The King's City

by Don Jordan

  A replacement for the Royal Charles was ordered and launched. The Charles II exemplified the pinnacle of contemporary English naval design and firepower. With ninety-six guns, she was a first-rate ship of the line. A first-rater had the greatest number of guns the current state of naval architecture could accommodate. These huge ships, with their awesome firepower, were designed to take part in battles in which opposing fleets sailed in line astern towards one another until they formed two parallel lines. The theory was that at this moment the maximum number of cannons on each fleet could be trained on the enemy line. If tactics and luck were removed from the equation, the fleet with the greater firepower should win. Hence, English ships of the line became bigger and bigger.

  London’s shipyards had a lot of catching up to do. Although Dutch ships were smaller in size, the number of ships in the Dutch navy outnumbered that in the English fleet. The frenetic rebuilding programme would continue for several years.

  Together with shipping losses following Dutch marauding, the war was costing London as well as the Exchequer dear. London merchant ships had to face the threat of interception by the Dutch navy in the North Sea and the Channel, as well as an explosion of Dutch and French piracy in the Caribbean. Merchants lost heavily and went bust. The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa collapsed. This was no small matter for the Stuarts. A great deal of the Duke of York’s prestige rode on the company’s ships, not to mention his reputation as a player in the world of London business. The trade in slaves continued, carried out by freelance captains and merchants prepared to carry individual risk and dodge Dutch warships on their way around Africa and up to Europe.

  Meanwhile, the cathedral chapter made up its slow collective mind. A new cathedral should be built. Its design would be entrusted to the man they considered best equipped for the job. Dean Sancroft summoned his friend Christopher Wren to give him the news that lie had permission to tear down and rebuild St Paul’s. In his habitual way, Wren set to immediately to draw up plans.

  Wren was instantly at loggerheads with the church hierarchy. The Dean, together with the chapter of St Paul’s, wanted a recognisably English church with a Gothic spire. Wren wanted to build something never before seen in England, something echoing the architecture of ancient Rome.

  If any of the church authorities washed to see what was in the rnind of the man they had hired to rebuild their great church, they had only to travel sixty miles to Oxford, where Wren’s first major building was nearing completion. The university had commissioned the Shcldonian Theatre for the express purpose of hosting its graduation ceremonies. It was like no other building in all England. It was U-shaped in plan, reminiscent of an ancient Roman theatre. From one angle it appeared akin to a mannerist Italian church designed by the sixteenth-century star Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio, from another it was a polygonal frenchified baroque confection topped by nine huge oval roof lights arranged in a semicircle around a cupola. It was as un-English as it was possible to be.

  On 19 March 1669, Sir John Denham, Surveyor-General of the Royal Works, died at home, in his official residence in Scotland Yard at Whitehall Palace. He was fifty-four. John Webb, his able assistant, now aged fifty-eight, saw this as his long-awaited opportunity. He applied for the job he had in essence been doing for nine years. He had worked on designs for Somerset House, for a new’ palace at Whitehall, for another at Greenwich, and on various other royal works.

  Again, Webb’s hopes were dashed. This time he was beaten to the post not by a poet and courtier friendly with the King but by Wren, a man who had not so much chosen architecture as his profession but had it thrust upon him by the King. For Webb, who considered his life’s work to be a continuation of the tradition of classical architecture stretching back through his patron and teacher Inigo Jones to Palladio and beyond, it must have been galling to see another younger man moving into the surveyor’s apartments in Scotland Yard, though at thirty-seven Wren was hardly youthful. Within three years, Webb would follow Denham to the grave.

  As surveyor, Wren’s first royal commission was to design and build a replacement Custom House in the City. The new cathedral would have to wait a little longer. The Custom House was an important commission, for it was imperative to have a new home for this key provider for the Exchequer. With its site by the river inside the old walled city, it was also intended as a symbol of Charles’s authority in the heart of the merchants’ domain. Situated midway between London Bridge and the Tower, Wren’s new classical Custom House would dominate the quayside where London’s shipping was at its busiest. Its elegant eleven-bay central block, surmounted by the royal crest and flanked by two wings jutting forward towards the river, symbolised to anyone arriving in London by sea the power of the throne over all that took place in the city. And still the question about what to do with St Paul’s hung over the city in the form of its burnt-out shell.

  * Today, Petts Wood is a suburb in tbe south-eastern London borough of Bromley.

  † The ship’s ornate stern plate, bearing the British Royal emblem flanked by a gilded lion and unicorn, is today on display’ at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  CHAPTER 16

  NEW TERRITORIES

  While Wren worked up his plans for a Custom House that looked like a royal palace, an inconspicuous little ketch named the Nonsuch sailed up the Thames in October 1669, and anchored at Deptford. Its captain, Zachariah Gillam, and his most important passenger, a Frenchman named Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, had completed a remarkable assignment which would further enrich London and change the history of a huge expanse of the North American continent. Gillam and des Groseilliers brought a valuable cargo of furs, together with news that there was a vast sea in northern Canada surrounded by lands untrammelled by Europeans. The inhabitants, the Algonquin Indians, were friendly and eager to trade. The proof of des Groseilliers’ claims was soon on the quayside for all to see: a cargo of fine beaver skins for which a London furrier paid the impressive sum of £1300.

  The origins of the Nonsuch’s voyage lay in events years before, when des Groseilliers and his brother-in-law, PierreEsprit Radisson, fell out with French colonial officialdom in Quebec. Des Groseilliers, a truly remarkable figure in the history of exploration, was piqued by official refusal to allow him to explore further north and west of French-controlled territory around Lake Superior. He went anyway, accompanied by Radisson, who was some twenty years his junior. During the winter of 1660-1 they endured great hardships, almost dying of starvation in particularly harsh conditions when heavy snow prevented even the Algonquin from hunting.

  They returned to Quebec carrying a large quantity of furs and the knowledge from Cree traders of vast hunting grounds to the north-west of Hudson’s Bay. For their pains, their furs were confiscated and, when they complained to colonial officialdom in France, found the official ear was deaf to both their discoveries and their complaints.

  Dissatisfied with their reception in Paris, where their project was described as chimerical’, the brothers-in-law decided to pursue British help. They went to Boston, where they hoped to receive backing for a further expedition into the Hudsons Bay area. Their plans were greeted with enthusiasm, but a voyage was aborted because of another unusually cold winter in which the bay was blocked with ice early in the season.

  They obtained an. introduction to Colonel George Cartwright, one of the King’s commissioners sent to New England to resolve various colonial disputes. Cartwright saw what the French had been unable to appreciate: if new fur-hunting grounds were to be found west of Hudson’s Bay and if – a big if – the bay offered a channel through to the Pacific, this was a project worth pursuing. He suggested that des Groseilliers and Radisson sail for London.

  En route, Radisson began to write an account of his adventures, designed to persuade Charles II that he and his companion were men worth taking seriously. Radisson had an extensive knowledge of the vast region of Canada. He had spent many years travelling through it, ten of them with des Gr
oseilliers, each journey taking two to three years, during which the pair endured extremes of hardship and danger, Radisson was an adroit linguist and spoke several native American languages. Among the great events he witnessed were the French-Iroquois war and the almost complete destruction of the Huron nation by the Iroquois. The most shocking of his personal experiences happened while he was out shooting duck with two friends. Surprised by an Iroquois raiding party, Radisson was taken prisoner. His friends were killed and beheaded. ‘They shewed me their heads all bloody’, he wrote. For over a year he remained a slave before escaping, being recaptured, suffering dreadful torture, finally escaping once more and making his way to a Dutch outpost and freedom. If such details were included in the account he proposed to present to Charles, they made a strange opening gambit from a man hoping for financial backing.*

  The ship bearing Radisson and des Groseilliers arrived on the Thames in October 1665, at the height of the plague epidemic. The royal court had moved from Oxford to Hampton Court, and it was probably there that the travellers were introduced to the royal circle. Their account of untapped wealth in uncharted territory brought them introductions to Prince Rupert, the Duke of York and finally the King. The explorers were put up at the expense of the Crown and, with the support of the royal family, plans were drawn up for an expedition.

  Hostilities with the Dutch forestalled any voyage until 1668. The first, exploratory voyage was a modest affair with two ships, the Nonsuch carrying des Groseilliers and the Eaglet carrying Radisson. The captain of the Nonsuch, Zachariah Gillam, was handpicked for the task. He came from a well-known family of New England shipbuilders. During a career at sea he had gained an excellent knowledge of the eastern American seaboard. Gillam was entrusted to represent the interests of the Crown, sailing with French adventurers who had demonstrated they could change sides at will.

  In a storm off Ireland, Radisson’s ship suffered damage and had to turn back. At a loose end in England, he continued writing about his expeditions and experiences among the indigenous peoples of North America, including accounts of battles between the French and their allies the Huron and Algonquin against the Iroquois.1 As it has come down to us, his account does not have the air of a sales document designed to make the reader long for the discovery of the North-West Passage. It is much more than that: a gripping first-hand account of a key period in the history of European expansion into the New World and of great personal hardship and endurance. Radisson’s account was very possibly extended at Charles’s behest, for as we have seen the King had a keen interest in foreign adventures and exploration. Charles would have read Richard Hakluyt’s celebrated Voyages, compiled the previous century. Now he had the opportunity to hold in his hands an account of exploration written by someone who, unlike Hakluyt, had actually been there.

  The Nonsuch successfully completed its voyage across the Atlantic and sailed into the vastness of Hudson’s Bay, all 1.5 million square miles of it. Des Groseilliers and Gillam made contact with the natives and explained their desire to trade. The winter was spent at the mouth of a river draining into the southern edge of Hudson’s Bay, which they named the Rupert River. There they built a house, grandly naming it Fort Charles. In the spring, native trappers fulfilled their side of the bargain and reappeared bringing a rich harvest of beaver furs. Gillam and des Groseilliers set sail for London. The faith put in the two Frenchmen by the London court had paid off handsomely.

  News of the success of the voyage caused jubilation among its backers, not least among them the Duke of York and Prince Rupert. The obvious way forward was to form a joint stock company under a royal charter guaranteeing a monopoly to the company. Rupert lost no time in drawing up a document setting out the company’s objectives:

  To undertake an expedition into Hudson’s Bay to discover a passage into the South Seas and find a trade for furs, minerals and other commodities. The Governor and Company of Merchant Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay has sole rights to trade, power to get warships, to erect forts, make reprisals, exercise a monopoly, send home any unlicensed traders, declare war and peace.

  Under the patronage of the Duke of York, the company had eighteen stockholders. Several of these were also investors in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, including Prince Rupert, the Duke of Albemarle, Lord Arlington, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Sir Robert Viner and Sir John Robinson. Charles signed the royal charter in 1670, and a second voyage was planned. This time, Radisson would accompany his brother-in-law to the forests of Canada they both knew so well and in which they had both gained and lost fortunes. The French and Dutch colonists were surprised to see them turn up in the pay of the British. In comparison to other joint stock companies, such as the powerful East India Company or even the beleaguered Company of Royal Adventurers, the Hudson’s Bay Company was, to begin with, a small affair. For London and for Britain its significance could not have been greater.

  The colonisation of foreign lands was key to London’s prosperity and to Charles’s vision of colonial might. Early pioneers, including Sir Walter Raleigh, had failed to establish colonisation as much more than an aspiration. Under James I the first colony in Massachusetts had been established not as an instrument of royal patronage but as an act of religious defiance in the face of royal decree. The English settlement of Virginia was a financial enterprise run by a joint stock company with royal backing to create what Richard Hakluyt, an investor in the venture, called ‘a prison without walls’.2 Under Charles I, Barbados and other islands developed as slave colonies. Charles II was keen to make his mark on the New World. Under his patronage, Carolina had been developed into a slave economy, its low-lying grasslands and swamps turned into paddy fields for cotton production.

  The right of colonists to take over the lands of indigenous people such as those in Carolina was at least in part based on biblical interpretations. Sir Robert Filmer argued in his Observations upon the Original of Government (and would do so again later in Patriarchd) that God had made Adam the father figure of all humanity and that by descent humanity had ownership of all of the world.3 This ownership was manifested through the divine right of kings. When the early European explorers arrived in the New World they noted that the indigenous people had a very different notion of land ownership from that pertaining in Europe. To European eyes, the land they encountered was held in common ownership, or even left as wilderness, rather than being farmed or cultivated in a system of individual ownership. The Europeans could not see the patterns of tracks and trails that denoted a landscape well understood and sustainably harvested by countless generations of people, nor could they understand collectively tended cornrows as agriculture. A divinely appointed European king, they felt, surely had the right to such lands.

  The transition from common to individual ownership came through labour. The point was ingeniously argued, not least by Ashley Cooper’s in-house philosopher John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government, published posthumously in 1689 though begun twenty years earlier.4 Locke claimed that when God gave the earth to all people this did not constitute ownership. Ownership only came to those who worked the land. Since the inhabitants of Carolina and elsewhere were largely hunter-gatherers they did not own the land. If one were to search for a thesis that defined the essence of Protestant colonialism it would be hard to do better.

  It is interesting that the King chose this moment to have his portrait painted in full armour. Up to now, Charles had chosen to have himself represented in regal clothes, sitting on a throne and wearing the insignia of the Garter. The new court portrait was another in a long line commissioned from Peter Lely. Many of these were copied by mezzotint artists and turned out as prints for London’s burgeoning art market. Samuel Pepys had one of them, a portrait of Barbara Palmer, over his mantelpiece at the Navy Office. Many of Lely’s court portraits were undistinguished, being largely worked up by assistants. The same state of affairs applied to his portraits of the King, being produced as gifts for supporters, foreign d
ignitaries and rulers. For this royal portrait, Lely tried something new. He would paint the King dressed as a soldier.

  Anthony van Dyck had painted Charles I in full armour on horseback. Even though Charles II was more of a horseman than his father, Lely did not attempt such a feat. He knew’ he was no van Dyck. He painted the King three-quarter length, standing, bareheaded, wearing exquisite burnished black armour; the pose harks back to a portrait by William Dobson of the King as a boy wearing part of a suit of armour, with a page holding his helmet, probably at the beginning of the civil wars in 1642.

  In the Lely portrait, Charles wears around his neck a gold chain and medallion, while around his waist a golden chain holds a ceremonial sword. In his right hand he bears a rod of office. His left hand rests on top of a helmet sitting on a plinth. Behind the helmet sits the King’s coronation crown. The message is clear: here is a powerful king who will support his growing empire with arms if necessary. It is a shame that Lely diminished the effect by painting the King with an oddly lowered left shoulder, giving him a short upper arm. The hand on the helmet is therefore not so firmly planted. Perhaps it is well that this hand was not depicted resting on the crown.

  For the indigenous peoples of Carolina the march of colonialism and mercantilism was a disaster. They resisted, in vain, what became a flood of migrants supposedly blessed by God. Far away, London-based investors including Ashley Cooper obtained an income from their colonial investments in Carolina, adding to London’s mercantile wealth. Locke’s ideas on labour, which became known as the labour theory of property, were to have a major influence on capitalist thinking.5

  The Arab scholar Ibn Kaldun had done similar work in the fourteenth century, but his theories were unlikely to be known to London merchants in the seventeenth. Londoners may, however, have known of Thomas Aquinas’s writings on the subject. Aquinas thought that value came from ‘the amount of labour which has been expended in the improvement of commodities’.6 A problem with the labour theory was that it concentrated on the value of goods, omitting the value of work done by those who, like doctors, administrators and official functionaries of all types, were not themselves goods, and whose services could not be so measured. It would be some time until a new’ breed of social researchers named economists put these theories to more rigorous testing.