by Frank Sherry
But despite doctrinal divisions, England’s power, especially at sea, continued to grow. Seaborne trade was encouraged. English seamen and merchants competed militarily and commercially with Holland and were rapidly wresting domination of the world’s trade routes away from the Dutch. At the same time, England under Charles II avoided confrontation with Royal France.
After the death of Charles II, however, English policy toward both France and Holland began to change radically. Charles’s brother, James II, a professed and devout Catholic, succeeded to the throne in 1685. James openly supported Louis XIV’s policies, including the Sun King’s brutal treatment of French Huguenots, and he seemed to support a religious reunion with the Church of Rome.
In a rapid series of events, later known as the “bloodless revolution,” the Protestant Parliament in 1688 invited William of Orange, Protestant ruler of Holland and a resolute enemy of Louis XIV, to become England’s sovereign. James fled to Ireland where he fomented an unsuccessful revolution against English rule. Eventually James took refuge in the court of Louis XIV. The male line of the Stuart dynasty was finished, and Holland and England were united under William.
The reign of William was one of the most significant periods in the history of England because it fixed forever the ascendancy of Parliament. William, a dour little man obsessed with destroying the power of France, agreed to grant Parliament virtually any power it requested in order to keep England part of a European league against Louis XIV. In effect, Parliament made a deal with William. Parliament would permit England to participate with William in his struggle against France. In return, William would accept Parliament’s supremacy in domestic and fiscal affairs.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
War with France would henceforth dominate England’s national life.
But despite the domestic and foreign strife that England had endured during the seventeenth century, the era had also been a period of splendor in the arts and sciences as well as a time of remarkable growth in commerce and wealth.
Nowhere was this reality more manifest than in the City of London.
London’s population had grown from about 150,000 in 1560 to approximately 750,000 in 1690—a fivefold increase that had made London a close second to Paris as the most populous city in Europe.
In the 1690s the city pulsated with life, brimmed with enthusiasm for the future, and basked in its own renewed beauty. For it was during this period that the great architect Sir Christopher Wren had reconstructed London as a city of grace and beauty, building more than fifty new churches to take the place of buildings destroyed in the Great Fire of 1664.
The intellectual life of the city revolved around numerous public coffee houses where brilliant men conversed freely on all topics under the sun, from religion to poetry to the latest court gossip, while sitting by the fire and sipping that exotic new brew, coffee. Some of the coffee houses even specialized. Lloyd’s, for example, attracted ship owners and eventually became the center for the new notion of maritime insurance. Will’s Coffee House, on the other hand, became fashionable among literary men. Addison and Steele were frequent visitors, along with lesser literary lions.
The theater flourished, as Restoration comedy and drama flowed from the pens of Dryden, Congreve, Wycherly and others.
In this era, the first newspapers began to appear—and the biting satire of Swift and Pope was soon to burst on the scene. It was also during this time that meetings and discussions at London clubs gave birth to the political parties that would dominate English political life far into the future: the Whigs and the Tories.
London buzzed with new ideas, hatched in an atmosphere of intellectual liberty not seen in the world for centuries. Dryden himself expressed the era’s attitude toward liberty of thought in these words: “Of all the tyrannies on human kind/The worst is that which persecutes the mind.”
But for all her intellectual ferment, London was preeminently a city of the sea. This fact was most plainly visible in the forest of masts that crowded the London quays. It was said that as many as two thousand ships might lie at anchor along the Thames on any given day.
A great mass of Londoners depended on the physical handling of seaborne trade: seamen and warehousemen, all those concerned with the supplying and repairing of ships, dock workers, and on top of these, the thousands more who were employed in supplying the needs of sea-trade workers and their families. It has been estimated that in the 1690s, more than a quarter of the city’s total population was, in one way or another, dependent upon the port of London.
In pursuit of the fortunes that astute dealers might accumulate by trading in goods brought in English ships from foreign shores, the merchants of London were rapidly establishing dozens of banking houses, exchanges, markets, and warehouses along the Thames docks. Before the end of the decade, London would surpass even Amsterdam in commercial activity.
England’s new eminence in the world was also reflected in her colonies, especially those across the Atlantic in North America.
Initiated in the reign of Elizabeth I with the settlement of Virginia, England’s empire—which now included the colonies of New York and New Jersey, seized from Holland—hugged the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Spanish Florida. Other colonial outposts dotted the West Indies and the western coast of far-off India.
In the 1690s Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were already significant cities and brisk centers of trade.
In the process of creating, protecting, supplying, and exploiting this busy empire, England and her colonies had fashioned an oceangoing fleet second to none—and had trained the skilled sailors to man it.
It is estimated that in the six decades between 1630 and 1690 English shipping tripled from 115,000 tons to 340,000 tons. Much of this growth in sea power can be attributed to the fact that in her wars with the Dutch and Spanish, England had captured approximately three thousand enemy ships, while losing no more than two thousand vessels of her own—for a net gain of one thousand ships. Contemporary records indicate that more than half the ships in the English merchant fleet in the 1690s were Dutch prizes.
In addition, the Royal Navy—established under Elizabeth I and given its name by Charles II—was also in a period of expansion, although official naval forces were sparse in comparison to the merchant fleet. The armed navy, still in its formative years, was expensive to maintain however—and for this reason England regularly employed armed merchant ships—privateers—to supplement the growing power of her navy. All the maritime states of that era did the same. Because the merchant vessels of the day were constructed much along the lines of men-of-war, carried cannon, and were manned by crews trained to fight, merchant privateers were effective instruments for expanding sea power, especially in their role as raiders of enemy commerce and onshore installations.
With her large number of well-armed trading ships, added to her smaller but very effective Royal Navy, England, by the last decade of the seventeenth century, disposed of sea power at least equal to that of Royal France.
As the seventeenth century entered its final decade, then, an aggressive, thriving England, with her compact new empire sustained by matchless sea power, and governed by a Parliament and king implacably hostile to Louis XIV, confronted a seemingly omnipotent France.
The stage was set for a titanic conflict. Two brilliant powers faced each other in a brilliant age. That they would clash was inevitable.
For the ordinary people of those times, however, such lofty concepts were incomprehensible. For men, women, and children who had to work in order to eat, the splendor of the age did not exist.
The vast majority of humankind lived much as they had always lived: in misery and in toil. Most men and women throughout the world still worked the land, laboring from dawn to dusk to produce a meager crop that they hoped would see them through the long, dark winter, which they usually spent huddled around inadequate fires in rude shelters.
London merchants might gather at Lloyd’s to share a meal
of roast beef and claret before a roaring fire, and colonial masters might enjoy a repast of venison and turkey in a Boston tavern—but the poor of most western nations still subsisted on a diet of coarse bread, turnips, beans, soup, occasional cheese, ale, or, more often, plain water. The poor ate meat as a rule only when the rich gave a feast, or when they dared to risk cruel punishment to poach game from the great estates.
In rural areas, famine was not unknown. In France desperate peasants, not allowed by the tax gatherers to retain enough of their own produce to live on, rose in arms against their masters several times during the century—only to be put down by the well-armed and well-fed soldiers of the regime.
In Spain, it was said, “the rich ate, and ate to excess, watched by a thousand hungry eyes as they consumed their gargantuan meals. The rest of the population starved.”
The ladies of Versailles might dance the night away by the light of a thousand candles, but for the wretched majority the fall of darkness meant only that the time had come to sleep in preparation for the next day’s labor.
Explorers and geographers might discover and map new continents across boundless oceans, but for the vast numbers yoked to the earth, the world consisted only of the immediate neighborhood—the village, the church, the estate of the lord of the land. Few among the working classes, whether they labored in the countryside or in the great cities, knew or cared what might lie beyond their own vicinity.
For all except the rich, life was not only miserable, but brief. Peasants, artisans, laborers, farm women—all usually wore out in their forties, ground down by toil, disease, and inadequate diet.
Women customarily bore a dozen or more children. But only half the infants born in this era lived past their first year—and only half of those who did survive could expect to reach adulthood. In this era, even the children of the wealthy were devastated by disease, although the life expectancy of the rich—unlike that of the poor—increased dramatically after they reached puberty.2
Periodically plague ravaged the cities of Europe. In the summer of 1665 the plague swept through London, killing 100,000 people and leaving the city desolate. Wrote Samuel Pepys in that bleak summer: “But Lord how everybody’s looks and discourse in the street is of death and nothing else; and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.”
Yet as terrifying and destructive as such outbreaks were, starvation, as well as such diseases as cholera, typhus, and smallpox—which were endemic given the poor sanitation of the times—carried off more people over the years than did the periodic eruptions of plague. In fact, because of the perennial exactions of endemic diseases, coupled with the malnutrition of chronic hunger, the population of Europe actually declined over the last half of the seventeenth century from an estimated 118 million in 1650 to approximately 104 million by the century’s end.
Nor were hunger, disease, hard labor, and lack of shelter the only miseries that the majority of mankind had to endure in that glorious age.
Nauseating filth, casual violence, economic exploitation, and judicial cruelty were also rampant.
Nowhere did the filth, violence, cruelty, and exploitation of daily life weigh more heavily on the impoverished multitude than in England, for if England often exemplified the best that the age offered, it also furnished graphic examples of the worst—especially in London itself.
For most of those who had to labor to exist, the London of the 1690s was not a place of scintillating coffee-house conversation and graceful architecture, but a dirty and dangerous city.
The narrow streets, mere alleys between tall buildings, ran like open sewers, with human and animal feces churned into a putrid morass underfoot. Smoke poured from thousands of fires and chimneys, mixing with the mists from the Thames to form poisonous fogs. Violence was everywhere in the great metropolis. Murder was common. Press gangs attacked unwary sailors, knocking them senseless in order to kidnap them for service aboard His Majesty’s ships or aboard shorthanded merchants.
Even sports were violent. A favorite pastime was cockfighting, and gamblers often wagered large sums on contests between birds trained to fight to the death. Baiting bulls, bears, and even tigers with savage trained dogs was also a popular sport for gamblers and idlers, as was bloody, bareknuckle boxing.
It was also an age of murderous state violence not only in England but throughout the world, when incredible cruelty was a routine part of ordinary civic life.
Torture was legal not only as punishment but also as a judicially condoned method for extracting information. The use of the thumbscrew to tear fingers from their sockets, branding on the face with a red-hot iron, nailing by the ears to a post, or whipping through the streets—these were “mild chastisements,” reserved for petty thieves and minor criminals. The law of the day reserved the direst punishments for those who dared oppose the will of the State or the Sovereign. In England, if a man was convicted of treason, he was strung up by the neck until nearly choked to death. Then, still alive, he was cut down, and the executioner cut off his penis and testicles, sliced open his belly, and tore out his entrails. Finally, the convicted man was beheaded—after which his body was cut into quarters.
Female traitors escaped this horrible punishment because, according to the law of the day, “the decency due to their sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies.” Female traitors were therefore burnt at the stake.
Such horrendous executions—performed in public—drew great crowds, including perfumed ladies and fine gentlemen, who often watched from their coaches or from wooden stands especially built for their convenience. The working people and shopkeepers of London often made a holiday of such grisly events, picnicking and laughing with their children, while the condemned screamed forth their last agony. The largest crowd ever to witness such an execution was estimated at 200,000.
Samuel Pepys—always a marvellous witness—gives the flavor of one such celebrated event in his diary: “Went out to Charing Cross to see Major-General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered, which was done there, he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people at which there were great shouts of joy.”
Treason was not, by any means, the only capital crime. Witches died in flames at the stake after long agonies of broken bones and torn joints during interrogation. Poor men—and women, too—desperate for bread, often went to the gallows for stealing a few pence.
The executions of such criminals—carried out in a place called Tyburn, almost in the center of present-day London—were also occasions for public enjoyment. So popular did they become that Londoners referred to the public hangings as “Tyburn Fair.”
In the remorseless struggle to stay alive, the desperate poor often surrendered themselves to vicious exploitation. Girls of twelve could legally become prostitutes—and thousands of young girls wore themselves out with gin and venereal disease in London’s black, stinking lanes. The pale children of debtors were made to sweat in the choking dust of mills, or to shiver in the cold dampness of workhouses, in order to satisfy the obligations of their parents.
For relief many turned to alcohol—and drunkenness was pervasive. London’s poor might not have enough money to feed themselves, but drink was cheaper than bread, and there was always enough money to get drunk. On Gin Lane, where poor sailors, prostitutes, and chimney sweeps drank themselves to death, sly pawnbrokers doled out farthings for drink in exchange for stolen goods—and the saying was: “Drunk for a ha’penny, dead drunk for a penny.”
In the New World, too, life could be bitter. Although, in America’s vastness, they were often invisible, the black slaves, displaced Indians, transported convicts, and indentured servants who performed the noisome labor in the colonies led lives every bit as wretched as those endured by the far more numerous poor of Europe. America—in the 1690s—was not yet the labor-hungry land of opportunity it was to become. At this time it offered no refuge
to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” For the most part it mirrored Europe, bestowing its wealth only on landed aristocrats, the burghers of the new cities, and aggressive merchants.
Nor did the colonies lag behind their mother countries in the use of public cruelty against the helpless. The Spanish enslaved Indians to work their mines. French slave traders in New Orleans had no compunction about ruthlessly tearing slave mothers from their children to make a sale. British colonists freely employed the whipping post, stocks, ducking stool, and gallows to enforce the laws. And witches were hanged publicly in Puritan Massachusetts to protect the common weal.
Yet despite the horrors they had to bear, the helpless majority of people suffered in silent resignation for the most part because they could envision no alternative to their painful lot. Only occasionally did they become desperate enough to rebel—and such rebellions were cruelly and swiftly suppressed.
While most of the laboring poor endured in silence and hoped for God’s justice in the world to come, some sought to escape their wretchedness by running away from it. A few turned to criminal activity. Many more joined the army, or ran away to sea. In England, because of her maritime tradition, thousands of boys and young men fled the hard life of the impoverished in order to follow the sea. Virtually all of them managed to find employment because—during most of this era—England’s rapidly expanding fleet stood in need of sailors.
GUILDHALL LIBRARY, LONDON
From the perspective of the untutored poor, a sailor’s lot must have seemed superior to a life of toil on land. At least the sailor labored in the fresh air, under the sky, sustained by the rough camaraderie of shipmates. These were conditions far better than the foul atmosphere of a mill or a mine or a prison. Furthermore, if the work a sailor did was hard, it was no harder than a farmer’s daily toil. If the food aboard ship was often putrid with maggots and mold, at least a sailor could always fill his gut with some sort of fare. If the sailor was often cold and wet at his work, so were the miner and the coachman. In addition, sailors usually earned more than landlubbers. English and colonial seamen, at any rate, ordinarily earned twice what a laborer earned.