The King's City Read online

  For Eithne

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  PART 1 1660–1663:

  THE YEARS OF OPTIMISM

  1 A City of Expectation

  2 The King Comes In

  3 Theatrum Redux!

  4 Something for Everyone?

  5 Rivals

  6 The Crowning of a King

  7 ‘Too Great an Honour for a Trifle’

  8 Foreign Adventures

  PART 2 1664–1667:

  THE YEARS OF DISASTER

  9 Trade Wars

  10 A New World of Science

  11 The Year of the Flea

  12 Pestilence, War and Fire

  13 The Aftermath

  14 A Star is Born

  PART 3 1667–1685:

  THE YEARS OF TURMOIL

  15 The Threat from Abroad

  16 New Territories

  17 Law and Order

  18 A Spy in the Family, in the Court and in the Theatre

  19 Trading in People and Money

  20 War and Enterprise

  21 The Mood of the City

  22 Coffee Wars at Home, Real Wars in the Colonies

  23 City Life

  24 The City Convulsed

  25 The Fall of Madam Creswell and the Migration of Criminals

  26 The City Cowed, the City Triumphant

  27 Death and Legacy

  Epilogue

  Appendix I

  Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure

  Appendix II

  The Navigation Act 1660

  Appendix III

  Robert Boyle’s Desiderata

  Appendix IV

  Brief Observations Concerning Trade and Interest of Money

  Appendix V

  Notes on the Formation of the Bank of England

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Index

  PREFACE

  On 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland rode across London Bridge, triumphantly entering a city he hardly knew and had not seen for almost twenty years. This book is about how the relationship between King and city subsequently developed, and about the remarkable people who helped London during his reign become the pre-eminent city in Europe.

  Though it is difficult to say with certainty, London was possibly already the continent’s largest city. It was not only the kingdom’s capital, but its long-standing economic vibrancy had led it to become disproportionately large – perhaps nearly one-tenth of the entire English population lived in the city, making it ‘a Head too big for the Body’, according to one contemporary source. Owing to the scale of London, together with its satellite towns spread along the Thames Valley, in 1660 England was already beginning to look like a Monopoly board tipped up to let all the pieces fall to the bottom right-hand corner* Of all parts of the kingdom, London was therefore the one of key importance to the returning king.

  London was one of a handful of ‘world cities’ scattered across the western hemisphere. Well-to-do Londoners drank tea from China and coffee from Arabia out of Chinese porcelain cups, enjoyed sack from Spain and the Canary Islands, put West Indian sugar in their drinks and syllabubs, smoked tobacco from Virginia, wore silks from Turkey and India, and flavoured their food with spices from Zanzibar and Indonesia. In the winter the wealthy kept their heads warm with hats made from beaver pelts from the far north of America. All this luxury was imported on English ships made watertight with tar and pitch from the Baltic, with sails hoisted aloft by ropes made with hemp from Russia to billow out from masts and spars made from Swedish pine. When Charles returned from exile, he was instantly involved in the commercial life of the city, particularly investing in and encouraging the slave trade, an issue examined here in some depth.

  World cities – which at one time or another included, besides London, Venice, Lisbon, Antwerp and Amsterdam – owed their size and eminence to well-established long-range trading links across the world. With such trade came wealth, and with wealth came power. Such cities therefore tended to become the focus for all domestic policies, the hub for home markets in commodities and raw materials, and the centre of national political power. Some, like Venice, grew so powerful they could exist without a country or political hinterland attached; others drew power towards them over large geographic areas. In the case of London, by the time Charles II rode through its streets on that first occasion, the city had become the centre of England’s economy, controlling markets in goods as far away as Cornwall and the Scottish borders, and even in Ireland. What made this possible, indeed inevitable, was the city’s trade with Africa, America, Asia and the Far East

  As contemporary observers noticed, cities grew rich at a rate disproportionate to the growth of their populations. In other words, large cities created wealth more efficiently than less populated areas. London was like that: a magnet for wealth. Already, in the seventeenth century, England’s economy depended upon its capital. In 1660, every thousand people living and working in London generated considerably more wealth than a similar number scattered through the villages and countryside.

  Not unnaturally, London therefore had strong historic views about its own important place in the realm, its rights and its freedoms. It was Charles’s misfortune to rule over a people he barely knew and who did not know him. It was the misfortune of Londoners to have a king who had grown to adulthood estranged from them.

  While King Charles II was in exile in Europe, at home the genie had escaped from the bottle: large numbers of people, from politicians to the plainest folk, had started to believe that they could look after their affairs without a king, or at least without one who believed – as the Stuarts tended to do – in absolutist rule that saw little need for representation of at least some of the people through Parliament. After the execution of Charles’s father, Charles I, following a protracted power struggle, England had been ruled without a monarch for eleven years, first as a republic and then as a form of military dictatorship. When this dictatorship collapsed in recriminations and further power struggles, the executed King’s son was invited to return to put things right. From the royalist perspective, it looked as if the genie had been put back in the bottle. But it had not. In London’s political and civic circles there were many who waited to see how an unpractised king would manage their needs and aspirations.

  Charles was born in London on 29 May 1630, at St James’s Palace, built by Henry VIII to the west of the City of London on the site of a leper hospital. As an infant, he was put into the care of the Countess of Dorset, wife to the 4th Earl of Dorset, Lord Chamberlain to Charles’s mother, Queen Henrietta Maria. Charles was brought up at his own palace at Richmond, nine miles up the Thames from his parents’ palace at Whitehall and a full ten miles from the Ludgate, the most westerly of the gates in the Roman walls containing the medieval heart of London.†

  When the prince was aged about eleven, rumours spread through London that he had attended Catholic Mass in his mother’s private chapel at Somerset House. Questions were asked in Parliament. The following year, civil war broke out, caused by a power struggle between Charles I and Parliament over the royal prerogative, the authority of Parliament and the right to levy taxes. The country split into forces loyal to the King and those loyal to Parliament. The King then went on a march through various counties to garner support. When his return to London was prevented by superior Parliamentarian forces at Turnham Green, Charles set up his headquarters at Oxford. This meant that from the age of about twelve, Prince Charles was brought up in a royal court at war with Parliament and about half the population, and unable to return to its main palace at the capital city. Within three years, with the war going badly for the
Crown, the King dispatched his son to the West Country, as titular commander-in-chief. According to the courtier Edward Hyde, the Prince took little interest in discussions about the war, preferring to flirt with a former nurse.

  By 1645 the situation had deteriorated so badly that the King ordered Prince Charles to leave for France. After much procrastination, the Prince sailed from England in March 1646 to live with his mother, now ensconced in a palace not far from Paris courtesy of her French royal relatives. Less than three years later, in January 1649, Charles I was tried and found guilty of treason against his people. He returned to the palace he had left seven years before to be executed. When the Prince heard the news, he was living in The Hague, thanks to the hospitality of his sister Mary, who was married to Prince William II of Orange. Two years later, Charles was crowned King of Scotland and led a Scottish Presbyterian army into England. Oliver Cromwell’s superior forces crushed the invasion at Worcester. Charles had to escape like a criminal, hiding out until he sailed in disguise for France. He had been in England for just five weeks.

  After the debacle of the failed invasion, Charles’s return to the throne looked unlikely. Most European powers, including France, recognised the Commonwealth as the de facto ruling power in England. Charles, a king without a kingdom, became an isolated figure. With little future ahead of him, he took to a life of ease and debauchery. Then circumstances changed. Cromwell died in 1658 and his son Richard was appointed Lord Protector in his place. Richard lacked the drive and character to rule and was deposed by a group of army grandees. Many wondered where the country was heading next. An elite group of politicians, aristocrats and bishops, a sort of establishment clique, invited Charles to return for the good of the country. During this period, stability was ensured in London by an army under former Cromwellian general George Monck, who brought the city under martial law on behalf of the Crown. Charles then returned and ruled for twenty-five exhilarating and tempestuous years, the period covered by this book.

  The scene was set for London to develop into one of the greatest cities in the world – if not the greatest of them all. Though its fabric was medieval, in the minds of its people the modem world was taking shape. The great trading city, developed to a large extent by the materialist ideas of Puritanism, would now benefit from the power of royal authority to propel it into a new era.

  Under the returned King, London looked forward to stability. The arts and sciences attracted some of the most brilliant minds in British history. Architecture flourished, with a cool, northern aesthetic drawn from hot, Mediterranean origins by men such as John Webb and most notably Christopher Wren, the father of English baroque and the designer of St Paul’s Cathedral as it stands today. London’s theatres, long closed, reopened to enchant with a saucy vigour and novelty of production thanks to impresarios such as Sir William Davenant, a man who claimed lineage from Shakespeare and happily rewrote his plays. Women played their part, within the constraints of seventeenth-century male society. Female playwrights including Aphra Behn appeared, together with that significant artistic innovation of the age – the female actor. Great artists of the stage rose up, including Elizabeth Barry, together with those who, like Nell Gwyn, became notorious for other reasons. Science blossomed, with the formation of the Royal Society; its members, including Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, brought new insights into the workings of mankind and the universe. New music accompanied royal pageants and masques, and even the moribund world of English art began to revive. People poured in from all over the country and the city’s ships and merchants expanded their international trade, growing fat on slavery, creating a new form of mercantile trade that would literally be the envy of the world. William Petty, John Locke and others expounded new theories of commerce and wealth creation, leading towards modern economics and capitalism.

  But it would not be all plain sailing. Under the rule of Charles II the city experienced some of the greatest cataclysms in its history. In 1660 London was still emerging from a depression that began in the early 1650s with the expansion of Dutch trade at the expense of its rivals, including England, In 1665-6 the city suffered an epidemic of bubonic plague, during which then-current medical remedies were tested and found wanting. Following the plague, the centre of the historic city burned down in one of the worst city fires in history. During these and other trials, Charles’s character was tested to the full. He proved to be a paradox, being, for example, both selflessly brave and totally selfish.

  London’s wealth was based on international mercantile capitalism, ‘the inhabitants of Europe being addicted to trade’. For this enterprise to work successfully, the state had to be intimately involved; in the case of London this meant Charles II.

  The ruler’s role was to regulate, to set taxes or enforce tariffs against foreign trade, and to help merchants increase their trade in the world by, if necessary, waging trade wars – and hence to increase London’s profits. The person who sat at the apex of this great enterprise was therefore of supreme importance. In early 1660, that person was missing. It was as if Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan had no head on its shoulders to guide it.‡ It was therefore understandable that Londoners, the majority of whom had supported Parliament against the Crown in 1642, now wished for a king to give leadership again. In adopting this role, Charles was handed one of the most difficult tasks allotted to any monarch.

  It is not possible to convey in one book all the many enterprises and innovations of an age, nor to include all the interesting or significant personalities – one can give only a snapshot. For example, Isaac Newton appears in these pages as a slightly peripheral figure. This is because his seminal work was done in Cambridge, not London, and to give full weight to the central place in modern physics he shares with Albert Einstein would require more than one book all to himself. Nor is it possible to delve into the twists and turns of political or ecclesiastical life to a great depth. What is attempted here is an impression of the vitality of early modern English life, and in particular in the place where everything was, or seemed to be, magnified – London. It is not fanciful to suggest that during Charles’s reign much of what shapes modern Britain was first forged.

  This book is the third and final part of a series about the reign of Charles II commissioned by Tim Whiting of Little, Brown. The first book in the series, The King’s Revenge, told the neglected story of Charles’s campaign for retribution upon the men who executed his father Charles I, while the second, The King’s Bed, examined how Charles’s notorious personal life influenced his reign. Both books were written in collaboration with Michael Walsh, who unfortunately has been unable to participate in this final part through illness. I say more about Michael and our long-standing collaboration on many projects in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book.

  * For this vivid image, I must thank that most distinguished British city planner and urban theorist, the late Professor Stuart Hall, who used it in a conversation with me.

  † Richmond Palace stood upstream of present-day Richmond Bridge, between the river and Richmond Green. It was demolished in the mid-seventeenth century.

  ‡ The frontispiece of the first edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan published in 1651, has a drawing of the state represented as a giant man whose body is made up of hundreds of little people gazing up reverently at the giant’s face. The giant holds a sword representing armed strength and a bishop’s crozier representing the Church, while its head wears a king’s crown, Hobbes came up with the design himself. A more disquieting image of total power would be hard to conjure.

  PART 1

  1660–1663:

  THE YEARS OF OPTIMISM

  CHAPTER 1

  A CITY OF EXPECTATION

  In the spring of 1660 the city was enveloped in noxious fumes. Truth be told, the air was never good at any time, though the direction of the wind had a major influence upon its quality. When blowing from the west it carried acrid smoke across the city from limekilns sited in the grounds of Whitehall Palace, les
s than a mile from the city walls. When the wind veered to the south, it carried fumes from the leather tanneries, the kilns and factories in the industrial slums across the river.

  When there was no wind at all, the furnaces of the trades inside the medieval city walls – the ironworkers, cutlery makers, leather workers, bakers, brewers, soap makers, glass blowers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, and anyone else who needed a flame – belched out a cloud of polluting chemicals that hung in the still air and sank into the streets and alleyways like a shroud. On Sundays the industrial smog died down, leaving the smoke from thousands of chimneys to puff sulphurous fumes from the sea-coal the inhabitants used to heat their homes and cook their dinner.

  Beneath Londoners’ feet the ground was as unwholesome as the air they breathed. Sanitation was rough and ready. Each house had a dry toilet at the back, in which human waste accumulated until collectors came round to shovel it up, load it onto carts and carry it out of the city. Collections could be irregular. In one repellent entry in his diary, Samuel Pepys described how his neighbour’s heap of human waste broke through the adjoining cellar wall, causing an unholy mess in Pepys’s cellar. Outside the city walls, at collection points too terrible to contemplate, human waste was mixed with horse manure to fertilise the fields in which the city’s food was grown. In this way London helped to feed itself – and possibly to recycle its diseases. This was also the age of the plague, the dreadful disease that had swept Europe periodically since the Black Death in 1382 – there had been more than thirty outbreaks in England alone, several of them touching London, the most recent of which had taken place in 1637.

  Londoners emptied their chamber pots into the open sewers that ran down the sides of the streets and sometimes through the middle. The contents routinely spilled out across the cobbles, covering them with a vile mixture of pig and horse manure mixed with rotting vegetables, animal entrails and human urine. Only rain could improve conditions, temporarily cleansing the air and washing away the hideous slush, sluicing it down to the choked rivers and culverts that ran under the streets into the Thames.