The King's City

by Don Jordan

  As profits were made and capital accrued, questions were posited about how value actually came about. Without labour, it was argued, no profits were made. Labour could take many forms as long as it took account of the activity necessary to obtain, create or acquire goods and sell them. Thus labour came to be seen as the basis of profit. One of those who argued for this view of how wealth accrued was Sir William Petty, in work he published in the early 1660s.7 His work was built upon by Locke and accorded Petty the right to be known as one of the many fathers of economics. Indeed, the value of land, measured by the cost of working it and selling the produce, became the comparative basis by which to measure the value of other things. In this way, a value could be put upon assets and the labour cost of setting them to work.8 If Sir William had examined his own career more closely he would have recalled that another way to make money was to undervalue other peoples land and sell it off at knockdown prices to others – and to oneself. This was what he had done with the expropriated land of Irish Catholics he surveyed in order that it could be sold to Protestant planters.

  In general, Londoners were doing well. The city still smelt of sewers but peacocks strutted above the mire. John Evelyn described a gentleman of fashion he spotted at Westminster:

  It was a fine silken thing which I spied walking the other day through Westminster Hall, that had as much Ribbon on him that would have plundered six shops, and set up twenty country pedlars: all his body was dres’t like a May-Pole . . . the motion was wonderful to behold, and the colours were Red, orange and Blew, of well-gum’d satin,9

  According to the brewer, importer and East India Company panjandrum ]osiah Child, the lot of Londoners had improved greatly over the preceding fifty to sixty years:

  Gentlewomen in those dayes would not esteeme themselves well cloathed in a Searge Gown, which a Chamber-Maid will now be ashamed to be seen in: Whether our Citizens and middle sort of Gentry now are not more rich in Cloaths, Plate, Jewels, and Household Goods, etc. then the best sort of Knights and Gentry were in those dayes. And whether our best sort of Knights and Gentry now, do not exceed by much in those things the Nobility of England sixty Years past: Many of whom then would not go to the price of a whole Sattin Doublet.10

  Child had made his fortune selling beer to the navy, John Evelyn described him as most sordidly avaricious’ (this from a man whose family owed its fortune to gunpowder). Like many of those who had done well in London, Child lived outside the city, having built a huge hubristic estate at Wanstead Manor in Essex. Evelyn was most sniffy about it, though he was complimentary about an avenue of trees Child had planted. Child was intellectually capable and rose to be president of the EIC, running it as if it were his own.

  The maintenance and expansion of trade, Child saw, depended upon the supply of money and the creation of conditions in which trade could prosper. He wrote widely on economic matters, relating in one pamphlet how all the ills of English trade could be ameliorated if only they copied their enemies, the Dutch: ‘The prodigious increase of the Netherlanders in their Domestic and Foreign trade, Riches and multitude of shipping, is the envy of the present, and may be the wonder of all future Generations.’ He set out fifteen areas in which the Dutch might be imitated, taking in everything from the cost of shipbuilding to the sums charged by lawyers in commercial legal fees. Child thought it important for the good of business that wives should be as well educated in mathematics as their husbands, that the Eaiglish should be thriftier, that inventors should be properly rewarded, and that merchants with experience in foreign trade should be brought into the government, rather than leaving it all to professional politicians.

  Child had one specific message – that the cost of money was paramount in ensuring a nation thrived. Interest rates had declined during the preceding century or more, with the result that England was wealthier. But more was to be done. The Dutch, he said, lent money at 3 per cent, the rate rising to four in times of war. In England the rate stood at 6 per cent, with the King having to pay much more when hostilities began. If these rates could be lowered to match the Dutch rate, England’s trade and wealth would increase. Child’s opinions went beyond the narrow ambit of commercial interests to encompass some acute views on the nature of English society, marking him out as a keen social observer. Several of his observations remain valid today.†

  As a major benefactor, Charles took a close interest in the East India Company. In 1670 he gave the company a new’ charter with many new rights. The company would be permitted to act like a sovereign state with its own army. It could acquire foreign territory, mint its own money, form alliances, make war, raise armies and exercise criminal and civil justice over its territories. This meant that foreign rulers had to deal directly with the company rather than with the Crown. It had become the first multinational, theoretically answerable to the Crown but in reality answerable to no one but itself. The company was to use these new powers with profound consequences for India.

  As part of his dowry when he married Catherine ofBraganza, Charles had received the Portuguese territory of Bombay, fie now rented it to the EIC for £10 a year. It would become the most important property England had in the entire continent.

  The EIC enforced its monopoly with fervour. Company-agents dealt ruthlessly with ‘interlopers’ – merchants who tried to operate independently in the vast stretches of territory covered by the company’s monopoly. The case of one particular merchant who fell foul of the monopoly rules became famous because it was fought through the courts and Parliament for so many years, London merchant Thomas Skinner began trading off Bengal in 1657. The following year, Skinner’s ship, cargo and property were seized by EIC agents, his trading post was gutted and the merchant himself badly beaten and left destitute thousands of miles from home.

  A few years later, Skinner reappeared in London and began a battle for restitution. In 1668 he seemed to have won when the House of Lords ordered the EIC to pay him £5000 in compensation. The Commons, which contained many EIC investors, promptly ordered Skinner to the Tower. In turn, the Lords, furious at the Commons’ intervention, ordered the chairman of the EIC, Sir Samuel Barnardiston, to the Tower as well. A constitutional battle lasting years developed, the Lords arguing their prerogatives against those of the Commons. With neither side stepping down, the dispute reached the King. At first Charles seemed sympathetic to Skinner. But his sympathies ultimately lay with his financial interests in the EIC. In 1670 Charles ordered both houses to drop the case completely. One of the reasons given was that the case was taking up parliamentary time that should have been spent voting the King’s supply – his state income. Charles could not have that. As a result, Skinner appears never to have received his compensation. He had tried to take on the might of the EIC and had learned that the company was not only a sovereign state abroad, but had friends in high places at home‡

  * It is not known how much of this Radisson wrote down in the first version of His memoirs given to Charles II, for the King’s copy was lost long ago. What we have today is mainly compiled from a handwritten version owned by Samuel Pepys and discovered among the Pepys papers at Oxford in the nineteenth century.

  † For an excerpt from Child’s fascinating pamphlet, containing a list of his observations and proposals, see Appendix IV.

  ‡ In 1694 an Act of Parliament would finally deregulate trade to India, meaning that any company could set up in business there. In practice the EIC continued to have almost total control, except for a parallel company briefly set up in opposition, which the EIC soon gobbled up by buying shares in it.

  CHAPTER 17

  LAW AND ORDER

  In 1670, Parliament made two violent crimes punishable by death, neither of which up to then had been subject to serious punishment. The first was that of stealing people. People theft, or ‘spiriting’, remained a major form of organised crime in London, particularly around Thames Street and the docklands downstream. Although this aspect of Ljondon’s underworld has been mentioned earlier
, a description of this fascinating and pernicious trade is necessary here to fill out a proper description of London life.1

  Spiriting began soon after the first colonies were established around the Chesapeake Bay area of America in the early seventeenth century. By 1645 the practice had become such a menace that Parliament ordered law officers to keep a watch for ‘those stealing, selling, buying, inveigling, purloining, conveying or receiving children’. London’s port officials were instructed to search all vessels ‘in the river and the Downs for such children’.2 These measures, and others that came after, made little difference.

  The problem facing those who wished to stamp out spiriting was that it was no ordinary crime, carried out purely for the benefit of one or two lowly perpetrators. Spiriting was a shady low-life business with major benefits for the colonial project that had the patronage of the royal family. One authority has pointed out that spirits had an important function within the economic system of colonialism: ‘instead of being deplorable outlaws in the servant trade they were faithful and indispensable adjuncts of its most respected merchants.’3

  The stock-in-trade of the spirit was a plausible manner and a connection to the shipping business. The unwary would be tricked in one of several ways. They might be plied with drink and then locked up by the spirit’s associate, who had access to a secure room in a dockside house or tavern. From there the poor victim would be taken by force to a ship and sold into slavery in the colonies. Other ruses involved a stranger striking up a conversation with the intended victim, who was then invited to look around a ship. Before they knew it, the ship was at sea and they were on their way to a new and brutal life. Some spirits used persuasion to get gullible people to sign up as indentured servants, in the belief that they were going to a better life rattier than one of unremitting drudgery and possible death.

  All ages and all types became prey for the spirits. An undated broadsheet told of the arrest and commitment to Newgate prison of ‘The Grand Kidnapper’, Captain Azariah Daniel. Under questioning, Daniel admitted to the spiriting of two missing twelve-vear-old children who were found in his house, hidden in an attic. A second case, related in the same broadsheet, told of the disappearance of the son of a Mr Vernon of Stepney. Asking around, Vernon learned that a boy looking like his son had been seen in the company of a mariner called Edward Harrison. Having obtained a warrant from a magistrate, Vernon and a constable went to Harrisons house. No boy having been found, the suspect was questioned by the magistrate and confessed to having put him on board a ship bound for Barbados. He made the further sensational claim that besides the Vernon boy there were ‘above a hundred and fifty more aboard several other ships in the said river [the Thames] bound to His Majesty’s Plantations’.4 The satirist Ned Ward, who visited the West Indies, painted a far from rosy picture of life in a sugar colony, describing Jamaica as ‘The Receptacle of Vagabonds, the Sanctuary of Bankrupts, and a Close-stool for the Purges of our Prisons . . . as Hot as Hell, and as Wicked as the Devil’.5

  Spiriting became progressively more widespread until attempts were made to try to stamp out the spirit trade. To no avail, a group of London merchants and aldermen petitioned Parliament to pass laws against the trade. In 1664 a plan was put forward to interview every emigrant for the colonies to ensure they were going of their free will. Nothing came of it. Finally, in 1670, Parliament made spiriting – any deceit or force to steal any person or persons with intent to sell or transport them into ports beyond the sea’ – punishable by death.

  The Act would not be applied. For example, a London spirit named Ann Servant was fined thirteen shillings and sixpence for putting a young woman named Alice Flax aboard a ship and selling her in Virginia. A horse thief would have been hanged. Four years later, two spirits who kidnapped a sixteen-year-old girl were fined twelve pence. The horrible fact was that spiriting had become an integral part of the plantation enterprise; too many London merchants, sea captains, plantation owners and others had too much at stake to effectively clamp down on the practice. Spirits were simply a fact of London life.

  Ned Ward had gone to Jamaica because he was impoverished, unable to make a good living either by his humorous writing or as an occasional tavern keeper in London. He had arrived in the capital from Oxfordshire to find that without connections or an education of grammar-school level, life as a poet and satirist was hard. He soon joined the throng who felt the need to try their luck in the colonies. The necessity for, and eager supply of, new labour across the Atlantic gave rise to one of the first prolonged episodes of racketeering in British history. Those with the price of a one-way ticket could, like Ward, try their luck in the New World and either thrive – as he did – or not. Those without means could sign up to work their passage, ln return for the price of their one-way ticket on a vessel to the West Indies or America, thev would be sold to an estate owner as a labourer for a fixed period of four to seven years, after which they would be free to go their own way and make a living for themselves.

  The system was open to abuse on an industrial scale. The trouble often began at the quayside in London’s docklands. Those selling their labour for a passage to a new’ life could find themselves signed up with some very unsavoury people. This might only become apparent once the ship docked on the other side of the Atlantic. The poor immigrants w’ould be lined up on the dockside to be bought and sold like cattle, and were often treated as such. They were owned life and soul by their master, who could sell them on, restrict their freedoms and mete out harsh punishments. Indentured servants could find themselves whipped and flogged, manacled, branded, starved, denied the right to time off, to marriage or even the company of the opposite sex, and punished for any misdemeanours by having their period of indenture lengthened. Freedom could become an unattainable abstraction. Servants, so-called, were often worked to death, their value reckoned as iess than that of an African, for Africans cost more and had to be looked after for a lifetime of labour.6

  The indentured servant racket spread out from London to Bristol and beyond, even reaching Ireland, so giving rise to the peculiar situation in which those who were already colonised might become part of the slave labour force for yet another new colony. The racket was only brought to a stop with the American War of Independence. Until then, it coexisted with the slave trade from West Africa.7

  London’s less lawful side extended into everyday life. Late on the night of 3 February 1664 Samuel Pepys was in his coach going up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s Cathedral when he saw two men abduct a young female shopkeeper he knew by sight. He recorded the incident in the following terms: ‘I saw’ two gallants and their footmen taking a pretty wench, which I have much eyed, lately set up shop upon the hill, a seller of riband and gloves. They seek to drag her by some force, but the wench went, and I believe had her turn served . . . ‘

  In other words, Pepys watched two members of the upper classes, aided by their servants, abduct a female shopkeeper in order to rape her. Such was the attitude of upper-class men to lower-class women, Pepys did not feel shocked by the event. He was moved by it in an altogether different manner: and, God forgive me! what thoughts and wishes I had of being in their place.’8 How telling was that phrase ‘God forgive me!’ – Pepys admitting his base envy of the men dragging off a woman he fancied. .

  The event does not reflect well on Pepys, who recorded no thought of intervening. In his defence, it is doubtful, should he have wished, that he could have materially changed the course of the assault. The problem lay not only with the prevalent attitude of men towards women, but also with the wider issue of law and order in seventeenth-century London. The upper classes were almost immune to censure by the law. There was no police force worthy of the name, only a few night watchmen, paid for by local parishes, and part-time parish constables, recruited from among the local population to serve on a rota system. The constables had power of arrest, but generally they played a passive role. The victim of a crime would have to go and find the constable to
make a complaint. If the victim knew or could recognise the wrongdoer, the constable could act, either apprehending the alleged miscreant or reporting him or her to the magistrates, whose job it was to bring a charge and conduct a trial at court. One of the problems facing magistrates was that when it came to offences involving affray or violent disturbances, there was no Public Order Act.

  When petty thieves were apprehended, it was often thanks to the ‘hue and cry’ whereby the victim and others would chase after the robber, shouting ‘Stop, thief!’ in the hope that other passers-by would catch the villain and hand him or her over to a constable. If the person involved was guilty of a petty offence such as pilfering, running away (by servants), begging, swearing in a public place or drunkenness, the constable would commit the perpetrator to the Bridewell prison. Every two or three weeks the Bridewell governors would meet and decide what to do with their new inmates. If their offence was minor they were often released, having already spent time in gaol.

  The second Act of Parliament of 1670 to make a crime punishable by death was brought in specifically to prevent violent acts of revenge. Until then, such actions had not been seen as crimes at all. Hence, someone who had been publicly slighted or had their reputation damaged in some way could deliberately disfigure the offender, putting out an eye or cutting off an ear or nose, and get away with it. Until the notorious case of Sir John Coventry in December 1670, deliberate mutilation was not a felony. Coventry was an MP and the son of the wealthy politician and judge Sir Thomas Coventry of Croome Park, Worcestershire. On his way home to Suffolk Street, off Pall Mall, following a sitting of Parliament, Coventry was set upon by a group of royal guards officers who cut off his nose, apparently in revenge for a witty, derogatory remark he had made just a short time before in Parliament about the King.* The assailants escaped punishment. Enraged that one of its members had been assaulted, Parliament passed an Act making an assault that resulted in mutilation a felony, a capital offence punishable by execution. Once again, the law was seldom enforced.