by Don Jordan
War continued between the Dutch and the French, dragging on into the following decade. Following various internal intrigues, the Dutch leader de Witt was assassinated and Prince William of Orange came to power. He consolidated his position by marrying Mary, the Duke of York’s daughter – a liaison proposed by Lord Danby and supported by Charles. Charles could not have realised that he had set in train the events that would ultimately lead to the overthrow of the House of Stuart, for even at this time, William had an eye on the English throne.
But it was the Duke’s marriage to a Catholic princess that caused consternation in London, adding fire to the smouldering tensions between the city and its king. While York’s children from his first marriage were both brought up as Protestant, it was taken as read that any progeny from the second would be Catholic, thereby making any male child a Catholic heir to the throne, providing Charles continued to be without legitimate offspring* Shaftesbury revived a suggestion made by the Duke of Buckingham in the 1660s that Charles should divorce Catherine and marry an English Protestant, so ensuring a Protestant succession. Charles once more turned it down. The political mood in London was now more unstable than it had been since 1660.
* Captain Cruft and the Unity would take the young Edmund Halley to St Helena in the South Atlantic four years later to watch the transit of Mercury across the sun.
† A factory was a warehouse, usually protected like a fortress, with attached trading rights awarded by the current local administration or emperor.
‡ In 1687 the EIC transferred its Indian headquarters from Surat to Bombay.
§ James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, had died in 1671.
CHAPTER 21
THE MOOD OF THE CITY
As the 1670s wore on, a deteriorating public mood in London made the future of St Paul’s Cathedral a matter of great public significance. Anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiment was running high, reflecting badly on the King and his new French Catholic mistress, as well as on the Duke of York, with his new Italian wife. The Anglican hierarchy was keen that any design for restoring St Paul’s or building a new cathedral should be a visual affirmation of Protestantism. After the years of shillyshallying, in 1673 Christopher Wren was appointed to design and build a completely new cathedral.
This vital commission was to rim in parallel with all his other duties for rebuilding London. Wren’s ideas of Protestantism were more aligned to those of the high Anglicanism of his father than to the traditions espoused by plain architecture and a preacher’s pulpit at the end of the nave. Wren was the choice of a king rather than of a Protestant Reformation.
Below the hill where the old church had stood, London was well on the road to being rebuilt, thanks to the work of Wren, Hooke and other surveyors and architects, with fine stone and brick houses lining thoroughfares that conformed to the new regulation widths. A new sewerage system was being installed. But everyone was kept guessing about the cathedral. What would Wren’s design be like? In 1674, Wren invited the dean and chapter to the Convocation House where he and an assistant had been working for months. Wren unveiled a huge model built out of oak, limewood and plaster. It was on a scale of 1:25, and became known simply as the Great Model.
Its large scale enabled the church worthies to enter it and walk through it, as Wren intended, so gaining an idea of the interior space he planned to create. The model was intended to inform and reassure. It did the first only too well, the latter not at all. The problem was the design – that of a classical European Renaissance church with a vast dome in place of a spire; in other words, a Roman Catholic church, not an Anglican church at all. In the current mood nothing but a traditional, Gothic Anglican building would do. Wren started again. It was now seven years since the destruction of the old cathedral.
This time Wren produced a design that sought to marry the Gothic with the classical. Out of the middle of the dome grew an enormous spire. It was a hideous compromise. The clerics loved it: it was, they agreed, more in line with English church tradition. The King also accepted to it and gave it his warrant. This design became known as the Warrant Design. Wren promptly hid it away. He had no intention of building it.
Wren had permission from the King to make what detailed changes he saw fit. He promptly ditched the spire. Reverting to his favoured baroque design, he proceeded in secrecy, consulting no one, his church going up behind a wall of tarpaulins. The church he was building was strongly reminiscent of St Peter’s in Rome – hardly the look of a Protestant church. Wren had not visited Rome, but in Paris he had admired the similar, though smaller, Church of the Val-de-Grace. To pay for the new cathedral, coal tax was increased. Hence the Protestant people of London would pay for their own, quite Catholic, cathedral.
While Wren proceeded, cautiously allowing no one but his workmen to see his drawings, a play was produced that came to epitomise the Restoration era. Marriage à la Mode by John Dryden opened at the King’s House in the autumn of 1673 and took London by storm. The double plot, based on lost identities and star-crossed lovers, was a recognisable update on Jacobean themes. Dryden had borrowed much of it from John Fletcher, who had collaborated with William Shakespeare and succeeded him as house dramatist for the original King’s Company around 1613.
Marriage à la Mode examined the state of seventeenth-century marriage and sexual attraction. Among families of wealth or position, sons and daughters habitually had to marry those flrey did not love in a sorry cycle that continued through generations. This was in contrast to the practice among the working population, where marriage for love was usual rather than an exception. Dryden humorously dealt with the heartache and cynicism of dynastic couplings. The w’ell-to-do audience would have recognised it all too well, as enforcers, victims or both. The King, with his own unhappy marriage, was no exception.
Unlike the slow progress at St Paul’s, the rebuilding of the city went on at a remarkable pace. By the m id-16 70s, 8000 plots had been redeveloped. The problem was that 3500 of these new houses, put up by speculative builders, stood empty.
Some people were not keen on moving back into the old, walled city. The planners may have been at pains to develop a more 6 re-resistant fabric but at first the people preferred to make their homes elsewhere. Their choice was to go to the fast-expanding suburbs around the old city. For those who could afford it, the new West End, between the old city and Westminster, was the fashionable place to be. However, because of its attraction for those moving from elsewhere, the old city gradually filled up. Energetic young people arrived to fill the empty homes.
Outside the walls, speculators bought land and built on it at an enormous rate. So great was the speculative boom that Charles tried to rein it in by decree. This had little effect: there was just too much money to be made. Favoured developers could do what they wanted. George Downing, with his government position, was able to develop the street that was to bear his name – Downing Street. Aristocrats owning land between Whitehall and the old city either developed new streets themselves or sold the land to speculators like Nicolas Barbon, a physician trained at Leiden and Utrecht, who turned to speculative building.* Barbon became the greatest housebuilder of his time, often running roughshod over regulations in his race to develop much of the land between the city and Westminster. His housing schemes filled in much of the land north of the Strand and in present-day Bloomsbury.
As well as being a developer, Barbon was, like Sir William Petty, a proto-economist. One of his books espoused the value of housebuilding to the economy of a city:
Houses in the middle of a Town are of more value than those at the out ends; and when a Town happens to be increased by addition of New Buildings to the end of a Town, the old Houses which were then at the end, become nearer to the middle of the Town, and so increase in value.
Houses are of more value in Cheapside, and Cornhill, than they are in Shoreditch, White-Chappel, Old-Street, or any of the Out-parts; and the Rents in some of these Out-parts have been within this few years considerably a
dvanced by the addition of New Buildings that are beyond them. As for instance, the Rents of the Houses in Bishopsgate-Street, the Minories, &c. are raised from fifteen or sixteen pounds Per Annum, to be now worth thirty, which was by the increase of Buildings in Spittle-Fields, Shadwells and Ratcliff-Highway. And at the other end of the Town those Houses in the Strand and Charing-Cross are worth now fifty and threescore pounds Per Annum, which within this thirty years were not Lett for above twenty pounds Per Annum, which is by the great addition of Buildings since made in St. James’s, Lekester-Fields, and other adjoyning parts.1
While building boomed from the old city to Whitehall, in Westminster political intrigue burgeoned. At the new parliamentary session that began on 7 January 1674, Shaftesbury warned that there were 16,000 Catholics in London ready to mount a rebellion. He asked Charles to order all Catholics to be banned from the city. Feelings ran high, with various antiPapist and anti-York measures proposed and debated. When it looked as if the political opposition were about to attack the King himself, Charles prorogued Parliament.†
On 18 April, during Easter week, John Graunt, the haberdasher who had tried to produce a method to forecast plague epidemics and so protect his fellow Londoners, died of jaundice at home in Bolt Court, off Fleet Street, destitute and facing charges of recusancy. Following the success of his epidemiological works, and his elevation to the Royal Society, Graunt had quit his successful business as a haberdasher and taken employment with one of the companies supplying water to London, and later as a collector of hearth taxes. He had converted to Catholicism, but because of the Test Act he had lost his employment and his income.
Graunt’s fall from grace was a salutary tale of how a person without social position was unable to kick against London’s prevailing ethos and hope to thrive. His conversion to Catholicism meant that Graunt could no longer legally hold a government job, and he had no patronage or leverage to protect him. His wealthy friend Sir William Petty did nothing – whether because help was refused or because he did not offer is unknown. Graunt climbed a considerable way, but ultimately social order was restored at his expense.
His funeral took place at St Dunstan-in-the-West in the Strand, a hundred yards from his home. John Aubrey, who attended, described his funeral: ‘His death is lamented by all good men that had the happinesse to knowe him; and a great number of ingeniöse persons attended him to his grave. Among others, with teares, was that ingeniöse great virtuoso, Sir William Petty, his old and intimate acquaintance.’ Graunt, who wished to prevent the needless deaths of his fellow Londoners, had failed to prevent his own life descending to a miserable end.
By the autumn of 1674 there was some cause for celebration in London. A new mayor was installed – none other than the goldsmith and banker Sir Robert Viner, whose close friendship with the King and Lord Danby, alongside his role as a preeminent fixer between City and Crown, had helped to keep him financially afloat despite his huge losses in the Great Stop. Like each new mayor, Viner processed like a prince through the city, carried in a decorated coach under triumphal arches. As a sign of their friendship, the King attended his inaugural banquet. The new mayor was regaled in poetry celebrating the city’s rebirth:
Our mines did shew, five or six years ago,
Like an object of wo to all eyes that came nigh to us:
Yet now ‘tis as gay as a garden in May;
Guildhall and th’Exchange arc in Statu quo prius.2
It was said that when Charles tried to slip away, Viner, very drunk, followed him to his coach and broke with etiquette by laying a hand on the King’s shoulder while entreating him to stay. Charles was reported to have quoted a line from a popular song – ‘А man in his cups is as rich as a king’, before agreeing to return to the feast.
There was less celebration on 29 September 1674, which came and went without much remark – this was the date stipulated in the 1670 Rebuilding Act by which time all temporary shelters for those made homeless in the Great Fire were supposed to have been pulled down. They were not; even though most private houses had been rebuilt, not all Londoners had been able to pay to have new homes erected.
On 2 February 1675 a frail 29-year-old man with a Derbyshire accent came to live in the city. He had an unusual address: the lower of London. John Flamsteed was the son of comfortably off middle-class parents, Mary and William Flamsteed of Denby. The family carried on a business in nearby Derby, malting barley.‡ At the age of sixteen, John left school with the expectation he would go to Jesus College, Cambridge, to which he had been recommended by his schools headmaster. But John was sickly – from what is unknown – and stayed at home, helping in the business. He learned mathematics from his father and developed a keen interest in astronomy. His early accomplishments brought him to the attention of Sir Jonas Moore, the vastly rich Surveyor-General to the Ordinance and a mathematician of quality with an equally strong interest in astronomy. It was thanks to Sir Jonas that young Flamsteed was given digs at the Tower.
Sir Jonas, who was of Lancastrian farming stock, seems to have seen Flamsteed as another promising young man from the north, and decided to offer him some help in life. Sir Jonas had a plan to establish an observatory at Chelsea College, in which he was trying to interest the Royal Society. At the same time, under the patronage of the Duke of York, a committee was being set up to examine the possibilities for determining longitude via proposals put up by a French astronomer. Sir Jonas seized the moment to introduce Flamsteed, now his protégé, to the King. The young astronomer was quickly appointed assistant to the committee. The French ideas on longitude were rejected, but the committee recommended the establishment of an observatory.
Events now proceeded with extraordinary speed for Flamsteed. On 4 March, four weeks after his arrival in London, he was appointed the King’s Astronomical Observator on £100 a year. Few outside the rarefied circle of the country’s top astronomers and mathematicians, a circle including Isaac Newton, Sir Christopher Wren and Sir William Petty among others, could have cared much about who was awarded the new position. For those in the know, Flamsteed seemed a good choice; he had developed knowledge of mathematics and astronomy at an early age, and had a determined, even stubborn character, together with a dogged, meticulous approach to work.
Work in building an observatory was almost as swift as John Flamsteed s elevation. The guiding purpose of the observatory’ was to increase the knowledge of the stars, so aiding navigation – critical to the country’s growing maritime trade. The site, chosen by Christopher Wren, was not at Chelsea but on the hill behind Inigo Jones’s Queens House, on the site of Henry VIII s old palace at Greenwich. Working together once more, Wren and Robert Hooke designed the building, an octagonal tower-like structure of red brick dressed with stone. Using old foundations and recycled material from the palace, it was built in haste without a proper budget. Sir Jonas Moore paid for the astronomical equipment out of his own pocket. The Ordinance Office was responsible for the building works and thanks to Sir Jonas’s interest in and patronage of Flamsteed, construction went on at a tremendous pace.
Upstream, on Ludgate Hill, it was a different picture. Despite a foundation stone ceremony, held on 21 June, there was little progress. Among those in attendance at the ceremony were Wren, his friend the Dean, and a small group of key personnel including the masons who would oversee the construction of the fabric of the cathedral. Master mason Thomas Strong laid the foundation stone, watched by his brother Edward and fellow master masons Joshua Marshall and Edward Pierce.
Strong came from a well-established Oxfordshire family of quarry owners.3 He and Wren had first worked together a few years before on Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre, and the relationship would last the rest of their lives: Wren went on to use limestone from Strongs quarry when building the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. The same quarry had possibly provided the limestone used by Inigo Jones for the lower storey of the Banqueting House at Whitehall; meanwhile stone from the quarry of the Marshall family went in
to the town hall in Abingdon. Both types of stone were particularly tough and weather-resistant while being sufficiently pliable to be carved.
Edward Pierce also hailed from an Oxfordshire quarrying family. He was a carver, an artist in both stone and wood. Each of these men had a team of masons working to them. Taken together with the teams of carpenters and others, the workforce ran into hundreds.
Now these highly skilled Oxfordshire men collected in London, brought by the vision of Wren and the needs of the city, to undertake the greatest commission of their lives. Unusually, a second foundation stone was laid. The honour went to master carpenter John Langland. The fact that neither stone was laid by Wren indicated something of his character. He was known to all as brilliant but self-effacing. Not only that, he had a reputation for having an affinity with those below him in social standing. These men, the master masons and carpenters, though educated in their trades at a high degree, generally, like Wren himself, had no private income to rely on. They all worked or they went without. Though his father had risen to be Dean of Windsor Castle – even then his tenure was interrupted by the Civil War – Wren’s upbringing was that of a country rector’s son. He appreciated the value of others no matter what their social status. Like his fellow former student at Westminster School, Robert Hooke, he depended on others for his advancement and station in life.4
At this auspicious moment, on the verge of the greatest work of his life, Wren stepped back to let others have their moment in history. With the self-belief of the visionary, he knew that if his radical plan for a new type of church building were to succeed, others would have to stay the course with him. This solemn but simple ceremony would have caused satisfaction among the little gathering. As events turned out, it marked an occasion full of promise and little else. Work would be stalled for some time to come.