Whittington worked in the mercers’ quarter, around Bow Church in Cheapside, and he worked hard, from early in the morning till 8 p.m., when the church bells sounded the end of the working day. His name first crops up in the records in 1379, when he had probably just completed his seven-year apprenticeship, and he makes his first loan to the state—5 marks to the city authorities.
We glimpse him again nine years later, when he has shinned up the greasy pole to become one of eight common councilmen for Coleman Street Ward. In 1390 he gives £10—a lot of money, as much as the Mayor would be expected to give—for the defence of the city. By 1393, by which time he must be in his middle to late thirties, he has attained the rank of alderman. He became sheriff in 1394.
His rise is unremarkable—neither especially quick nor slow—but by now he has enough dosh to be ranked with the great moneymen of the age, men like Brembre or William Walworth. The decisive moment comes in 1397, as the reign of Richard II is moving fitfully to its close.
You will remember that the King was ill-disposed towards the City, for its role in the attempted coup against him by the “Lords Appellant”; and you will remember that Richard had attacked the City’s democratic institutions by appointing his own Warden. On the death of the Mayor, Adam Bamme, he decided arbitrarily to make Richard Whittington Mayor of London. He was a man, said the King, “in whose fidelity and circumspection we repose full confidence.” But Dick Whittington knew it was no good appearing to be the glove puppet of the King. He needed the support of his peers. There would have to be an election. So for £10,000 payable to His Majesty, he arranged for the City to buy back the ancient freedom of self-government conferred by the Conqueror, and on 13 October 1397 he was duly elected Mayor, with the approbation not just of the King but of the City merchants as well.
Two years later came the coup. Henry Bolingbroke took over, Richard starved to death in captivity and a new dynasty was born. Yet Whittington sailed on regardless; indeed, the new king Henry IV agreed that he should be paid a debt of £1,000 still owed to him by Richard II. It is a comment on Whittington’s chameleon skills that one king should pay him the debts incurred by another. Dick Whittington had the guile and the tact to be in with everyone.
He sold goods worth £2,000 to Robert de Vere, the notorious favourite and supposed lover of Richard II. Remember that crackling and burning of expensive drapery in the London house of John of Gaunt during the Peasants’ Revolt? Whittington supplied the replacement soft furnishings. When Blanche and Philippa, daughters of Henry IV, were looking for wedding silks, Team Whittington was there with the tape measure. It is tempting to imagine that his calm and expertise gave him a hold over the women of the household, who must surely have been involved in these decisions of colour and taste. The reality, however, is that London’s champion mercer had an even more powerful means of binding himself to his royal clients. Between 1392 and 1394 he sold goods worth £3,500 to the household of Richard II, and he was far too smart just to pocket the proceeds. He loaned it back to the cash-hungry monarchs of England.
From 1388 onwards he made no fewer than sixty loans to the crown, with the biggest going to Henry IV and Henry V—and he did it even though usury was illegal.
England was then a good Catholic country, obedient to the teachings of the Bible. “Usury of any thing that is lent is unclean,” says Deuteronomy, and Ambrose of Milan had raged in the fifth century against the very concept of lending money at interest. “Thou collectest wealth from the misery of all, and callest this industry and diligence, when it is but cunning shrewdness and an adroit trick of the trade!” said Ambrose, and he no doubt speaks for many who have coped for years with the charges imposed by British banks. In 1139 the second Lateran Council concluded that usury was theft, and indeed it was banned for everyone except Jews; and Jews were able to continue to lend money at interest only because a careful reading of Deuteronomy showed that it was forbidden to charge interest “to thy brother,” which was taken to mean other Jewish people. Lending to Gentiles was fine.
It must be said that the Jews suffered terribly for performing this function, which is now recognised everywhere (except possibly Tehran) as vital for an expanding capitalist economy. The story of medieval English persecution of the Jews is so hideous that we are sometimes in danger of airbrushing it from the curriculum: the massacres in London and York in 1189–1190; the behaviour of Simon de Montfort in expelling the Jews from Leicester. There were hundreds of other disgraceful episodes. In 1290 Edward I expelled Jews from the kingdom altogether, and the chief moneylenders of the English economy did not return until the age of Oliver Cromwell.
There was a gap in the market, and Whittington filled it with chutzpah. He didn’t take interest for his loans, dear me no, nothing so vile as interest. He merely ensured that he was exempt from various dues and taxes that would otherwise go to the Royal Household. Now given that the wool trade dominated the economy, it is not surprising that the most lucrative permanent source of royal revenue was “wool subsidy”—a tax payable to the King on exports of wool and cloth to the Continent. In exchange for his loans, Whittington obtained letters patent from the King exempting him from wool subsidy; and if he didn’t pay wool subsidy, he could export the stuff more cheaply than anybody else; and then he would make even more money, and lend even more to the King, and win himself ever bigger tax exemptions and an ever bigger share of the market.
By 1404 he was exporting wool from both London and Chichester, and in 1407 he had a monopoly of wool exports from Chichester, sending out six shiploads of wool to Calais and a total of 250 sacks. And by adroitly manipulating his position as one of the big lenders to the Crown, he was able to further his own commercial interests. At one stage he followed in the footsteps of Chaucer by becoming the “collector of the wool custom and subsidy in London.” It is a transparent conflict of interest. It is like asking the chief executive of Goldman Sachs to serve simultaneously as head of the Financial Services Authority. He could grant himself a licence to export wool without paying customs duty.
Whittington became rich by the most tremendous dodge. He concealed, or dressed up, the interest that he received on his loans. And yet he was so venerated by the twin poles of London’s power—court and City—that he was not only knighted by Henry V but asked to sit in judgment on usury trials in 1421, as though he was not himself committing usury by another name.
The world of royal finance was strewn with hair-trigger mines. It required genius to negotiate and we must conclude that Dick Whittington was a financier of genius, because throughout his life he retained that essential element of trust. Already in 1382 he was the kind of man who could be given pearls and jewels and other goods to hold, worth a total of £600, without, apparently, being asked for any security in return.
Such was his prestige that he was elected Mayor again in 1406 and again in 1419 (the fourth time, if you include his initial appointment by Richard II), and he died in 1423 with a knighthood and just about the most perfect reputation of any businessman before or since. He was a banker, a usurer in all but name, and yet his life is portrayed every year as a rags-to-riches story of triumph against the odds.
The simple reason for his modern halo is that Dick Whittington gave, and he gave on a scale that is completely alien to modern British culture—though not, perhaps, to modern America.
By the time he died there was scarcely an aspect of London life that had not felt his beneficence. He adorned and improved the Guildhall. He supervised the expenditure to complete Westminster Abbey. He was so appalled by the conditions in Newgate jail, where prisoners were dropping like flies to prison fever, that he opened a separate prison for debtors at Ludgate. He created a ward for unmarried mothers at St. Thomas’ Hospital, and drainage systems for Billingsgate and Cripplegate.
He rebuilt his own parish church, St. Michael Paternoster Royal, and he was so tender-hearted as to provide accommodation for his own a
pprentices in his own house, and to pass a law, as Mayor, forbidding the washing of animal skins in the Thames in cold, wet weather—because so many apprentices were being forced to do it and were catching their death of cold. He caused the building of one of the first public drinking fountains in London—possibly the very first; and he created a public toilet, possibly the first since Roman times, in the parish of St. Martin Vintry. It was not a particularly complicated or sanitary affair, since it was flushed by the Thames at high tide; but it constituted a vague medieval stab in the direction of hygiene, and was known long after as “Whittington’s longhouse.” Even when he died, the cascade of money did not die, and its trickle can still be seen today. Whittington had married Alice, daughter of Sir Hugh or Sir John (or even Sir Ivo) Fitzwarren, but they do not appear to have had any children; and he left £7,000 in his will, which has been used over the generations to fund the kind of project that would normally be left to the state. Whittington money repaired St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His legacy created a trust, still administered by the Mercers’ company, that distributes money to three hundred poor people a year; and to this day—six hundred years later—Dick Whittington continues to provide almshouses for those who have fallen on hard times.
In the village of Felbridge, near East Grinstead, there are fifty-six flats available for single women or married couples on low incomes. Go on the website and you will see that they appear to be delightful places, set in rose-filled gardens. There are studios and one-bed and two-bed apartments available for those over sixty who find themselves in straitened circumstances. No pets are accepted, it says; which of course reminds me—why did the fictional Whittington acquire a cat, when there is no trace of his feline friend in the historical record?
Some say it has to do with a print of Whittington, in which his hand was resting on a skull until that image was thought too morbid and the skull was replaced with a cat. Some say it is an echo of a tenth-century tale from Arabia, all about a poor boy whose only possession was a mouse-killing cat and who went on to become one of the great men of the kingdom. But surely the answer is obvious.
The reason Dick Whittington was equipped by posterity with a cat was that it made him appear yet kinder and gentler and more humane. It was in keeping with his character as it had become understood by the London public. He may have been poor, but like so many poor people he was not too poor to look after a cat; and because the English are particularly fond of animals, the cat became shorthand for the extreme generosity of Whittington’s soul.
In that sense, the myth hints at a poetic truth. London needed Whittington’s capitalist drive and entrepreneurial spirit. Successive kings needed him to help fund their ventures. Agincourt, that totemic victory over the French, exalted by Shakespeare as a critical moment in the maturing of English confidence, was partly funded by Whittington. He was a major player, economically and politically; but it is his philanthropy that has gilded his reputation.
He deserves that reputation, and the more we delve into the truth behind the legend, the more respectful we become. In 1569 Richard Grafton’s Chronicle concludes an account of his bequests and euergetism with the exhortation “Look on thys, ye aldermen, for it is a glorious glasse.” In the same spirit we can say today, “Look on Dick Whittington, ye bankers and plutocrats of London, for he is a glorious example.”
There is one final achievement of Dick Whittington that we should mention. It was thanks to one of his bequests that in 1423 there opened London’s first public library.
It was located next to the Guildhall, and the idea was that citizens should be able to get hold of books that might otherwise have been reserved for the clergy or the aristocracy. By 1476 that library was filling up with books printed by William Caxton on his wonderful new machine, and then by works from the press of Wynkyn de Worde.
By the time Wynkyn died in 1535 he had published eight hundred books—and that explosion in the availability of the printed word, for loan as well as for sale, had incalculable consequences for the intellectual and religious life of London. It was the beginning of a mass market for literature of all kinds.
In the following year King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, in one of the greatest pro-business moves of any government in history. Suddenly ecclesiastical land and property became available to the aspirant merchant classes. Fine property was up for grabs—cheap.
The guilds moved in, the leathersellers taking over a nunnery, for instance, and the butchers taking over a parsonage. Soon the great Elizabethan trading companies were being founded, beginning in 1555 with the Muscovy company. They were joint-stock ventures financed by London’s expert bankers.
In spite of repeated outbreaks of the plague, the population soared, overtaking Venice, and by 1580 it was not far behind Paris. The city burst out of its ancient boundaries in sprawling Tudor ribbon developments.
In the East End there was a mixture of housing and small industrial concerns: bell-founding, glass-making, ivory- and horn-working, followed by silk-weaving and papermaking. In the West End, rich men started to build posh houses. With thousands of immigrants arriving from poorer areas of the country, London started to account for an ever larger share of English trade and of the English population.
With an increasingly literate and prosperous bourgeoisie, there was a market for entertainment, from someone who could not only come up with a good story, but who could subtly and not-so-subtly glorify the culture and achievement of Elizabethan England. Whittington not only paid for Agincourt; he helped to subsidise a London literary culture that would eventually produce that battle’s supreme artistic commemoration.
William Shakespeare
And how London pioneered the modern theatre
Shortly before they opened the reconstructed Globe Theatre in Southwark in 1997, I went down there to interview Zoë Wanamaker, the Harry Potter star of the tip-tilted nose, whose late father, Sam, had been the visionary responsible for making it all happen.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, and it may be that I hadn’t prepared the interview with my normal attention to detail. But when Zoë and I walked into the middle of that wooden O, and we stood in what was intended to be the auditorium, I confess I was a bit taken aback.
“You mean there aren’t any seats?” I said to Zoë.
“That’s right,” she said.
“And you seriously expect people to come and stand here for hours on end and listen to Shakespeare?”
“Of course they will,” she said, with the exuberance of an American; and though I was too polite to say so at the time, my first thought was, you have got to be kidding. When you look at the Elizabethan theatre experience, it seems incredible that they put up with it.
They had to leave the limits of the city for the “liberties,” the lawless stews on the perimeter where the theatres were allowed, places like Southwark, with a reputation for whores and bearbaiting and thievery of all kinds. They had to hold their noses as they went past the industries that were forbidden within the city walls: the fullers with their naturally procured ammonia; the gluemakers boiling up bones into a fog of smell. And if that wasn’t enough to knock you out, there were the tanners, who liked to make their hides supple by steeping them—there is no easy way of putting this—in vats of stewed dog turd. They then went into a theatre that had no roof, so they ran the risk of being drenched or squinting at the sun.
There was no system of heating or cooling the building. The whole place was at constant risk of catching fire, or just falling over, like the theatre that collapsed in St. John Street, killing thirty or forty people and “two good, handsome whores.” There were pickpockets everywhere, and women constantly at risk of having their plackets groped. There were no toilets, and some playgoers relieved themselves helplessly on the backs of the legs in front of them, so that the ground beneath was a mulch of spilt beer and oyster shells and less wholesome substances.
As for the crowd themselves—well, there has been much debate, but the overwhelming opinion is that, in large part, they really were the London mob. As the indignant Privy Council put it in 1597, they were vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horse-stealers, whoremongers, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason and other idle and dangerous persons. When they put back their warty heads and opened their carious mouths to laugh or shout as one, the actors on stage would be bathed in what the playwright Thomas Dekker called “the breath of the great beast.” They were the “penny stinkards,” he said. They didn’t get much of a spectacle for their penny.
There were no curtains. There was not much scenery. The costumes were eccentrically cobbled together from the hand-me-downs of rich men. The lighting was amateurish and the special effects revolved around the blood or organs of sheep. There weren’t any pretty actresses to ogle because the female parts were all played by men, for some English reason that did not prove compelling in other parts of Europe.
The whole thing might go on for three or four hours, followed by a “jig,” a bizarre Elizabethan dance, rather like the satyr play that followed ancient Greek tragedies but a bit mystifying to us. If you paid a shilling, I suppose you might sit on cushions in the Lords’ room; if you paid sixpence there was the relative comfort of the gentlemen’s room; but the overwhelming majority were prepared to pay good money—enough to buy a loaf of bread weighing a pound—to stand in conditions of acute discomfort.
No modern English audience would put up with it in a football stadium, let alone a theatre. And yet the Elizabethans loved it, and they came week in, week out, in huge numbers. On any given day—assuming they hadn’t been closed for plague—you could expect to find two plays being staged in theatres that held between two and three thousand spectators each. So over one week, assuming five days of performances, about fifteen thousand Londoners paid to see a play. That makes sixty thousand a month—in a city with a population of two hundred thousand!
Johnson's Life of London Page 9