The King's City Read online

  The odd thing about Denham was that although consistently tormented by creditors, he proved expert at raising money for the royal cause. On one occasion he brought £10,000 from Poland to the exiled royal court at Breda. Denham, therefore, was a man with faults but also with real strengths, particularly powers of persuasion. When not combing northern Europe for money, he resided at the exiled royal court.

  When weighing up Denham’s suitability for the position as surveyor versus that of Webb, there arose the problem of Webb’s political reputation. During the interregnum he had not devoted himself purely to work for royalists. He had worked for Lord Fairfax, the former head of the Parliamentary army, drawing up designs for the rebuilding of the Fairfax seat at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, and had worked for another prominent Parliamentarian sympathiser, the 4th Earl of Pembroke, whose seat was at Wilton.

  Webb, however, had also done good service for the royal cause, having once been imprisoned during the Civil War for his undercover work as a courier and spy. When he heard of Denham’s appointment he was so incredulous that he wrote a second petition rather rashly suggesting that the King change his mind, ‘that Mr Denham may possibly as most gentry in England at this day have some knowledge in the Theory of Architecture but nothing of ye practique soe that he must have of necessity have another at his Maties charge to doe his businesse . . . His Matie may please grant some other place more proper for Mr Denham’s abilitye and confirm Mr Webb the Surveyors place . . .’13

  Charles was not about to begin his reign by allowing a commoner to persuade him to change his mind. Webb would have to be content with the position of Denham’s assistant, Denham proved himself to be an able administrator, leaving Webb to carry out architectural design and oversee building work. With the King’s blessing, Denham and the Lord Chancellor, Edward Hyde, convened a royal commission to do something about the congested and dilapidated state of the capital, ‘for reforming the buildings, ways, streets, and incumbrances, and regulating the hackney coaches in the City of London’.14

  John Evelyn, always with the wellbeing of London in mind, praised Denham for paving the streets of Holborn.15 Denham’s new paving meant that carriages could move more quickly and efficiently, while new gutters improved drainage to such an extent that he saved life, ‘so many of the fair sex and their offspring having perished by mischances . . . from the ruggedness of the unequal street’. Unencumbered by remedial works, Webb was free to rebuild Somerset House, as well as producing more new plans for a proposed Whitehall Palace designed along classical lines. Under Webb, classicism would signify the country’s return to monarchy and Charles Stuart’s grandeur as a rightful king, and set the tone for a nation led by hereditary kings, not commoners. But all that was yet to come.

  Webb’s new role as Denham’s assistant surveyor promised much. He knew the long history of the various attempts by the House of Stuart to build a new royal palace at Westminster. He had seen Jones’s early designs prepared for James I, followed by those for Charles I in the 1630s and late 1640s, largely drawn up by Webb himself in the years before the King’s death. Charles II renewed the Stuart interest in a new palace and Webb was soon at work preparing new plans and reworking the drawings from the 1640s.

  There were also ambitions for a new palace at Greenwich. When Charles first visited Greenwich he was surprised at the state of dilapidation into which the venerable Tudor palace had fallen. The house in which Henry VIII was born had lain vacant during the Commonwealth before being turned into a biscuit factory for the navy, Charles ordered it to be pulled down: only Inigo Jones’s House of Delight was spared.

  Webb was soon at work on plans for a new palace. But whereas the Whitehall scheme foundered on the financial rock that shattered so many Stuart building plans, the palace at Greenwich actually got under way. Webb’s designs, based on drawings by Jones, abandoned the plain front of Jones’s Queens House and substituted a palace with all the exuberant ornament of the baroque. Inevitably, the money soon ran out. One wing was built, now known as the King Charles Building and part of the Royal Hospital. That was all. Charles never used it as a residence. The complex we see today was completed after Webb’s death, when others took up the challenge to fill the largely derelict site.

  Webb had other outlets for his prodigious skills. His knowledge of theatre design and production, honed under Inigo Jones, came to the fore. Soon after the Restoration, William Davcnant approached him to design his revolutionary new theatre inside the disused Lisle’s tennis court at Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

  The 54-year-old theatre professional, Davenant, and the 49-year-old architect, Webb, knew they bad to make their mark now or never – and they trusted one another to succeed. They would make history and change theatre in Britain. Davenant’s intention was to give the public something of the concealed wizardry previously reserved for the eyes of royalty, while offering the players a platform on which they would be free to move among their audience. Webb and Davenant knew they w’ere on to a good thing. But it would take time to design and build.

  To the problem of adapting a building that had been designed for a different purpose, Webb came up wath an ingenious solution. Ilis idea was to erect a building within a building. He designed a wooden structure to sit inside the masonry walls of the former tennis court. A wooden skeleton would support the raised stage, the wings, the proscenium arch, the flies for machinery, the seating and all the rest. Behind the arch, to the sides and in front of the wings were doors of the type via which a medieval actor would have been comfortable making entrances and exits. To the sides and at the back, the auditorium was flanked by raised galleries. The proscenium arch fronted a deep stage with wings sufficiently wide to allow for scenery flats that could be moved on and off from the sides. The flats could be arranged one behind the other from the front to the back of the stage, giving the illusion of great depth via receding planes. The English theatre as we would know it for the next three hundred years was born.

  The theatre’s patron, the Duke of York, was so pleased with the designs concocted by Davenant and Webb that he showed them off to visitors. The representative of the city of Florence, Giovanni Salvetti, wrote home that the Duke showed him ‘the design of a large room he has begun to build in the Italian style in which they intend to put on shows . . . with scenes and machines’.16

  Salvettis dispatch pointed out that these innovations for the London public stage copied what was already the norm in Italy, where moveable scenery and machines for moving clouds and deities about were already the least that opera goers could expect. He might have added that Inigo Jones, thanks to his travels in Italy with the Earl of Arundel, had long since brought these ideas to England for use in court masques. As has been pointed out by others, Lisle’s court theatre was the most important new playhouse in the history of the Restoration stage.17

  While Webb was engaged in his many differing projects, the man whose name was later to overshadow his own was working in disciplines unrelated to architecture, with no inkling of his own future crucial role in shaping the nation’s capital city. At the time of the Restoration, Christopher Wren was twenty-seven and spending his time between Gresham College in London, where he was professor of astronomy, and All Souls College, Oxford, where he was a fellow and bursar. As befitted a young virtuoso§ Wren was interested in several fields of empirical philosophy. He carried out experiments and observations in many areas, including medicine, but his primary interest at this time was in mathematics. In this he allied himself with the small but increasing number of natural philosophers who believed mathematics essential for understanding the observable world; even to be the foundation of God’s creation. Mathematical demonstrations were, Wren said, the only truths that can sink into the mind of Man void of all uncertainty’.18

  There is only one small clue to Wren’s passing interest in architecture – a note in his papers that prior to 1660 he made some drawings of designs exhibiting ‘strength, convenience and beauty in building’. This tripartit
e recipe revealed that, like Jones and Webb, Wren had read the works of Vitruvius, whose ‘strength, utility and beauty’ became the motto of the neoclassical revolution. But it was his mathematical interest that was to change Wren’s life, for mathematics was seen not only as the core of the new empirical science but as the bedrock of architecture. Within a year Wren would be asked to offer his advice on repairing the crumbling fabric of St Paul’s Cathedral.

  * “Rupert was therefore first cousin to King Charles N. His sister Sophia was mother to King Ccorge I of Great Britain.

  † In the nineteenth century a British envoy met an Akan chieftain whose gold bracelets were so heavy that he rested his arm on the head of a small boy. The British went on to fight several wars against the Asante ‘s Kingdom of Gold, finally declaring it a Crown possession in 1901. Today, the Ashanti gold mine is one of the ten largest in the world.

  ‡ The exact familial relationship, if there truly was one, between Inigo Jones and John Webb is unknown. What is known is that Webb’s wife was related to Jones.

  § In the mid-seventeenth century a virtuoso was someone who, after the Latin virtu, had virtue, especially by being a skilled experimenter in the field of natural philosophy, or science. Only later did it come to be applied specifically to a talented musician.

  CHAPTER 5

  RIVALS

  Sir William Davenant was not alone in his pursuit of the King s warrant to build a theatre. He had several rivals, chief among them the veteran producer and actor Michael Mohun, the bookseller William Rhodes, and the courtier and playwright Thomas Killigrew. Killigrew had the advantage over Davenant of being close to the King, as a companion and confidant. When Charles sailed home from Holland on board the Royal Charles, Killigrew was among those who accompanied him. Pepys, also on board, described Killigrew as being in Very high esteem with the King’.

  Killigrew had little formal education but made up for the deficiency with his natural wit and intelligence: His high good spirits and fondness for the stage were exhibited early on. According to Pepys, young Thomas frequented the theatre in his boyhood and when a request was made for a boy to go on stage and play a ‘demon’, as extras were known, Thomas would quickly volunteer. Unlike his brothers, Thomas did not attend university but went into service at the royal court, where he became a page to Charles I. He travelled widely on the continent and at the age of twenty-three was present in Loudun, France, during the notorious witchcraft trial, on which he reported.1 In the same year, he wrote his first play, a tragicomedy entitled The Prisoners, performed at the Phoenix Theatre in Covent Garden by the Queen’s Servants, a troop named in honour of their patron, Queen Henrietta Maria.

  Though Killigrew has been portrayed as a libertine, in Anthony van Dyck’s portrait, painted at the time Killigrew wrote The Prisoners, he appears as anything but. He has the sensitive face of a young man likely to be concerned by what others thought of him, rather than that of a rake. He was put down by Pepys as a court jester’, employed to make Charles laugh. While that is certainly true, there was more to Killigrew than that. He was a well-read man from a cultured family that had been in royal service for generations. Upon the Restoration, his interest in theatre extended to becoming a manager. This was hardly surprising; like all the returning Cavaliers, he was financially hard up. His writing didn’t help much. He probably received nothing at all for his plays performed while in exile. Even in England, playwrights were traditionally given the box office receipts for the third performance of each play, after which the theatre companies were deemed to own them. Only if the play were a tremendous hit would the playwright receive any further money. So, if a playhouse had 400 seats and charged five shillings to see a play, then the playwright’s take was £100. This was not a pittance but nor was it a fortune, being about six times what a skilled provincial tradesman earned in a year. To live well, a playwright had to be prolific or have a share in the business. Early in his career, Killigrew had made efforts to open a theatre of his own but had been thwarted by the outbreak of the Civil War,

  When the young Prince of Wales went into exile, Killigrew went abroad in his service. In 1650 he was given an important role as royal representative in Venice. His task was to extol the royal cause and extract money to help restore Charles to the throne, much as Denham was expected to do elsewhere. While in Venice, Killigrew finished a play titled Cecilia and Clorinda which he had begun before his appointment, and wrote another, Bellamira her Dream, in its entirety.

  Killigrew’s mission to Venice did not go smoothly. Anxious not to inflame relations with the Commonwealth, in 1652 the Venetian government expelled him on the pretext of a charge that he ran a smuggling racket. According to a Venetian politician, the underhand method of his expulsion had a deeply unsettling effect on the young diplomat.2 He was afterwards given the uncomfortable nickname ‘Ambassador Tom’.

  As fundraiser, diplomat and occasional spy, Killigrew travelled widely across Europe in search of money and support. While in Madrid he wrote his most successful play, Thomaso, or The Wanderer; with a plot based upon the. foreign adventures of exiled Cavaliers. By 1655 Killigrew was in The Hague, where he met and married Charlotte van Hesse-Piershil, the daughter of a member of the court of the Prince of Orange. By now Killigrew had command of a regiment in the Dutch army, as was so often the way for impecunious Cavaliers.

  At the Restoration, Killigrew’s services were not immediately rewarded. He applied for, and failed to be awarded, various offices or sums of money, including a position suited to his military background as the keeper of the Greenwich armoury. When nothing materialised, Killigrew changed tack. On 9 July 1660, only five weeks after Charles’s arrival in London, he applied for a royal warrant to start a theatre company named the King’s Company of Players. Charles gave the project his blessing. With the advantage of the King’s patronage, Killigrew’s troupe was seen as being the direct successor to the King’s Men of the Jacobean era. This was important, for it meant the company had exclusive rights to many of the older plays, including all of Ben Jonson’s works and preferential rights over those of Shakespeare.

  Killigrew’s warrant was a blow for Davenant. He had waited twenty-one years to stage a play once again for a king, only to see his opportunity slipping away. For a playwright whose own plays had been produced by the original King’s Men, the awarding of the warrant to another must have been personally grating and commercially daunting. Davenant was very different in, character from Killigrew, being both more serious minded and more practised in the theatrical arts. He was also very determined. Desperate to salvage something from the situation, he suggested to the King that he and Killigrew should both hold warrants and run two separate theatres in London. Charles agreed, and so was born the Duke’s Company, sponsored by the King’s brother, the Duke of York. In July r66o Davenant and Killigrew were rewarded with licences to run a joint monopoly, to ‘erect two playhouses . . . and absolutely suppressing all other playhouses’.3

  The licences given to Davenant and Killigrew were hereditary, with the warrant holders able to assign their patents to their relatives or others they appointed. The peculiar notion of an inheritable monopoly on the stage dated back twenty years or more, to an attempt by Davenant to take hold of the theatre in Dublin.4 Now the idea returned with the creation of a monopoly designed to squeeze smaller companies out of business. More importantly, Charles’s granting of a monopoly meant that two trusted monarchists had absolute control over the theatre in London.

  By the late autumn, both theatre companies were ready to begin production, helped by enlisting personnel from other companies who had little choice but to join them or starve. Davenant elected to form his company out of William Rhodes’s young players from the Cockpit Theatre, while Killigrew chose the older players from Michael Mohun’s company. Initially both companies had similar repertoires, comprised of Renaissance plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Fletcher, Middleton and the like, along with some new works by Davenant and others.

  K
illigrew was ready first, and his new company opened in the venerable Red Bull theatre in St John Street, Clerkenwell, on 5 November, before moving to a much more central site between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand three days later. One of his first productions was a play by Davenant. Whether or not this was produced as a friendly nose-thumbing to the author is not recorded. Davenant would open a week later at the Salisbury Court Theatre, his revolutionary theatre at Lisle’s tennis court being still under construction.

  When Londoners entered Killigrew’s new theatre, what they saw looked little different from a public theatre in the Elizabethan age. A stone’s throw from Davenant’s, Killigrew’s playhouse was built in Gibbons’s former tennis court in Vere Street, next to Clare Market, a small marketplace developed in the late sixteenth century, its tightly packed streets and Elizabethan buildings now housing a swarm of food stalls and shops.* Gibbons’s tennis court was so narrow there was no space for wings or scenery, if Killigrew had wanted them, and actors made their entrances through doors at the back of the stage.

  Though undoubtedly put at a disadvantage by the King’s Men opening before him, Davenant banked on playing a long game. His new playhouse was far from ready, but his temporary venue already had some innovations. Davenant also trusted his shrewd judgement of the ability of His players. He had the benefit of a leading actor of great talent and drawing power. Just as Shakespeare had written for the star of his day, Richard Burbage, Davenant had the star actor of his era, 25-year-old Thomas Betterton, who had gained early experience and training in illegal performances put on by William Rhodes at the Cockpit Theatre.