A HISTORY OF SURREY half of the sixteenth century. The old royal apartments outside the keep must have been ruinous, for Mr. Carter took up his abode in the keep, opening windows and making chimneys to render it habitable as a house. The manor and royal park of Guildford were granted to John Murray, afterwards Earl of Annandale, for life in 161 1, and in 1620 in fee simple. The friary house was included. The grant was confirmed, with rights of free warren, in the sixth year of Charles I. This ended royal residence in Surrey, except at the houses in the Thames valley and for awhile at Nonsuch. The earlier part of the reign of Charles I. saw of course levies of soldiers, on no great scale, for the wars in Germany and with the French. But mismanaged war, under the direction of a mistrusted minister like Buckingham, was unpopular. The troops intended for the expeditions which sailed from Portsmouth were quartered mostly on the coast or along the roads leading to Portsmouth. Some were at Farnham, on one road to the Hampshire coast from London. The grievance of the billeting of soldiers was one of those taken up in the Petition of Right in 1628, and Farnham seems to offer an instructive example of the worth of the Petition. On June 7, 1628, the king had answered the Petition favourably with the ancient form Soit droitfaict and the rest. On July 10, Parliament having been dissolved on June 26, the lords of the Council wrote to the deputy lieutenant of Surrey to suppress the discontents in Farnham which had arisen from the billeting of soldiers, and to see that the soldiers continued in their billets. The Farnham people had in some cases turned them out of doors, but they were to be reinstated. 1 The letter exemplifies the doctrine of the king and Council that the Petition laid down general rules, but that their application must be determined by the discretionary authority of the Crown as cases arose. Nor indeed, though the doctrine seemed to annul the use of the Peti- tion, could it well be otherwise. The whole Petition laboured under the drawback of being merely a negative instrument, protesting against abuses, but devising no means by which the abuses could be avoided if Government continued to be carried on. War was being waged with the approval of Parliament in principle, though they might object to the means employed. The relief of La Rochelle was ardently desired. The soldiers intended for the service had to be somewhere ; no barracks existed, and no money was voted for providing quarters of any kind. No means existed for putting the soldiers under canvas. It was inevit- able that for a time at least they should remain in their billets. When the Parliament had an army of its own it had to be billeted in the same way. In the late autumn of 1628, when Buckingham was dead, La Rochelle taken, and the force which had failed to relieve it dispersed, the Council wrote to the deputy lieutenant of Surrey to see after the transport back to Scotland of Scottish troops who had been employed 1 Loseley MSS. July lo, 1628, vi. 132. 400
