The King's City

by Don Jordan

  Economic and social life gradually returned to the city – how could it not? Before the plague London had been en route to becoming the epicentre of trade and commerce for north-west Europe. Those who had been dispersed from it knew nothing of the world of crops and animal husbandry. They were anxious to return to what they knew, to making and buying and selling. London, with its workshops and factories, its shops and stalls, its guilds and storehouses, its great trading houses, was their home.

  One enterprise that was slow to pick up was tax collecting, specifically of the hearth tax, the proceeds of which went directly to the King. By the spring, Charles was feeling the financial pinch so badly that he decided to scrap the current system of collecting the tax and introduce another, hopefully more efficient. Responsibility was taken away from local officials and put out to tender to private tax collectors, known as tax farmers. A consortium of London merchants bought the right to collect the tax. They would be allowed a profit, to be taken from each shilling raised. The tax was thereby privatised. Charles’s belief that he would do better through a farmed tax leads one to suspect that he was badly advised, for tax farming was a notorious racket.

  While London returned to work, cases of plague continued, particularly in outlying areas. Evelyn reported plague at Deptford as late as April 1666 and cases were reported elsewhere into the autumn.

  Intellectual life also resumed. On 22 March the Royal Society met again for the first time since the suspension of its meetings the previous spring. Among those at the meeting was Christopher Wren, newly returned from Paris,

  Unlike so many others, Wren had not left London to flee the plague. He had for some time been planning a foreign trip to study architecture. Although Wren had no official position as an architect, John Denham, the King’s surveyor, had directed him to go to Paris to study the latest ideas.1 There could be only one purpose behind Wren’s visit – to look for ideas to use in the preservation or rebuilding of St Paul’s Cathedral. It could be seen as a snub for John Webb, who was after all the King’s surveyor in all but name, but he was busy on various royal projects. Wren was a young man brimming with ideas and waiting for a position in life.

  The man behind the decision to send Wren to Paris was not Denham, but the King himself, for Charles had followed Wren’s career and wished to enhance it. The strength of Charles’s admiration could be measured by the fact that in 1661 he had offered Wren the important post of surveying and building a new harbour at Tangiers, The offer came via the familial and court connections so vital to a career in London during the Restoration. Wren’s cousin Matthew Wren was Bishop of Ely and wielded considerable influence, having been chaplain to Charles I. He recommended his cousin for the post as an individual of known mathematical ability. However, on the advice of William Petty, whose colonial service enabled him to see that this particular job would lead only to headaches, and because of his health, which was always frail, Wren turned the King’s offer down. He did so with reluctance, for with the commission came the promise of the post of Surveyor-General of the Royal Works once Sir John Denham died. Luckily for Wren, Charles did not take the refusal as an insult.

  Wren probably wished to go to Italy to see ancient Rome and the architecture of the Renaissance at Florence and elsewhere. He did not have the money, however. But he knew that if he wished to expand his knowledge of the neoclassical architectural ideas sweeping into northern Europe, he needed to see some of it for himself. The books of plans he consulted at home were insufficient. Of all the possible destinations within his means and with sufficient architecture of interest, there was only one choice: Paris. Armed with an invitation to stay with the British ambassador, Wren set off just as the plague was taking hold in June 1665.

  It was possibly his second visit to Paris* While there, he was thrilled by the churches surmounted by domes rather than by traditional English towers and spires. He met the ageing François Mansart, the venerable architect who had introduced symmetrical classicism to France. He also met the great Italian architect and sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who had been invited to Paris to consult on the rebuilding of the Louvre Palace. Bernini was so famous throughout Europe that crowds stopped to stare whenever he walked by. Wren was lucky to meet Bernini, who was not given to indulging young upstarts, no matter how polite and cultured they might be. In the end, Wren gained a few minutes of Bernini’s time, during which he was given a fleeting glance of the great man’s drawings for the important commission to revive the east front of the Louvre. For possession of these drawings, Wren said, he ‘would give my skin’.2 Louis XIV and his court gave rather less: after laying a foundation stone, they rejected Bernini’s plans.

  Wren’s enthusiasm for Bernini’s architecture revealed much about the direction of the young man’s thinking. Bernini had, along with Francesco Borromini, created the extravagant baroque architecture that expressed the Catholic Church’s anti-Protestant counter-Reformation. It was not so much the counter-Reformation that interested Wren, for he was as firm an Anglican as could be, but the imaginative verve of its architecture.

  Once Wren returned to London, the question of what to do with the crumbling St Paul’s was as fresh as ever. Conservative architectural voices gave their opinion, as before, that the old church should be patched up. Wren saw how the ancient nave leant away from the vertical owing to its weak foundations and the heaviness of the roof. The old church was falling down under its own weight. No amount of shoring up could mend it for long. Fresh from his Paris experiences, Wren was ready with new proposals. Backed by his friends John Evelyn and William Sancroft, the Dean of St Paul’s, he suggested a solution – tear it down and start again. Patching it up would only mean delaying matters ‘to ye next Posterity as a further object of Charity’.3

  For Wren, only a revolutionary approach not seen before in England could fulfil the need of creating a cathedral that would be the pride of London while satisfying the needs of the new Anglican liturgy. With the reforms that led up to the Savoy Conference of 1661, the Church no longer had need for a long nave from which the people would watch the mystery of the Eucharist. But the Anglican Church hung onto its orthodox views. The new inclusive idea, which Wren supported, of a congregation participating in the religious service and listening to readings and a sermon in a basilica was to run into trouble. What Wren wished for was a less hierarchical space, in which the nave would widen out and shorten under a great dome until to all intents and purposes it disappeared altogether to become a square, a fat stubby cross, or even a circle.

  Wren wrote to the commission for the rebuilding of St Paul’s that the traditional crossing, the meeting point of nave, choir and transepts, should be transformed into something else: a spacious dome or rotunda with a cupolo [cupola] or hemispherical roof and upon ye cupolo for ye outward ornament, a lantern with a spire to rise proportionally’. (This last detail showed that Wren was conscious that the church hierarchy would, no matter what, still want an English Gothic spire.) He went on to point out the major advantage of his new space: ‘Ye church which is much too narrow for its height rendered spacious in ye middle which may be a proper place for a Vast Auditory.’4

  Wren’s revolutionary ideas had their supporters, including his longstanding friend John Evelyn, For his ideas to prevail, however, they would have to be discussed at a full meeting of the commission and its advisors.

  Before such a meeting could be called, there occurred a major turning point in the war with the Dutch. Despite some victories at sea in the preceding year, the British still faced the prospect of Dutch supremacy over trade routes. A great Dutch fleet laden with spices had returned from the East Indies unchecked by the British. To make matters worse, because of their expansionist ambitions in Europe, the French declared war against the English on the Dutch side. Charles’s ambitions regarding international expansion were seen by his cousin Louis XIV as interfering with French interests. The Royal Navy faced the prospect of having to fight two fleets. A French fleet took control of En
glish colonics in the Caribbean and Suriname, with the intention to sail against Virginia, although an English fleet dispatched in June retook Suriname and destroyed much of the French fleet’s capability.

  Before matters could escalate any further, Charles decided the Royal Navy urgently needed to inflict a serious blow against the Dutch. A fleet under the command of George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, opened the action by attacking the Dutch fleet at anchor off Dunkirk. The Four Days’ War, as it came to be called, lasted from 11 to 14 June, and was the longest sea battle in history. Both sides claimed victory, but in the final tally the British fleet suffered much heavier losses than the Dutch, losing some twenty ships, with 1000 men killed and 2000 taken prisoner. The Dutch lost six or seven ships with 1500 men killed. The English losses resulted in a withdrawal of the fleet to the safety of the Thames Estuary. According to an eyewitness account, hundreds of bedraggled and wounded sailors were to be seen struggling along the road from the navy town of Rochester, heading towards London, looking as if they were unlikely to return to active service.5 The Dutch mounted a blockade on the Thames Estuary, hoping to prevent the English from putting out into the Channel or North Sea.

  Anxious to force home their naval advantage and prevent another fiasco like the surprise attack on their merchant fleet, the Dutch decided to put into effect a scheme they had been hatching for more than a year. The plan was to wait until the English fleet put into Chatham dockyard for repairs, then attack and utterly destroy it. Despite its merits, this plan had one major drawback: it was dependent upon the English for its timing. At the end of July a large Dutch fleet commanded by their best admiral, Michiel de Ruyter, set sail to carry out the plan, hoping to find the blockaded English fleet bottled up in Chatham. The weather was against the Dutch, and an expected supporting fleet from their new French allies failed to show up. De Ruyter had to postpone his plan. On the morning of 25 July he discovered the full English fleet at sea off North Foreland, under the command of Prince Rupert and the Duke of Albemarle. The ensuing engagement would be known as the Battle of St James’s Day† Although both sides lost few ships, the Dutch lost many more men in the fighting. At one time the Dutch position became so desperate that de Ruyter stood on the deck of his flagship crying out to be martyred by English gunfire.

  Two days of fierce fighting resulted in a narrow English victory. Three hundred English seamen died and 1200 Dutch. The following month, a fleet commanded by that unswerving scourge of the Dutch, Admiral Robert Holmes, raided the Dutch town of West-Terschelling, finding 160 Dutch merchant ships at anchor and destroying most of them. In what became known as Holmes’s Bonfire, he also sacked and burned the town. The Dutch took this attack on a town as a great provocation, reinforcing their desire to deal the English a knockout punch. Thanks to their superior shipbuilding industry and economic backing, the Dutch navy could be restored to full capability sooner than the English.

  During the conflict, some London merchants made fortunes. If they could find crews willing to take the risk, merchants could bring supplies across sea lanes patrolled by enemy warships to sell the goods at a premium. William Rider continued to supply the Royal Navy with tar, pitch and timber from Scandinavia. Now rich, he enjoyed showing off his country house to friends and business acquaintances, including Samuel Pepys, a key contact who administered Rider’s naval contracts.

  Though both London and the King had been all for the war only a year or two earlier, opinion was now divided. The war had started out well enough, but as it dragged on it showed up some severe discrepancies between English and Dutch sea power. Although England was much more populous than Holland, its population was comprised mainly of rural peasantry who paid little or no taxes. Holland was chiefly urban, with a strong tax base, and so could spend proportionately higher sums on its navy. The English ambassador to The Hague, George Downing, reported that in order to have a strong navy the Dutch were prepared to pay high taxes. During the war, for every warship the English built, the Dutch built seven. For any proud Englishman taking a ferry down the Thames past the Royal Navy dockyards at Southwark and Rotherhithe this would have come.as a surprise, for London prided itself on having been a shipbuilding city since Tudor times. Amsterdam, however, was everything London was in shipbuilding and more‡ In the 1660s, with the Exchequer empty, the question of whether the English fleet was capable of delivering a victory against the enemy was earnestly debated in Parliament.

  In such financially straitened circumstances, the matter of repairs to St Paul’s Cathedral became tiresome, a thorn in the side of the church authorities and of the government. A decision had to be made. On 27 August the Dean of St Paul’s, William Sancroft, left his deanery on the south side of the cathedral and walked the two hundred yards up a narrow lane to the cathedral’s west front, before ascending the steps to Inigo Jones’s great classical portico over the west door. A clutter of shops and stalls now lined the steps and porch, designed to award Italian gravitas to the ailing Gothic building. Sancroft went in, to chair yet another meeting on the future of the cathedral.

  The church Sancroft held in his care was the largest in England and the third largest in Europe. St Paul’s had sat above London on Ludgate Hill since its foundation stone was laid during the reign of William the Conqueror in the late eleventh century. A previous church on the site had been destroyed by fire. The construction of the current building had been delayed when a serious fire broke out in the city in 1135, and another in 1212§ The Norman church was not consecrated until 1240. Since the fourteenth century, its fabric had gradually decayed. The graceful spire, among the tallest anywhere in the world, was damaged by fire after being struck by a lightning bolt in 1444. In 1561, when lightning struck again, the spire caught fire and fell. During the civil wars, Parliamentary soldiers used the nave as a barracks. This was no new desecration; in Elizabethan times the nave had been London’s public promenade and was known as Paul’s Walk. People of all classes gathered to walk up and down, exchanging information and gossip, making conversation and business deals twice a day, morning and evening, as if called to matins and evensong.

  Dean Sancroft was joining his fellow commissioners for the repair of St Paul’s, who were gathering along with various invited experts to see matters for themselves. John Evelyn was present to lend his omniscient grandeur. Wren was there, as were the fashionable architect Roger Platt and the master mason Joshua Strong. Wren expressed his view that the nave walls were leaning dangerously outwards owing to the weight of the roof. Platt disagreed. His opinion could not be dismissed; having studied the architecture of Rome, he had more recently designed Lord Clarendon s house, currently going up on Piccadilly. One of the first private houses to be built in England in the classical style, its design was already influential.

  Plumb lines were deployed to test Wren’s theory. The walls were found to be leaning – the why was debated. The party moved on to the crossing. Here, Platt said the old, unsafe steeple could be repaired or replaced. Wren, supported by Evelyn, argued that it would be best to pull it down and build anew. One can speculate that Evelyn and Wren had agreed beforehand on their joint submission. Unanimity among the commissioners was impossible, but Wren was asked to prepare plans and costs for a dome to replace the steeple. This arrangement received general acceptance, suggesting prior support from Wren’s close friend and patron, Dean Sancroft.

  While the St Paul’s commissioners continued their deliberations, tax inspectors went out on their twice-yearly rounds of London to ascertain the amount of hearth tax due to the King. In August, an inspector went down a small street near London Bridge inhabited by skilled working men and women. Pudding Lane was a typical medieval street, built mainly of wood and plaster, with jettied upper storeys jutting out over the road. The inspector moved from house to house, noting down the number of stoves and fireplaces in each building. Mary Whittacre, a widow, had two; George Porter, a plasterer, three; the Widow Gander one. Thomas Knight, as befitted his trade as a glass maker, had four; Wil
liam Ludford, another plasterer, also had four, one of which was stopped up to avoid paying tax on it. And so on down the street. The twenty-one households in Pudding Lane had between them sixty-eight hearths, making a total in taxes owed to the King for the half-year of £3 8s. The household paying the most tax was that of Thomas Farriner, a baker who made hard tack, or ships’ biscuits. Farriner s house and shop had five hearths and one oven.6

  On the evening of Saturday 1 September, Farriner, together with his family and maid, raked out the oven and fires and went to bed, looking forward to a restful Sunday. But by one o’clock in the morning his home was on fire. It is not known exactly what happened, but it appears that sparks escaped from the oven and set fire to the bakery. By the time the family was roused, the bakery was well alight. Unable to go downstairs and exit through the bakery to the street, the family opened a top floor window and escaped across the roof to an adjoining house. The maid froze in fear and died in the flames.

  The fire spread quickly along the congested street. By the time the constable was roused and the church bells rung to call out the yeomanry, which doubled as a part-time fire brigade, several houses were blazing. Flames leapt from building to building across the narrow street. A strong east wind – dubbed by John Dryden a Belgian wind’ – whipped up the flames and caused the fire to spread rapidly.

  London’s fire hazard had been obvious for many years and was periodically discussed. John Evelyn had warned of it as lately as 1659. Despite the constant risk, little was done about it. Though outbreaks of fire occurred regularly, they were generally contained. The last serious London fire had been in 1638. London’s firefighting consisted of three basic components: spraying water, pulling down buildings, and blowing them up. Taking water first; it was either passed hand-to-hand in buckets, squirted from heavy and ungainly hand-held water squirts that looked something like giant water pistols, or pumped from a number of wheeled fire engines that took time to manoeuvre through the narrow streets and had very limited range. Water was obtained from the Thames and there was a water wheel beside the northern end of London Bridge. In extreme cases, the wooden water mains could be hacked open; but this usually resulted in the water merely draining away.