This book was conceived more than fifteen years ago as a volume in a popular series. By the time that this series was discontinued, however, it was already uncomfortably outgrowing these requirements and was well on the way to becoming a very different sort of study. The transformation of what was originally designed as a history of early Stuart London into a study of the relations between the business world and the crown and court is chiefly attributable to the influence of two historians. From the beginning I felt myself drawn powerfully by the influence of my former master, the late Professor R. H. Tawney, in the direction of that borderland country between business and politics which his own work, and not least his last book, so brilliantly illuminated, and which I began tentatively to explore in my book on the money market published in 1960. But my final decision to make this the subject of the whole book rather than of a part of it I owe to the advice of Professor G. R. Elton, who confirmed my uneasy impression that my original draft was not one book but two and who made very specific and most valuable recommendations as a result of which the present book is lighter by at least a third, and I hope more readable and coherent, in consequence.