by A. N. Wilson
It was to worship at the shrine of Becket in Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims assembled:
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage To Caunterbury with ful devout corage . . .
The tabard is a short jacket open at the sides, worn by a knight over his armor and emblazoned with his arms. It is also worn by heralds, in their case emblazoned with the royal arms. A good name for an inn in a city where so much pageantry and ceremony took place.
Southwark came into its own after the building of London Bridge. Its magnificent thirteenth-century church of St. Mary Overie (becoming a procathedral only in 1897 and Southwark Cathedral in 1905) is the first Gothic church in London, and the finest. All the region was owned by the bishops of Winchester. The colloquialism “clink” for a jail or prison was first given to the Bishop of Winchester’s private prison, not far from St. Mary Overie, and there survives a fragment of rose window from the banqueting hall of the bishop’s palace.
Geoffrey Chaucer (who died, aged about sixty, in 1400) is one of those very great artists who existed at the very hub of public life, while remaining detached and in many ways quite mysterious. We know what he looked like: a portrait survives. His nervous young colleague Hoccleve has given us an unforgettable picture of Chaucer at work, not as a poet but in the office. We possess more life records of him than we do of Shakespeare. Yet he still keeps his own smiling counsel. In the Canterbury Tales, the innkeeper upbraids him for his diffidence, his looking at the ground when he speaks and his inferiority as a poet—“Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord!”
This ironical and amusing man was page to Lionel, Duke of Clarence (the third son of Edward III). He was widely traveled in France and Italy. He was involved with both sides of London life—the Westminster court, and the City with its trade and merchants. As clerk of works from 1389 to 1391, Chaucer would have helped oversee the rebuilding of Westminster Hall, with its superb double hammer-beam roof by Richard II’s architect, Henry Yevele. As comptroller of the customs from 1374 to 1385, he lived in rooms above the gate at Aldgate and would have been a witness to all the comings and goings of the port and to all the tensions and rivalries between the different factions in the City and between the City and the court. He would have seen one of the most dramatic popular uprisings London ever knew, the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, when a vagrant priest called John Ball preached to a huge crowd on Blackheath and asked the subversive question
When Adam dalf, and Eve span, Wo was thanne a gentilman?
The Kentish peasants were met by the fourteen-year-old King on Blackheath, and the Essex mob swarmed near Chaucer’s Aldgate windows. The London mobs joined forces with their Kentish leader, Wat Tyler, who demanded the abolition of the peerage, while Jack Straw, another of the rebel leaders, was leading an attack on the Treasurer’s house at Highbury. The boy king was very brave; he held a debate with Tyler at Smithfield, offering to be his captain and to abolish the aristocracy, but of course it was a ruse and the rising was eventually crushed.
The question posed by the rebel priest, however—who was a gentleman?—was of deep resonance for Chaucer’s generation. For this poet-courtier, pageboy, and friend of monarchs was not the son of an aristocrat (though his granddaughter Alice became one of the very richest and most powerful women in England, as the Duchess of Suffolk).
Chaucer’s father was a vintner, John Chaucer, described as a “citizen of London.”1 The house was in Thames Street by Walbrook, at or near the foot of Dowgate Hill. The principal sources of London’s wealth in the Middle Ages were trade in cloth, both wool and silk, and wine. The wool and silk were brought upriver from all parts of the country and exported as cloth.
The City livery companies, which survive today with their halls, had their origins, most of them, in the Middle Ages, and their names reflect the range of trades and crafts most commonly and profitably practised in the City. The Vintners’ Company, for example, received a charter in 1364, granting it a monopoly of trade with Gascony. The Merchant Taylors go back to 1327, the Mercers to 1347, the Drapers to 1364. The Pewterers, the Plumbers, the Skinners and the Wax Chandlers, the Saddlers and the Dyers are all medieval.
Many craft guilds had established themselves as early as the twelfth or thirteenth century. Liverymen, members of these companies, could wear a distinctive uniform and were granted the freedom of the city. From among their number were chosen the aldermen, who in turn chose the Lord Mayor. The first mayor, Henry Fitzailwin, a wealthy merchant, was in office for twenty years, from 1192 to 1212. King John was forced to concede the independence of the City, granting it its charter in 1215. John’s son, Henry III, tried to claw back the privileges the City had claimed for itself, and Edward I all but abolished them. For thirteen years, 1284–97, he ruled the City directly through his own appointees. But this was the last time that happened, and for a very simple reason. Whenever a king needed money, he had to come cap in hand to the City to borrow it or be given it. We noted at the very beginning of this book the extent of Richard II’s debt to the grocer Lord Mayor Sir Nicholas Brembre.
By the fifteenth century, the mayors were styling themselves Lord Mayor and the Guildhall was a splendid building. Its great library was collected with the money left by London’s most famous mayor, Richard Whittington. One of the most stabilizing features of English life is that whereas the merchant class of other countries aspired to become gentry and aristocracy, the English landed classes, frequently poor, liked nothing more than to form connections with trade and money making. Snobbery about being “in trade” was a Victorian absurdity and would not have been comprehensible to Chaucer or Whittington. Whittington came from a Gloucestershire gentry family who apprenticed him as a mercer in London. He became mayor four times and made a fortune, which, since he was unmarried, he left to the city that had been the cause of his prosperity.
It is not clear how this solid and slightly boring figure became the Dick Whittington of puppet plays, cheap books, and ultimately Christmas pantomimes. There are Russian, Scandinavian, and even Buddhist cognate stories. Dick Whittington, an orphan boy, comes to London to work as a scullion to Hugh Fitzwarren and is helped by the kindness of Fitzwarren’s daughter Alice and by his clever cat. Worn out by ill treatment from his mistress, he steals away from Leadenhall Street, but when he reaches Holloway he hears the merry peal of the Bow Bells, which seem to say, “Turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.”
The legend seems to have taken written form for the first time in the reign of James I. In 1605 a license was granted for the publication of a ballad called “The vertuous lyfe and memorable death of Sir Richard Whittington, mercer, sometyme Lord Mayor.” There is a reference to it in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle (printed 1613). The story is in a sense a perennial London legend. Among all the lures the city has offered outsiders over the years—anonymity, sexual gratification, excitement, escape from the humdrum, or simply the opportunity to work—the most potent is the sense that the place can somehow work magic, making poor girls and boys rich, and transforming those who arrive in obscurity into figures who are wealthy and famous. The Lord Mayors of London continue today to be as solid, sensible, rich, and dependable as the real Richard Whittington. It is the legendary Dick who inspired the writers, pop stars, TV personalities, city slickers, and sharp politicians who over the generations have seen London as their means of asserting the will, of getting on.
5
TUDOR AND STUART LONDON
The Globe Theatre is a faithful reconstruction of the Topen-air playhouse designed in 1599, where Shakespeare worked and for which he wrote many of his greatest plays,” says the website for Sam Wanamaker’s building on the south side of the River Thames. “Today, audiences of ‘this wooden O’ sit in a gallery or stand informally as a groundling in the yard, just as they would have done 400 years ago.”
Only, of course, it isn’t just as they would have done. The modern Globe is connected to a modern building wit
h running water, lavatories, bars, and cafés selling cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, hot tea and coffee, bottled beer, iced drinks. Electric lights shine and there are heaters. The audiences arrive in cars, or by bus or Underground. They very likely ordered an evening in this authentic Tudor playhouse by booking their seats on-line, with a plastic credit card. Sam Wanamaker’s Olde Tudor Experience is about as authentically Tudor as Disney World.
The very idea of attempting to reconstruct the past, quite literally in this case, is an illusory and incidentally a very modern one. If we actually went back to the London of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries we should find a largely wood-built, smelly, plague-ridden city bursting with a population explosion.
In 1500, there were about 75,000 Londoners. By 1600, there were around 200,000; by 1650, perhaps double that. This was in spite of the fact that plague was frequent. Indeed, the persistent recurrence of the disease makes it all the more remarkable that the late sixteenth century was a time when the English drama, properly speaking, began, for at every outbreak of the plague, the theaters closed and the actors and managers lost their income.
For example, consider the theatrical company known as Strange’s Men, patronized by Ferdinando Stanley. Lord Strange (later Earl of Derby) performed “harey the vi” (Henry VI ) to good audiences at Philip Henslowe’s Rose Theatre on 3 March 1591–2. Henslowe made £3 from one performance, £3 16s 8d at another: this was big money. Thomas Nashe said that there had been “ten thousand spectators,” but by June the theater had closed because of plague. Nashe—possibly an early collaborator of Shakespeare’s—like with Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, always had to look about for some non-dramatic work to bring in an income when the theater was closed; his pornographic poem “The Choice of Valentines” is an evocation of brothel life in Southwark in the 1590s. Strangely enough, the only fear haunting this poem, sometimes called “Nashe’s dildo,” is not of plague or venereal disease but of impotence. 1
When one thinks of the fact that the inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart London all believed in hell, or supposedly did so, it is fascinating that they continued to indulge so freely in sexual vice of all kinds. Shakespeare’s Sonnets, also written to keep the wolf from the door while the theaters were closed, reflects a bisexual world where abstinence is not even considered. When Shakespeare writes of the brothel in Measure for Measure, it is obvious that he writes from experience, and that he was not unusual. Henry VIII, in 1546, had ordered the closure of all the stews in Southwark. This was a bit ripe, coming from a monarch who was himself riddled with syphilis, and after his death the following year, under the kingship of his Puritan young son Edward VI, the bordellos reopened.2
The first great historian of London, John Stow, lived from 1525—he was born in the parish of St. Michael Cornhill, the son of a tailor—to 1605. He was over sixty when the first edition of his great book was published in 1598, but he had given his whole life to the Survey of London.
Stow was an intensely conservative and pessimistic observer of the London scene. He told a friend towards the end of his life that he had talked as a youth with old men who remembered Richard III as a comely prince. 3 He had a passion for details—the beauty of a perished bell tower in Clerkenwell, the decoration of the old Blackwell Hall. He saw London as being steadily wrecked by overpopulation, overbuilding, and the greed of developers, City men, and speculators. Every monument, every parish record had been perused by Stow. He was as fond of his recollections of the sedgy ditches near Moorgate as he was of the old stocks by Walbrook. Now he saw only swindlers “that more regarded their own private gain than the common good of the city.”
Stow had lived through an extraordinary century. While he was in his twenties, more than two hundred Protestants were burnt alive for heresy at Smithfield Market between 1554 and 1558 under the religious fanaticism of Mary Tudor. These times were followed by Elizabeth I’s spy ring and its attempt to round up Catholic dissidents—“the fools of time,” Shakespeare called them, “Who died for goodness who had lived for crime.” For the Elizabethans, Roman Catholics, with their willingness to plot against the Queen and use violence in the furtherance of their ends, occupied something of the same position that Muslims have in the modern world. They were objects of suspicion, and it was felt that their uncompromising religious views were incompatible with good citizenship. Stow had an equal horror of the Puritan sectaries, whom he saw as spoiling the sensible church-state balance that was the Elizabethan Settlement.
You see the power of ideas to move and to change human beings if you follow the life career of another Londoner, who was born three years after Stow’s death, in Bread Street, the son of a scrivener. John Milton grew up in the very same street that contained the Mermaid Tavern, one of the favorite drinking places of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare. (It was owned by the Fishmongers’ Company.)
What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid!
Exclaimed their fellow to dramatist Beaumont,
Heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame,
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life.
The boy Milton—a “pigeon of Powles,” as the pupils at St. Paul’s School were called—would have heard the drunken laughter of these elder poets drifting up from the street as he damaged his eyes reading late into the night. He stayed in London throughout his life, seeing the Civil War and seeing the monarchy out.
Milton had been the keenest and most articulate supporter of the English revolution. He did not sign the death warrant for the King, but he worked as Latin Secretary to Oliver Cromwell; this, the equivalent of being foreign secretary, entailed writing letters to foreign powers on behalf of the new English republic and welcoming their embassies and delegations. English republicanism was very much a product of the Puritanism which flourished in the City of London, and it modeled itself very much on that of the Dutch.
Charles I, the most aesthetically intelligent of all English monarchs, had looked at the models of Italy and France to redesign his London. He was able to employ the services of Inigo Jones (1573–1652), son of a cloth worker from St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf. The architect, who had made a deep study of Palladio, did stage design for masques and plays by Ben Jonson. ( Jonson gracelessly thanked him by caricaturing Jones as “the joiner of Islington” in A Tale of a Tub.)
Jones wanted to make London as beautiful as Paris or Venice. He laid out Covent Garden in the Earl of Bedford’s estates with arcaded piazzas modeled on the Place des Vosges (Place Royale, as it was in those days). As Surveyor General of the King’s Works, he built the Queen’s House in Greenwich and laid out the grandiose Whitehall. The only surviving Jones building in Whitehall is the Banqueting House, completed in 1622. The ceiling is filled by Rubens paintings placed there by the discerning Charles I in the 1630s. Little can he have known that Inigo Jones, that great designer of pageants and stage shows, had provided in the Banqueting Hall a background like none other for the most dramatic end to any royal drama.
After a trial in Westminster Hall, the King was condemned to death, and the execution took place on January 30, 1649. A scaffold was erected outside the Banqueting House, to avoid the necessity of conducting the King to Tower Hill (the normal place for public executions) and risking public disorder. Almost the last sight the King would have had, as he walked through the hall, would have been the great Rubens ceilings. He stepped out of the window onto the scaffold, Bishop Juxon accompanying him. It was one of the most extraordinary moments in English history, silent, cold. None of the crowds could hear his dignified last speech. He was too far away from them. As he knelt, his final word was “Remember.” A light falling of snow scattered the crowd as the ax fell. One eyewitness said that “there was such a dismal groan among the thousands of people that were within sight of it (as it were WITH ONE CONSENT) as he ha
d never heard before.”
6
RESTORATION
Paris remains a city divided by the revolution of 1789. In all its subsequent great crises—in 1848, in 1870, in 1940—the old fissures open; the wound still bleeds. London, which had been a republican stronghold during the English revolution, welcomed the return of a monarchy whose power was restricted by that of an aristocratic oligarchy, and of the City itself. Charles II, a canny and affable monarch, was personally responsible for putting the past of the revolution behind him and letting bygones be bygones. Reprisals against those who had supported the execution of his father were few, and Pepys’s well-known account of the execution of one of the regicides, Major-General Harrison, captures the spirit of London at the time, a London determined to put the past behind it and concentrate on present business:
October 13 1660:
To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance. But my Lord not being up, I went out to Charing-Cross to see Major-General Harrison being hanged, drawn and quartered—which was done there—he looking as cheerfully as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said that he said he was sure to come to the right hand of Christ to judge them that have now judged him. And that his wife doth expect his coming again.
Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at Whitehall and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing-Cross. From thence, to my Lord’s and took Captain Cuttance and Mr Sheply to the Sun taverne and did give them some oysters. After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett which I bought her in Holland and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it. Within all afternoon, setting up shelves in my study. At night to bed.