The King's City

by Don Jordan

  * Today, the site of Clare Market is largely covered by the buildings of tbe I .ondon School of Economics.

  † The general population did attend plays, often of a rough and bawdy nature. LI su ally these were performed at London’s various annual fairs, chief among which were St Bartholomew’s Fair, which took place in Smîthfield over two weeks in August around the international cloth sales fair, and Southwark Lair, held in September. The latter was notorious for its debauchery, being situated in one of London’s main brothel districts.

  ‡ Hence the eoin known as a golden guinea.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE CROWNING OF A KING

  While Holmes made mischief in Africa, London prepared for the coronation of Charles II, King of Great Britain and Ireland. The ceremony was scheduled to take place on St George’s Day 1661 in Westminster Abbey. The organisers, though, had a major problem to overcome before the coronation could take place: there were no coronation regalia. The regalia had been destroyed on the orders of Cromwell; the crown and orb, along with many other pieces, were melted down, and the gold and precious stones sold off. They were, Cromwell had said, a reminder of’the detestable rule of kings’.

  For goldsmith and banker Robert Viner, now twenty-nine years old, the lack of a crown was an opportunity not to be missed. He would seize the moment and ensure that his workshops made replacement regalia. By so doing, he would position those workshops at the zenith of London’s goldsmiths and create for himself a lasting personal relationship with the King. Viner secured this vital commission by spending £30,000 of his own money, buying precious stones and gold and paying for the labour of his finest craftsmen. His new crown was a replica of the one that had been destroyed, the eleventh-century crown of St Edward the Confessor, used in coronations for six hundred years. Reputedly, William the Conqueror wore it at his coronation, and subsequently so did William II, Henry I, Henry II, Richard I and King John. All this history Cromwell had dismantled, turned into ingots of gold and a clutch of precious stones sold for a total of £2647 18s 4d.

  Using detailed accounts of the venerable crown of the saintly King Edward, Viner fashioned a magnificent recreation. The new crown had a frame of purest gold set with 444 gemstones including rubies, amethysts and sapphires. Inside the frame sat a cap of royal purple, trimmed around its base with ermine.

  Robert Viner had come to London from Warwick as a boy apprentice to his uncle Sir Thomas Viner, a well-established goldsmith and important banker. Although Sir Thomas was Presbyterian, his nephew grew up in the Anglican faith. Robert’s unusual brilliance both in shaping precious metals and designing ornaments and jewellery, and more particularly in business, was quickly recognised. Sir Thomas taught Robert the arcane banker’s knowledge that would enable him to take in money at one rate and lend at another, ensuring the balance was always in his favour. Gaining such knowledge placed Robert among the favoured elite of London’s wealthiest.

  It was therefore not surprising that apprenticeships to the top London guilds were expensive. Those joining the Guild of Goldsmiths had to pay an entrance fee, running costs and a fee to a master. The total could be anything from £500 to £3000.1 Its new members therefore tended to be sons of well-established merchants, tradesmen or craftsmen, or the younger sons of the gentry. A third of all trainees came from the higher social classes, and the proportion was nearly the same for those entering all the merchant and other trade guilds. Surprisingly, only a small proportion (4 to 6 per cent) were the sons of London goldsmiths. A third of apprentices came from outside London, indicating both the desire of wealthy families around the country to ensure their sons got a start in London business, and the extent to which London drew in people to fulfil its need for extra skills.2 Out of the hundreds of London goldsmiths, several dozen – perhaps as many as ninety – acted as bankers.3

  The city would have to be prettified for the coronation, but how? Seen from across the Thames, its medieval streetscape rising up from the river presented a charming view, but a traveller taking a wherry across the river and walking up from the quays into its ancient heart would be assailed by smells too terrible to analyse and forced to breathe air mixed with soot and toxic fumes.

  The city fathers marshalled their plans for a major spring clean, to be followed by the erection of elaborate decorations. John Evelyn seized the moment to publish a book setting out practical proposals on how to cleanse the city’s noxious air. He wrote what was in essence an environmentalist’s handbook.4 But his book was more than that; it was a royalist broadside, the cleansing of the capital’s air a metaphor for ridding the city of the corrupt air of the Commonwealth and letting in the refreshing zephyrs of monarchy.5 London’s otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer’, he wrote, was mixed with ‘an impure and thick mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour that corrupted the lungs of the inhabitants. London, said Evelyn, resembled the ‘face of Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli or’ – his best and most English invention – ‘the Suburbs of Hell’.6

  Evelyn was a man of independent means, whose money allowed him to indulge his curiosity about many subjects, including the quality of London’s air, a matter about which he strongly felt something should be done. He had what today would be called a social conscience. His solution involved the moving of all major coal-burning factories downwind of London to north Kent, a location that would happily also be safely downwind of the Evelyn estate at Deptford. To replace the burning of coal, he advocated a return to wood and charcoal, supplied by planting great forests on private estates throughout England.

  Evelyn envisaged a return to the clean airs London was reputed to have enjoyed long before Cromwell and coal polluted them; a time when the city air was scarcely contaminated, and wood and charcoal were burned by all. This happy state of affairs had changed towards the end of the thirteenth century when brewers, dyers and other trades introduced sea-coal, a fuel that burned at a higher temperature than charcoal, giving off dark smoke. Coal burning produced such a nuisance in London that Edward I prohibited its use, not once but twice. His proclamations had little effect.7 By the middle of the fourteenth century, other measures were taken to help cure London’s polluted air and noxious smells. Edward III ordered the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to banish slaughter yards from the city. No cattle were to be killed closer than Knightsbridge in the west and Stratford in the east.8 By the seventeenth century Edward’s edict was observed merely in the breach.

  For his pains, Evelyn gained an introduction to the King, but was satirised in the press. London was a hive of lampooners and humourists, commentators who had honed the edge of their quills during the political upheavals of the 1640s and 50s. Any pretension to superior knowledge, such as Evelyn’s plans to cleanse the air, was open to ridicule. Even the group of distinguished professors who met at Gresham College were merrily targeted for fun. Their many proposals for enhancing the quality of life, along with Evelyn’s proposition for London, gave rise to the following lines:

  Oh, blessed witt that thus contrives

  By new found out but fertill arts,

  In pleasure to lengthen our lives.

  To teach us next to perfume farts

  And without fuell or coal make fire

  Some other member will aspire.9

  Evelyn’s plans came to nothing; cleansing London’s air remained a long-term goal.* For now, the Corporation of London cleaned the streets as best as it could and put up decorations. Triumphal arches were built and theatrical tableaux designed. Not to be outdone, London’s guilds and merchant companies planned their contributions. People passing up and down Lcadenhall Street in the spring weather watched as a remarkable wooden structure rose up on the façade of an Elizabethan mansion named Craven House. When the superstructure was finished, an artist went to work, painting a mural of a flotilla of merchant ships in full sail. Above the mural stood a larger than life-size figure of a merchant seaman saluting all who walked beneath him. This wonderful piece of bombastic illustration was London
’s first advertising hoarding. It marked the headquarters of the East India Company, London’s most powerful trading organisation.

  The company had its beginnings in early English voyages to establish trade in the Indian Ocean and beyond. Queen Elizabeth granted a royal charter in 1600 to the group of investors and merchants who put together the fleets of ships sent out to explore the possibility of developing trade on a long-term basis. This was an exceptionally risky business. Ships could be lost due to pirates, storms, illness or hostile locals, or to strenuous competition from the Spanish or the Dutch East India Company. Hence the London merchants, and their aristocratic backers, spread the risk, emulating the Dutch and other continental trading groups by setting up a joint stock company.

  At first, the company imported spices, quickly expanding into exports of English cloth and metalwork. In time, it took on the saltpetre trade, essential for the manufacture of gunpowder. But what really made the company a success in the early 1600s was its business importing and exporting pepper. Fortunes were made selling it onward into the European market. The company looked set to be a continuing success until rivalry with other English traders and then with the Dutch almost caused it to go under. Competition between English and Dutch spice traders in Indonesia led to an agreement enforced by the governments of England and the Dutch United Provinces that they would share trading posts. Thus began an uneasy coexistence of the EIC and its Dutch rival, the United Elast India Company.† This arrangement broke down in 1623 when the Dutch accused the English of plotting against them in Indonesia. In what came to be known as the Amboina Massacre, the Dutch authorities tortured English merchants to reveal details of the plot, before executing several of them. The event caused a sensation in London and repercussions continued for decades.

  With the Dutch firmly established in Indonesia, the English looked for other foreign trading centres. Madras in India appeared to provide the answer. But with the outbreak in hostilities between the House of Stuart and Parliament in 1642, all organisations connected with the Crown came under suspicion. It took Cromwell to reaffirm the company’s place as a central tool of the nation’s trade with the East, giving it a new warrant in 1657. The death of the Protector the following year plunged the company back into uncertainty.

  The situation was resolved during Charles IPs coronation year. Granting the EIC a new royal charter, Charles gave it astonishing powers. The company’s colossal new entablature atop Craven House announced more than its resurgence – it announced the confidence that came with its new charter. Charles had no say in the running of the EIC, but he made sure he had a financial interest to match his imperial ambitions. The country had few resources: some coal and wool, some tin and lead, a very little gold and silver. But since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 there had existed a collective desire to become a major sea power reaching out into the world to take what could be taken.10 Under the reign of Charles II, this ambition was prosecuted as never before. The playboy king became the adventurer king.

  The rejuvenation of the venerable EIC was symbolic of Charles’s ambition to top up the insufficient income granted by Parliament. The royal guarantee of a monopoly was so advantageous that the company promised Charles a colossal 70 per cent of all profits (though it’s most unlikely he ever received anything like this amount). In return, the new royal charter granted the company judicial authority over all persons living within its territory (i.e. its trading posts and factories) in India and elsewhere and the power to imprison any rogue traders who did not wish to operate under its jurisdiction (a continuing problem). By granting these powers the King was ensuring that the company had the ability to concentrate on increasing trade.‡

  As preparations gathered pace for the coronation, Charles honoured those who helped the national effort in some way. Knighthoods were handed out to merchants and officials as rewards, or to keep them on side. Among those to receive such favour were several members of the EIC. In March, a month before the coronation, the merchant William Rider was among those honoured. A major investor in the company who over a long and successful career had imported everything from tobacco to pilchards, he was knighted for services to the King in recognition of his role in supplying the navy with many of its most important basic needs, including timber and tar.

  It would eventually be discovered that Rider was not above sharp practice, selling cheap hemp from Scandinavia at a substantial premium and making up a story that the tar warehouse in Stockholm had burned down so that he could inflate the price he charged the navy. Navy Office stalwart Samuel Pepys called Rider ‘false’. True or false, the navy needed Rider – and his star continued to rise.

  *

  On 22 April, the day before the coronation, the King paraded through London in a grand procession based on those undertaken by his father and by Elizabeth I. The participants – who included trumpeters, the King’s bodyguards, known as the Gentlemen Pensioners, Knights of the Garter, his brother the Duke of York, heir to the throne, and dignitaries including aristocratic office-bearers and the Lord Mayor – set out from Tower Bridge and wended slowly through the city to Whitehall. Fountains poured out wine at intervals along the route, and there were bands, dancers and various tableaux vivants. The route went through four triumphal arches of great size and magnificence. The first of these, in Leadenhall, represented the triumph of monarchy over rebellion. The female figure of Rebellion was mounted on a Hydra in a crimson robe, torn, snakes crawling on her habit, and begirt with serpents’. Her companion Confusion was a ‘deformed shape’.11

  Not to be outdone, at nearby Craven House the council of the EIC had set up a live tableau of its wealth and largesse. Two Indian youths were positioned outside, one mounted on a camel, the other attended by two ‘blackamoors’. The camel carried two panniers, filled with silks, spices and jewels, which the youths flung out among the spectators. In Cornhill the King was met with the sight of eight nymphs cavorting in the ancient waiter cistern, while at the Royal Exchange was an arch wdth scenes depicting the River Thames and one of His Majesty’s warships. At the junction of Wood Street and Cheapside a grand arch represented Concord. In Fleet Street, the final triumphal arch represented the Garden of Plenty. As the King exited the city at Temple Bar he was greeted by a cage containing a variety of wild animals.

  The coronation itself took place on 23 April. London was decorated from end to end; gallants and their ladies dressed in opulent finery. At the King s insistence, the streets again ran with wine, an outward sign of profligate luxury which probably had the added attraction of masking the city’s more noxious smells. At the crowning ceremony in Westminster Abbey, Viner’s replica crown was a fabulous success. A near contemporary of the King (he was younger than Charles by a year), Viner became a royal favourite. He was as close to being a friend to the King as any commoner was likely to be.

  Indeed, Viner, like other merchants before him, became indispensable to the King. He was not only the royal goldsmith but, like his uncle and father before him, a banker. Though usury was still frowned upon by many, London’s bankers charged interest on loans and so were vital in greasing the wheels of commerce. To carry out their business in the city the goldsmith bankers had to become members of their guild, part of the elite group among guilds along with the mercers and grocers. The apprenticeships served by these trainee merchants were rigorous. Mathematical ability was necessary to master the many facets of business. Bookkeeping in its many forms was taught according to well-understood and established principles. The application of credit, commission on sales and so on, had to be mastered along with the means of accurately recording transactions, and computing likely and actual outcomes. Records had to be kept of orders taken, goods dispatched, payment received. For the elite among merchants, business was international; therefore exchange rates had to be understood and factored in. Interest charged on loans was tied to risk and there were rules on how to gauge it. This world of money provided those given entry to it the means to become part of an
aristocracy separate from but parallel to that of inherited titles and land.

  Viner was not alone in thinking that lending money to the restored monarchy was as secure as any other business loan, and as his fame and fortune grew, he lent increasingly large sums to the Crown. Samuel Pepys visited Viner at his grand home, Swakeleys House at Twickenham, to collect loans for the King. Charles, who had an insatiable need for money, made Viner first a knight, and then a baronet.

  The coronation had been a huge propaganda success for the House of Stuart. All of London had turned out and cheered. In the spring of the palindromic year of 1661, all could surely look back to a tormented past and forward to a glorious future.

  * Evelyn’s dream of a city without smog would not come true until the Clean Air Act of 1956.

  † Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC for short.

  ‡ By 1665 the company would pay its members a dividend of 40 per cent.

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘TOO GREAT AN HONOUR FOR A TRIFLE’

  Science came to London via a number of scholars who shared an interest in an emerging idea: that the nature of the world was best investigated through experiment. From among their ranks in the preceding years had grown a loosely defined assemblage which became known as the ‘invisible college’ or the experimental philosophical clubbe’. Several of these scholars were professors at Gresham College, the institution of public learning in Bishopsgate, close to London’s Roman walls. The college’s grand headquarters were located in the former home of Sir Thomas Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange. In 1597 Gresham had bequeathed his home and die revenues from die shops lining the exchange in order to found the college and pay the stipends of seven professors, namely of astronomy, divinity, geometry; music, law, physic and rhetoric.*