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came another row, in which Ossory taunted Ashley for his past Cromwellian loyalties, and called Buckingham a liar.
    Finally the Irish Cattle Bill was voted through the Lords, but with Seymour’s nuisance clause removed. The angry Commons promptly reinstated it. At the same time, urged by Howard and the disgruntled royalist William Garraway, they added a proviso to the Poll Tax Bill, which decreed that new money should only be raised if the government gave parliamentary commissioners an account of all funds spent since the war began. This was an extremely worrying development, the first time the Commons had asserted their right to examine and question royal expenditure. On the night of the final Commons vote, Charles allegedly ordered the Lord Chamberlain to send to the playhouse and bawdy houses to make all the court MPs go back to parliament and vote to get rid of the clause. 8 The vote still went against him. He was saved, briefly, when the House of Lords then rejected the proposed parliamentary commission and petitioned the King to name his own team of inquiry. At this the Commons were outraged again.
    While the Poll Tax Bill was still being debated, and Charles was not yet sure of his supply, the Buckingham faction in the Commons pushed forward yet another divisive issue. This concerned Lord Mordaunt, Charles’s spymaster during the exile. In November the House received a petition claiming that as Constable of Windsor Castle, Mordaunt had illegally tried to evict a castle official, sending in troops, who hurled out his furniture and frightened his son so badly that he died. Mordaunt, it was said, had thrown the official into prison and had also tried to rape his daughter. In December, the Commons drew up articles of impeachment, a process that had not been used for twenty years. When the House rose for the Christmas holiday Mordaunt’s future looked bleak.
    A further issue, this time a direct onslaught on Clarendon, concerned the Canary Patent. Trade with the Canaries had been established since Tudor times, and when he was ambassador in Madrid in the 1650s Clarendon had become convinced that the wine growers were exploiting the competitive English market by pushing up their prices. After the Restoration he persuaded seventy British merchants to ask for a charter of incorporation, so that they could combine together and offer the Spaniards a single price ‘which they would have to take or leave’. 9 In 1665, despite protests from merchants left out of the favoured group, and from the City of London, a charter was given to the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants trading to the Canary Islands’, to regulate the trade. But the sailings had been challenged by private carriers and badly affected by the war and the Fire and by opposition in the Canaries themselves, and the merchants found themselves in difficulties. Aggrieved traders who had been excluded claimed that Clarendon had been bribed to set up the patent. There were several petitions to parliament against the charter, which was bound, sooner or later, to be overturned.
    In the run-up to Christmas, Westminster had become tense and unruly. In the Commons, MPs turned up drunk and would not stop talking. In the Lords, on 19 December Buckingham deliberately jostled the Marquess of Dorchester, a small man known for his hot temper, provoking a stand-up fight. Wigs were lost, hair was pulled, blows were exchanged, and both were briefly sent to the Tower. 10 Buckingham began to seem out of control. A few days after his release, he leant across the table at a meeting, grabbed the Marquess of Worcester by the nose and ‘pulled him about’. Charles intervened and Buckingham was despatched to the Tower again. Observers were baffled by Charles’s patience with him. It was not loyalty to childhood memories, since although Charles could be sentimental, he was no fool. Certainly some of his decisions were tactical, but he seems almost to have admired the duke’s manic