The Last Revolution

by Patrick Dillon

  The break which the fire made in London’s history was as stark as the gap the Civil War had opened in the country’s political life. To close it, Londoners could have built an exact replica of their old town, of course – somewhat as politicians had tried to reconstruct the prewar monarchy at the Restoration. Instead, more radical plans had been suggested, showing a city of Italianate piazzas, long vistas and regular grids of houses (drawings which must have seemed as futuristic at the time as 1960s impressions of freeways and tower blocks). The problem was that it was cheaper, then as now, to develop green fields than ruined buildings, and the court at Westminster, a mile west of the City, was a beacon both of fashion and lucrative office. A futuristic new London would indeed take shape after the fire – but not within the City’s walls. It rose, instead, on open fields to the west, as Dudley North discovered when he first set out to explore the town.

  On 6 April 1677, Richard Frith signed a fifty-three-year lease on the open farmland of Soho Fields. A building licence had already been obtained by an entrepreneur called Joseph Girle, who had himself leased the ground from the Earl of St Albans. The development was typical, then, of London’s westward expansion, for behind it lay profits for courtiers who could persuade the Crown to grant them estates near Westminster. Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans, was the friend (and rumoured husband) of Henrietta Maria, the Queen Mother, and the man behind the successful 1660s development of St James’s Square and Jermyn Street.

  Frith’s contract demonstrated the legal complexity which already clouded London property. Nobody seemed to own land outright anymore. Frith would pay Girle rent of £300 the first year, £400 thereafter, with a clause allowing him to buy out his lease for £4,000 two years later. There happened to be some pre-existing agricultural tenancies on the land, but Frith was confident he would be able to buy these out. Just as intricate was the financial package behind the proposed development. One of the many changes which struck Dudley on his return was in business practice. ‘Almost all’ merchants now used bankers rather than ready cash. Roger remembered that the first time Dudley visited the Exchange, he came home ‘in great amazement at his own greatness; for the banking goldsmiths came to him upon the Exchange with low obeisances hoping for the honour – should be proud to serve him and the like; and all for nothing but to have the keeping of his cash’.1 The banker Dudley selected for this honour, Benjamin Hinton, happened also to be banker for Richard Frith’s Soho development. It was Hinton who would provide cash for the project, and, to ease it further, Frith brought in Cadogan Thomas, a timber-merchant who would provide building materials in return for a mortgage on the estate. Joseph Girle, the original lessee of the estate, also had interests in a brick-making business, and contracted to supply £2,000-worth of bricks a year.

  Everything started well. It was Gregory King, who would later work on the printed record of James’s coronation, whom Richard Frith selected to design and lay out the new estate. The showpiece would be King, or Soho, Square, ‘a very large and open Place, enclosed with a high pallisado pale, the Square within being neatly kept, with walks and grass-plots’.2 Its central statue of Charles II and the Four Rivers echoed Bernini’s recent masterpiece in Piazza Navona, with Nile, Danube, Plate and Ganges replaced by Thames, Severn, Trent and Humber. Frith hoped to lure in a number of fashionable opinion-formers as magnets to other tenants, and Soho would also have its own new church, St Anne’s. Gregory King’s layout was a simple but effective grid. The houses were in the modern brick style, uniform, flat-fronted, with regular rows of sash windows. Inside, each house offered a pair of rooms per floor, both well-lit, well-heated and of a regular shape.

  The houses could not, in other words, have presented a greater contrast with traditional London lodgings. ‘When I compare the modern English way of building with the old way,’ the foreign visitor Guy Miège would later record,

  ‘I cannot but wonder at the genius of old times. Nothing is more delightful and convenient than light, nothing more agreeable to health than a free air. And yet of old they used to dwell in houses, most with a blind stair-case, low ceilings, and dark windows; the rooms built at random, often with steps from one to another, so that one would think the men of former ages were afraid of light and good air, or loved to play at hide and seek.’3

  Finding it hard to make ends meet on his small estate in Suffolk, Edmund Bohun moved up to London in October 1685. He planned to make a living as a writer, but the lodgings he found in the old City were so ‘dark, stinking, and inconvenient [that] I was heartily ashamed of them when any of my better friends came to see me’.4 Even wealthy Londoners had grown up in a city of sunless courtyards and wooden houses subdivided into airless labyrinths. Dudley North moved out of his brother’s house in Covent Garden into a palatial mansion in the City, but soon regretted it.

  ‘Smoke and dust filled the air and confounded all his good furniture. He hath in person laboured hard to caulk up the windows ... but notwithstanding all that could be done to prevent it, the dust gathered thick upon everything.’5

  The regular, bright avenues of the West End offered a whole new way of life, healthy, convenient, and modern. For Richard Frith, meanwhile, the new way of building them had advantages of its own. Those regular rows of brick houses with deal floors, each one so many feet across, could be mass-produced. The terraced house was not only a breakthrough in cityscape but in standardisation. By subdividing his streets into smaller plots, meanwhile, Frith could also miniaturise and subdivide the finance – and risk – for the whole project.

  John Markham, a carpenter, took on several of the new Soho houses in 1678. He accepted leases in lieu of payment for work elsewhere on the estate. In other words, he turned himself from a tradesman into an investor, a risk-taker. Needing finance to complete his houses, he went to the victualler, William Hall, who supplied food and drink to his men, and offered him a mortgage. There was risk involved, but the prize, for Markham, made the risk worthwhile. If the scheme succeeded he would end up as landlord of three valuable London houses.

  As the brick walls rose out of Gregory King’s trenches, as rafters were tiled over and carpenters fitted sashes into the gaping window openings, the future looked bright for everyone involved in the Soho Fields development. Workmen sawed timbers for joists; cartloads of bricks rumbled in from Joseph Girle’s brickworks in Marylebone. In September 1679 Frith bought out his lease. The principals totted up their profits; John Markham calculated his own modest fortune. Maybe in the next development, further west, he would be the one to put together financial deals and sign contracts with Dukes.

  But a forgotten detail now returned to haunt Richard Frith. The old agricultural tenants stalled on selling out their leases. Behind them, although Frith didn’t know it yet, was a rival: the king of all property developers, the man who first ‘invented this new method of building by casting of ground into streets and small houses ... and selling the ground to workmen by so much per foot front’,6 the most ruthless, flamboyant and controversial businessman in London, Dr Nicholas Barbon.

  Roger North got to know Nicholas Barbon well after the fire at the Temple, when he headed the committee for reconstruction and Barbon won the development contract. Apart from anything else, Barbon symbolised the astonishing gap between men of the Civil Wars and the emerging generation. Barbon’s father, Praisegod Barebones, was a member of Cromwell’s parliament, an Anabaptist lay preacher who delivered six-hour hellfire sermons in his leather shop on Fleet Street. His son belonged to a new world. Admiring (and slightly shocked) Roger North watched the master-entrepreneur at work. ‘I have seen his house in a morning like a court, crowded with suitors for money. And he kept state, coming down at his own time like a magnifico, in déshabille ... And having very much work, [contractors] were loth to break [with him] ... And thus he would force them to take houses at his own rates instead of money, and so by contrivance, shifting and many losses, he kept his wheel turning, lived all the while splendidly, was a mystery in his time, un
certain whether worth anything or no.’7

  Barbon’s genius was not in architecture – although the simplified classicism he pioneered produced one of the most beautiful of all cityscapes. It was certainly not in construction. Roger North visited houses newly built on the Barbon method in Arlington Street and found the chimneys already subsiding. His skill was as a businessman – charming creditors, juggling debts, sweet-talking clients.

  ‘He said it was not worth his while to deal little; that a bricklayer could do. The gain he expected was out of great undertakings ... and because this trade required a greater stock than he had, perhaps £30,000 or £40,000, he must compass his designs either by borrowed money or by credit with those he dealt with.’8

  London’s new development was not welcomed by everyone. Barbon’s business methods attracted opprobrium; the old City worried about the 3,500 houses which now stood empty within the walls. To many, besides, the growth of the capital seemed a symptom of disease. Like a healthy body, a healthy society should not change. A town swollen to seven times the size it had been a century before (by the most alarmist estimates) must be sick. Conservatives likened London’s ailment to rickets, ‘fancying the City to be the head of the nation, and that it will grow too big for the body’.9 Nicholas Barbon was not only London’s leading developer, however, he was also the leading propagandist for his business, and in 1685, as the Duke of Monmouth’s gamble ended in disaster, it was he who set out to answer these objections in a tract he called An Apology for the Builder. His argument demonstrated how radical was the economic revolution now simmering under the surface of English life. Houses, Barbon argued, were not just homes – they were commodities like any other, and their supply would be regulated by the market: ‘[Builders] will do as other traders ... When they find they cannot let those already built, they will desist from building.’10 As for the fear of a capital city endlessly swallowing up green fields, Barbon’s response was even more startling. No one should be surprised by signs that society was changing, he argued. It was changing. He cited population statistics, a recent enthusiasm of the new breed of scientific investigators who attended the Royal Society. One of them, William Petty, had produced figures which showed that the population was growing. A world whose population was growing, Nicholas Barbon now claimed, could not possibly remain in a steady state. The dream of static harmony belonged to the past. Indeed, it had never been more than a dream, as history proved:

  ‘As mankind increased ... they possessed more ground, till they spread themselves into Egypt, and so over Africa, and from thence into Greece, over Europe, and now Europe being full, their swarm begins to fill America.’

  What Barbon deduced from the expanding town, in other words, was not just an apology for building developers, but a whole new vision for society. He joined John Locke in spotting a progression from primitive simplicity to present-day complexity. People lived not in a constant but in an expanding universe. Change, rather than stability, was their natural lot. Not just change, indeed, but improvement – progress, for ‘by [trade] and arts [people] are better fed, better clothed, and better lodged ... and as they increase they build new towns [and] enlarge their cities’.’11 Through the expanding city of London, Nicholas Barbon offered his readers not just new homes and new lifestyles, but a vertigo-inducing glimpse into a future wider and more technologically sophisticated than anything living people knew; a future which was not copied from the past, but forever restlessly changing.

  Nicholas Barbon put forward many other arguments for property development in his pamphlet. What he did not point out – he was too good a salesman for that – were its risks.

  John Markham must have become increasingly desperate as his deadline with William Hall approached. He couldn’t complete his houses until Frith had finished their brickwork. Frith, meantime, was bogged down in his dispute over Barbon’s agricultural leases. He blamed Markham for slow carpentry. A crescendo of accusation and counterclaim rose above the half-finished chimney-stacks of Soho. When William Hall foreclosed on him, John Markham’s dream was over.

  By the time crowds of curious onlookers gathered outside Monmouth’s palace in Soho Square in July 1685, they were witnesses not only to a political débâcle but to the collapse of a financial dream. Richard Frith was in debt to Cadogan Thomas for building materials, while Thomas was behind on interest payments to Benjamin Hinton. Benjamin Hinton, the banker, may have had ‘very great dealings’, but he ‘had also many great and considerable debts’.12 In 1682 the first blow fell when Hinton’s many creditors ‘did suddenly and violently’ call them in. Dudley North was one of his luckier clients – he only lost £50. It did not take long, however, for creditors to round on Frith and Thomas and demand the £60,000 they owed Hinton. For a time, all building in Soho came to a standstill.

  Monmouth House had been Frith’s last throw of the dice. On 17 February 1682, he and his partners had signed with the Duke for ground rent, mansion and stables ‘well and truly, firmly and without deceit so built’, the complex to be finished by Christmas 1683. The deal was worth £7,000. By spring 1683 Monmouth was living in part of the unfinished mansion.

  By 1685, though, as the Duke of Monmouth stepped out onto Tower Hill, Richard Frith had spent more than £4,000 on the great house and been paid less than half of it. He and his partners, the courts heard, were ‘very great losers by the misfortune of the said Duke’.13 Five strokes of the axe brought to the ground a whole edifice of risk, and beneath Hinton and Frith were crushed the dozens of smaller investors who had supported the base of the pyramid. Eight years later the Heyward family was still fighting through chancery for £779-worth of carpentry their father had never been paid for, to finish rooms where a king would never entertain. The great house in Soho Square would remain unfinished for thirty years, a gaunt reminder both of a pretender who risked all for the crown, and a businessman who risked everything to make his fortune.

  V

  ‘THE HIGH AND MIGHTY STATES OF THE UNITED PROVINCES’

  Trade and commerce were becoming ever more important to England. That could be read in the development of Soho, and Dudley North found many signs of such a change on his return to London. ‘No country can be rich or flourish without trade,’ wrote Slingsby Bethel, the London merchant and radical politician now in exile in Holland, ‘nor be more or less considerable, but according to the proportion it hath of commerce.’1 From the opposite end of the political spectrum, Sir Josiah Child, flamboyant monarch of the East India Company, agreed, and every economic writer in England knew which country to hold up as a model. On the other side of the North Sea an economic miracle had taken place which, in less than a century, had turned a flooded marshland into the richest corner of Europe. No one was quite sure how or why this transformation had taken place, but no one, equally, could ignore it. ‘The United Provinces,’ wrote Nicholas Barbon, who went to university there,

  ‘within one hundred years last past ... have changed their style from poor distressed into that of High and Mighty States of the United Provinces, and Amsterdam that was not long since a poor fisher-town, is now one of the chief cities of Europe.’2

  Sir William Temple, diplomat and writer, first went as ambassador to the Hague in 1668, when the Dutch miracle was at its height. He wrote a book, Observations Upon the United Provinces, to describe his experiences, and in it he described a prodigy, a country which seemed to be founded on principles quite unlike any others in Europe.

  He began by describing the unpromising natural landscape of Holland, deluged by winter floods, harbours closed four months of the year by ice. He described the constant effort required to make this land habitable: the mills spinning to mop water from the fields, the great dykes which ‘employ yearly more men, than all the corn of the Province of Holland could maintain’. He described a country of ceaseless industry. Villages and towns dotted the landscape. One English exile counted more than forty within a day’s journey from home. And – here was the first clue to Dutch succes
s – linking these communities were not rutted tracks but open waterways which led not only ‘to every great town, but almost to every village, and every farmhouse in the country; [with an] infinity of sails that are seen everywhere coursing up and down upon them’.3

  Sails meant trade – the subject of so many Dutch seascapes. Trade which enriched the nation when military power or ancient prestige could not, which paid for the windmills and the dykes, and the food which the land would not grow, which, in a fifty-year explosion of economic growth, had given the Dutch a country remarkable for ‘the beauty and strength of their towns ... their canals, their bridges and causeways ... [and the] convenience, and sometimes magnificence, of their public works’.4

  Amsterdam was the hub of this nation dedicated to trade. John Evelyn had visited the city in the 1640s and wondered at the gabled merchants’ houses with ‘a whole navy ... every particular man’s bark or vessel at anchor before his very door’.5 Unpromising as its geology was, the Provinces could not have been better situated for trade. In the late seventeenth century all heavy goods travelled by water, and the United Provinces could see trade prospects in every direction: to the west was the French wine trade, to the north lay England, while ships’ masts, timber, hemp and pitch could be brought down from the Baltic in round-bellied Dutch cats and hoys. Dutch fishing fleets scooped herring from the North Sea. The ships of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the great Dutch East India Company, filled Europe with silks, spices, and Chinese porcelain. To distribute all these goods, meanwhile, the Rhine wound inland from the Provinces, with its tributaries reaching into the heart of Europe. ‘No country can be found,’ wrote William Temple,