Vigorous efforts were made to enforce this proclamation, and the Water Poet was especially active in the matter, in the interests of his protégés, but all to no purpose. Two years later the King, "finding it very requisite for our nobility and gentry, as well as for foreign ambassadors, strangers and others" that the said restrictions should be withdrawn, was graciously pleased to sanction the licensing in London of fifty hackney coaches. Such attempts at limitation must, however, have been equally of no avail, since in 1652 there was another order, which set forth that not more than 200 should ply in the streets. In the following year the watermen sent a further petition to the House of Commons, and in 1654 the Protector issued an order limiting to 300 the number of hackney coaches to ply in London and Westminster and six miles round, while the number of hackney coach horses was not to exceed 600. Two years or so after this the watermen sent still another {62}petition to the House of Commons. This petition of "the Overseers and Rulers of the Company of Watermen, together with their whole society," declared that their "trade or art of rowing on the water hath been long reputed very useful to the Commonwealth"; that the Company had, "ever since their incorporation, been a nursery to breed up seamen"; that, after serving "the Commonwealth's special service at sea," they found that "the art affordeth but a small livelihood to them, and that with hard labour"; and-- "That of late your petitioners' art is rendered more contemptible than formerly, and their employment much lessened and impoverished, by reason of the strange increase of hackney coaches, which have multiplied from about three hundred to a thousand, in eleven years last past, whereby people are discouraged from binding their sons apprentice to the trade of a waterman, and if remedy be not speedily had, there will not be a sufficient number of watermen to supply the service of the Commonwealth at sea,[12] and also your petitioners and families utterly ruined. "That of late some rich men about the city, keep very many hackney coaches to the great prejudice, as your petitioners humbly conceive, of the Commonwealth, in that they make leather dear, and their horses devour so much hay and corn; and also they do so fester the streets as that by sad experience divers persons are in danger of their lives, by reason of the unskilfulness of some of them that drive them, besides many other inconveniences which are too large to be here inserted." Therefore the petitioners humbly prayed that Parliament would limit the number of such coaches.