The republic, having thus to reckon on open hostility from the clergy, and on a deeper hatred, tempered with fear, from most of the gentry, had no countervailing influence with the commercial class. This class, which never loves experiments in government, took its political tone largely from the presbyterian preachers; and in the city, as we have seen, gave great strength in the crisis of 1648 to the royalist reaction. The financial necessities, moreover, of an armed republic aggravated the offence of its moral and spiritual innovation. Hitherto the army had been supplied with provisions by a system of free quarter. Its leaders had been quite aware of the popular grievance which this system caused, and which only its admirable discipline prevented from being far greater. The removal of it had been a constant topic in the documents issuing from the army-council; but this implied the introduction of new and heavy taxation. The purged parliament, however, had spirit for the work, and quickly imposed an ‘assessment’ of 90,000_l_. a month (more than 1,000,000_l_. a year). Such a burden was sure to be a permanent source of complaint, but for the present the impressive display of restrained power, with which the new government had begun its rule, and the apprehension that it might be the only present alternative for a worse rule of levellers, had made the city more civil. At the special instance of Cromwell and Vane it advanced money on security of the tax, and the lord mayor, with other city magnates, was placed on the committee of assessment. A prompt suppression of a levelling mutiny by Cromwell, in May 1649, seems for the time to have composed the commercial mind, and a few days after a great banquet was given by the city to the parliament and officers of the army, remarkable chiefly {335} for the description of it by Whitelock, which indicates that in one respect at least, good taste, superior to that of our times, went along with puritan gravity. ‘The feast was very sumptuous, the music only drums and trumpets, no healths drunk, nor any incivility.’ The mercantile interest was further conciliated by an act passed soon afterwards (the beginning of legislation which was gradually to transfer the carrying trade of the world from the Dutch to the English), to the effect that no foreign ship should bring merchandise to England except such as was of the growth or manufacture of the country to which the ship belonged. Still the breach between the high spiritual endeavour on which alone the republic really rested, and the aspiration of the smug citizen who left such endeavour to his minister and to Sundays, was too great for orderly and vigorous administration to fill. The condition of this administration, moreover, was that Cromwell should keep its enemies at a distance.