The King's City

by Don Jordan

  Newcourt’s oblong city was traversed from east to west by seven grand, equidistant thoroughfares, each eighty yards wide. A further seven major streets led from north to south. In this way the city was to be divided into sixty-four square units, or ‘parcels’ as Newcourt termed them. Each unit would constitute a parish with a church at its centre. For major public spaces, four of the basic units would be combined. In the case of St Paul’s, the rebuilt church would sit at the centre of a grand piazza, somewhat like Covent Garden. This radical plan, whose implementation would have required the destruction of all of the remaining part of London, was unsurprisingly turned down. It became instead an inspiration for William Penns utopian dream of Philadelphia, advertised sixteen years later.*

  A radical plan of a different form was put forward by Valentine Knight, a military officer. Knight suggested a canal should be dug leading from the Thames beside the ‘lower, north through the old city, then west across the metropolis to join up with the Fleet River outside the walls at the western side of the city. Knights suggestion was a brilliant solution to travel around the congested city. Where it fell down was in the method of payment. Knight not unreasonably thought the King could charge a toll to travel by canal to help pay for rebuilding. Sensitive to his public image, Charles felt he would be seen to be benefiting from the disaster. He had Knight put in gaol.

  Robert Hooke, always keen to take on another scheme no matter how busy, put in his plan. His home, Gresham College, had escaped the fire. With the Guildhall gone, the mayor and Corporation had no offices, so they sequestered the college until such time as a new Guildhall could be built. The Royal Exchange had also moved its activities into the college. The Royal Society now occupied the great palace of Arundel House on the Strand, next door to Somerset House, having been invited by Henry Howard, the 6th Duke of Arundel. Since everyone knew Hooke had no other home, he alone among all the professors was allowed to stay in his rooms.

  From there, right inside the ruined city, he concocted his ideas on how best to carry out its rebuilding. Like Newcourt, he came up with a geometric grid in which the key buildings, such as churches and commercial halls, could be sited as if on a chessboard.

  The aldermen newly installed at Gresham College liked his design sufficiently to give it their approval, going so far as to turn down the plan offered by the city’s official surveyor, Peter Mills. As Mills’s plan has not survived we do not know what form it took. Another member of the Royal Society who was keen to enter into the discussion was Sir William Petty, eager to lend his views on organisation gleaned from his time in government administration in Ireland. He did not produce a city plan, but offered his thoughts on how the rebuilt one should be administrated.

  Two more members of the Royal Society lent their minds to the task. John Evelyn and Christopher Wren both suggested a rational, classical city. Their plans were remarkably similar. This was not surprising, for they had discussed how to rebuild the city. Wren, always hyperactive, quickly drew up some initial plans, which no doubt Evelyn would have seen. At any rate, both men’s plans had a key feature: the incorporation of Westminster and the West End into the overall design, so that a rebuilt city east of the Fleet River was linked to the newer city to the west. In Wren’s plan, a huge new piazza was sited north of the Temple with eight roads radiating from it. A ring of outer connecting roads joined them to form an octagon. One of the radiating roads led to the Palace of Whitehall, and others into the old walled city. In this feature, the plans were strikingly similar. If that were not enough, both plans included major arteries running east from St Paul’s, Evelyn’s plan featuring three routes fanning out whereas Wren’s had only two. Where the two plans differed substantially was in the area of the eastern walled city that had been saved from the flames. Here, Evelyn proposed wholesale redevelopment, including another grand octagonal piazza, where Wren left well alone.

  Exhibiting the capacity for work that those who knew him remarked upon, Wren completed his fully worked-up plan eleven days after the fire, two days before Denham sent out his emergency measures. As a sign of how his mind was working, he did not present his plans to the Royal Society but to the King. (Evelyn, to his equal credit, presented his own plans two days later.) Thanks to Wrens marvellous skills as a draughtsman, his plan was beautifully drawn and presented. Not only that, but the plan itself was elegant and rational, laying out a modern city built around several key points, chiefly St Paul’s in the western section of the old city, linked by the northern arm of his major east-west routes to the Royal Exchange, which became the focal point of the entire city. The symbolic link between God and Mammon could not have been plainer. Wren, evidently, had not onlv scrutinised architecture while he had been in France, but had taken on new ideas in planning, most notably Andre Lc Notre’s 1661 designs for the gardens and parklands of Versailles, laid out in grids and triumphant diagonals. It is perhaps little wonder that Wren did not present his plans to the Royal Society for discussion, for what he had created was a triumphal city for an absolutist monarch.

  While Richard Newcourt’s vision was for a religious city, designed around a grid of parishes, Wren’s vision was more practical. Around the Royal Exchange were to be positioned the Post Office, the Excise Office, the goldsmiths’ premises and, most interestingly, a space for something simply labelled ‘Bank’. This last was a marker of the long-running debate over the launching of a national bank to replace the current hydra-headed system whereby multiple city goldsmith/bankers made loans to the Exchequer, which in turn was located not in or near the city but inside Whitehall Palace, placing it symbolically in the King’s immediate domain rather than at the service of the nation.

  Charles, always with an eye for the French way of doing things, favoured a massive rebuilding scheme that would create major boulevards and triumphant vistas. To this the city corporation perceived two impediments: the first was cost, the second the frenchified design favoured by the King. A meeting of Parliament reached no conclusion either way. Long after Wren’s and everyone else s drawings were rolled up for good, the debate over the general needs of the city continued. Its economic revival was at stake. Merchants and shopkeepers did not want to wait for years to move back into a beautiful, triumphant city designed on classical Roman lines: they wanted to resume business right away, or as quickly as the ruins could be cleared and new houses of commerce erected.

  Under Wren’s friend Robert Hooke, a team surveyed the outlines of the destroyed city, making a map of the roads and alleys. From this, a plan was formed for widening the roads and working out how to compensate those whose properties would suffer. The new roads were to have different widths according to their function. At the dockside they were to be one hundred feet wide, major streets seventy feet, others fifty, forty-two, and so on down to alleys at sixteen feet; where possible, the latter would be dispensed with altogether. Building in wood with rubble or mortar infill was banned. All new edifices were to be built in stone or brick. No overhanging upper storeys or windows or galleries were allowed. All these stipulations were formed into a Rebuilding Act in 1667, by which time around 650 houses had been rebuilt. Compensation for those who lost land due to road widening was to be paid from a new tax of twelve pence per ton of coal landed in London for the following ten years.

  While Hooke forged on urgently with laying out the surveyed city, its key organisations and entities had their own headaches. Most of the city’s ancient livery companies had been obliterated, as had its churches. Nevertheless, some elements of London life revived with astonishing rapidity. Major functions of government carried on in their temporary accommodation. In Gresham College, the city corporation met more or less nonstop. Despite being dislodged and having several of its members involved in vital work surveying and redesigning the damaged city, the Royal Society swiftly recommenced its meetings. At a session held on 30 October 1667, Dr Wilkins suggested that the time was right for the society to build its own college. By the time of the next meeting, on 5 November
, the idea had taken flight. Several of the society’s wealthier members promised money. Letters were to be sent out to the whole membership asking for subscriptions.

  By the following May, £1000 had been promised and the society voted that work should begin on its new home as soon as possible. The building was to be erected between the Strand and the river on land to be provided by the Duke of Norfolk. Both Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke – as if they were not busy enough – were asked to make draft plans. Wren’s estimated cost was £2000. The cost Hooke arrived at is unknown, though both plans were put forward for a decision on 13 July 1668. In the meantime, Hooke was ordered, as usual, to shoulder the work, to make models, estimate costs, engage workmen, and make yet more drawings based on changes the society wished to make to the original plans. It all came to nothing. On 10 August, a meeting decided that work on building the new college should be put off until the following spring.8 After that, all mention of the great scheme lapsed.

  The Royal Society’s failure to build itself a college was a deciding factor in its future fortunes. It is not recorded why the work did not go ahead but it is reasonable to surmise that sufficient money was not raised. Many of the members failed to pay their subs, and some were too poor to do so. It might also be the case that the Duke of Norfolk withdrew his offer of the land.9 Whatever the case, the college went into a period of gradual decline and did not recover its prestige until Sir Isaac Newton became its president in 1705, bringing with him his international reputation.

  But that was in the future; for now the society’s usual flurry of events and publications continued, providing a sounding board for the new empirical ideas. During 1667 it was visited by one of its most remarkable critics, the aristocratic writer, thinker and philosopher Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. For Cavendish, experimentalism obstructed the working of pure reason. The crux of the matter was this: how could the introduction of mechanical instruments help in understanding God’s world? God had designed the world so that those who lived in it were meant to understand it by the powers God had given to mankind – analytical deduction and so on. The anti-experimentalists argued that the use of machines such as microscopes intervened between mankind on the one hand and the rest of God’s creation on the other.

  Margaret Cavendish was not entirely opposed to the Royal Society’s experimental work. She valued the role of observation in understanding the natural world and thought people should be trained to do so. But she shared Robert Boyle s belief that no theory or observation could be proposed as ‘truth’; all one could do was put forward one’s finding as a probability.10 As Boyle expressed it, ‘not to Dogmatize, but only to make an Enquiry’,11

  Cavendish read Micrographie and was not convinced by all of Hooke s conclusions. Commenting on his observation that in various lights a fly’s eye appeared to be constructed in different ways – a perforated lattice, cones, pyramids, etc. – Cavendish thought the microscope provided ‘inconsistent and uncertain ground’ and questioned how the experimenter could judge the ‘truest light, position or medium that doth present the object naturally as it is’.12 This was a fair point, based not entirely on hostility to the idea behind the observation but on the quality of the observation.

  The Duchess was not alone in her criticism of the use of microscopes. Thomas Sydenham shared some of her reservations, adding his own feeling that the augmentation of human senses bestowed by God might even be sinful. He discussed his criticism of microscopy with a new acquaintance, fellow physician John Locke, who was to play such an important role in the Enlightenment as a philosopher and political theorist.

  Locke was born in Somerset in 1632 into a Puritan family that supported the Parliamentary cause during the civil wars. Thanks to the patronage of his father’s former commanding officer, Locke went to Westminster School and Christchurch, Oxford. In 1667 he was invited to London by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and later ist Earl of Shaftesbury, as his personal doctor. Following a successful operation overseen by Locke to remove a cyst on Cooper’s liver the two men became friends. Cooper credited Locke with saving his life. And so two of the most important political minds of the age came together.

  Locke lived at Ashley Cooper’s home, Exeter House, next door to the Duke of Arundel’s palace on the Strand. Here, probably at the suggestion of Cooper, who greatly influenced the younger man, he began his work on theories of government and the state. Like John Milton, and Cicero long before him, Locke concluded that the only just society was one in which there was a contract between government and people. If the ruler or rulers broke the contract the people could select a new government. Though the work could not be published during Charles’s reign, it was secretly disseminated among those who, like Ashley Cooper, grew disenchanted with Charles’s rule.

  Locke continued his medical studies with Sydenham, who had a successful practice in Pall Mall, not far from Exeter House. He particularly admired Sydenham’s insistence on keen clinical observation rather than ‘indulging in idle speculations’. Sydenham also played an important role in the development of modern British philosophy. Along with Ashley Cooper, he is credited with planting the seed for what would become Locke’s hugely influential work on the empirical basis of knowledge, later published as An Essay on Human Understanding. Long before that, however, Locke and Sydenham wrote a treatise on the use of the microscope in studying anatomy. Their combined assessment was that such unnatural aids reinforced the view that there were God-given limits to what mankind might observe and know. They argued that by examining the contents of the human body under a microscope all that was done was to aid the observation of the surface of more and more things, ‘creating a new superficies for ourselves to stare at’.13 It was an elegant argument. As scientific methodology improved, however, it was one that would become redundant.

  The criticism of experimentalism that it tended to look only at the surface of things was linked in the seventeenth-century mind to the metaphysical idea of vitalism. This was the idea that animate and inanimate objects differed because of a Vitalising’ spark within things judged to be alive that was absent from those judged not to have life. Given the limited knowledge of biology available in the mid-seventeenth century, vitalism was a highly regarded philosophical position.

  Desirous of seeing the Royal Society’s experiments for herself, on 23 May Margaret Cavendish journeyed south from her ducal seat, Welbeck Abbey in Northamptonshire, accompanied by her husband William Cavendish, ist Duke of Newcastle and grandson of the famous Bess of Hardwick. The Duke, who had fought in the Civil Wars on the Royalist side, was the immensely wealthy patron of several writers, including Jonson, Davenant, Dryden and Thomas Shadwell. But his greatest passion was the breeding and training of horses, and he hoped London would greet his new book on the subject with enthusiasm.

  London was much more interested in Margaret. By virtue of her ‘antic’ dress and her wide-ranging interests in intellectual pursuits, such as poetry and natural philosophy, widely considered best left to men, she was seen as unconventional. In the male circles of literature and science her attainments were largely dismissed, though she was universally acknowledged to be very fine looking,14 We are left a reasoned if partial portrait of this remarkable woman in the lines written by her husband as a poetic foreword to her extraordinary utopian novel The Blazing World, published the year before she visited the academicians:

  Her Beauty’s found beyond the Skill

  Of the best Paynter, to Imbrace

  These lovely Lines within her face.

  View her Soul’s Picture, Judgment, witt,

  Then read those Lines which Shee hath writ15

  The attitude of the London virtuosi to this highly intelligent and astute student of the arts and sciences can be gleaned from Robert Hooke’s diary entry for the day she visited the Royal Society. Several experiments, he wrote, were put on Tor entertain Duchess of Newcastle’. It seems not to have occurred to Hooke or the other members o
f the society that the Duchess might find in their experiments something more than mere entertainment. At any rate, Hooke and Boyle performed a series of experiments including the use of magnets, microscopes and their now famous vacuum pump in order to demonstrate weighing air in a receiver by Rarefying engine’.16 What the Duchess made of these demonstrations is sadly unknown. We do know that she held to her belief in the superiority of pure reason over experimentalism. Royal Society Fellow Joseph Glanvill felt the need to apologise to the Duchess for what the society had been able to show her, writing to her that:

  all that we can hope for, as yet, is but the History of things as they are, but to say how they are, to raise general Axioms, and to make Hypotheses, must, I think, be the happy priviledge of succeeding Ages; when they shall have gained a larger account of the Phaenomena, which yet are too scant and defective to raise Theories upon .. ,17

  Just as he had been strangely far-sighted in his prediction of communication via magnetic waves, Glanvill could see that where the society currently fell down was that its knowledge was at an early stage. Once more was known, nature’s secrets would become amenable to explanation. In the middle of the seventeenth century it took quite a leap of the imagination – one most were unable to make – to realise this.

  By far the greatest voice raised against the experimentalists was that of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that ‘sense’ should not stand in the way of ‘reason’, and that no number of devices such as a telescope or Boyle’s vacuum pump could make up for the application of reason by the pure natural philosopher, who should not he some mere designer or maker of engines. He wrote scathingly that the practitioner might