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 INDIFFERENCE TO THE COMPANY'S NEEDS 173 land," " search the books." Cheap pepper and cloves mattered little to the country gentlemen of England, battling for their liberties with the Crown. To the people at large the Company represented the survival of a royal prerogative, which had grown un- popular even under Elizabeth, become intolerable under James, and was, in 1624, sternly curtailed by statute. A monopoly might be needful for the armed trade which was then the only trade possible in the East. Yet to the rising spirit of the nation, the exclusive priv- ileges granted to the Company by King James seemed scarcely more bearable than those granted by the Bor- gian Pope to Portugal and Spain. Its sufferings, with the exception of the Amboyna outrage, touched no chord of popular sympathy. Up to 1628, books for or against the Company were published at intervals. But from its appeal to Parliament in 1628 onwards until 1640, I do not find that a single book or pamphlet in its interests issued from the press. Parliament and the nation left the Company severely alone to the king. The aggressions of the early Stuarts on the Com- pany, often denounced as mere acts of extortion, are disclosed by a dispassionate inquiry in a somewhat dif- ferent light. The Crown regarded the Company as its own creation, and knew it to be in continual need of its support. It had made over to the Corporation a privilege of a highly marketable value— the monopoly of the Indian trade— which it could have sold and re- sold at large prices to successive groups of adventurers. The king also armed the Company with powers of mili-