by Don Jordan
The delays in building were twofold: the supply of money and of stone. The new coal tax to pay for the rebuilding was far from sufficient. The tax on sea-coal arriving at London docks from Newcastle was levied at fourpence halfpenny a cauldron (the equivalent of fifty-two and a half hundredweight, or 5880 lb). This brought in roughly £5000 per annum; far from enough. There was also the issue of how to carry thousands of tons of stone to the site. The stonemasons’ quarries could not supply the enormous quantities of material required, nor could such vast amounts of stone be economically transported from Oxfordshire by road.
Hence, for the interior of the church, Wren chose a medley of stone, some of it from the Strong family quarries at Burford and Taynton, the rest from Devon and as far as Caen in France. This meant that some could be brought by sea. For the exterior, Portland stone was to be used. Wren specified this fine-grained stone for its durability and light, almost off-white, hue. He wanted his cathedral to glow in the sunlight above the city. There was another consideration: the Portland quarries were on the coast.
Portland in Dorset had once been a thriving and efficient centre for the quarrying, finishing and transportation of stone. The civil wars had put paid to that. Its quay, kept in excellent condition when Inigo Jones had been the King’s surveyor, was now run down. The cranes were rusted and its roads rutted and in places washed away. Wren put forward proposals for restoration and re-energising the industry. The commissioners for rebuilding St Paul’s agreed and appointed the experienced London stone merchant Thomas Knight as their agent in Portland.5 So, while Londoners saw little or no evidence of a new cathedral rising, work was under way in Portland, rebuilding a dockyard and levelling roads from the quarry face to the waters edge.
Wren had other headaches. Once the massive task of clearing and levelling the site on Ludgate Hill was complete, it was discovered that the London clay was so unstable that foundations had to be dug much deeper than previously thought. Wren should have remembered the nave’s leaning walls. Teams of navvies ended up digging down twenty feet before the masons could start putting in the stonework.
Bogged down with a multiplicity of troubles at the site on Ludgate Hill, Wren could take pleasure in how quickly the structure he and Hooke had designed was progressing on Greenwich Hill. Once the observatory was completed, Flamsteed proved to be a dedicated worker, meticulous to a fault§ While he established himself in the intellectual life of London, a debate on the application of astronomy was opening up inside the Royal Society. Mariners needed to do more than get a fix on the stars if they were to know their position. They needed to know their longitude. This necessitated a reliable watch that could record with a high level of accuracy the hours and minutes a ship sailed east or west. A row brewed inside the society between rival factions. More was at stake than the glory of being first to develop a longitude watch; whoever gained a patent could become rich.
Among those competing were the society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, and his rival, curator of experiments Robert Hooke. Hooke accused Oldenburg of double-dealing by revealing his work on the watch escapement to others without his permission. However, the King agreed to allow Hooke to demonstrate his watch to him. It looked as if Hooke’s future was assured. The King tried out Hooke s watch and told him it kept the time well. Unfortunately, while Hooke’s theory was correct, contemporary technology was insufficiently advanced to make his watch as accurate and reliable as required¶
It was a blow for Hooke, who had laboured all his life on manv projects only to find he was constantly sidelined by events or thwarted by rivals. Just a year before the watch debacle he had clashed with Newton over the nature of light. Hooke conceived light as being composed of waves, while Newton thought it consisted of particles; today we know they were both partially right. Yet it was Newton’s Optics that received all the attention and is still remembered today. Few remember that it was Hooke who first said that light travels in waves, or that Newton initially disagreed with him.
Ever since first crossing swords with Hooke, Newton had preferred to keep away from London. On 9 December, however, he made one of his rare visits to the city. Despite their bristly relationship, Newton was to present to the Royal Society a long paper on optics in which he speculated on the nature of light and how different colours were formed:
the agitated parts of bodies, according to their several sizes, figure, and motions, do excite vibrations in the æther of various depths or bignesses, which being promiscuously propagated through that medium to our eyes, effect in us a sensation of light of a white colour; but, if by any means those of unequal bignesses be separated from one another, the largest beget a sensation of a red colour; the least, or shortest, of a deep violet; and the intermediate ones, of intermediate colours.6
In his society diary, ffooke dryly noted only that ‘Newton spoke on optics’.7
One day in 1675 – the exact date is unknown – the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the kingdom took a coach to Covent Garden to have her portrait painted by one of the most fashionable artists of the day. What was unusual was that the artist was a woman, Mary Beale. The sitter was the daughter of John Maitland, ist Duke of Lauderdale, friend of Charles II, member of the government, Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for Scotland and President of the Privy Council of Scotland, which he ruled as his own private fiefdom.
The sitter, Lady Frances Hay, had married John Hay, the eldest son of the ist Marquess of Tweeddale, at Highgate, near London, in 1666, the same year that John was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The future looked bright for the young couple but quickly turned sour when Lauderdale took against his new son-in-law, and the couple were forced to live on the continent for many years. In 1675, however, Lady Frances, already into her forties, came to London to have her likeness recorded.
There were notably few professional women painters at the time, the pursuit usually being considered an amateur calling for ladies. One of the few exceptions before Mary Beale was Joan Carlyle (1606–79). The most famous of women painters active in England during the seventeenth century had been Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656), who worked with her father Orazio in the court of Charles I for a few years from 1638. Artemisia, who like her father was influenced by Caravaggio, was one of the most talented Italian painters of her period.
Mary Beale was horn in 1633 to John and Dorothy Cradock in Suffolk. John was a country parson and an amateur artist who taught his daughter to paint; she went on to take lessons from Peter Lely and developed a style based on his. To a great extent, her studio flourished thanks to her work being similar to that of her mentor, and their stars to some degree shone and fell together. The Beale family lived and had studios at Covent Garden and then Fleet Street, while Mary’s husband Charles acted as her business manager.# From the copious notes he left of his business transactions we know that in her best years Mary made around £200 a year, sufficient to keep herself, her husband and two sons in comfort if not luxury. She charged £5 for a head-and-shoulders portrait and £10 for a full-length study. For comparison, Samuel Pepys paid £17 to have his portrait painted by John Hayls.
Among Mary Beale’s sitters were George Savile, 1st Marquess of Halifax, the proponent of the Test Act who became a favourite of Charles II, John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and the chief motivator behind the formation of the Royal Society, the physician Thomas Sydenham, and several notable clergy, including Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury. She painted various society beauties, including the marvellously named Lady Style and Jane, Lady Leigh, whose portrait by Beale as a shepherdess might have passed as being by Lely if the brushwork were only finer. She also painted a portrait of Charles II, though this seems to be a copy of a painting by Lely.8
The portrait Beale painted of Frances Hay reveals her as a classically handsome woman rather than an aristocratic beauty, with a mass of black curls, a direct gaze and a straight nose set above a full mouth.9 She looks as if she would not be a pushover
in a debate. In several self-portraits, Beale displayed no tendency towards self-flattery. One such work is notable, showing Beale sitting in classical dress with her right hand resting on a canvas bearing two portrait sketches in oils of her sons. Beside her hangs her palette, scrubbed clean like a well-used domestic chopping board, ready for the next commission, Beale, the artist, wanted people to know that while she might be the proud mother of two children she kept a well-run studio.10
For a lesson on the comparatively poor state of British art at this time, it is instructive to compare Beale’s self-portrait with Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting.11 The two women had biographical details in common: both were taught by their fathers and both followed the style of established and successful artists. But the similarity ends there. While Artemisia’s portrait is explosive, Mary’s is banal. The cultural isolation of England that had begun in the reign of Henry VIII, coupled with a fashion during the Stuart and Cromwellian eras for portraiture above all else, conspired to stifle English artistic innovation. One cannot, for instance, imagine an English painter of the mid-seventeenth century having the inspiration to paint a portrait of a fellow artist in the form of a drawing consisting only of the image of a hand holding a brush, yet that is exactly what the French artist Pierre Dumonstier did when he visited Artemisia in Rome in 1625.12
Although a brief flowering of native baroque artists during the reign of Charles I, and into the Commonwealth, produced painters of the calibre of William Dobson and Samuel Cooper (who continued to work into the reign of Charles II), England had at this time little significant home-grown artistic momentum.** Perhaps another reason was that, from the Elizabethan age onwards, drawing and painting had been seen as largely amateur pursuits for men and women of the higher social classes, to be learnt as part of a rounded Renaissance education. The amateur’s output could be highly prized; Charles II owned a cabinet containing paintings by, among others, Elizabeth Pepys and Susanna Evelyn. Even Nicolas Hilliard, a professionally trained goldsmith and limner who was painter to Elizabeth I, thought only ‘gentlemen’ should engage in painting.13
In the same year that Frances Hay went to Covent Garden to have her portrait painted, two of the most remarkable figures in London surreptitiously quit the city. The Frenchmen des Groseilliers and Radisson quietly left the city’ to which they had given so much, made for Dover and sailed for France. They had been beguiled by secret French promises of wealth if they abandoned the Hudson’s Bay Company they had helped found, and once more used their expertise in the service of their homeland. Behind them, the two explorers left a profound legacy. Their work on behalf of the British had been crucial in the company’s early success, helping to lay the groundwork for British control over all of Canada more than a century later.
In France, the friends’ hopes were dashed. They found they had little status and were refused the official positions they expected. Des Groseilliers, now in his mid-fifties, sailed across the Atlantic once more to recommence the arduous life of a peripatetic fur trader. Not long after, he was followed by Radisson, the latter once more in the employ of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which by now mistrusted him too much to allow him to work at its London HQ, and insisted he return to Canada.
In the autumn of 1675, an anonymous pamphlet appeared in London, priced one shilling, and entitled A Letter from a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country. Gaining instant notoriety, its price shot up to twenty shillings. Its author was said to be Lord Shaftesbury, now out of government, though John Locke may have written part of it. The pamphlet accused Lord Danby of plotting to install the monarchy with absolute and arbitrary power under divine right, without any say from Parliament. The rights of the political classes were therefore under attack, with the freedoms granted under Magna Carta under threat from a king who would reign without any countervailing force, such as the House of Lords, to restrict his will.
Another pamphlet that appeared around the same time, entitled Two Seasonable Discourses Concerning the Present Parliament, put forward the advantages for the King of holding regular parliaments. These would vote him more money, support the Church, grant dissenters freedom of conscience and permit freedoms to Catholics providing they continued to be banned from public office and bearing arms. Again, Shaftesbury was seen as the hand behind the polemic. Charles began to consider curtailing not only Parliament, but some of his former minister’s personal rights. And so London, rife with rumour, stumbled uncertainly towards Christmas.
* Barbon’s full and correct name was Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-I ladst-Been-Damncd Barbonc, his name awarded by his father Praise-God Barebone, an influential Puritan during the Cromwellian era.
† It would not sit again until April 1675.
‡ The process by which cereal grains are treated to change their starch into sugar, to be used in brewing or distilling.
§ Flamsteed would go on to map the position of 2955 stars. Alas, he was so meticulous that he kept his findings under lock and key for years, allowing no one to see them, worried that he had failed properly to check over his computations. Finally, in a fit of frustration, his friend Edmund Halley stole the star charts and, together with Isaac Newton, published them without Flamsteed’s permission.
¶ It would be a hundred years before John Harrison demonstrated a watch that could keep time with sufficient precision to help mariners find their longitude.
# Ellen Clayton in English Women Artists states that Charles Beale mixed pigments for the Board of Green Cloth. As the board was an administrative body, this is perhaps unlikely. The board gained its name from the baize cloth that covered the table around which it met. Charles’s colour-mixing perhaps took place elsewhere.
** Art that was intrinsically English both in form and content really only came about with the career of William Hogarth, beginning in 1721 with his engraving satirising the South Sea Bubble investment fiasco.
CHAPTER 22
COFFEE WARS AT HOME, REAL WARS IN THE COLONIES
On 30 December 1675, Robert Hooke left his lodgings in Gresham College and walked south down Bishopsgate towards the Royal Exchange to have a coffee and engage in the days gossip. It was a mild day for December and the storms that had plagued the capital earlier in the month had cleared away. At the Exchange, Hooke turned right into Cornhill and then left at the church of St Michael. Going down the alleyway beside the church, Hooke made his way past scaffolding, stones and other paraphernalia of the masons and carpenters rebuilding what remained of the medieval church all but destroyed in the Great Fire.
Behind the church Hooke found his destination, Garraway’s Coffee House. It was a journey of at most four hundred yards and one he took almost every day, knowing that at his journeys end he would find strong coffee, the company of people he knew, and interesting conversation. On this particular winter’s day he found his fellow coffee aficionados in a state of shock, staring with disbelief at an item in that day’s official government newspaper, the London Gazette.*
The cause of the consternation was a prominently displayed royal proclamation. The headline was set in that peculiar mix of upper and lower case used by printers of the time when at a loss how else to grab attention. With this item they need not have worried:
By the King.
A PROCLAMATION
FOR THE
Suppression of Coffee-Houses.
CHARLES R.
The proclamation ordered all coffee houses throughout the entire country to close by 10 January, in eleven days’ time. Coffee houses, the proclamation stated, and the ‘idle and disaffected’ people who frequented them, had produced Very evil and dangerous effects’. Magistrates across the realm were to recall all licences for the sale or retailing of coffee, chocolate, sherbet or tea on pain of a fine of £5 a month. Persistent offenders would face much more serious sanctions.
To be lumped in with the ‘idle and disaffected’ cannot have caused much delight for the highly industrious and
monarchist Hooke and his fellow virtuosi, let alone the men of business who used coffee houses as offices. The assorted readers in Garraway’s and hundreds of other coffee houses across London, as well as in many more all over Britain, read that these simple establishments ‘fomented diverse false, malicious and scandalous reports to the defamation of His Majesties government’.
Charles was not the first Stuart hing to try his hand at prohibition. His grandfather, James I, had issued a strongly worded jeremiad against tobacco in 1604, calling it a pernicious’ and foul-smelling weed. But the immediate cause of his abrupt order was, of course, the appearance of the pamphlets written by Shaftesbury, Locke and their opposition allies, all avidly read and discussed.
London’s coffee houses sold not only coffee but also the other beverages that were about to be banned, backed up by copious supplies of sweet tobacco from the farms in Virginia, with newspapers and pamphlets to read. Occasionally they served alcohol. On long, communal tables designed for conviviality lay cups, spoons, plates and smoking supplies such as clay pipes, jostling for space along with copies of the London Gazette, the latest unlicensed newssheets and broadsides, scandal-mongering pamphlets, satirical poems and political and social diatribes of every variety.
From the government’s point of view, coffee houses were politically suspect, allowing their clientele to read a great amount of illegal material. The many scurrilous political satires appeared despite the efforts of the official censor, Roger L’Estrange. Had they been inspected, many houses would have fallen foul of the laws that forbade the publication of treasonable writings. The heterodox and liberal atmosphere of the coffee houses was seen as a breeding ground for political debate and dissent – and some were exactly that. The houses had become successful in their secondary role of providing meeting places for those who viewed either the King or his government with ill favour.