The King's City

by Don Jordan

  A few weeks after the Coventry affair, in early 1671, an even greater public scandal erupted, involving the King’s 21-year-old son, the Duke of Monmouth. The flashpoint was in Covent Garden, an area known for its brothels. Monmouth, accompanied by his friend the Duke of Albemarle and several other young aristocrats, tried to force entry to a brothel. It was said they wished to enact some form of revenge on a prostitute who had infected Monmouth and Albemarle with the pox (either gonorrhoea or syphilis). Perhaps they wanted to slit her nose, a common act of violence meted out to women accused of selling sex for money. The night watch was called. A fight broke out and most of the night watchmen fled, leaving one man pleading for mercy at sword point. The aristocrats ran him through.

  The watchman’s murder caused public uproar. Dryden penned some satirical lines:

  T’was an injury beyond repair

  To clap a king’s son and a great duke’s heir.9

  There was no question of punishing any of the perpetrators of this coldblooded crime. Charles called the watchman’s death a ‘sad accident’ and issued a proclamation giving a ‘gracious pardon’ to Monmouth of‘all Murders, Homicides and Felonyes whatsoever . . . ‘ To reassure the public that young aristocrats would not be allowed to run riot and kill ordinary people without redress, the King announced that the royal guard was ordered to help the watch in tackling wrongdoers ‘whatsoever quality they be’.10 This was a bit rich: it was the royal guard that had attacked Coventry.

  There remained a general problem of energetic, often drink-fuelled, public misbehaviour or brawling by the upper orders. In such cases, the magistrates had limited powers. The pull of the aristocratic caste far outranked the magistrates’ station, the latter usually being recruited from the gentry. The year before Pepys witnessed the abduction of the young shopkeeper, a less serious public disturbance illustrated the point. It took place in Bow Street in Covent Garden, a favoured haunt of those seeking a more easy-going and artistic form of life, a home to theatricals and poets, and because of its prostitutes a favoured night-time carousing spot for young bloods of the better families. Bow Street, so called because of its shape, curving in a bow in a north-westerly direction from Russell Street at its southern end, was developed on former estate lands of the Earls of Bedford. The west side was developed first in the early to mid-ibjos, work carrying on at roughly the same time as the 4th Earl was developing his new Covent Garden piazza a hundred yards to the west. The east side was developed by 1640, three years after the completion of Inigo Jones’s gracious piazza, making the area a desirable one in which to live.11 But Bow Street never became the fashionable residential street for the upper classes it was designed to be. By the 1660s it was a street of mixed use and quality, comprising housing, shops and taverns. One of the watering holes frequented by the ‘Wits’, a band of well-born young men who considered themselves arbiters of manners with a licence to thrill, was the Cock Tavern.

  One summer evening several young ‘gallants’ went drinking in the Cock. They included Charles Sackville and Sir Charles Sedley, the rakes we met earlier when they took Nell Gwyn off to Epsom. These men were no longer callow youths, Sedley and Sackville both being twenty-four years of age. Sedley was embarking upon an active political life, while Sackville was fully employed at the royal court as one of the ‘Merry Gang’, the King’s unofficial jesters and entertainers. On this evening die friends, blind drunk, decided to entertain the people in the street. They went onto a balcony and mimed various positions of sexual intercourse. Then they took off their clothes and performed stark naked for the gathering crowd. Sedley dipped his penis in his glass and then drank the health of the King, whereupon rioting broke out.

  Brought to court, Sedley was found guilty of lewd behaviour and bound over to keep the peace. Who knows what fate might have befallen a person of lesser rank – beheading or transportation for treasonous behaviour? Sackville and another pal were let off with cautions.

  A more serious incident involving Sackville had occurred in Covent Garden a year before. Together with his brother Edward, he and several friends killed a working man by the name of Hoppy in a street fight, claiming afterwards they thought he was a robber. Given the rank of the assailants, they were found not guilt)’. Even the Earl of Rochester, no stranger to drunken escapades, wondered aloud to the King how Sackville was able to get away with so much. For a man who had spent time in the lower because of his own bad behaviour, this was no idle musing.

  One of the most notorious events of the 1660s involved Rochester’s friend, fellow member of the ‘Merry Gang’ and de facto first minister of the government, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who had been reconciled with the King since Charles snubbed him at Dover. Buckingham embarked upon an affair with Anna, Countess Shrewsbury in 1668. When her husband discovered the affair he challenged Buckingham to a duel. Word of the challenge reached the King, who made it clear that the duel should not go ahead. The duel was nevertheless held, discreetly, outside London on Barnes Common, across the River Thames from the Bishop of London’s estates at Fulham.

  Tempers ran so high that the duel developed into a general fight. Buckingham ran Shrewsbury through the chest, fatally wounding him.† One of Buckingham’s seconds, a man named Jenkins, was killed. Another second, Captain Sir Robert Holmes (the naval commander and leader of expeditions to Africa), seriously wounded Sir John Talbot, one of Shrewsbury’s men. Because of Buckingham’s status and closeness to the King, the duel caused uproar in London. Samuel Pepys confided to his secret diary that the world would think less of the King when the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a whore’ and hoped the duel would spell the end of Buckingham’s political career.12

  The King chose not to act against his friend. No censure was brought to bear on Buckingham, and within weeks he appeared in public at the state opening of Parliament. Charles’s only reaction was to issue a proclamation that in future no one who killed another person in a duel would be pardoned.

  These few instances of crimes involving the uppermost layers of society illustrate how extremely lax was law and order in London. In a city of almost 400,000 inhabitants, where the influx of newcomers was fast outstripping its fearsome infant mortality rate, crime was a popular subject for gossip. Like city dwellers everywhere, Londoners loved to read about it in books and newssheets. In this way, crime paid. Among those it paid were Henry Marsh and Francis Kirkman, London-born booksellers, writers and publishers with a shop at the sign of the Prince’s head in Chancery Lane. Within a few years of the Restoration they published a novel entitled The English Rogue. It was written by Richard Head, who was born in Ireland, possibly a parson’s son, and educated at Oxford University.

  Head had a weakness for gambling. It haunted his life. While dodging his creditors between Ireland and England, he took up writing satirical and humorous works.13 When his writing did not pay sufficiently, he settled in London, where he became a bookseller. But with The English Rogue, Head finally attained the success he longed for. The censor Roger L’Estrange initially turned the book down for being too lewd for publication. With some revisions, it was licensed and published by Henry Marsh. What seemed a small event in the London book trade, the publishing of an amusing tale for popular enjoyment, was in fact no less important than concurrent developments taking place on the London stage.

  In Richard Head’s invention can be seen sprouting the early shoots of the English novel form. Indeed, The English Rogue has a very good claim to be the first English novel. It first appeared thirteen years before the more usual contender for the title, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, well before another contender, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in the mid-i68os, and several decades before Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Cmsoe (1719).

  Claims that earlier works, including the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or Thomas Malory’s retelling of ancient fables in Le Morte d’Arthur, could be characterised as novels are surely fanciful. Quite why T
he English Rogue has been so regularly overlooked, however, is hard to fathom. Perhaps its bawdy, amoral content or the fact that its narrative form was rather slight, being essentially a collection of interlinked adventures, are to blame, filiere can be little doubt, however, that The English Rogue was an important progenitor to Defoe’s much later runaway success, Moll Flanders.14

  The book, told in the first person, purported to be the reminiscences of a highwayman and thief named Meriton Latroon.15 It cannot in any way be claimed as a major work of literary fiction shaped as a memoir; London would have to wait for Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) for that. But both books to some extent depended upon the claimed experiences of the narrator: in the case of Head, his experiences in Ireland during the uprising of 1641; in Defoe’s, his childhood memories and those of his family during the plague. At any rate, The English Rogue was so successful that when Henry Marsh died shortly after publication Kirkman immediately republished the work. When the new edition sold well, a second volume of Meriton’s memoirs appeared, the title page proclaiming that Head was still the author, along with Kirkman. Third and fourth volumes followed.

  Head disowned his co-authorship of the later versions. He may have continued to be involved; we don’t know. But the four books’ racy style, allied to an endless sweep of outrageous escapades, amused an audience well used to the proximity of the darker side of city life. A major part of the hooks’ attraction was that they contained many sexual encounters, exhibiting as much variety as the author could manage. Among tales of thievery and getting-away-with-it, the books included handy hints on how to evade robbery by highwaymen or mugging in the city. A few years later a sequel appeared in which the rogue was no longer English but French; it was written anonymously, though some scholars still see in it the hand of Richard Head.16

  So many crimes were labelled a felony that the hangman was kept busy. The full application of the law in so populous a city meant large-scale executions of poor, hungry and mainly law-abiding people on a depressingly regular basis. There was one way of avoiding the death penalty. First-time offenders could claim ‘benefit of clergy’ so as to receive a lesser sentence, or none at all. This unofficial right’ had developed out of an ancient dispensation for priests, who could be tried by an ecclesiastical court rather than a civil one. Over time, it had become adapted to the civil world, so that anyone charged with a first offence could ask for and expect leniency.

  The law did not treat men and women equally in this matter. Though women were given the right to claim benefit of clergy in 1624 if they were accused of stealing goods valued at less than ten shillings, a man could claim the same right for goods up to forty shillings.‡ The distinction mattered a great deal, for in the mid-1600s there were no fewer than fifty crimes (including all types of theft, murder, witchcraft and treason) that merited the death sentence, and benefit of clergy was available for most types excluding witchcraft and treason.

  When it came to crimes of immorality, a healthy strain of hypocrisy characterised the treatment of the differing social classes. Men and women could be tried and sentenced for being a bawd (i.e. a pimp, or one who solicits sex from another to be sold to a customer) or a prostitute. Despite this, the King’s servant William Chiffinch was widely known as the ‘king’s whore mas ter’, since among his many duties was that of soliciting girls for his master. Several members of the court also pimped for the King, among them his childhood friends the Duke of Buckingham and Baptist May. Charles was also widely rumoured to be a client of Madame Creswell’s infamous brothel in the docklands, east of the City walls. It is unlikely that he frequented Madame Creswell’s in person, the more likely scenario being that girls were sent for and brought up the river in a wherry to alight at night at a private jetty. From there they would be taken up a staircase that led directly into private rooms presided over by Chiffinch and adjoining those of the King. But to accuse Chiffinch – or Buckingham – of being a bawd would have been unthinkable.

  For the petty criminal, meanwhile, London was a magnet. Shops displayed every conceivable kind of merchandise. Cornhill was lined with the premises of goldsmiths and silversmiths, Thames Street was lined with merchants’ warehouses containing valuable goods from across the world, and the increasingly well-to-do merchant classes carried money, gold watches and jewellery. All this gave plentiful opportunity for the different varieties of thief to exercise their skills. A look through the records for the Middlesex Assizes and the Old Bailey shows that the majority of cases were of theft. For the Londoner with money in his or her purse, pickpockets were a constant curse. But the most feared of all London’s thieves were the footpads. These were armed robbers who worked mainly at night in the city’s ill-lit streets and alleyways. If a victim proved slow to hand over money, the footpad would rarely hesitate to use extreme violence.

  To deal with its crime, London had an assortment of law enforcement officers employed by the parishes. While primary enforcement was haphazard, the penalties were not. Almost any crime perpetrated by an ordinary person could result in the death penalty. Death in exchange for a silk handkerchief was not out of the question.

  According to John Graunt, London’s murder rate was surprisingly low. In one of the years whose bills of mortality he followed, 1632, there were just seven recorded murders in London. In an entire twenty-year period for which Graunt compiled figures, out of 229,500 deaths only eighty-six were due to murder, making an average of 4.3 per annum. Against this, Graunt compared London to Paris, where ‘few nights scape without their Tragédie’.17

  Graunt explained the low murder rate as being down to two factors. The main one was that Londoners policed themselves on a local level, with constables paid by the parishes. This, he said, led to ‘no man settling into a trade for that employment’ (i.e, murder). The second reason had more to do with Graunt’s view of his own nature and that of his fellow-countrymen, who had a natural and customary abhorrence of that inhumane crime, and all bloodshed by most Englishmen’. There might possibly be other reasons, of course; among them that the murder rate was under-reported and that Graunt, like all good patriots, overestimated the pacifie nature of his own tribe and the lawlessness of foreigners.

  Hangings took place at Tyburn, a village to the west of London where a permanent ‘hanging tree’ stood to remind anyone travelling in or ont of the city, to or from Oxford, Bristol and all points west, of the penalty for an enormous range of crimes. Prisoners to be hanged would be taken from Newgate prison, next to the Old Bailey, west via the Oxford Road (today’s Oxford Street) to Tyburn. Hence to be hanged was to have ‘gone west’. Executions became a form of entertainment for the poor; on hanging days, huge crowds made their way out of London to Tyburn. Prisoners were taken from Newgate by cart and when they reached the gallows they would often make a speech before they died. The crowds expected it.§

  There was one way of evading the noose: transportation to the colonies. In the 1600s the new colonies in the Leeward Islands and Virginia were voracious in their need for workers. The slave trade alone was not sufficient, even when augmented by the iniquitous indentured servant business and the quasi-legal spiriting trade. The cash crops of Virginia and of islands like Barbados required enormous numbers of new workers. The attrition rate in the harsh climate was heavy, abetted by the equally harsh treatment of the majority of the workforce, whether black or white. Working conditions were brutal. There was no health care for the workers, who were treated as chattels, bought and sold like animals. The transportation of criminals had the dual advantage of reducing the prison population at home and increasing the cheap labour force in the colonies.

  Sometimes those sentenced to hang were offered the option of transportation. Thus in the Old Bailey records we find petty crimes rewarded with a harsh lifetime in the colonies, as in the case of a woman apprehended by a night watchman while stealing a silver tankard from a victualling house and sentenced to transportation.18

  For the many Londoners who lived on
the very margins of existence the experience of law and order was a brutal one. Minor offences could result in the offender spending several days in the stocks, where treatment by the elements and at the hand of their fellow citizens could be pitiless. Homelessness itself was a crime, which could send the offender to a foreign land. For those attracted to London’s promise of better things but who somehow did not make the grade, forced into living life on the fringes, the gap between their fragile day-to-day existence and extinction at the end of the hangman’s rope was a narrow one.

  * The debate, on a tax on the theatre, took place in December 1670. Sir John remarked that the King’s only interest in the theatre was in actresses. The assault took place on 31 December. The King pardoned the assailants.

  † Twenty years later, Shrewsbury’s second son was killed in a duel by Charles H’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy.

  ‡ The law was changed to give parity to the sexes in 1691. Benefit of clergy was abolished in 1823.

  ¶ So began the tradition of Speaker’s Corner, at the north-east corner of Ilyde Park.