efficient leader; sixty thousand men had drifted to Lincoln and had halted there in noisy uncertainty till their way to London was interrupted. They had no commissariat: each man had brought a few days' provisions with him; and when these were gone, the multitude dissolved with the same rapidity with which it had assembled. On the Wednesday at noon, Richard Cromwell reported that the township of Boston, amounting to twelve thousand men, were gone home. In the evening of the same day five or six thousand others were said to have gone, and not more than twenty thousand at the outside were thought to remain in the camp. The young cavaliers in the royal army began to fear that there would be no battle after all.[112] [Sidenote: The king's answer to the rebels' petition.] Suffolk could now act safely, and preparatory to his advance he sent forward the king's answer to the articles of Horncastle. "Concerning choosing of councillors," the king wrote, "I have never read, heard, nor known that princes' councillors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people. How presumptuous, then, are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of least experience, to take upon you, contrary to God's law and man's law, to rule your prince whom ye are bound to obey and serve, and for no worldly cause to withstand. [Sidenote: The suppression of the abbeys was by act of parliament, and in consequence of their notorious vice.] "As to the suppression of religious houses and monasteries, we will that ye and all our subjects should well know that this is granted us by all the nobles, spiritual and temporal, of this our realm, and by all the commons of the same by act of parliament, and not set forth by any councillor or councillors upon their mere will and fantasy as ye falsely would persuade our realm to believe: and where ye allege that the service of God is much thereby diminished, the truth thereof is contrary, for there be none houses suppressed where God was well served, but where most vice, mischief, and abomination of living was used; and that doth well appear by their own confessions subscribed with their own hands, in the time of our visitation. And yet were suffered a great many of them, more than we by the act needed, to stand; wherein if they amend not their living we fear we have more to answer for than for the suppression of all the rest." Dismissing the Act of Uses as beyond their understanding, and coming to the subsidy,-- [Sidenote: The subsidy is granted by parliament, and shall be paid.]