The King's City Read online

  Parliamentary elections were held. The country voted out numerous old Commonwealth men and Cromwellians and voted in many royalists and Presbyterians, men who favoured an agreement with the King. Among those elected was Thomas Bloodworth, an ambitious member of a very wealthy London merchant family whose fortune came from dealing in silk and lead, investment in property and membership of the Hast India Company. His father John had been master of the Vintners’ Company, while his mother Anne was the daughter of the East India Company’s bookkeeper, Andrew Ellam. The family were staunch royalists who supported the return of the King. Thomas, ambitious for influence as well as money, was one of five merchants who signed a credit note promising £25,000 for the King to assist his return. Within a few years Thomas Bloodworth would be Lord Mayor of London.

  As spring wore on, despite the commercial activity in the streets, a stillness enveloped the city. It was a stillness of the mind, of expectation and suspense. The army was everywhere, its officer class noticeably culled of its Commonwealth men and replaced by royalists and trimmers. And, like the first sparrows of spring, a type of person long exiled from London began to appear on the streets. Threadbare figures who, despite their obvious dearth of funds, carried themselves with the assurance of those who had once been able to hold their own and were certain of their worth, some had the look – a sort of contained hauteur – of men who had once been able to persuade others to do their bidding, to turn the disposition of a crowd.

  These were theatrical men, stalwarts of the playhouses that had existed before the wars. They had lost their livelihood when the Puritans closed the playhouses in 1642 to cut down on public licentiousness, ‘Fasting and prayer having bin often tried to be very effectuall.’8

  With rumours of the King’s return, the theatricals emerged to sniff out the possibility of returning to their old profession. Among them was a tall, distinguished-looking figure, his dignified appearance let down by an oddly upturned nose. This was the theatrical producer and writer Sir William Davenant. At the age of fifty-four, Davenant was a link with the past, with the great period of Renaissance English theatre. William Shakespeare had been a friend of his parents. For a few years Davenant had been keeping the wolf from the door by staging semi-clandestine theatrical evenings in his home. In this way, he dodged precariously around the ban.

  Sensing the royalist wind was picking up force, Davenant was keen to open a new public theatre. He knew that other former theatre owners were also anxious to resume business. Aware he had to beat the opposition, Davenant went to inspect a disused real tennis court at the end of Portugal Street to sec if it could . be turned into a theatre.§

  Building a theatre inside such a tennis court was an idea copied from the French, denn is courts proved ideal for the purpose, their long, high interiors lending themselves to the erection of a stage and a deep auditorium. Davenant signed a lease and began to look around for an architect and builder to turn the property into the theatre he had in mind.

  Word spread that the wily impresario and poet was returning, planning to open a public theatre. The theatricals sensed their time was coming round again. And so, with Charles not yet back on the throne, theatrical life began to seep back into the city, coming up from below, without fanfare, whispering that fun was about to make a comeback.

  Off the Kent coast meanwhile, at anchor in The Downs, the English navy awaited instructions.¶

  * Today. Greater London’s population of 8.5 million is eight times that of the next largest city, Birmingham, which has a population of 1,1 million.

  † The Corporation of London continues to run the City of London, lobbying for its own privileges, overseeing its planning applications and finances. How well this sits in a modern democracy is open to debate.

  ‡ Trinity House came into being in 1514 by royal charter of Henry VIII

  § In Wenceslaus Hollars perspective map of central western London of 1650, the tennis court can he seen on the western side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, protruding into the public spaces.

  ¶ The Downs was the sheltered stretch of water north of the English Channel, stretching between Dover and Deal. Here the fleet could maintain a state of readiness, while still taking on supplies.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE KING COMES IN

  At his home in Axe Yard, not far from John Thu doe’s official residence, a young man made preparations to accompany his employer on a voyage. This was 27-year-old Samuel Pepys, born in Salisbury Court off Fleet Street, the university-educated son of a tailor and a seamstress, now with several years’ experience in government work as a teller in the Exchequer. Pepys arranged for his house to be shut up, while his nineteen-year-old French wife, Elizabeth de St Michel, was sent to stay with friends in the country. In his diary (which he had started to keep in January), he wrote on 6 March 1660 that he thought the King might return soon. It is safe to suppose that he based this speculation on information from his employer.

  Edward Montagu was the son of an earl and held the rank of general-at-sea, recently bestowed upon him by the Council of State. Despite the great differences in their social status, Pepys and Montagu were related; Montagu’s mother was Pepys’s great-aunt. Pepys was Montagu’s private secretary, and the two men shared an analytical and pragmatic turn of mind. Born in a house built by Oliver Cromwell’s grandfather, Montagu had served as a general in the Parliamentary forces. In the heady and uncertain days of late 1659 and early 1660 he switched sides. Seeing the political chaos that had developed since Cromwell’s death, Montagu was not alone in believing rule without a king had run its course.

  Along with General Monck, a few among the nobility, and a few Anglican bishops, Montagu nursed a secret: he was in contact with the exiled King, Montagu was one of those planning, in the parlance of the time, ‘the King’s coming in’. At his desk at the Navy Office in Seething Lane, Montagu compiled lists of dyed-in-the-wool Cromwellian officers to be forcibly retired from the Navy. His view was that this was the time for flexible men like himself, men who knew how to bend with the wind, to take charge. On Montagu’s hit list were those he could not trust to accept change, those firmly attached to the ideals of the Commonwealth or the rule of the Protectorate.

  On 23 March, Montagu left his desk and took a boat down the Thames to join the fleet off Dover. Pepys accompanied him. Once on board his flagship, Montagu vigorously renewed his cull of officers with republican or suspect sympathies.

  In the Dutch town of Breda, the exiled King was preparing his statement of intent, a letter setting out his objectives upon his return. Charles had lived in Breda for most of his exiled years, thanks to the support of his sister Mary, who had married William II, Prince of Orange and head of state of the Dutch United Provinces. Upon William’s death, the country’s republican leader and opponent of the House of Orange, Johan de Witt, extended his predecessor’s courtesies towards the Stuarts. Owing to its historic connections to the House of Orange, Breda had onee been an important city. Many noble families had resided there. Its glory days, though, were long over and the town in which Charles resided was a backwater, largely ruined by war, with only a few fine houses remaining.

  Here, Charles drew up his calling card to his kingdom. His close advisors were his Civil War counsellor Edward Hyde, the Irish royalist James Butler, ist Duke of Ormonde, who was a close friend of the King, and Sir Edward Nicholas, former Secretary of State to Charles I. The letter they produced promised freedom of religious expression for all who did not seek to overthrow the Crown, restoration of land and titles to dispossessed aristocracy, and a general amnesty for all who had fought on Parliament’s side against Charles I. Those who had directly planned the execution of the King were to be exempted from the amnesty. An order to this effect was to be drawn up by Parliament, which would decide who was to receive exemption. Charles’s document seemed to have something for everyone, including death for the regicides – except that the document was not quite what it seemed.

  With hindsight, it would be
realised that the document had one clear intention and one clouded exclusion. The clear intention was to ensure that soldiers like Monck, who had fought with Cromwell, would be immune from any future legal action for their part in the war against Charles I, and their subsequent part in the administration of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. The part that would later be seen to be important by omission was any guarantee for the actual role of Parliament in the future government of the country. The declaration mentioned a Tree parliament’ by which Charles gave the word of a king’ to be advised, but it did not spell out the actual relationship between Parliament and Crown concerning, for example, which took precedence over the other on important matters such as taxation or declaring war. In his clandestine negotiations, Monck had been too eager to safeguard his own position to think about that of the country as a whole. Charles and his advisors must have marvelled at an agreement so advantageous to the King and of such disadvantage to those old adversaries of the House of Stuart – the elected members of the House of Commons.

  On l May the secret talks were made public. Rather than seeking to sharpen up a hazy document, the two Houses of Parliament, now replete with royalists, sought only to race one another for the honour of voting for the King’s return. The House of Lords won by a whisker. Thirteen years had passed since the Cromwellian generals Henry Ireton and John Lambert had written a constitution that guaranteed rule by monarchy and Parliament. Charles I had turned it down and gone to his death. Now his son was to return on the basis of a document that did not spell out the constitutional arrangements for how the country would be governed. It was one of the greatest failures of oversight in the history of Parliament, and indeed of the country.1

  On 9 May the Declaration of Breda was presented to Parliament in the form of a ‘Bill of General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion’. Heated debates took place, with many showing their new zeal for the monarchy by calling for widespread retribution. Realising their days on earth were numbered, many of those who had signed Charles Is death warrant quietly began to leave the country, bound either for the Calvinist states of northern Europe or for Puritan New England. The round-up of those who stayed stretched from Yorkshire to Ireland. The changing of the political guard was taking place swiftly, although the King was still weeks away from landing on English soil.

  A letter from the King was presented to London’s Lord Mayor, the sheriffs, aldermen and common council men, promising to renew the city’s charter and to allow the Corporation to retain its privileges. Commonwealth politicians of the upper social ranks kept their thoughts to themselves, hut republicans from London’s working classes made their views known in strong language. Many appeared in magistrates’ courts, charged with treason. On 11 May, Edward Medburne, a glazier from Wapping, was arraigned in front of the Middlesex magistrates, accused of shooting his mouth off in the Gun Tavern in Wapping, According to witnesses, Medburne said he that if he met the King he would ‘run his knife through him and kill him’, and he did not mind if he was hanged himself. He also said that if the King and General Monck were hanged together he would ‘spend that day five shillings for joy’, a hefty sum for a working man.2 Dorothy Phillips, the wife of a shoemaker, was brought in front of the magistrates for calling the King a bastard. It is not known what happened to Medburne and Phillips, but it was not a time for leniency.

  Events were moving rapidly. On 12 May, Montagu’s fleet set sail and two days later it arrived at the Dutch port of Scheveningen. A large retinue of members of the Houses of Lords and Commons and of assorted grandees from the merchant classes of London made their way to The Hague to greet the King, who had left Breda to base himself on the coast in preparation for returning to England. Businessmen always know on which side their bread is buttered. In their hearts, many – or even most – might have remained antagonistic to the House of Stuart and hostile to Episcopalian rule by the church of which the monarch was the figurehead, but in their heads they knew’ the direction in which power had shifted. Shrewd minds would have worked out that if London were to be able to go about its business unhindered by the change in government, it had better take the initiative. Thomas Bloodworth was among the eighteen ‘commissioners’ representing city merchants. If Charles was astonished to see them on Dutch soil, he let nothing show. He knighted all of them for their pains.

  On 23 May, Charles, accompanied by his brother James, went on board Montagu’s flagship. On the same day, in London, husband and wife Edward and Alice Jones appeared in court, charged with treason for saying that ‘it was the King s time now to reign but it was upon sufferance for a little time.’ Over the ensuing weeks, Londoners regularly appeared in court accused of similar crimes. Others rejoiced and paraded royalist banners in the streets.

  As the royal entourage set sail from Holland, London’s business elite busied itself getting rid of republican symbols. The arms of the Commonwealth were removed from the Guildhall and replaced with the yellow and blue Stuart royal standard. In New Palace Yard, in Cheapside and at the Old Exchange, the common hangman burned copies of the Parliamentarian Solemn League and Covenant. Not to be outdone, courtiers gathered in Whitehall Palace found a bust of Cromwell, strung it up by the neck and left it dangling from a window.

  On 25 May the King landed at Dover. Monck was there to greet him. The King made Montagu and Monck Knights of the Garter. Montagu was created an earl and Monck, by dubious dint of descent from an illegitimate son of Edward IV, a royal duke. For his part in the voyage, Pepys received a sum of money, something always close to his heart.

  Charles was astonished at the tumultuous welcome that greeted him. He had fled the country on 14 March 1646, pursued by Oliver Cromwell’s Ironsides, with a £1000 price tag on his head. Now Cromwell’s former flagship, the Naseby, renamed the Royal Charles, brought him back in triumph. He landed on the beach at Dover to the blare of trumpets and a salute of cannon. The huge throng of people gathered under the cliffs heaved with excitement as the King, whom most had never seen, sprang agilely ashore.

  A press of courtiers and dignitaries jostled to kiss the hem of the King’s slightly threadbare robes and deliver the humblest declarations of loyalty and love. Most were rewarded with a smile and a nod. The one exception was the King’s friend from boyhood, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Three years earlier Buckingham had made his peace with Oliver Cromwell and returned to England from exile. Charles found that hard to forgive. When Buckingham kneeled, Charles snubbed him.

  There followed words of homage from the mayor of Dover and other dignitaries before a leisurely progress towards London, which Charles planned to reach on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660. He made one lengthy stop en route. Six days earlier, at Charles’s urging, his dead father had been canonised at Canterbury as a martyr of the Anglican Church. Charles’s first task in England was to pay tribute to his father. During his three-night sojourn in the cathedral city, the King was presented by the mayor with a tankard of massy gold’. During the stopover, George Monck – along with three others, the Earl of Southampton, William Morrice and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper – was made a privy councillor.

  The Stuarts particularly valued the order, which bound its members, or knight companions, personally to the monarch. Charles I in particular had held great store by it, wearing the insignia to his death on the scaffold. On hearing of his father’s death, nineteen-year-old Charles II had his portrait engraved by Wenceslaus Hollar. Charles I was depicted wrapped in a cloak on which was ostentatiously pinned the order’s great starlike medallion, giving the little portrait an impressive symbolic meaning that indicated it was created to be distributed for propaganda.

  Then it was on towards the capital. The King, now attired in a silver doublet and a gold-laced cloak, was accompanied by his two brothers, riding just behind and to either side; the humourless James, Prince of Wales, dressed all in white, and the.boisterous Henry, Duke of Gloucester, in green silk, twenty years old and described by Edward Hyde as ‘a prince of extraordinary hopes’*
Hyde later recalled: all the way from Dover thither being so full of people . . . it was as if the whole Kingdom was there.’3 Samuel Pepys noted that, The shouting and joy expressed by all is beyond imagination.’4

  Charles recorded his own reaction in a letter to his sixteen-year-old sister Henrietta Anne, written after his first day back in England: ‘My head is so prodigious dazed by the acclamation and by the quantities of business that I know not whether I am writing sense or no.’ He joked that it was clearly his own fault that he’d stayed away so long, since everyone he met in England had longed for his return.5

  Meanwhile, from across the south and east, troops, militia and bands of rejoicing royalists were drawing towards Blackheath. This high expanse of heathland immediately to the south of London had been the scene of historic gatherings including the Peasants’ Revolt in the fourteenth century and Jack Cade’s Rebellion and the Cornish Rebellion in the fifteenth. Now it was the rendezvous for Charles to inspect an army that had been until days before, in name at least, that of a republic. It was to be the greatest demonstration of loyalty so far.

  General Monck had spent five months purging the army of republican and other unhealthy’ elements, cashiering hundreds of religious and political radicals and replacing them with royalists. At the same time, the delicate business had begun of disbanding all Cromwellian regiments, the continued existence of which was a permanent threat to the monarchy. Facing the King so soon after his arrival in the country with tens of thousands of battle-hardened Roundheads might prove a venture too far.