The King's City Read online

  With his fingers in many pies, Rider was far from unusual. Many wholesale merchants had multiple interests. In Rider’s case, the business that had made him wealthy was the prosaic, everyday matter of supplying the navy. During the Commonwealth years, he imported timber, tar and pitch via the Baltic, chiefly from Sweden, making himself essential to government.

  What men like Rider hoped was that any new government, especially a new monarchy, would continue to find them indispensable. In the meantime, impermanence in government was bad for business; orders were not made, bills not paid. For Rider, a political settlement of whatever nature was best arrived at soon. Merchants like him provided the economic powerhouse that made London what it was – a city grown fat on trade, where all social classes lived cheek by jowl in the maze of its medieval streets and the entrepreneur was never far from the next deal. For such men, a change of government was something to be weathered rather than feared.

  The close proximity of London’s social classes reflected the city’s history. A wall around any city initially dictated the limits of building. The great and the wealthy lived cooped up with the low and the needy. When the threat of invasion receded and the city could expand outside the walls, the new suburbs tended to cater for a growing workforce rather than for the wealthy. Only with the western expansion of London towards Westminster in the early 1600s had an area grown up specifically for the aristocratic classes. The merchants, many of them spectacularly wealthy and members of merchant dynasties, tended to stay put in the original city, next to their businesses and close to their rivals. By and large, this meant they rubbed shoulders daily with the poor and the ordinary. All shared in the atmosphere of urban vibrancy on a level unknown anywhere else. The urgency, the fun, the immediacy, the opportunity and the unhealthy stench all made London what it was. There was simply nowhere else like it in England.

  It was therefore no surprise that the retailer John Graunt and the plutocrat William Rider lived among the same crowded streets. In what had once been the heart of the Roman city’, along Lombard Street and thereabouts, merchants built their houses of brick or dressed stone, marking them out among the medieval wood and plaster cityscape. These grand houses were generally set behind courtyards, distancing their inhabitants from the noise and bustle of the street.

  For most who could afford it, that was not enough; taking a leaf from the aristocrats’ book, a country house was required. Rider was one of those who could afford it. He could escape the old city’s smells and filth by taking a coach through Bishopsgate and driving a mile north-east to his Elizabethan country house, Kirby Castle, in the pleasant agricultural hamlet of Bethnal Green.

  A man like Rider spent most of the week at his city house, from where it would take minutes by carriage or sedan chair to the Royal Exchange or to a tavern where fellow merchants congregated to gossip and do deals, or else to the waterfront where the core of the city’s business lay among the warehouses and shipping. From the Exchange, Rider’s journey to his warehouses took him down Water Lane, where sat the headquarters of Trinity House.‡ This was the corporation that oversaw safety at sea, building lighthouses, marking channels and providing pilotage on the Thames. In the spring of r66o Rider became a trustee of Trinity House, an honour that allowed him to take a small but important step into the establishment.

  From Trinity House, Rider had only to turn the corner to enter Thames Street, fronting the river. If Leadenhall was the chief retail artery of the city, the Thames was its beating heart. So important was the Thames to London that the city’s Lord Mayor was the ‘conservator’ of sixty miles of river from ‘Gravesend in the East, to a place called Colme Ditch in Surrey’ (possibly the point at which the River Colne joins the Thames at Staines).5 Lining the old city’s southern edge were the quays and docksides along the river. This was the Pool of London, the deep anchorage stretching from London Bridge to the Tower. Standing on the quays, Rider could see before him a constantly changing scene of ships coming and going, barges putting in and out, wherries criss-crossing; the sky was filled with the persistent movement of masts, sails and spars.

  On the landward side of Thames Street ran a continuous wall of solid buildings with small, barred windows. These were the warehouses. Ships and lighters tied up at the wharfs to unload pepper from Java, cinnamon from Istanbul or Malaya, sugar from Barbados and Jamaica, tobacco and indigo from Virginia, wool from Yorkshire, coal from Newcastle, tar and timber from Sweden, cotton, silk and saltpetre from the Bay of Bengal. Here could be found more of London’s wealth than anywhere else in the city, except perhaps for the strongboxes of the goldsmiths in Cheapside, under the afternoon shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral,

  William Petty watched and wondered about the economic laws that underpinned the city’s economic activity. Bringing his analytical mind to bear, he formulated theories about the nature of trade and the economic forces at work which would influence Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, Karl Marx in the nineteenth and John Maynard Keynes in the twentieth. In the 1660s the merchants of London worried about more immediate things: how the King would affect their business, what taxes might be imposed, and whether or not London could find a way to compete with its great rivals, the Dutch. Amsterdam’s trade was greater than London’s, its merchants wealthier, its global reach further and more secure, its shipping better developed and its navy stronger. As London waited to welcome its king, Amsterdam was the great cloud on the horizon.

  *

  For the warehouses to be filled, emptied and filled again required a huge army of workers, each one connected in some way to the next – chandlers, sailors, shipping agents, warehousemen, customs officials, carters, shipwrights, ropemakers, sailmakers, tavern owners, potboys, victuallers, cooks and more. Their living depended not only upon their own efforts, but on those of people from across the world whom they would never meet. London was the hub of a global economy, linking China, India, java, Borneo, Zanzibar, West Africa, the Americas, the West Indies, Sweden, Turkey, the Levant and Russia. London was not simply a city, it was a great engine of trade.

  There was one London trade in which the merchandise at its heart did not have to enter or leave the city to make money. This was the African slave trade. The business consisted of trading textiles from the East Indies and other goods for slaves in East Africa, who were then sold in the slave markets in the West Indies and America. The slaves were shipped across the Atlantic via what was known as the Middle Passage to English colonies. On the return voyage the ships were loaded with tobacco, sugar, indigo and other produce to be off-loaded in British ports, before completing the triangular journey back to Africa. The trade was slow and haphazard. For it to become an organised economic force a figurehead was required, someone who could give the trade new impetus and focus. In the spring of 1660 such a person was yet to appear.

  As the spring days lengthened, there seemed no escape from the rumours and speculation. The gossip spread out beyond the city walls at Ludgate, across the Fleet River, and into the lawless alleys of the ragged urban slum known as Alsatia. Built across a former monastery garden, this was now home to some of the most villainous people in England. In a maze of streets sandwiched between the Tudor walls of the Bridewell prison on the east and the lawyers’ leafy enclave of the Temple on the west, debtors, scroungers, murderers and thieves were left to manage their own affairs and think their own duplicitous thoughts. The area was so notorious that it would provide the material for a play, Thomas Shadwell’s The Squire of Alsatia.

  West again was the Strand, where speculation circulated among the wealthy aristocrats and gentry who inhabited fashionable modern mansions and older houses built in Tudor times. For aristocrats, the return of the King mattered a great deal, for without a king, the aristocracy had no meaning. The aristocratic system worked on patronage flowing downwards from the monarchy. If the King returned, patronage would flow once more; status and power would be restored to nobility who during the Cromwellian era had been seen as less valuable than
, in Cromwell s famous dictum, ‘the middle sort of men’.

  North of the Strand lay the mildly disreputable area of Covent Garden. Only a few years before, it had been fashionable, after Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Russell, commissioned Inigo Jones to create a square with a church and a terrace of fine houses in the 1630s to replace a shanty town that had offended Charles I. The area had fallen down the social ladder once more when taverns and brothels opened up around the south end of Jones’s innovative Italianate piazza, copied from that at Livorno. One of the inhabitants of the Piazza was the artist Peter Lely. If the King returned it could herald a great commercial opportunity for Lely, who had been making his living painting the portraits of wealthy merchants and Parliamentarian grandees. A reinstated royal court might be a major new source of commissions.

  Lely was one of a large and varied population of foreigners living in the city. They included German merchants, Jewish traders, diplomats from many states, a handful of men of letters, and commercial agents and merchant seamen from many lands. A member of a small group of foreign, chiefly Dutch, artists who had come to earn their living in England, he was bom in Germany to Dutch parents; his real family name was van der Faes. The name Lely derived from a lily carved over the door of the house where his father was bom in The Hague.

  Lely arrived in England in the early 1640s aged twenty-one, at what seemed an excellent time for an ambitious young artist. The arts were flourishing in England. Charles I was a great patron of painters, commissioning works from many of the finest European artists. England had few notable painters of its own: the break with Rome and the rise of Protestantism had seen to that. Only the great William Dobson rose out of a sea of home-grown mediocrity. With the death of Antony van Dyck in 1641, and Dobson five years after that, there was room for a new premier court painter.

  Lely hoped his time had come, but within a year of his arrival civil war broke out. It had been a hardscrabble existence since then. He had been reduced to giving painting lessons, among his pupils being a keen boy of very limited financial means and a real aptitude for drawing: his name was Robert Hooke, the son of a curate and schoolteacher on the Isle of Wight. Perhaps with the return of the King, Lely could give up teaching and get back to producing the great landscapes he longed to paint.

  Close to Lely’s house in Covent Garden Piazza, in an alley off Drury Lane, Mrs Helena Gwyn struggled to bring up her two daughters Rose and Eleanor (the latter known either as Nell or Nellie). Mrs Gwyn had been bom in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, and had lived in the parish almost all her life. Her husband, who was said to have been a Welsh army captain, had abandoned the family, leaving mother and daughters to fend for themselves. Mrs Gwyn took to the bottle and to keeping a brothel in Coal Yard Alley. It can’t have been an easy business in a Puritan town. Her girls grew up knowing they had to make their own way in life without the expectation that anyone would help them. Families like the Gwyns had more to worry about than whether or not the King was likely to return.

  Further west, in the drawing rooms along the well set-up streets around Whitehall Palace, political gossip competed with social chatter. Here were located the houses of the nobility most closely connected to the royal court. In 1660 the few former courtiers who remained in residence shared the comparatively clean streets and air of Westminster with the Parliamentarians, soldiers and political revolutionaries who had run the country under Oliver Cromwell. Included among them were those who had sat in judgement on the old King and sent his head rolling on a scaffold outside his own Banqueting House. Such men had especially good reason to ponder how the dead monarch’s son might deal with them if and when he were restored to the throne.

  The aristocrats, too, had reason to be wary; as the political wind backed and veered, it was not impossible that a more draconian regime might emerge that would not look kindly on the nobility. Many stayed out of town, glad to find an excuse to keep away.

  Family matters called Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, to Ireland and ensured she was well away from any unpleasant developments. She was one of the most important figures in Restoration London. The so-called ‘invisible college’ that preceded the Royal Society may have met at her house. London was her natural milieu; there she mixed in the circles of the most brilliant minds of the day. Her brother, Robert Boyle, who was yet to carry out the scientific work that-would grant him lasting fame, was also in Ireland, finding life on the family estate increasingly unrewarding. A settlement that restored stability would attract those of wealth and status hack to London.

  Secrets, no matter how vital, were hard to keep. From drawing rooms, taverns and the teeming streets, talk of the King swirled down to the Thames, to be picked up in the hundreds of wherries that sculled across to the far bank of the river, taking the gossip to the industrial slums of Southwark, where the unskilled and the skilled worked and lived together. The rumours flowed down the river, to the shipyards where ships that sailed across the Atlantic or the Indian Ocean and beyond were built, maintained and lay at anchor between voyages. A procession of ship owners, captains, investors and merchants daily made its way up and downstream to see how their new ships were coming on, their rowers dodging between the hundreds of other wherries criss-crossing the river.

  Downriver, beyond the Deptford shipyards, the land was low-lying and given to swampy pools; these harboured mosquitoes that caused malaria – swamp or campaign fever, as it was called. Yet the air here was cleaner than in the city. Here were several more of London’s shipyards, some military, others commercial. Next to the shipyards of the Fast India Company, across two hundred acres of land, John Evelyn and his wife Mary had created their Garden of Eden, a unique collection of trees and shrubs, many of them rare species from overseas. Evelyn was a cultured man of inherited wealth. He and his wife had evaded the horrors of the Civil War and the subsequent problems associated with being Royalists by travelling in Europe. Evelyn was warm-hearted, a steadfast friend to those he considered worthy. He had a puritanical attitude to all forms of licentiousness, along with a well-developed sense of duty to the state – and on the debit side was as dreadful a snob as any man whose father made the family fortune from the manufacture of gunpowder.

  When Evelyn was not thinking about horticulture and his beloved garden, he thought about London, its great capacity for wealth and its current parlous state. He compiled lists of the practical trades, the processes involved in manufacture, and the types of businesses undertaken. His hope was to produce encyclopaedic profiles of London’s business and trades. The sheer diversity and complexity of the material defeated him, and he abandoned it. This allowed his inquisitive mind to be taken up with the unstable political situation. In the autumn of 165g Evelyn had anonymously published a pamphlet entitled An Apology for the Royal Party, arguing that the interregnum had brought nothing but unfulfilled promises propped up by military might. Only the restoration of the monarchy could, he reasoned, bring the order and stability he saw all around him in his garden.

  In his modest house in Holborn, John Milton had Evelyn’s pamphlet read to him. The poet was now totally blind, but he could plainly see the way the political wind was blowing. He dictated a broadside in response to Evelyn, advocating a return to republican principles of equality.6 But Milton was tarnished goods, having sold out in some eyes by becoming a minister in Cromwell’s military Protectorate. There were few republicans – or Commonwealth men, as they were known – of any substance left to speak out. They were either dead, in retirement, or destroyed by events. The last of the breed, General John Lambert, had been ignominiously deserted the previous autumn by the army he hoped to lead against Monck and thrown in the Tower. There was some heroic spark left in the old soldier: on 3 March Lambert escaped and attempted to raise an army to overthrow Monek, only to surrender without a shot being bred.

  Even though the republican cause was hopelessly compromised and fragmented, Milton felt he must reassert its values and warn against the re-establishment of mona
rchy, that ‘unsound noxious humour of returning to old bondage, instill’d of late by some [cunning] deceivers’.7 Others spoke out, but they were people without clout; men like Robert Locker, a labourer, who appeared before the Middlesex magistrates to answer the charge that he had spoken ‘words against the King’s Majesty’. Other men and women were heard saying uncomplimentary things and hauled before the magistrates. Only a month or two before, they would have been cheered for their egalitarian spirit. Those of more substance, and with more to lose, kept their heads down as events unfolded with astonishing rapidity.

  Among them was John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and spymaster. Throughout the growing turmoil, Thurloe had somehow managed to remain in government and, to everyone’s surprise, in the spring of 1660 still occupied his post, Thurloe had information that might be worth a great deal to a returning monarch. But could it be parlayed into an agreement? And would Thurloe wish in any case to part with it? Even with his precious supply of intelligence, could Thurloe, the arch Commonwealth and Protectorate man, do anything to ensure his survival under a restored monarchy?

  In London, royalist politicians secretly and tentatively felt their way towards an agreement with the exiled King, who resided in Holland. At the centre of these delicate negotiations, directing emissaries back and forth, was General Monck, a man proving himself to be more flexible than his physical bulk might indicate. At the start of the Civil Wars Monck had fought for the King, then for Parliament, becoming a bulwatk of Cromwell’s Protectorate. What Monck seemed to hope for with the King’s return was the introduction of a constitutional monarchy, encompassing a Parliament with ample powers, and a liberal atmosphere in which all political sides and creeds could get something of what they wanted, ensuring peace would reign. Like many old soldiers, Monck was more politically naïve than he liked to think.