The King's City Page 7

  Like many European nobles, Rupert was highly schooled in warfare. When the civil wars broke out in England, he volunteered his military prowess to his uncle Charles, acquitting himself ably, if erratically, on the field. Following the crushing defeat by Parliamentary forces at Marston Moor in 1644, he languished in Europe before returning to the British Royalist cause with the outbreak of the brief Second Civil War, taking command of a small fleet that harried Parliamentary shipping before turning to piracy. He then returned to Europe, latterly in service to the Holy Roman Empire in Vienna. With his cousin Charles seemingly miraculously recalled to power, Rupert left for England, where he was warmly welcomed and awarded an annual stipend of £4000. It was said he had turned up with some of his privateering money still intact, £2000 of which he used to bribe his way physically into apartments in the royal court. Comfortably bivouacked, and with a reasonable income, Prince Rupert found himself at the age of forty-one ensconced in the palace of his cousin the King, with an agile mind and little to occupy it.

  To fill his days, Rupert took up alchemy, equipping a laboratory in The King’s Walk in the Temple, further developed his early method of printmaking by mezzotint, and endeavoured to keep himself busy. But he remembered his days in battle and those spent commanding his little Royalist fleet of privateers off West Africa. He had explored 150 miles of the Gambia River, caught malaria and heard stories of a mountain of gold somewhere in the interior. He added this legend to his cache of tales of heroic deeds.

  There was gold indeed – although no mountain of it – in what are today Ghana, Togo and Benin. In the Precambrian era, enormous quantities of gold were deposited in quartz veins set in granite. By the seventeenth century, local people had begun hacking gold from surface veins, although most was laboriously sieved from deposits in the form of fine dust in sand and gravel. The Asante people, a sub-set of the Akan, made royal regalia out of gold so lavish they declared their land a Kingdom of Gold.†

  Quite soon the stench of revenge faded away and the Palace of Whitehall became gripped by gold fever. The King’s brother, James, Duke ofYork, found Rupert’s stories particularly convincing. An expedition was planned to find the mountain of gold. Samuel Pepys noted, ‘I heard the Duke speak of a great design that he and my Lord of Pembroke have, and a great many others, of sending a venture to some parts of Africa to dig for gold ore there. They intend to admit as many as will venture their (sic) per man.’1

  The task of finding gold was entwined with a more general plan to establish trade links with various kingdoms in West Africa. This was not an easy matter. For many years, assorted Europeans, including the Dutch, the Swedes, the Danes, the Portuguese and the Spanish, had traded along the coast. In the late fifteenth century, the Dutch and Spanish sparred over trading rights for gold, slaves, ivory, pepper, mahogany and other commodities. In 1479 they fought the first European colonial war over access to the areas riches. The Dutch prevailed and in 1482 established a trading fort on the coast of present-day Ghana. Fort Elmina was the first European settlement in West Africa. The gold supply was controlled by, among others, the Asante nation, which coincidentally was one of the kingdoms in which slavery was traditionally practised.

  Customarily, West African societies (but not all of them) acquired slaves in one of two ways, either by war between competing nations or via an hereditary system. In the seventeenth century, along the coast and in the immediate hinterland there were dozens of independent states, vying with one another for status and power. For example, the Fon dynasty of Dahomey only came into being at the beginning of the 1600s. The Fon, along with the neighbouring Asante, took slaves in battle. The first European nation to take advantage of African slavery for its colonies in the Americas was Spain, closely followed by Portugal, with the Dutch following suit much later, and only then the English.

  Many ingenious justifications were to be made for colonising the Americas, exterminating the inhabitants and supplanting them with enslaved Africans. Aristotle was called upon for his authority: ‘Those whose condition is such that their function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them, those, I say, are slaves of nature. It is better for them to be ruled thus.’2 This was taken as sanctioning the enslavement of all ordinary non-Christian foreign people. The fifteenth-century Spanish theologian Juan de Sepulveda built on those ideas, saying that the indigenous people of the Americas were ‘natural slaves’ as characterised by Aristotle: ‘inferior to the Spanish . . . as monkeys are to men’.3

  Within a few decades of invading England, the Normans had sought justifications for conquering other nations. A twelfth-century Welsh monk named Gerald came up with excuses for sweeping the Irish off their lands and settling Anglo-Normans in their place. Here is one of the kinder things this factotum to Henry II had to say about the Irish: ‘It should seem that by the just judgments of God, nature sometimes produces such objects, contrary to her own laws.’4

  By Elizabeth I’s reign, the English were not only spasmodically planting Ireland, but sporadically trading in West Africa, bringing slaves across the Atlantic to sell in the Spanish colonies in the West Indies or in England itself, though many more of these slaves were probably brought by Dutch traders. After a time, Elizabeth banned the use of slaves in England because their employment warped the home labour market, driving down the wages of labourers in East Anglia-an interesting early example of distortions arising from the internationalisation of commerce. From then on a desultory trade continued until the English civil wars reduced it to a trickle. Thanks to those domestic wars the English were unable to compete with other nations trading in West Africa, and so the Dutch became the dominant European trading nation in the region. This pre-eminence was what Charles, Prince Rupert and the Duke of York were keen to overthrow.

  On 18 December 1660, Charles issued a charter setting up the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa. He bestowed on the company a monopoly on English trade running the length of West Africa from Cape Blanco (a peninsula north of the Gambia River), all the way south and east to Cape Castle (a trading fort built by the Swedes in Ghana in the 1650s). The monopoly, which was to last a notional thousand years, was to provide a platform from which to take on the Dutch East India Company, which was out-competing its rivals not only in Africa but in other territories.

  The new company was very much a Stuart family initiative. The King promised to invest £800, the Duke of York, being the company’s patron, £3600, Prince Rupert £800, and the Queen Mother, Henrietta Maria, £400. Characteristically, the King paid only £560 of the £800 he had pledged. Among the aristocratic investors attracted to the scheme were the Dukes of Albemarle and Buckingham and the Earls of Bath, Hawley, Ossory, Pembroke, St Albans and Sandwich. To these aristocratic investors (or adventurers, as they were called) were added a group of wealthy London merchants and senior members of guilds. They contributed not only their money but also their business acumen. Among them were the wealthy goldsmith and banker, Robert Viner, the Lord Mayor, Sir John Robinson, and Colonel Philip Frowde, the prominent East India Company investor. The company’s books were to be kept by the able William Coventry, the Duke ofYork s secretary, who was no less ambitious than his father, the former Keeper of the Great Seal for Charles I. In all, the total amount in subscriptions promised by the primär}’ investors was £17,400.

  To confirm the royal family’s commitment, James in his role as Lord High Admiral made it known he would lend the new company several Royal Navy ships to accompany its merchant vessels to Africa. The scene was set for the royal family’s first commercial venture, albeit with the participation of experienced personnel from London’s merchants, captains and seamen to carry out the task.

  *

  While the Stuarts put together the finances for their private money-making venture, there was one man long associated with the royal family who believed he richly deserved a job from the King. This was the architect John Webb. To begin with, it looked as if he was well on his way to royal
preferment, for when it was known Charles was definitely on his way home, the government asked Webb to oversee the refurbishment of Whitehall Palace to make it once more fit for habitation by a king, to prepare ye Royall houses for yor Maties [Majesty’s] reception’.5 Whitehall Palace had been Oliver Cromwell’s official residence as Lord Protector, but it had suffered neglect during the wars. After Cromwell’s death in 1658 it had lain unoccupied. There followed a move to sell it off, which came to nothing. Now Webb oversaw an £8000 makeover. He claimed the work was done in the space of a fortnight, but quite how such a colossal sum of money could have been spent in so short a time is anybody’s guess. At any rate, most of the money expended – including a sizeable sum out of Webb’s own pocket – remained unpaid long after, setting a pattern to be repeated throughout the new King’s reign.6

  Webb was the most highly qualified architect of his generation. He was born in 1611 among the mansions and bookshops of a street called Little Britain, situated among the warren of narrow lanes to the north of St Paul’s Cathedral. In terms of its inhabitants, Little Britain was a microcosm of the old city, where the wealthy and the not-so-well-off lived side by side. At the age of seventeen Webb went to live with his uncle, Inigo Jones, studying classical architecture under his tutelage.‡ According to Webb, Charles I himself had demanded that he be ‘brought up by his unckle Mr Inigo Jones upon his late majestyes command in the study of architecture’.7

  We only have Webb’s word for this, but true or not, he was the first English architect to be trained by another in the classical architecture of Italy. Jones himself was the last of a breed: the master masons and carpenters who had built medieval Europe. These men, all learned in their trade, some of them geniuses, had remained mostly anonymous down the centuries. Jones’s name, too, might not have come down to us had he not become a designer of court masques and gone on to become the protean force that brought a new style of architecture to England.

  By dint of his studies with Jones, Webb could rightly be proclaimed as the first professionally trained architect in England. Like William Davenant, he was a link with the court of Charles I, and was perfectly equipped to introduce new forms of theatrical architecture. Webb was ambitious enough not to be content with picking up commissions from actor-managers and country gents who wanted a Tudor house remodelled or a new one built. He wanted more.

  Inigo Jones’s importance in the history of British architecture cannot be overstated. He changed the nation’s architectural landscape, introducing a rational, methodical code of humanism from beyond the Alps. During two trips to Italy he fell under the spell of the ancients, and also fell for the distillations from the ancients made by Renaissance humanist architects such as Alberti and later theoretical works by Andrea Palladio. The latter’s writings harked back five hundred years to the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius, from whom future luminaries such as Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci learned much. Jones was not alone in having noticed some of these correspondences, nor in having read Vitruvius or Palladio, but he was the first person to bring these ideas back to England, determined to put them into practice. Importantly, he had the ability to do so. In essence, what Jones realised was that when the great fifteenth-century architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi planted an octagonal dome on top of Florence’s cathedral he had firmly put the lid on Gothic architecture.

  The first building designed by Jones in the Italian manner was at Greenwich, on the site of a royal palace and castle dating back to the thirteenth century. This revolutionary building, designed by Jones for Queen Anne (the wife of James I), would be called the House of Delight, harking back perhaps to the ‘Palace of Pleasaunce’, or Placentia, built for Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI. Jones’s new building was designed as a lodge attached to the old palace. When the queen fell ill work ceased; it was not resumed until the reign of Charles I, when the lodge was completed for Queen Henrietta Maria. The new building, afterwards known as the Queen’s House, exhibited a smooth, mathematical restraint quite different from anything seen before in England.

  The Queen’s House was quickly followed by another royal commission, the Banqueting House, built for James I. With its enormous double-cube reception hall, it was a radical departure from the medieval great room, replacing its typical mullioned, latticed windows and heavy beamed ceiling with large, clear windows and rood beams hidden above a flat plaster ceiling, decorated in a stately Italian classical manner. Jones designed not only the hall but the sets, costumes and special effects for many of the masques staged there, until the installation of the famous ceiling paintings by Peter Paul Rubens put paid to theatrical events for fear of candle smoke damaging Rubens’s images of a transcendent and divinely appointed James I.

  Jones had hoped – as had James – that the Banqueting House would be the first section of a glorious new palace on the banks of the Thames. Like so many of the building plans of the House of Stuart, it was not to be; in this case it was stymied when a not-so-transcendent Charles I was led out from under the scenes of divine providence to his execution.

  When Jones died, three years after the King’s execution, Webb inherited his patron’s enormous collection of drawings and books, including those gathered during his travels in Italy. Most importantly, Webb inherited his patron’s ideas, skills and love of Italian architecture. While Webb received the great man’s library, his wife, Jones’s first cousin once removed, inherited his wealth. Webb was therefore fully equipped to continue his mentor’s work without financial worries. He had worked with Jones on royal buildings, including Somerset House, set by the Thames about half a mile downriver from Whitehall Palace, as well as the plans for the proposed new palace at Whitehall itself. He also worked with Jones on domestic buildings, including Wilton House in Wiltshire, where the double-cube room echoes that at the Banqueting House.

  Webb was at the cutting edge of the new vogue for the classical in architecture. He designed the first classical portico on an English house, at The Vyne, near the village of Sherborne St John. This was a not altogether happy marriage of Gothic and Palladian, the portico being placed on a house with cren-ellations or false battlements across the roofline. It was an early mismatch, caused by the 25-year-old architect’s youthful ambition, The design may have been fumbled, but Webb would not make many more mistakes.

  Given the theoretical and practical training he received from his mentor, it was not unreasonable for Webb to think that with the monarchy restored he would be appointed to his old master’s position. With his advanced thinking, Webb saw himself as the pre-eminent choice as surveyor to the returned King. It was not to be.

  Making sure he described the work he had done so speedily at Whitehall, Webb wrote a petition to Charles, asking for the job of Surveyor of the King’s Works, which he said he had in effect carried out for some time for the King’s father. In this role he had worked on designs for a new palace at Whitehall, which he discussed with Charles I while the King was a prisoner at Hampton Court, and then at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, in 1647–8, during the months leading up to Charles’s trial and execution. Charles’s desire for a new palace, designed all of a piece, to replace the hodgepodge at Whitehall dated back to his time in Spain in 1623 when he saw the Escorial, the palace of Philip IV.8

  The old Whitehall Palace was to be pulled down and a new one – intended to rival Versailles – built in the garden of St James’s, leaving the waterside open.9 The evidence of the collections of drawings now held at Worcester College, Oxford, and in the collections of the Cavendish family, the Dukes of Devonshire, at Chatsworth House, shows a vast neoclassical palace set around a series of symmetrical courtyards. The plans, initially drawn up by Jones, were worked up into finished drawings by Webb shortly before Charles I’s untimely death put an end to the project.10 It was to these thwarted dreams that Webb referred in his application to the new King.

  Webb’s petition fell on deaf cars. Unknown to him, Charles had made his choice of survey
or before sailing from Holland. Webb was sidelined in favour of the courtier Sir John Denham. Although described by John Evelyn as ‘a better poet than architect’, Denham had the advantage of being a royal favourite. In 1649, following the execution of his father, Charles II had offered Denham the post of Royal Surveyor if and when he regained the throne. Eleven years later he made good the promise.

  Denham was born into a family of high-ranking royalist lawyers in Ireland in 1614. His father was chief justice of the King’s Bench in Dublin and his mother daughter of Garret Moore, ist Viscount Drogheda. Denham attended Trinity College, Oxford, and qualified as a lawyer from Lincoln’s Inn, being called to the bar in 1639. With the death of his father, he inherited ten estates; moreover, his wife, Anne Cotton, brought a Buckinghamshire manor to the family. They had two sons and two daughters.

  So far, so good, but Denham was a gambling addict. Although his estates provided an income of above £10,000 per annum, in one year he was reported to have run up debts of £4500 and signed away several estates owing to his love of cards and dice. He seems to have developed this taste for reckless gambling while still at Oxford, where he was reprimanded for not repaying a debt to the city’s recorder.11

  According to those who knew him as a student, Denham gave no inkling of wit or poetic abilities. But on the eve of the Civil War in 1642, he published anonymously both a verse play that was performed and a poem that was to become famous. The poem, Cooper’s Hill, took the form of a bucolic reverie in which a description of the Thames from a famous viewpoint at Egham became a metaphor for the virtues of monarchy at a crucial point in history. John Dryden declared it ‘the exact standard of good writing’.12 Today it seems florid and laboured, but for many years it was much admired. During the Civil War Denham wrote anti-Parliamentary ballads and continued to run up gambling debts.