The Thames supplied London with goods from the known world, with spices and furs and wine; here came the Venetian galleys, with their stock of merchandise from Constantinople and Damascus, joined by the three-masted ships from the Low Countries with their cargoes of fur and timber. But the river also carried the great barges of hay and fuel, without which the city could not have survived. There was a story of an alderman, who had been told that Queen Mary was so annoyed with the city that she intended to remove Parliament and the Courts of Justice to some other place. He asked “whether she meant also to divert the river of Thames from London.” On being told that she had no means to do so, he replied that then “by God’s grace we shall do well enough at London, whatsoever become of the Terme and Parliament.”
It was the river down which the first explorers sailed. Hugh Willoughby and Richard Chancellor set sail from Deptford in 1553, with a letter addressed to “all kings, princes, rulers, judges, and governors of the earth.” They were on a voyage of discovery, searching for a northern route to the Indies, but the one surviving vessel landed on the Russian coast; this was the beginning of trade with the merchants of Moscow. When the ships came near Greenwich “the courtiers came running out, and the common people flockt together, standing very thick upon the shoare.” At a later date Colonel John Smith left from Blackwall and, after a perilous voyage, established the colony of Jamestown in Virginia. The Mayflower sailed from Rotherhithe. It seemed then that the waters of the world might be interpreted as one extended Thames. The Turkey Company was later established as a result of the trading voyages and, on the last day of the sixteenth century, the queen signed a charter for the establishment of the English East India Company. The merchants and adventurers of the Hudson Bay Company, of the East India Company itself, and of the West India Company, started their travels on the river.
So when Wenceslaus Hollar depicted the river in the 1630s, in his famous panoramic map of London, it was appropriate that he should depict the banks and stairs, wherries and barges, as combined in a vast network of activity. In contrast the streets and houses of the city seem deserted, as if all the energy and business of London were concentrated upon the flowing Thames. The names of the wharves are clearly marked, for ease of reference, with “Paulus wharfe…Queenhythe…the 3 Cranes…Stilliard…Cole harbour…the Old Swan,” and the river itself is filled with vessels of every description. Below London Bridge the great merchant ships are docked while Mercury, the god of commerce, is pointing to the cartouche of “LONDON” itself. This vista became the model for many later maps and representations, so that the prospect of London stretching from the river became the single most important vision of the city. The Thames represented the city’s destiny. It was how London was imagined.
During the early stages of the Civil War the Thames remained a royalist stronghold along its middle reaches. The river was, after all, the source and site of ancient or traditional power. Just as it had once harboured old Catholic families, recusants under Elizabeth, so it acted as a refuge for those who supported the king in his struggle against parliament. Many royalist and Catholic houses, beside the river and its tributaries, were besieged by parliamentary troops—among them Mapledurham House, Blount’s Court and Basing House. There were royalist garrisons at Reading and at Oxford. Oxford became the temporary royal “capital” for Charles I. By two of the river’s most ancient bridges, those of Radcot and New Bridge, there were battles and skirmishes; at Radcot Bridge, in 1645, Prince Rupert fought off a parliamentary army. The prize of Kingston was sought by both sides, with the monarch’s troops being ousted by parliamentary soldiers who in their turn were expelled by royalist troops retreating from the battle of Turnham Green. Then a parliamentary army returned and held the town until the end of the Civil War. Prince Rupert destroyed two parliamentary regiments who had set up a garrison by the river at Brentford; many of the soldiers were drowned in the Thames.
The royal river of course celebrated the return of royal favour. When on 23 August 1662 Charles II was rowed from Hampton Court to Whitehall with his bride, Catherine of Braganza, he was imitating the Tudor pageants of Henry and Elizabeth in a deliberate attempt to renew his own majesty. He was associating himself, and his family, with the history of the river. As he sat upon the royal barge with his bride, he was inviting the blessing of the river. He received it in the shape of an actor playing Isis who sang out, accompanied by music,
Divinest pair! Isis (to meet
Your unmatched loves) kisses your sacred feet.
The royal pageant had been titled “Acqua Triumphalis” and, according to Evelyn, it was
the most magnificent Triumph that ever floted on the Thames, considering the innumerable boates & Vessels, dressd and adornd with all imaginable Pomp, but, above all, the Thrones, Arches, Pageants & other representations, stately barges of the Lord Mayor & Companies, with various Inventions, musique, & Peales of Ordnance both from the vessels and shore.
It was a chance for Londoners in particular to exorcise their previous association with Cromwell and the Protectorate—a London crowd had gathered for the execution of the present monarch’s father—and it was also an opportunity for the Thames to be recognised again as the sovereign river of England.
That is why, at the time of the Plague and the Fire, in 1665 and 1666 respectively, it became the instinctive place of refuge. It was part of the river’s status as a boundary that it was believed that it might act as a frontier, or defence against flame and disease. In Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), written some years after the events described, there is an account of a waterman at Poplar who acted as a carrier and postman for those families who had taken to the river and had secured themselves in vessels anchored in it. “All these ships,” he explained, “have families on board, of their merchants and owners, and such like, who have locked themselves up and live on board, closed shut in, for fear of infection.” Defoe estimated that there were ten thousand people sheltering on the Thames in this secluded manner. The riverside was lined with boats, too, and many Londoners had decamped to the estuary where they lived upon the barren marshland of that area. The precautions did not in general check the contagion. The plague had been carried into London by the Thames itself, spreading from the Rattus rattus, otherwise known as the black rat or the ship rat. The infection reached the ships, creating havoc among the refugees who had believed themselves to be safe. The watermen, who used their boats as houses, were also struck down. They were found dead in their wherries, riding the tide.
Of the Fire a year later Pepys reports that, after watching the flames from the Tower, he walked down to the waterside and hired a boat to take him towards London Bridge. The Thames had already become the scene of intense activity with the citizens and their families removing their household goods by “flinging them into the river, or bringing them into lighters that lay off.” The poorer people stayed in their houses until the fire came too close, at which point they began “running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs, by the waterside, to another.” Later that night he described the Thames as “full of lighters and boats taking in goods, and goods swimming in the water; and only I observed that hardly one lighter or boat in three that had the goods of a house in it, but there was a pair of virginalls in it.” But the river once more proved an illusory refuge. Pepys reported that “all over the Thames, with one’s faces in the wind you were almost burned with a shower of fire-drops.” Evelyn completed the picture in his diaries, with an account of “the Thames covered with goods floating, all the barges, and boats laden with what some had time and courage to save…Oh the miserable and calamitous spectacle!” The heat and the smoke became too intense, and those on the river were forced to land on the southern bank and fly to the fields, or sail out of the immediate neighbourhood of London.
The rebuilding of London after the Fire of course greatly changed the prospect of the city from the Thames. It also altered the appearance of the banks themselves. The warehous
es and quays, destroyed or damaged, were rebuilt. The streets leading down from the City were also rebuilt, their houses now constructed of russet or yellow brick, and above the roofs rose the gleaming steeples of the fifty-one churches that Christopher Wren, the king’s Assistant Surveyor-General, restored or built again. It was a more solid, a grander, riverscape than that of the medieval or Tudor city. This was nowhere more evident than in the reclamation of the Fleet River that flowed down into the Thames by Blackfriars. It had become no more than an open sewer in the heart of the capital, making its noisome way through the Fleet valley, but under Wren’s superintendence it was widened and cleaned up. It became a navigable “cut” as far as Holborn Bridge in the centre of the city; it was crossed by newly built bridges and lined with wharves and warehouses. It was a measure of Wren’s determination to scour London and the Thames of their past.
The king had decreed that “we do resolve and declare that there shall be a fair key or wharf on all the river side.” As a result there emerged a plan for a continuous Thames Quay, a model of progress and efficiency on the north bank of the Thames that would complete London’s pre-eminence as a trading nation. It was to take the place of the jumble or warren of wooden sheds and warehouses, stairs and alleys, that characterised the old riverscape. It was to stretch from the Temple to the Tower of London, at a width of 40 feet (12 m); it was to be lined with grand buildings, of which the new Customs House (also designed by Wren) was the exemplar. It was to represent the wholesale transformation of the river: on both sides of London Bridge the Thames was to be overlooked by new building that reflected the spirit of a city awakened and renewed.
It did not quite succeed in the manner intended. Below the bridge, private and unplanned quays had already been erected, before the programme of public works had begun; they had been needed immediately after the Fire, not least to bring provisions and materials for the army of building workers who had migrated to the city in the first stages of rebuilding. It did not seem practicable to begin again. Above the bridge, Wren reported to the monarch that everywhere the area was “inclosed and incumbred with Pales or Brickwalls irregular houses and buildings Piles of Timber Billetts Faggots and heapes of Coles many boarded sheds and several great Laystalls…the old Towers of Baynard’s Castle yet standing.”
The rebuilding was occasional and sporadic. But there were specific accomplishments. A new Fishmongers’ Hall, for example, was built. New wharves were constructed at Dowgate and at Puddle Dock. Bridewell was largely rebuilt. Houses were erected along the side of the river in more orderly fashion. Thames Street was widened and the level was also raised 3 feet (0.9 m), to ensure against inundation by water rather than fire. And there were additions to the litany of great buildings along the Thames. Preeminent among them stood the cathedral church of St. Paul, with its dome of shining Portland stone. Wren changed the Thames just as he changed London; he designed the hospital at Chelsea for wounded soldiers, and then the hospital at Greenwich for naval men. The official or administrative life of the river was partly his invention.
It was now being celebrated as the calm river, the river that did not rage, the river without extremes, the river that did not generally overflow its banks in excessive vigour. In that sense it became an image of the new dispensation of the renewed kingdom, averse to extremism and the enthusiasm of any faction. The river incorporated the myth of the nation.
PART VI
Elemental and Equal
The island in the Thames where Magna Carta was reputedly signed
CHAPTER 16
The Waters of Life
Water is utterly familiar and yet altogether elusive. That is why it has been described in terms of negation. It is odourless. It is colourless. It is tasteless. It is rarely, if ever, located in its pure state. The epitaph upon the headstone of John Keats, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water,” is the token of one who believed that he had left no trace. Water is utterly mysterious. Images of the river, whether in photograph or painting, never really look “like” the river itself. Until a relatively late date the natural philosophers and scientists considered water to be an indivisible element, and only after 1783, through the combined efforts of Cavendish, Watt and Lavoisier was it recognised to be an inorganic compound of hydrogen and oxygen. But still ancient beliefs clustered around the chemistry, with oxygen considered to be the “father” and hydrogen the “mother” of this substance.
Yet water is the matrix and nurse of all life. It is perhaps the oldest thing upon the earth. It has remained unchanged, in every respect, for 3,500 million years. The seas were formed in the depths of pre-Cambrian time, and there is not one drop more or less than at that inconceivable beginning. The water of the Thames may once have fallen from the back of a pleiosaur or filled the bath of Archimedes. That is where the enchantment of the river lies. It is the deep and ancient force, the thrust and stir of creation. The noise of its waters is the sound of burgeoning life. “And all the liquid world,” as Abraham Cowley put it, “is one extended Thames.”
It is the first element of life in another sense. The child in the womb lives and develops within the embrace of water, growing within the membraneous sac, and of course the human body is itself comprised principally of water. So was Neanderthal Man. So was Cro-Magnon Man. We are all part of the same texture. It has been estimated by biochemists that the amount of salt in human protoplasm, some 0.9 per cent, was precisely that within the ancient seas where life first began. We are born within primordial waters.
The fact that the human body is by weight 60 per cent water may help to explain why the river has been granted human characteristics such as unpredictability and fierceness. What better way is there to symbolise purity, too, than the image of clear and limpid water? It may also help to explain the intimacy with which water is associated. The water is like blood coursing through the veins. And in that consonance between the veins of the human body and the rivers of the earth there is a strange pull of sympathy between the human being and the running water. Motionless waters evoke death, as the poems and stories of Edgar Allan Poe testify. When we look at our reflection in water, we are looking at ourselves in a double sense.
It has also been described as the mother of all elements, with Isaac Newton’s belief that “that rare substance water can be transformed by continued fermentation into the more dense substances of animals, vegetables, salts, stones and various earths.” That is why the myth of purity is so important, since motherhood and purity are deemed to be cognate in the myths of human origin. It is in fact the attribute of water to be able to purify itself; the river metabolises waste in the manner of a living organism by absorbing oxygen from the air and from plants; the oxygen then “burns” organic waste material.
But in a more general sense water is spiritually pure. It is the renovator and protector of the world. It redeems ugliness. It is the source of health and strength. It palliates the human senses, refreshing to the touch, calming to the eye, and melodious to the ear. There seems to be an instinctive harmony in the life and appearance of the river-bank, for example, at least where the set of the stream and the nature of the soil have not been displaced by human activity. Like white light it contains everything, embodying the paradox of simplicity and heterogeneity. White light contains all colours, and therefore none. Water contains everything, and is therefore transparent. It is the quintessence of everything, and of nothing. It communicates easily with all manifestations of itself, effortlessly becoming one and finding a common level.
So what is its identity? It has been compared with time, death and consciousness, but in that sense, too, it is being compared with everything and nothing. It is of protean appearance, changing its shape from ice to water to steam. Solid, liquid, or gaseous, it is forever elusive. When Coleridge watched the course of a waterfall in the Lake District he was moved to write of “the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual Sameness of the Form—it is an awful Image & Shadow of God & the World.” But this changefuln
ess, this state of perpetual becoming, is also part of its energy. It is also an aspect of its power. Water can defy gravity by moving uphill. It will wear down and dissolve the toughest metal. It has created the plains and valleys of the earth. It does not abide obstacles. It can destroy mountains. A single drop of rain exerts a force of 2.3 pounds per square inch (0.165 kgf per square cm). A thunderstorm unleashes the energy of a large atomic bomb.
Water never can be wholly still, with the forces of radiation and gravity, heat and movement, all around it. Leonardo noted down in eight folios “730 conclusions on water,” of which sixty-four were concerned with water in movement. Among his categories were polulamenti e surgimenti (bubblings and surges), sommergere (submersion) and intersegatione d’acque (intersections of waters). He was considered to be a “master of water” and was employed as an adviser on its power in fields as various as flooding, energy and transport. He understood the might of the river.
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