarded with public office: he became the keeper of records in the Tower of London and was apparently a model civil servant.

Drake as Fiction

Maybe Drake deserves his explosive end. I can almost hear a George Bush Junior type whine of he killed my dad! emitting from the Merry Monarch. It clearly was apocalyptic.