by Uglow, Jenny
But if Charles could not control his nobles, his subjects, his sailors or his parliament, he could at least try to make a deal with his enemies. Early in 1667 he began to sue for peace.
V Spades/ piques
King of Spades from The English Counties, by Robert Morden, 1676. The medallion for the King of each suit showed Charles II, while the Queen was depicted by Catherine of Braganza. Clubs showed the Northern counties, Hearts the Eastern, Diamonds the Southern and Spades the Welsh.
30 Breathing Spaces
What buying and selling, what dealing and chaffering, what writing and posting, what toil and labour, what noise, hurry, bustle and confusion, what study, what little contrivances and overreachings, what eating, drinking, vanity of apparel, most ridiculous recreations; in short, what rising early, going to bed late, expense of precious time is there about things that perish!
WILLIAM PENN, No Cross, No Crowne
IN DEFERENCE to the sombre mood after the Fire, there were no great Christmas festivities in Whitehall. But as the New Year came, with its fierce frost and snow, new singers arrived to entertain the court. ‘This evening I heard rare Italian voices’, wrote Evelyn, ‘2 Eunuchs & one Woman, in his Majesties greene Chamber next his Cabinet.’1 The singers also appeared at the Theatre Royal, including a beautiful soprano, who, Killigrew warned all admirers, adamantly refused to be kissed. This year too, young Pelham Humfrey, later Purcell’s mentor, returned from France to inject some Gallic brio into the King’s music.2 A new card game, too, had arrived from France in the middle of the war. This was basset, or bassette, which became an obsessive court pastime, considered only fit for those of high rank since the gains and losses could be so huge. It was a game of pure chance, where the banker, the talliere, assisted by the croupiere, sat with his bank of gold on the table before him and the rest of the players put forward their cards one by one, with their stakes upon them, hoping to multiply this through a mass of complex rules, but almost bound to lose, since all the advantage was with the bank. (Louis XIV decreed that the banker must be the son of a nobleman of the first rank, and eventually banned the game altogether, fearing court bankruptcies.)
While fortunes were being lost at court, more serious things were happening outside. Soon work began on rebuilding London. Immediately after the Fire, Charles had ordered that no rebuilding should start until the damage was properly estimated. He warmed to the plans of Evelyn and Wren, with their new quays along the Thames and geometric grid of avenues, vistas and squares, bringing memories of the Paris of Mansart and Le Vau that he had admired in his exile. But to implement these he would have to raze the old network of city streets, and such high-handed grandeur would smack of absolutism, an affront to the rule of the City fathers. Much as he liked the plans, they had to be laid aside. On the other hand, he could lay down basic rules for rebuilding without a political storm. A swift royal proclamation declared that new houses should be of brick or stone; the old overhanging storeys must go; roads should be widened to get rid of the web of alleys and lanes, and paved to allow easier traffic, ‘convenient and noble for the advancement of trade of any city in Europe…both for use and beauty’.3 Even this early statement made it clear that every stage of planning and building was to be a collaboration between the crown and the Lord Mayor and aldermen. It was vital for Charles to work with the City, to capitalise on the goodwill he had won during the Fire, and to squash the gossip that some courtiers – notably the ever tactless Bab May, his current Keeper of the Privy Purse – had actually rejoiced that the ‘rebellious city’ had been brought to its knees.4
At booths around the City, landlords and tenants registered their legal claims, and a commission was set up to survey the burnt areas. The court appointments included Christopher Wren and the royal architects Roger Pratt and Hugh May, while the City put forward their surveyor, Peter Mills, and builder, Edward Jerman, and also Robert Hooke, who had delivered his proposed plan not to Charles, but directly to the City Corporation at Gresham House.5 In the bitter, stormy winter the commission drew up their plans and costings. In February 1667 parliament passed two acts. One set up Fire Courts, dealing with wrangles between landlords and tenants who were ruined, or reluctant to rebuild. (Business was so heavy that there was still a waiting list after a year, and the courts sat all day.) The other was the first Rebuilding Act, which laid down the provisions for standardising houses, widening streets, arranging compensation and relaxing guild rules to allow immigrants to swell the army of labourers. The work was to be paid for by a ten-year tax of a shilling on each chaldron of coal (just over a ton) brought into the Port of London. Soon the City passed its own Act of Common Council, laying down rules for establishing disputed boundaries.
Work could now begin. At the end of February, Sir Robert Vyner and the Lord Mayor came to ask directions from Charles about measuring out the streets. Everyone had a view. The best way, according to Pepys’s friend Captain Cocke, would be to sell the whole area to a commission, then let them sell it again, giving preference to the old owners, so that it could be built as the trustees desired, ‘whereas now, great differences will be and the streets built by fits’.6 The commission, however, could not do anything so bold and the streets, as Cocke prophesied, were indeed built in bursts as money and men became available. First, though, they had to be surveyed. In March and April, when the weather was still so icy that no leaf appeared on the trees, Hooke and Mills began the Herculean task of staking out the line of the new streets. With a small team of workmen they covered the entire area in nine weeks. In late March, Pepys wrote, he went out with Sir William Penn ‘to my shoe-maker’s, cutler’s, tailor’s…and in my going do observe the great streets in the City are marked out with piles drove into the ground; and if ever it be built in that form, with so fair streets, it will be a noble sight’.7 (At the end of the year, Pepys heard that William Penn junior, who would warn people so passionately against this greedily material world, had lately returned from Ireland, as ‘a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing’.8)
Hooke was appointed surveyor for the City, and became a local hero, greeted warmly wherever he went. For years the streets would be a mess of scaffolding, ropes and piles of bricks and timber. Roads were widened and the gradients were lowered on the steepest hills, making them easier for carriages and carts. Entrepreneurs made fortunes out of new brickworks, and the price of land rocketed. By the end of 1667, in the centre of the City, where a new road was planned from the Guildhall to Cheapside, ground worth fourpence a foot before the fire was now valued at fifteen shillings.9 Speculators flourished, like Nicholas Barbon, who first set up a fire insurance business and then began buying back leases from landlords who did not wish to redevelop their land themselves. With astonishing speed, Barbon built up a property empire, building terraces of houses from St Paul’s to St James’s. His new wealth seemed remote from his family’s old faith: he was the son of the preacher Praise-God Barebones, who had christened him not Nicholas, but ‘If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damn’d’.10
For many people, as for Barbon, money came before religion. The Exchange was rebuilt before the churches. In October crowds watched as Charles rode in procession to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets to lay the first stone of the new building.11 It was reopened two years later, with all its shops and wonderful arcades. But the churches came next. In May 1667 a second Rebuilding Act listed fifty-one parish churches to replace the eighty-seven churches and six chapels lost in the fire. These would slowly rise over the coming decades, their spires inscribing the vision of Wren, Hooke and Hawksmoor on the skyline.
The argument over the design of St Paul’s took longer. The remains of the charred tower and crossing were pulled down stone by stone in the late summer and autumn of 1668. Crowds gathered to see the walls tumble, and gaze into the great vaults of St Faith’s, where the booksellers’ stock had burnt. But it was not until a year later, when Charles appointed Wren as surveyor general, that any real plans were made. Eve
n then it took another three years for the walls to be demolished, and Wren’s design for a cruciform neoclassical building with a cupola, displayed as a model to the King, was compromised by the demands of the Church for something more traditional. The foundation stone was eventually laid in June 1675. The work was finished stage by stage under Charles, James and William and Mary, until it was finally completed in 1711, in the reign of Queen Anne, with the aged Wren the only survivor of those who had begun this great project.
London came to life again fast, with all the ‘noise, hurry, bustle and confusion’ that the young Quaker Penn so disliked. The theatres reopened, and the booths and freak-shows, the dancing horses and ‘Pulchinello’ were back at Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield in late August. The Post Office was up and running and stage-coaches clattered into the great galleried inns in the suburbs. Messengers and porters were back at their posts on street corners, with the great white scarves that they used to carry parcels tied across their chests, ready to run errands through the half-built streets. The number of hackney carriages was much lower than the four hundred authorised by law that had crammed the streets before the Fire, but the river was crowded with skiffs carrying people from bank to bank. The taverns and coffee-houses and brothels were packed. As if the conflagration had never happened, Londoners walked in the parks, played on the bowling greens and laid bets on bull- and bear-baiting and cock-fights. If anything, the mood was even wilder. Pepys was horrified by the young gallants in Spring Gardens, forcing themselves on any woman who walked by.
In this time of reconstruction the city moved westward. The ecclesiastical courts moved to Essex House in the Strand, and the Excise Office to Bloomsbury Square, built by the Earl of Manchester on land granted at the Restoration, its fine houses now nearly complete. While the old Exchange was out of action, the New Exchange in the Strand became the great shopping centre, an alternative to the theatre as a place of entertainment. It had two long double galleries of drapers’ and mercers’ shops, where customers were served by well-dressed women or smart apprentices selling silks and gloves, walnut cabinets and gilded mirrors, everything the heart could desire. Nearby, a ‘great new ordinary’ was built by Adam Lockett at Charing Cross, much admired by Pepys when he ate his grilled pigeons there, and immortalised as ‘Lockett’s’ in the plays of the next generation.12
The Royal Society, still exiled from Gresham House, also moved west. Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, invited the Fellows to move into Arundel House in the Strand, and prompted by Evelyn, he also donated the great library collected by his grandfather, the famous virtuoso, whose collecting trips on the continent were an early forerunner of the Grand Tour. Soon all was as before. ‘We had divers Experiments for improving Pendule Watches,’ wrote Evelyn on 8 January, ‘& for winding up huge Springs by force of powder; with an invention for the letting down, & taking up any earth, Corall, or what ever it met with at the bottome of the sea.’13 The noisy, dangerous gunpowder trials continued, to the Fellows’ evident enjoyment, and so did the gruesome medical experiments, transfusing blood from a sheep into a dog ‘till the sheep died, the dog well, & was ordered to be carefully looked to’.14 In a lighter mood, there was a demonstration of a newly invented calash, a light, four-wheeled carriage with a folding hood, with which Charles was particularly pleased.
His Majesty was also pleased this spring by a striking visitor with strong views on experimental philosophy. The Duke of Newcastle had finally raised enough funds to buy back the house that he had built in Clerkenwell in the 1630s, and he and his duchess drove down in state from the country in April 1667. Although Newcastle’s relationship with Charles had been awkward ever since he requested permission to leave court and live in the country, Charles was among their first visitors. A host of nobles and old friends from the days of exile followed, crowding into Newcastle House over the next month. Margaret Cavendish, now in her forties, fascinated all those who came. ‘The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic,’ wrote Pepys, who pursued her coach all over town to get a glimpse of her.15 She talked volubly to cover her shyness, about her books, her ideas on religion, her poetry, her views on science. ‘My tongue runs fast and foolish,’ she had once confessed, uttering ‘so much, and fast, as none can understand’.16
The Duchess was a poet, a writer of successful plays and the author of provocative essays. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, in 1666, she had attacked Boyle and Hooke and the high value that the Royal Society put upon experiment. Like Hobbes and other critics she objected that their experiments revealed only superficial wonders, and their observations were often distorted. She was now extremely keen to visit the society, so they made a great exception to their rule against women and invited her to a meeting, displaying the air-pump and other wonders. At the time she seemed overcome, and could say nothing except that she was ‘full of admiration, full of admiration’.17 But with her usual energy Margaret thought over everything she had seen and diligently reworked her ideas in The Grounds of Natural Philosophy, published the following year. In all her work she sought a way of using reason that acknowledged the limitations of human intellect, and remained humble before the mysteries of nature. Since order was clearly visible in the natural world she concluded that a vacuum could not exist in nature, as it would ‘destroy nature’s unity and create disorder’. The cosmos worked, she decided, not by one body forcing another into motion, but by free will, ‘general agreement’, the ‘consent of associating parts’. In the climate of the late 1660s, amid musing about the power of king and people, and debates about the place of men and women, this argument from ‘consent’, even in cosmic terms, seemed to shimmer with a political and personal resonance.
While Margaret Cavendish astonished with her ideas, she startled even more by her appearance. She wore no make-up, but covered her face with patches. She also designed her own clothes. ‘I took great delight’, she wrote, ‘in attiring, fine dressing, and fashions, especially such fashions as I did invent myself…I always took delight in a singularity, even in accoutrements of habits.’18 Her outdoor dress combined silken gowns with a man’s coat and a broad, plumed, Cavalier hat; her court dress was stiff and heavy, like something from an earlier age, with a train of alarming length. When she and the duke went to see his comedy, The Humorous Lieutenant, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she wore a classical-styled ‘antique’ dress, with bared breasts and scarlet-trimmed nipples – unfortunately more like an actress than an Amazon. At one court ball, when a woman appeared with ‘at least sixty ells of gauze and silver tissue about her, not to mention a sort of pyramid upon her head, adorned with a hundred thousand baubles’, Charles stopped for a moment to think. ‘I bet,’ he said, ‘that it is the Duchess of Newcastle.’19
Charles was impressed as well as amused by the duchess. When the Newcastles paid their formal visit to court, he directed them to the queen’s rooms after their audience with him had finished, and later joined them there, something that was considered most unusual. Like the heroine of her fantastical, feminist fiction, The Blazing World, which had been published – all too aptly, given its title – in 1666, Margaret Cavendish was proud of being different. She was, she wrote, ‘as ambitious as ever any of my sex was, is, or can be’. Although she could not be Henry V or Charles II she could be ‘Margaret the First’. She could not conquer the world like Alexander or Caesar: ‘Yet rather than not be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own: for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in every one’s power to do the like.’20
In The Blazing World, carried off to sea by a ruthless merchant Margaret’s heroine is saved by Providence, in the shape of a storm that carries her beyond the Arctic ice-floes, beyond the Pole to the region of animal-men – walking Bear-men, Fish-men, Bird-men, Spider-men and a host of others, who treat her as a goddess. As empress of her new world, she thinks, discusses and plans her state with care, joining with these wondrous creatures in scienti
fic and philosophical debate. Charles’s court circles abounded in strong women, not all of them brilliant, but many of them brave. But Margaret Cavendish stood out, even in an age when women in many spheres made their mark: as mistresses of estates and court politicians behind the scenes, as actresses and writers, as printers and publishers and businesswomen and scientists.
The frontispiece to Margaret Cavendish’s Plays, Never before Printed, 1668, uses a portrait of her on a pedestal, engraved ten years earlier, and shows her attended by Minerva, huntress and goddess of the arts, and Apollo, in his guise as god of poetry.
Charles’s capital was humming and the women of all classes were a chief adornment. On May Day, Pepys was walking to Westminster ‘in the way meeting many milk-maids with their garlands upon their pails, dancing with a fiddler before them; and saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings’ door in Drury-lane in her smock sleeves-and bodice, looking upon one – she seemed a mighty pretty creature’.21 Nell Gwyn was a stage star, but the London streets were a perpetual theatre. Every feast day had its show, from the milkmaids and maypoles on May Day to the Lord Mayor’s procession in October and the marches of the guilds on their saints’ days. Every square saw jugglers and acrobats and quack medicine-sellers setting up their stages and booths. Every district rang to the street-cries of the traders.