The King's City

by Don Jordan

  There was one other enquiring mind that must not be forgotten: that of Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Rupert, like Charles and James, was a man with a keen interest in seafaring matters. Living in Whitehall Palace on the charity of his cousins, Rupert had become a sardonic and embittered man who tried to keep himself engaged in as many pursuits as his station permitted. Planning such an enterprise undoubtedly suited him.

  Charles had awarded the company charter in 1660 but it had taken two years to bring together the finance, planning, ships and manpower for the company to launch its first commercial voyage. Finally, with everything ready, on 26 September 1662 the Mary, owned by the Royal Adventurers and captained by John Denne, put out from London and followed the trade winds south to the Gold Coast. Once there, Denne traded goods for a cargo of 224 men, women and children. On the infamous Middle Passage west across the Atlantic, forty-nine of Captain Denne’s enforced passengers died – 22 per cent of the total. That left 175 men, women and children to be sold when the ship arrived in Barbados.

  From the point of view of flie traders, a human attrition rate of around twenty per cent was not ideal but it was acceptable. For the slaves, it was hellish. Such were the perils of the trade that the death rate could be very much higher. Adverse weather could mean that voyages outlasted water and rations. Bad or inadequate supplies at the outset, harsh or cruel treatment during the voyage, the spread of disease on hoard the ship – all of these might contribute to a high death rate among the slaves. In December 1662 a Captain Bowles sailed out of the Thames in command of the Royal Adventurers’ ship Blackamore, bound for the Bight of Benin. The ship reached Africa safely and 373 Africans embarked. Two-thirds of them were women and one-third were men. There were no children. During the Middle Passage things went very badly wrong. When the Blackamore came to the dockside in Barbados only 150 Africans remained alive. A total of 223 had died, a mortality rate of almost sixty per cent.*

  The day after the Blackamore moored up in Barbados, the William, another company ship, arrived under the command of John Wayward. The planters and traders at the quayside must have wondered what possible horrors lay on board. A total of 125 men, women and children survived – sixty per cent of the original cargo of 180. The next company ship to arrive in the West Indies from Calabar in the Bight of Benin was the Hope, commanded by Captain Nicholas Pepperell. Of its original cargo of 229 Africans, 156 survived the crossing, an attrition rate of just below 32 per cent. The day after, the Zebulon arrived. It landed a cargo of 197 men, women and children from the Bight of Benin, having lost 24 per cent of its original human cargo. Three days later, the Amity docked with only eight slaves for sale. The original size of the cargo had been just nine, indicating that something – most probably a Dutch warship – had prevented the Amity from taking on more. The Katherine, another company ship, under the command of Joshua Tidde, landed 145 men, women and children out of an initial cargo of 209 bought at New Calabar, Benin. The death rate was 32 per cent.

  Such mortality figures were inordinately high for what should have been a voyage which, shipwreck aside, most would hope to survive. The death toll indicates that the conditions in which the human cargo was transported were very much worse than those in which any person should reasonably have been kept. One must conclude that the company either did not provide individual captains with sufficient funds for rations, or allowed them to skimp on rations in order to subsidise their own pay. Either way, given the consistently high level of mortality seen on these early voyages, we can deduce that the company did nothing to prevent the deaths of Africans.2 We may surmise that the company had computed that despite the loss of a high proportion of its cargo, profits could still be made. The operating ethos of the merchants of the City of London was a hard-hearted one. As for profits on these voyages, up to £20 a head was the going rate for a slave delivered from Africa to the quayside in Barbados. This could make a voyage very lucrative. A cargo of 200 slaves was worth £4000. One Barbados sugar planter complained when he had to pay the company £6000 for a consignment of 300 new slaves.3

  The trade in humans from Africa took place out of sight of Londoners, registering only as figures of the Company of Royal Adventurers. Nevertheless, physical manifestations of the trade would make an occasional appearance. These were young African boys and girls brought into England to make picturesque house servants for lords and ladies of fashion. Such children, their dark features handsomely set off by well-made clothes, acted as visual foils for their mistresses, whose skin tended to be as fair as that of their slaves was dusky. Sometimes these child slaves appeared in paintings, as in Pierre Mignard s fine portrait of Louise de Kérouaille, the Breton noblewoman who became Charles’s mistress. In the painting, a cute African girl dressed in silk offers her mistress a cornucopia of pearls.4 The portrait provided proof that Charles and other members of the royal household came into contact with African staves, although it was usually held that none existed in England.

  Now and again these children felt the need to run away from their fine surroundings, seeking freedom in whatever way they could. Their adventures were recorded in advertisements: An East-Indian tawny-black boy’, went one. ‘Long-haired and slender, a mark burned in his forehead and chest, his name Peter, in a purple suit and coat, ran away.’5 It seems Peter did not much care for his life in fine clothes, waiting upon fine people. The mark on his chest was a brand showing that he had run away once; that on his forehead indicating he had run away a second time. When caught again – as he almost certainly would be – his reward for running away a third time would be a voyage back across the Atlantic. On the sugar plantations of Barbados there would be nowhere for Peter to run.

  The following year, 1663, Charles took a decisive step in widening his imperial interests by creating a new North American colony called Carolina. The colony was enormous, in theory if not in practice, reaching from Virginia at 36 degrees north all the way south to Florida at 31 degrees north, and right across the continent to ‘the south seas’. It therefore comprised twelve of today’s states (including the greater part of Texas and southern California), encompassing ‘parts of America not yet cultivate or planted, and only inhabited by some Barbarous people who have no knowledge of Almighty God’.6 According to its royal charter, eight Englishmen, its proprietors, now owned this vast land. They were the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon; the head of the army, the Duke of Albemarle (George Monck); the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Ashley Cooper (Lord Ashley, later Lord Shaftesbury); Lord Craven; Lord John Berkeley; Sir George Carteret; Sir John Colleton; and Sir William Berkeley.

  What was created was a new feudal territory ruled by a cabal of eight aristocrats of the king’s choosing. It was notable that all these men lived outside the old walled city, close to the seat of royal power at Whitehall Palace. Cooper, for example, lived on the Strand, while Clarendon lived near St James’s Palace. This was part of a deliberate design to move the nexus of economic power closer to the Crown, No matter that Clarendon and-Cooper disliked one another; the goal was economic enrichment for the Crown and its closest adherents.

  The structure of a proprietary colony meant that the proprietors ruled everyone and everything within their land, in direct line of control from the King. Something like it had been tried before. Charles’s father, Charles I, had given the same huge territory to his attorney general, Sir Robert Heath, who failed to establish a colony. Before that, Sir Walter Raleigh had made five attempts at establishing settlements, all of which failed. In the spirit of colonialism and state-sponsored enterprise surging through Restoration London, there was a strong impulse to make Carolina a success this time round.†

  While the Carolina and Africa companies busily set about increasing the population of England’s western colonies, a different sort of mind set about calculating the population of London. In the spring of 1663 John Graunt, the haberdasher-cum-demographer, published his groundbreaking work on London’s mortality and population. Its typically unwieldy seven
teenth-century title was Natural and Political Observations made upon the Bills of Mortality. It was an instant success, running to five editions.

  The bills of mortality were the parish records of the numbers of people who died each week, classified according to the cause of death; their purpose was to warn of the onset of plague epidemics so that wealthy people, and anyone else who was able, could escape to the hopefully healthier countryside. The information was collected by ‘searchers’, women categorised by Graunt as ancient matrons’. Earlier in the century, London had set up what was intended as an early-warning system to alert the city to the unset of a plague epidemic. Each parish had to compile a weekly record of deaths and the possible causes. These were then sent to the Guildhall, where administrators compiled a complete tally in order to see when the number of deaths by plague in the city was on the rise. Such knowledge would allow the city’s inhabitants to flee before they were infected. By analysing these lists, Graunt realised that the figures for instances of plague were greatly underestimated. Diagnosis was a very inexact art at the time. Several recorded causes of death, such as convulsions, might be due to plague, he reasoned – particularly if such cases occurred when plague deaths took place in the same parish. Graunt reached the alarming conclusion that instances of death by plague could be four or even six times the numbers reported. Graunt hoped his analysis would be taken note of – for the great benefit to Londoners, particularly those willing to pay for the information.

  The publication of Graunt’s epidemiological work coincided with reports of an outbreak of plague in Holland. The risk of plague travelling long distances was well known even if the mechanism of transmission was misunderstood. Charles therefore instigated a temporary ban on trade with Holland to prevent ships bringing the plague to England. It was a shrewd and necessary decision, though unpopular with the City of London, which carried on a great deal of its business either with Holland or through Dutch ports into Europe.

  According to the biographer John Aubrey, Graunt researched and wrote his book by rising early and working on it before going into the family shop for the day’s business. His book presented the first known tables of life and death based on real mortality data. Graunt observed that about one-third of all deaths occurred from childish ailments and guessed that some of the other illnesses also caused deaths among children. From this he estimated that about thirty-six out of every 100 deaths in London related to children under six years old. Hence he argued that, of every loo children conceived, only sixty-four would reach the age of six. He then used a mathematical projection to obtain the numbers of the original 100 who would reach the ages of sixteen, twenty-six, thirty-six, and so on. Since he now had the numbers of births and deaths, Graunt was able to work out the approximate popidation of London, which, as we’ve seen, he put at 584,000. It was an ingenious piece of work, which brought Graunt to the attention of the King.

  Always interested to hear of new ideas, Charles saw the benefit of Graunt s work and commended him to the Royal Society. As a tradesman, Graunt was not of the right social class to be a member of a society composed of gentlemen. However, the society could not refuse the King’s command and so Graunt was made a Fellow, an unlikely figure among the moneyed, university-educated members of the society. Charles saw what the society failed to see; that a man from a lower social order but with the right intellectual equipment was probably as suitable a member of an organisation for promoting knowledge as any other. After all, Graunt’s friend Sir William Petty had started off as little higher than a servant.

  With so much happening during the opening years of Charles s reign in so many fields, social, artistic and commercial, it must have looked to most as if London and the realm were well set for a peaceful and prosperous future, at odds with the recent past. But questions over religion still bedevilled the country. Charles was uneasy about Presbyterianism, having felt himself let down and belittled by the Scots when negotiating with them after his father’s death. Yet his identity was not especially allied to Anglicanism in the way that it was for the English upper classes. He wanted a tolerant approach to other religions, largely because of the continuing influence of his own Catholic mother. As for the many schisms in Protestantism that had appeared during the interregnum, his views on them were very much less severe than the majority of those in the church hierarchy or in politics.

  His naturally relaxed views regarding religion caused constant strain between Charles and his own government, the Anglican Church and Parliament. A series of Parliamentary Acts, known collectively as the Clarendon Code after the Lord Chancellor, sought to tighten the grip of the high Anglican establishment on religious observance and church governance, while restricting public office to those who abided by the new Anglican prayer book. In London, where nonconformism was rife among clerics and laity alike, the tightening of the religious screw did not play well. Under pressure from Presbyterians, assorted nonconformist Anglicans and his mother, Charles attempted to bring in an Act of Indulgence, softening the line against those of differing religious persuasions. The political roof fell in. A move was made in the House of Lords to have Clarendon impeached. In the end, Charles had to back down.

  The King had completely misread the strength of feeling among his own supporters, the Anglican bedrock in the Church and Parliament. Rumours spread in London about his true religious allegiances and his reputation took a further battering because of his sex life. As Pepys wryly commented, the King ‘doth mind nothing but pleasures’.

  Pepys was not entirely correct. Charles had an overriding obsession with pleasure and sex, it was true, but he had several other interests. Some of these, including sailing and horse racing, were also pursued purely for personal pleasure, but he had other long-term goals. One of these was that his reign should be marked by great buildings. In this he was supported by the hierarchy of the Anglican Church. Both King and clergy saw that all great times were marked by their architecture, which would live on after the actors had left the stage, as with ancient Rome. The partially mined St Paul’s Cathedral was an early target of their ambition. They had discussed its future in 1661, with some input from Wren, and now, two years later, the subject came up again. Charles instructed the commission set up to oversee and repair the church to restore it unto the ancient Beauty and Glory of it’.7 The commissioners reported that the structure was in a dreadful state. A further report recommended patching up what was there. The church’s future would remain a talking point for King and commissioners for years to come.

  At the same time as Charles was attempting and failing to promote religious tolerance, he endeavoured to promote a new woman to his bed. This was Frances Stuart, a teenage beauty and a new lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Charles had received advance intelligence of her arrival from France, where she had lived for some time at the French court with her mother. The news came from that impeccable source, Charles’s sister Henrietta, who informed her brother that Frances was ‘the prettiest girl in the world’. When she arrived in early 1663, aged fourteen, Charles was smitten. His official mistress, Barbara Palmer, was a beautiful 22-year-old, but Frances was said to outshine her.

  Charles made a laughing stock of himself chasing the noncompliant new girl around the palace. His affair with Barbara – who had borne him two children, with a third on the way – had already become public knowledge and was the talk of London. She ran a very grand salon at her house in King Street, next to the palace, where she entertained in grand style as one with royal influence. The King’s new infatuation was soon the talk of the court, and beyond. Unusually for Charles, this time he found his advances endlessly rebuffed. La Belle Stuart made a fool of him.

  Henrietta was responsible for much more than casual intrigues over her brother’s sexual desires; she was an important conduit of communication between Charles and her brother-in-law, Louis XIV of France. In October 1662, Henrietta was the go-between for a controversial deal in which tin gland sold its military outpost Dunkirk to France. The deal
gave Charles a great deal of money (five million French livres). But he also gained the animosity of many of his subjects, who believed any deal with the French was foolhardy. Louis was perceived as a more significant long-term threat to England than the Dutch. For most, a deal with Catholic France was to be viewed with suspicion.

  It had been an unfulfilling period for Charles. Not only had his amorous advances been rebuffed, he had found his influence with Parliament limited too. There were to be greater difficulties ahead.

  * The Blackamore had been involved in a notorious incident the previous year when George Downing kidnapped three regicides in Delft, one of them his former friend and mentor John Oakey, and shipped them back to England to be executed.

  † Carolina’s cotton industry, powered by slavery, would go on to play a major part in Britain’s industrial revolution.

  PART 2

  1664–1667:

  THE YEARS OF DISASTER

  CHAPTER 9

  TRADE WARS

  In 1664 the King gave his consent to one of the most audacious plans ever conceived to enrich his inner circle. If successful, the plan would coincidentally make a great deal of money for those of London’s merchants who traded in Africa.

  The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa was underfunded, badly led and underachieving. What was required was what we now call a relaunch. New shares were issued. The reformed company was once more a joint venture between the royal family and London merchants, with the Duke of York taking control. Along with the injection of funds, meanwhile, the company’s goals changed. Trading for gold along the Gambia River was still an aim, but the company’s major activity was now to be slave trading.