The King's City Read online

  During the spring of 1660, nothing could wash away the persistent rumour that stuck to the city with an obstinacy that equalled of the tenacity of its smells: the King, it was said, was about to return from exile. Eleven years had passed since most of London had turned out to witness the old King, Charles I, beheaded on a scaffold outside his lavish Banqueting House, crowding Whitehall for a mile all the way from Charing Cross to the river. After that, London’s population had been compelled to settle for a Puritan regime under which making money was good and frivolity was not. The great Maypole on the Strand had been pulled down, the theatres closed, and Christmas celebrations frowned upon.

  It was not all bad; music was not only allowed, but encouraged. The people of London had need of a good tune to cheer their hearts. They had been through a great deal since the outbreak of civil war in 1642. The brilliant German artist and engraver Wenceslaus Hollar told a friend, biographer John Aubrey, that when he first came to England in 1636, it had been a time of peace and the people, rich and poor, looked cheerful. When he returned after the war he found ‘the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spiteful, as if bewitched’.1

  Bewitched or not, by early 1660, the Puritan experiment in governing without a king had spiralled into chaos. Following Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658 the army and Parliament began a protracted duel for supremacy, during which Cromwell’s son Richard was appointed Protector, only to be roughly shooed away without a fight by a group of army heavyweights. The army then tightened its grip on London. Sir John Barkstcad, a London-born goldsmith, who under Cromwell had become Lieutenant of the Tower, ran a cruel and corrupt administration. During the winter of 1659, Londoners got up petitions to complain about the army’s repressive use of force. The army, in turn, fired on demonstrating crowds, causing several deaths. Feelings ran high. The need for change, for a new ruler to take hold of the deteriorating situation, was the talk of London.

  It was far from certain that the young King, Charles II, would return from exile. He had been away from England since he was sixteen and had no experience of power. Some said Richard Cromwell should be given another chance. Others said that George Monck, the former Cromwellian general who now had an iron grip on London and whose troops were bivouacked throughout the capital, had designs on becoming another Cromwell. Though Monck publicly proclaimed his earnest allegiance to Parliament, his loyalty privately lay elsewhere. He ordered that the old city’s defences be dismantled. Troops went to the city’s eight gateways and lifted the great wooden gates, studded and reinforced with iron, off their hinges. With great difficulty, portcullises were removed from the gatehouses and broken up. London, the walled city that had closed its gates to a king during the civil wars, now lay defenceless, a fact not lost on the inhabitants of a city once described as ‘England’s Jerusalem’.2

  There was no official census and hence no record of London’s population. One of the inhabitants, a draper named John Graunt, wondered how many people lived in the city and decided to find out. Graunt ran a successful family haberdashery business in the heart of the old walled city. He had an inquiring mind and, though we have no record, seems to have been well educated. Apart from carrying out a full census, sending recorders door to door, there was no accurate means of estimating the population. So Graunt set out to invent a means of reaching such an estimate. He took as his starting point a trawl of the parish records of births and deaths. Then he estimated the average number of people living in each household. From this, Graunt was able to estimate the city’s population at 384,000. The total population of England in the middle of seventeenth century was at most five million, and perhaps as low as four, meaning that between one in ten and one in thirteen of England’s population lived in London.3

  To gain a sense of London’s great scale, we should remember that the next largest city in England was Norwich, with a population of 25,000 * Unlike London, with its many trades and industries, the economy of a city like Norwich tended to be based on one major industry. In the ease of Norwich, this was the textile trade, mainly the weaving of worsted wool cloth. Norwich’s population included a large number of foreign migrants, escaping religious persecution and attracted by the vibrant cloth industry.

  In the north of England, among the largest towns was York, Though once a major ecclesiastical centre, York’s significance had declined with the dissolution of the monasteries. Its seventeenth-century population of something over 10,000 was supported by an economy based on woollen manufacturing, leather tanning and general trade, both domestic and foreign; its significance as a trading centre was due to its location on the Great North Road and the River Ouse, which flowed eastwards into the Humber Estuary, enabling York to export cloth to the continent. In time even this trade would largely be taken over by Hull, owing to its situation on the coastal estuary. Perhaps greater in population than York was Newcastle, a major industrial hub and coal port.

  Until the mid-1600s towns on the east coast tended to be of greater size and importance than those in the west, thanks to their proximity to continental Europe, with which England and Scotland had historically traded. By the middle of the century, Liverpool was a fishing town with a population of perhaps two thousand. Growing trade with England’s new colonies across the Atlantic meant that Liverpool’s population would increase as it became a centre for refining sugar brought from the West Indies, the first so-called sugar houses appearing in the town in the 1670s. Sugar was later followed by the cotton imports that fed the industrial revolution in Lancashire. In a similar fashion, the seaport of Bristol became involved in the importation of sugar and tobacco. Like Liverpool, it would not grow significantly until the following century, when it became rich on slave trading on an industrial scale.

  Larger than any town in England other than London was the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, In the mid-seventeenth century it was a walled city laid out on an east-west axis with its one grand street of handsome houses and public buildings rising up to the royal castle at its western end. Off this thoroughfare ran hundreds of narrow streets and alleyways like ribs from a spine. In all, the city housed somewhere from 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants.

  The city inhabited by John Graunt was clearly on a completely different scale from anywhere else in the kingdom. Even in Europe, only Naples and Paris competed for size, ‘l ire population of the former was somewhere around 300,000, while that of the latter was variously estimated at between 180,000 in 1600 and 500,000 in 1700; the latter figure was probably wildly optimistic, because of the depredations of the civil war known as the Fronde.

  There were other large cities in northern Europe. Amsterdam, the premier Dutch seaport, had a population of around 200,000. Leiden, the Dutch city where many Englishmen went to study medicine, had a population of more than 100,000. Because of their scale, these early megacities created environments unlike almost everywhere else. They offered totally different ways in which to live and to experience life. Not only that: long before the seventeenth century London had developed into the centre in which the entire country’s political power resided and via which its economic life was channelled or controlled.

  If it could be said that one city was obsessed with another, then the city with which London was obsessed was Amsterdam. By any measurement apart from size, Amsterdam was the most successful city in Europe. Trade, banking, culture, painting, crafts and medicine all flourished in what was to become known as the Dutch Golden Age. The Dutch had built on their commercially advantageous position next to Germany at the head of the Rhine and next door to the Baltic. They then branched outwards into the eastern spice trade, becoming wonderfully wealthy. Their society was far in advance of England’s, their institutions in advance of London’s. At any one time, among Amsterdam’s population of 200,000 lived large numbers of English and other merchants from all across Europe. The English merchants in Amsterdam were able to examine Dutch society at first hand and admire its Calvinist orderliness and dedication to trade. They envied the Dutch for t
heir commerce, their knowhow and their money. These preoccupations were to have significant ramifications for both countries during the ensuing years.

  When not selling gentlemen’s clothing, John Graunt continued to work on his mathematical obsessions. The intellectually curious Graunt seems to have hit upon the art of statistical analysis all by himself. Mis work – a form of protoepidemiology – would later propel the shopkeeper into the circles of the scientific elite.

  Graunt was an influential man in the meritocracy of city merchant life, a captain in the trained bands (London’s part-time militia) and an alderman, one of the ruling elite, elected from among the city’s common council members. London’s establishment was based on the city’s ancient social structure, centred on the Corporation. This was medieval in origin, hierarchical in form and fiercely independent. The Corporation was comprised of a pyramid of elected representatives, beginning with councilmen; one tier up were the aldermen, followed by two sheriffs and finally the Lord Mayor. Only those who were Freemen of the City of London could vote or stand for election. To become a Freeman was to enter a closed shop, based on the medieval system of guilds or livery companies, each representing a trade. The guilds were arranged in hierarchical order dependent upon social status, from humble wheelwrights and tin workers at the bottom to the grand mercers (international cloth merchants) and grocers (international spice merchants) at the top, wielding power and influence. To join a guild usually entailed having to serve a lengthy and often expensive apprenticeship. An apprenticeship with the grocers or mercers amounted to what would today be a university-level education in economies and commerce, together with the hands-on experience of a sandwich course. London was thus ruled by a self-perpetuating clique, which ran the city through the two powerful entities of the Corporation and the guilds. The system served London’s interests well.†

  Graunt had a friend with whom he could discuss his arithmetical problems. This was William Petty, a true renaissance man: colonial administrator, mathematician, surveyor, musician and leading exponent of the study of the finance of trade and the nation (what would in time become known as economics). Petty had made his fortune in Ireland, surveying the island for Oliver Cromwell, in preparation for selling off the best arable land to English settlers. It was said, probably with good reason, that Petty had used his position deceitfully to enrich himself. His income from land rents was said to be £18,000 a year, putting him among the very top echelons of the contemporary rich list.

  Petty’s beginnings could not have been more different. His parents had, like Graunt s, been in the rag trade, and he had, like Graunt, largely educated himself in his early years. The difference was that Petty had started lower, as a cabin boy, and climbed higher; academically trained in Holland, he had become personal secretary to Thomas Hobbes, the mathematician and philosopher, before studying medicine at Oxford.

  Petty, with his rigorous education, was better versed in mathematics than Graunt. Thanks to his status as an aider-man, however, Graunt was able to help Petty – who was now, because of his wealth and education, his social superior – recommending him for the professorship in music at Gresham College, London’s only institution of higher learning. The college had opened to promote the latest and most advanced learning at the beginning of the century, when the merchant philanthropist Sir Thomas Gresham bequeathed his mansion to the city. Gresham had made his money in several spheres of business, including the building of the Royal Exchange at the western end of Cornhill, where London’s stock trading took place.

  In the spring of 1660, Petty had a more mundane problem on his mind: he had been thrown out of his Gresham College rooms. Thanks to the military crackdown, the army had commandeered the college for barracks. The building was ideal for the purpose, being a large mansion with a courtyard, situated inside the city walls. Petty, along with his friend and fellow professor Christopher Wren, resigned from the college in protest at its requisitioning. His rooms having vanished, Petty’s mind turned to staying with his friends, the Graunts.

  The route of Petty’s coach to the Graunt home in Birchin Lane would have taken him south along Bishopsgate and up the slight incline of Cornhill. Here Petty found himself atop the middle of the three hills on which medieval London was built. To his west was Ludgate Hill, crowned by St Paul’s Cathedral, an ancient crumbling church of great significance to Londoners by virtue of its antiquity rather than its architecture; to his east, Tower Hill, named after the huge, grey Norman keep of the Tower that sat between it and the river.

  At this point, Petty had to force his way across the constant stream of people, carriages and carts pouring into Leadenhall immediately to his left, one of the city’s greatest streets, where once had stood the Roman forum. Now, together with Cheapside, Leadenhall was London’s international shop window, selling the most exciting goods from around England and the world. Terraces of graceful, timber and plaster buildings rising six storeys high lined the road. Their pointed gable ends faced out onto the street, giving the roofline a vibrant rhythm. Foreign visitors marvelled at Leadenhall’s luxury and vivacity.

  Turning away from Leadenhall’s delights, Petty would head west along Cornhill, one of the most congested parts of the city. A flood of humanity flowed past his carriage; shoppers, idlers, deliverymen with their barrows, draymen on their carts, pickpockets, the poor, the industrious and the rich. The streets, already narrow, were reduced to tracks by the hordes of street sellers, licensed and unlicensed, selling poultry, vegetables, butter, cheese, beer, cutlery and woollen cloth. Petty’s coach turned south off Cornhill, leaving behind the merchants and millers haggling over seasonal prices, to descend into Birchin Lane, where he reached his destination, a substantial property on the west side of the street. This was Graunt’s home and shop, just across the street from the house where he had been born.

  Born on 24 April 1620, Graunt served in London’s militia through the Civil War years and into the Commonwealth and Protectorate. He would therefore have been a Parliamentarian, like most of London’s middle classes and proletariat. His friend Petty had worked directly for the Cromwellian regime in Ireland and so we can assume they shared political opinions. How strongly held these were we cannot say with certainty, but soon enough both men would be willing to accept privileges from the King.

  London was a city of chiming clocks. Almost every parish church had a clock, which struck the hour and sometimes the half-hour and the quarter. They did not chime in unison, so Londoners took the time from each parish as they passed by the neighbourhood clock. London was a city in which timekeeping mattered.

  While Petty fretted about his lodgings, Captain William Rider, seafarer and merchant, waited for the daily chime of the bell in the tower of the Royal Exchange, summoning all merchants to trade. The Exchange was the city’s commercial heart, modelled on the great Burse at Antwerp, Europe’s first stock exchange, which in its sixteenth-century heyday had attracted bankers from all over Europe.4 London’s Royal Exchange did not deal on such an international scale, but it was where London’s business was done. It sat at the intersection of six streets, forming a natural focal point for the eastern portion of the walled city, just as St Paul’s Cathedral did for the western end. Twice a day, at twelve noon and six in the evening, the bell in the Exchanges tower rang. In its Italianate piazza, stocks were traded, shares bought and sold, gossip exchanged.

  Rider personified commercial London. For generations, the city’s merchants had enjoyed elevated status, their prestige recorded in the city’s ancient livery halls, grand homes of the city trade guilds. Stained glass windows, rich plateware in silver and gilt, ceremony and ritual marked their members out as nothing less than mercantile heroes.

  We should define here what constituted a merchant in seventeenth-century London. A merchant was a wholesaler who almost certainly traded goods on the international market. Those who sold goods or services on the domestic market were never known as merchants; they were simply known after their trades, as haber
dashers, shipwrights, vintners, tailors, and so on. A merchant had a status well above the average person in a trade. Some merchants, it was said, were as rich as princes.

  Rider was not quite a merchant prince, but he was on the way up. With the knack of thriving in any weather, he had made his money under both monarchy and Commonwealth. During the reign of Charles I, Rider laid the foundations of his fortune as master of a ship trading in the Straights – the common name for the Mediterranean, so called after its narrow entrance from the Atlantic. The Mediterranean had been a mainstay of London’s foreign trade for hundreds of years. Shakespeare nodded to this important link in several plays: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Romeo and Juliet (set in Verona), The Merchant of Venice and Othello (whose full title was Othello, the Moor of Venice). Trade with Italy, Turkey and the Levant was well established from Tudor times, bringing spices, cloth and luxury goods for sale in the metropolis’s upmarket shops, or to be sold on into other West European countries. Londoners were acquainted with the Ottoman Empire both via the tales of those who went there – sailors, merchants and their factors – and by the goods that emanated from it. Queen Elizabeth had strengthened trade links between the vast empire and her small realm off the coast of Europe.

  From his trading activities in the Mediterranean, Rider made sufficient money to become a major investor in the East India Company (EIC). This great speculative machine controlled the majority of London’s eastern foreign trade, chiefly with the emperors, nabobs and sultans of countries such as China and India. Those who ran the EIC believed that no foreign ships should trade along routes or in foreign ports it considered as its own. Trading voyages might take two years or more, but the potential profits were great. So were the risks. The EIC allowed merchants like Rider to split the risk on voyages. Each year, the company would assemble a fleet bound for the cast. The merchant princes and aristocrats who owned stock in the company shared in the profit – or loss – of all ventures. Later, the rules were altered to allow merchants to buy parcels of investment in each of the ships. Thus each merchant was not open to all the company’s risk, but only to that in the voyages he helped finance.