Then came the news that the New Model Army was fighting itself, the Rump had been kicked out, and people were talking about restoring the monarchy. Straight away Charles put out a declaration promising that if he was made king, he wouldn’t be like his father but would rule fairly. In London General Monck called a convention to decide who should run Britain, and after reading Charles’s declaration it asked him back as king.
Everyone in Charles’s court cheered when the news arrived. The Convention sent a ship to carry him back to England. It came from Oliver Cromwell’s navy, and had once been called Naseby, after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. The Convention could see how tactless that was and quickly renamed it the Royal Charles. On the voyage back to Britain, Charles told his companions his story of hiding in an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester. Most of them had heard it a hundred times before, but they didn’t mind. The fugitive in the forest was about to be crowned king of England.
Crowds waited at Dover to cheer Charles’s return, and at every stop on his journey to London, people flocked to see their king. They sang and waved flags, for at last the Puritans were gone and they could play music, dance and enjoy themselves. And everyone liked the look of the new king, who was more than six feet tall, with dark skin and thick brown hair. He didn’t seem to take himself too seriously, but joked with everybody – and winked at every pretty girl in the crowd.
Meanwhile, jewellers were already making new Crown jewels, for the Puritans had melted down England’s ancient crown and sceptre. And on the night Charles reached London, fireworks soared into the sky.
“Never was so joyful a day ever seen in this nation,” wrote one of the people watching the royal procession. “I stood in the Strand and beheld it, and blessed God.”
Scientists
IT seemed as if people had done nothing for years but argue about politics and religion. But of course they had been busy with other things as well, for life goes on even in troubled times. During the civil wars and the Interregnum (the time when Britain had no king), merchants went on trading, and authors went on writing books. And scientists made discoveries that completely changed how people thought about the world.
In those days people didn’t think it was possible to find out more than they already knew, and that wasn’t much. They didn’t understand diseases and infections. They didn’t know about molecules and atoms, planets and stars, why things fall when you drop them, what your lungs and liver do, or why acid burns. That was why doctors weren’t much use when you fell sick, and why people still travelled on horseback, heated their houses by lighting fires, and went to bed at sunset because there were only candles to read by. They had no telephones, computers or TVs, no aeroplanes, cars or space rockets, no machine guns or tanks, no fridges and no electricity, because no one knew enough to invent them.
But towards the end of the Middle Ages, as the Renaissance and Reformation made everyone question their beliefs, some people started to look at the world around them more curiously. The Polish astronomer Copernicus watched the stars until he discovered that the earth and planets revolved around the sun, not the sun around the earth. Before then, most people believed the earth was the centre of everything (athough the ancient Greeks had discovered the truth, everyone had forgotten). An Italian called Galileo made the first telescope, and proved Copernicus right.
The Church was furious with Galileo. It worried that if people asked too many questions about the world, they would stop believing in God and going to church. They even made Galileo give up his experiments. But since the Reformation, the Catholic Church no longer controlled the whole of Europe, and it couldn’t stop people elsewhere questioning things.
An Englishman called Sir Francis Bacon, who lived in the time of James I, loved asking questions.
“If you’re not sure about something,” he said, “you must carry out an experiment. If you want your experiment to work, you must measure things accurately. That’s the only way to know if something is true.”
Bacon lost his life doing an experiment. He wanted to know if keeping food cold would make it last longer, so he went out on a winter’s night to stuff a chicken with snow. He proved that freezing preserves food, but caught cold and died.
Bacon’s method of testing whether things were true was the start of science, although experimenters in those days didn’t call themselves scientists but “experimental philosophers”. People didn’t have to guess any more. And the things they discovered by experiments were more wonderful than any story. William Harvey discovered the heart was a tiny pump that pushed blood round the body. John Flamsteed set up a telescope at Greenwich and made the first catalogue of the stars. An Irish scientist called Robert Boyle wondered whether air was “something” or “nothing”, so he made a pump and connected it to a metal ball.
“What is inside the metal ball?” he asked the people watching.
“Nothing,” someone replied.
“On the contrary,” said Boyle. “The ball is full of air. If we take the air out, then it will be full of nothing.”
He began to pump, a dent appeared in the ball, and suddenly it crumpled into a lump of twisted metal – he had made a vacuum. Thanks to Boyle, people began to understand about air and pressure.
When the king was restored and peace returned, people became more and more excited about science. Charles II, who loved experiments, started the Royal Society for scientists. It still exists today, and the most famous of all scientists, Isaac Newton, was one of its first members.
Newton had very odd habits. When he was working on an experiment, he became so absent-minded that he forgot to eat for days on end. At Cambridge, where he went to university, gardeners didn’t smooth over any marks they saw on the gravel paths in case they were calculations Newton had made when he was out for a walk.
First, Newton discovered gravity. Before then, people took it for granted that things fell downwards when you dropped them, but Newton worked out why. He worked out why the planets move in the way they do and what holds the stars and planets together. Then he investigated light and discovered that white isn’t the emptiest colour, as you’d expect, but the fullest, being made up of all the other colours put together.
Today we understand much more about the world and the universe than ever before, and scientists keep on discovering things. But Newton understood that the world is so vast and complex that there will always be more to find out. Just before he died, someone asked him about his wonderful discoveries. “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore,” he replied, “and diverting myself in now and then finding a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Plague
TO start with, everything went well after the king was restored. Many people felt as if they were waking up from a nightmare. They were allowed to dance again, and go to the theatre. Noblemen dressed in the brightest colours they could find. Merchants imported rich silks and bought other fashions from China as well: wallpaper to decorate houses, and furniture far lighter and more elegant than people in Britain were used to. They imported coffee, and coffee houses opened all over London. People used to go there in the morning to read newspapers and meet their friends.
The king was among the first to adopt each new fashion. He put on Chinese clothes, then started to wear a wig, a fashion copied from France. Charles’s court was a gay scene of parties and dances, while the prettiest women competed for the king’s attention. But just when Britain seemed set for a new age of pleasure and prosperity, it was struck by a series of disasters – first plague, then fire, then war.
Hundreds of years before, the Black Death had killed a third of the people in Britain and Ireland. The plague had never been so bad since, though it had never quite gone away, so when doctors found one case in London, they weren’t too worried – at first.
But then they found another. And another.
London was very dirty and crowded. The streets were made
of mud and the buildings of wood. Houses jutted out so far that they almost touched each other, blocking all sunlight from the ground. Streets ended in crooked alleys where hundreds of people lived together, sleeping ten to a room. There were no toilets or drains. The whole town stank of horse dung and rotting food.
In such a dirty, crowded place diseases spread quickly, and there was nothing doctors could do to help. Today we know plague is spread by fleas carried on rats, but doctors in those days didn’t know where it came from and had no medicines to cure it. Children watched their parents groaning, with eyes rolling and terrible black swellings erupting in their armpits, but all they could do was pray. The authorities sealed up every house where there was a case of plague and painted a red cross on the door. The victims’ families were sealed up with them, and passers-by, seeing faces peering out of the windows, knew most of them were doomed. Every week, newspapers published lists of how many had died. Soon the graveyards were full, so pits were dug on the outskirts of the city; and each morning, carts rumbled through the streets to pick up the bodies.
“Bring out your dead!” chanted the drivers.
Families loaded the corpses of their dead parents or children onto the carts, and they were taken away and thrown into the pits.
The rich left the city to escape the danger, while the poor watched from alleyways as their carriages rolled past. They couldn’t escape – they had nowhere else to go. Markets were deserted, and shops boarded up, while the lists in the newspapers grew longer and longer. Only when winter came did the plague end. But by then thousands in London had died.
Other towns were struck by the plague as well. Norwich had an epidemic, and so did Portsmouth and Newcastle. The little village of Eyam, in Derbyshire, had its own attack of the plague, which came in a chest of infected cloth from London. When the women who unpacked the chest fell sick, the vicar of Eyam, William Mompesson, realized his village was doomed. He called a meeting, and the villagers bravely agreed that to stop the plague reaching the neighbouring villages, they would shut Eyam off from the world. No one would be allowed in or out.
For more than a year, nothing was heard from Eyam. It was as if the village no longer existed. Only when the plague was over did the church bells ring again, and people from neighbouring villages went down the road to see what had happened. They found William Mompesson praying in his church, but only a few villagers were left to pray with him.
Everyone else was dead.
The Great Fire
THE plague came to an end, but London’s troubles were not over, for in the very next year it was destroyed by fire. The blaze started in a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, near London Bridge. Fires happened quite often in those days, because all the houses were made of wood, so when the lord mayor was told about it, he didn’t even bother to get out of bed.
“Pish!” he said. “A woman might piss it out!”
But that night a strong wind was blowing. It plucked sparks from the flames and scattered them across the rest of the city. Soon two or three fires were burning. Because the buildings were close together, the fire easily jumped from one to the next. By the following morning, everyone who lived near Pudding Lane had to move out of their houses, while soldiers ran to and from the river with buckets of water to throw on the flames.
It didn’t do any good. The fire spread further. A pall of smoke hung over London, and smuts fell on the Thames like black snowflakes. The roads out of the city were blocked with people pushing carts piled with chairs, chests and cooking pots. Scared-looking children ran alongside, carrying their pet cats and dogs. In the city itself, the roaring of flames was so loud that no one could hear the orders soldiers shouted. Burning roofs exploded in showers of sparks. Men and women shoved along the streets, trying to save their possessions before the fire devoured them.
Rumours spread along the alleyways.
“The fire’s reached Shoreditch!”
“It’s almost at St Paul’s Cathedral!”
When night fell, the fire was still raging. London Bridge was in flames, and the river Thames glowed orange in its reflection. Some escaped in boats piled high with possessions – suitcases, tables, even musical instruments – and stared in horror at their burning city, above which St Paul’s Cathedral blazed like a great candle.
After three days, the fire was stopped by blowing up the houses nearest the flames, so there was nothing for them to burn. But by then most Londoners had lost their homes and were living in refugee camps around the city. After the fire Samuel Pepys, who kept a diary, went for a walk through London. The streets were still hot, and there were piles of charred wood everywhere. He climbed a church tower to see how much had been destroyed, and what lay before him almost made him weep. “It was the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw,” he wrote in his diary.
In just three days, old London had disappeared.
The Dutch Wars
AFTER plague and fire, people hoped they were due for a run of good luck, but instead the disasters went on. The third was a war against the Dutch.
The Dutch, who had won their freedom from the Spanish, were the newest and strangest nation in Europe. They didn’t have a king, allowed many different religions, and became rich not by fighting but by trade. In time, people in Britain would learn many lessons from the Dutch, who became their allies, but to start with they were furious that Dutch trade rivalled their own. Oliver Cromwell had fought a war against them, and Charles II fought two more.
When they had faced the Spanish Armada, the English had proved themselves the better sailors, but the Dutch, who were used to the sandbanks and tides of the North Sea, were just as skilful. The year after the Fire of London, Admiral de Ruyter led his ships up the Thames to the river Medway, where the English fleet was anchored. Before anyone could raise the alarm, he seized some of the English ships and sank the rest, then sailed back to Holland in triumph.
Never before had the English suffered so shameful a defeat at sea. They won victories against the Dutch as well, but even so, the wars gained little, and some people started to mutter that since the Restoration, Charles’s kingdoms had known nothing but plague, fire and defeat.
“We shouldn’t have called the king back!” they grumbled.
And all the old arguments about politics and religion started up again.
The Exclusion Crisis
WHEN Charles II became king he had ordered Oliver Cromwell’s body to be dug up. He had executed the MPs who signed Charles I’s death warrant. He had passed laws to make everyone join the Church of England and to stop Puritans getting jobs. He called Parliament for a few years, but then dismissed it and ruled alone.
“Charles II is turning out just like Charles I,” Puritans grumbled.
Most people didn’t mind at first, because they were so glad the wars were over. But when things went wrong, they started to complain. They grumbled about Charles’s mistresses, his fine clothes and his extravagant habits. Charles, who was clever and charming but very lazy, preferred parties to running his kingdoms. They criticized him for not calling Parliament. And most of all, they complained about his friendship with the king of France.
The king of France, Louis XIV, was the most powerful ruler in Europe. He called himself the Sun King, because he was as mighty as the sun. He built a huge palace at Versailles, and had absolute power in France, never calling parliaments or asking for advice. Louis sent Charles money so he could do without taxes and avoid calling Parliament in England. People began to wonder whether Charles wanted to become an absolute monarch himself.
They didn’t trust Louis’ faith either, for he was a Catholic and Catholics were becoming more and more unpopular in Britain. People feared they were trying to take over the country (even though there were so few Catholics in England and Scotland that they had nothing to worry about). They even accused them of starting the Fire of London.
“Catholics care more about their faith than their country,” they muttered. And they noticed how many of Ch
arles’s friends were Catholic – his wife, Catherine of Braganza; several of his mistresses; and his younger brother, James, who suddenly announced he was giving up the Church of England to become Catholic. Charles had no legitimate children (meaning children with his wife, the queen – he had plenty of children with his mistresses), so James was next in line for the throne when Charles died.
“We could end up with a Catholic king!” people said nervously.
So when rumours spread of a “popish” plot to kill Charles, crown James and make Britain Catholic again, many people believed them. To start with, Charles didn’t take the plot seriously, for James was unpopular.
“Who’d kill me to make you king?” he joked.
But the rumours grew until he had to call Parliament. Parliament had split by now into two parties. Tories supported the king, saying his right to rule came from God, and no one could challenge him. Whigs (many of whom were Nonconformists, meaning they refused to join the Church of England) said the king had to obey the law like everyone else, that his power came from the people, and if the people didn’t like the way he ruled, they could get rid of him.
Whigs began a campaign to have James excluded from the throne. Riots broke out in London, and it looked as if Charles’s kingdoms were heading for another civil war. But although many disliked James and hated the thought of a Catholic king, they hated the idea of civil war even more. So when Charles dismissed Parliament after three years of arguing, most people supported him. Whigs were furious, though, and some began a plot to assassinate Charles and James at Rye House, on their way back from Newmarket races. When the plot failed, Charles executed its leaders and retaliated by passing laws against Nonconformists, who were no longer allowed to worship in their own way.
Then Charles, who is sometimes called the Merry Monarch because of his sense of humour, started to behave like a tyrant. Newspapers could only print what the king allowed. Many Whigs fled into exile in Holland. In Scotland the Covenanters started a revolt against him but were beaten, and many exiled or put to death. To Scots, the last years of Charles’s reign became known as the Killing Time.
The Story of Britain Page 13