Note (Back to Main Text) — Chapter VI · DEATH OF MARY.

The chief immediate difficulty was to find money for present necessities. The loan was gone. The subsidy would not come in for six months. Englefield, Waldegrave, Petre, Baker, and Sir Walter Mildmay, were formed into a permanent committee of ways and means, with instructions to sit daily "till some device had been arrived at."[641] Sir Thomas Gresham was sent again to Antwerp to borrow £200,000, if possible, at fourteen per cent.[642] The queen applied in person for a loan to the citizens of London. For security, she offered to bind the crown lands, "so assuredly as they themselves could cause to be devised;"[643] and she promised, further, that, if she could legally do it, she would dispense in their favour with the statute for the limitation of usury.