by Don Jordan
For such minds, there were the twin problems of the King’s attitude to Parliament, which bore strong similarities to that of his unfortunate father, and the question of the succession within a royal family that many saw as being composed mainly of Catholics, including the King’s heir, his brother, and his many bastard children – not to speak of the Queen and the main royal concubine, Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth. Customers of the more politically minded coffee houses had had much to chew over since the Test Act had caught in its web the Duke of York himself. If the coffee-house malcontents had known about the secret treaty with France, there might have been real reason for insurrection to brew in the jangling minds of the coffee addicts. As it was, fear of popery combined with the pungent smell of black coffee and tobacco smoke to make for a heady mix increasingly viewed with alarm in Whitehall. To the devotees of the black bean the proclamation was as great a shock to the system as the strongest slug of Turkish coffee.
The coffee house fad had burst upon London twenty years before thanks to the travels of merchants, adventurers, diplomats and others in Asia and the Levant. The coffee trade was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and exports to the West mainly originated through ports in Yemen. By the early seventeenth century, coffee drinking had become fashionable in the houses of members of elite circles. The first coffee house in England probably opened in Oxford in 1650, run by a Lebanese proprietor. In 1652, a coffee house opened in London; its proprietor had come to England with Daniel Edwards, a merchant who for many years had lived in Smyrna, trading with the Turks of Anatolia, and employing Pasqua Rosee, possibly born in Sicily of ethnic Greek stock, as some form of middleman or translator. Upon Edwards’s return to London, Rosee came too. At his home near the church of St Stephen Walbrook, in the heart of the old city, Edwards treated his guests to Rosee’s coffee. Word of Rosee s brew spread and Edwards selflessly supported Rosee’s venture in going out on his own and opening a commercial coffee house, albeit a mere shed in the churchyard of St Michael’s Cornhill, near where Hooke’s favourite coffee house, Garraway’s, later stood. The business flourished and the coffee fad took off. Soon a second coffee house opened, the Rainbow in Fleet Street, run by a former barber named Farr.
As coffee houses proliferated, the government set out to regulate them. In London, the Middlesex magistrates granted licences, initially to raise revenue for the Exchequer. To gain a licence a proprietor had to prove he had paid duty on the goods he sold. Later, once coffee houses took on differing characters, some becoming known for the dissenting political views of those who frequented them, the government came to see the licensing laws as a potential tool for political control.
There are many testaments to how vile this early coffee tasted. Yet it caught on. One clue to its popularity is contained in a poem lambasting the evils of alcohol – ‘foggy ale’ and the ‘sweet poison of the treacherous grape’ – and proclaiming coffee as heaven sent:
Coffee arrives, that grave and wholesome Liquor
That heals the stomach, makes the genius quicker
Relieves the memory, revives the sad
And cheers the Spirits, without making mad.1
To the puritanical or improving mind, coffee was God’s antidote to alcohol, providing a convivial drink without intoxication. Not everyone was so enamoured of the dark brew. Early in the century, the treasurer of the Virginia Company, George Sandys, a vocal advocate of slave labour, reported from his travels to Egypt and Constantinople that the Turks drank coffee ‘blacke as soote and tasting not much unlike it’.2 Despite such reservations, the coffee house arrived in London at exactly the right time. The population was eager for news, for new thinking, for debate. The city, though old, had a young population, keen for knowledge and ideas. If one wished to know what was happening, the place to go became the nearest coffee house. For the price of a cup, anyone, no matter what his social status, was welcome to join in the conversation. This was the era of the ascent of polite society – an ideal to be cherished if not often attained. Fuelled by caffeine, debate was lively. The rule that conversation should be respectful and civilised was not always adhered to, though argument resolved by fisticuffs was supposedly the preserve of the tavern.
Each coffee house drew its particular clientele. Those around the Royal Exchange attracted merchants and traders, those in the vicinity of Whitehall Palace were forums for political debate, those in the region of the Strand and Fleet Street were the haunt of journalists, while playwrights and members of the Royal Society picked and chose between them.
Coffee houses soon made their appearance in the printed media. Satires were written, as were plays. A play published in the 1660s and entitled Knavery in All Trades, or, The Coffee House has been attributed to the dramatist John Tatharn, though it is so thinly written this seems unlikely. Pepys went to see it and pronounced it the ‘most ridiculous, insipid play’ he had ever seen. According to the play’s printed title page, it was performed at Christmas by apprentices; in other words, by amateurs. Much of the play’s action takes place in and around a coffee house and concerns the doubtful morality and honesty of most of the characters. It gives a disparaging verdict on the qualities of coffee: ‘’tis most pernicious to the brain, it fires the pericranium, disorders al the faculties, presents ideas most delusive,’ opines one character, who amusingly goes on to claim that ‘Brutus . . . drank heartily of it when designed the death of Royal Cesar’3 – a comment eerily presaging the fears of the royal court a decade after the play’s appearance.
A further attack on the coffee house came with the publication of the anonymously written Womens Petition Against Coffee. The writer of this amusing and bawdy pastiche had undoubtedly sat through many a half-witted discussion in a coffee house. The petition was addressed to ‘the Right Honorable the Keepers of the Liberty of Venus’ on behalf of the women of Britain – ‘Several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want’ because their husbands could no longer make love to them due to the disabling effects of coffee. The loss of sexual vigour was caused by nothing less than
the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands, and Cripple our more kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as Age, and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.4
Impotence was not the petitioners’ only complaint. Men stoked up on coffee could out-talk women: ‘by frequenting these Stygian Tap-house s’ they soon learned ‘to exceed us in Talkativeness, holding wild discussions on major issues such as ‘what colour the Red Sea is of; whether the Great lurk be a Lutheran or a Calvinist; who Cain’s Father in Law was, (&c.’ Not only was the conversation tedious, but rather than replacing the taverns, the coffee houses actually ‘pimped’ for them:
For when people have swill’d themselves with a morning draught of more Ale than a Brewer’s horse can carry, hither they come for a pennyworth of Settle-brain, where they are sure to meet enow lazy pragmatical Companions, that resort here to prattle of News, that they neither understand, nor are concerned in; and after an hours impertinent Chat, begin to consider a Bottle of Claret would do excellent well before Dinner; whereupon to the Bush they all march together, till every one of them is as Drunk as a Drum, and then back again to the Coffee-house to drink themselves suber; where three or four dishes a piece, and smoaking, makes their throats as dry as Mount Aetna enflam’d with Brimftame; for that they must away to the next Fed Lattice to quenc them with a dozen or two of Ale, which at last growing nauseous, one of them begins to extol the blood of the Grape, what rare Langoon, and Racy Canary may be had at the Miter: Saist thou so? cries another, Let’s then go and replenish there, with our Earthen Vessels: So once more they troop to the Sack-shop till they are drunker than before; and then by a retrograde motion, stagger back to Soberize themselves with Coffee: thus like Tenuis Balk between two Rackets, the Fopps our Husbands ar
e bandied to and fro all day between the Coffee-house and Tavern, whilst we poor souls sit mopeing all alone till Twelve at night, and when at last they come to bed finoakt like a Westphalia Hogs-head we have no more comfort of them, than from a shotten Herring or a dried Bulrush . . .
The petition ended by asking for coffee to be banned for anyone under the age of sixty. Good old-fashioned ales should be provided in its place.
It is generally thought that coffee houses were exclusively male preserves, except for the maids or waitresses, the landlady, if there was one, and maybe a whore or two in the upstairs rooms. Such a picture is not entirely correct. Although the clientele was predominantly male, both Robert Boyle and Samuel Pepys tell us of women frequenting coffee houses; the latter describes going in a coach with his wife Elizabeth and her lady’s companion Deborah Willet to a coffee house in Covent Garden on a Monday morning at ten o’clock. If Elizabeth and her maid could go, so could other wonren. So was the author of the pamphlet actually a woman? If so, Aphra Behn comes to mind as the most likely candidate.
The writer, though, was undoubtedly someone who preferred the company of an alehouse, making it more probable that the writer was male. Judging by the high quality of the writing, he or she was probably a poet or playwright, certainly one well used to writing sustained comedy. If the author were a man, the likely aspirant – or aspirants – for the honour must be looked for among the members of the ‘Merry Gang’, the professional wits who, like George Etherege or William Wycherley, could readily produce a humorous piece of writing. One thing we know for sure is that whoever the authors were, in person they were likely to enhance the conversation of any coffee house they entered.
The petition must have had some success, for it was followed up by a counter-blast, The Men’s Answer to the Womens petition Against Coffee. Between them, these squibs undoubtedly caused considerable hilarity in coffee houses, taverns and anywhere else that the more lubricious members of society met. When the King’s petition appeared the following year there was little mirth. The ban was put in place in January 1676, but before the languishing piles of imported coffee beans could rot, it was repealed. The power of commerce was greater than that of the Crown. There were hundreds of coffee houses in the city, providing the setting for all manner of business. Books were sold, auctions of goods held, shares in joint stock companies offered to the adventurous. Merchants had commercial interests not only in the importation of the small black beans but often in the coffee houses themselves. The fact was that the coffee trade had become important. It was closely allied to the major cash businesses of sugar and tobacco, both fed by widespread addiction to sweet coffee with an accompanying pipe to smoke, and both dependent upon the London-based slave trade. The coffee house had become such a part of the commercial fabric of London that a king could not will it away.
As the battle raged over the future of London’s coffee houses, a much greater conflict was being fought out far away. Both battles were over personal rights – what today would be called civil rights. In America, animosity between English colonists and the native peoples had been increasing for some time. The colonists were greedy for land and did not consider it imperative to keep to agreements they made with the local inhabitants. For decades, London had allowed English colonies along the eastern seaboard of America to grow without control from home. Many of the earliest Puritan settlers had emigrated in order to set up colonies independent from the stifling religious orthodoxies they found at home. To a great extent they had succeeded in evading direct control from London. As long as the colonies paid their trading taxes and sent their cash crops home to England, they were kept on a very loose rein.
One of the problems with this arrangement in New England was that when it came to relations between the settlers and the Wampanoag people of Massachusetts, agreements were broken and land grabbed in an ad hoc manner. The indigenous population was in sharp decline, driven by imported European illnesses and internal immigration to escape the invaders. It is estimated that by the 1670s there were 35,000 English settlers in New England and only 15,000 indigenous people.
In 1675, disagreements came to a head. The Wampanoag leader Metacom was suspicious of English ambitions. He foresaw that ultimately the English would take over everything and destroy his people. He set about putting together a coalition of tribes to resist the settlers.
In the resulting conflict – which would become known as King Philip’s War† – Metacom’s united tribes attacked more than half of the English settlements in New England. Out of a total of ninety settlements, fifty-two were either destroyed or partially burned down. The war spread from Massachusetts into other parts of New England and carried on through the winter. London sent reinforcements of 1000 extra troops, and in the spring of 1676 the English launched an offensive. Metacom was forced to retreat to Mount Hope, a small hill in Rhode Island. The English captured his wife and nine-year-old son and sold them into slavery in the West Indies. In August, Metacom’s stronghold was overrun and he was shot dead. His head was put on a spike in Plymouth.
By the end of the war, 5000 indigenous people and 2500 English were dead. The native American population of New England never recovered. The war convinced Charles and his government that the colonies should he brought under stricter control. New governors were appointed with powers to ride roughshod over the wishes of local assemblies. Despite the introduction of more centralised control, under Charles’s rule the colonies were not run as a pure exercise in imperial expansion but as economic units within the increasingly important transatlantic trade that fed London’s economy.5
London’s colonial problems were not confined to New England. Rebellions had broken out elsewhere. In 1675, slave uprisings were put down in Jamaica, leading to a declaration of martial law imposed by extra troops sent by London. In Barbados too a rebellion was brutally suppressed, with fifty-two Africans beheaded, burned alive or tortured to death by other gruesome methods. Among the island’s large population of Irish indentured servants, disturbances took place on such a regular basis that the Irish workforce was phased out and replaced by one that was entirely African.
In the first English colony of Virginia, another threat arose to the colonial enterprise. An uprising that became known as Bacon’s Rebellion almost led to the colony breaking completely free of London rule. For some time, there had been unrest among African slaves and indentured European servants, the latter for the most part slaves in all but name. Since the end of the British civil wars, Virginia had been a dumping ground for Irish rebels and English undesirables. Criminals rounded up across England were shipped to the colony. After the Restoration, former Cromwellian soldiers were transported along with the increasing numbers of London criminals, known as ‘Newgaters’. Some of these former Roundheads led a series of small-scale insurrections.6
At the heart of the discontent in Virginia were the issues of land and taxes. Indentured servants, who had worked their passage to the new world, discovered upon gaining their freedom that their promised parcel of land rarely materialised. For the poor, taxation was harsh, based on a poll tax, which meant that the richest landowner paid the same as the poorest former indentured servant. On top of this, relations with the indigenous people were never good.
When a minor theft from a farm escalated into widespread butchery by both Europeans and the indigenous people, a hotheaded aristocratic planter called Nathaniel Bacon, who was descended from Elizabeth I’s chancellor Francis Bacon, advocated an all-out war intended to exterminate the native peoples. The colony’s governor, Sir William Berkeley – a cultivated man, a favourite of Charles II and an able and effective governor who experimented with new crops to improve the colony’s economy – put forward a more reasonable approach. Matters came to a head during 1676, when elections to the ruling House of Burgesses turned into a mass rebellion of mostly freed indentured servants, led by Bacon. The appeal of the rebellion was based on Bacon’s recognition of the abuse of the underclasses by the colonialist
grandees; his intention was not only to take on the warring tribes and wipe them out, but to create a form of ‘levelling’, in what seems to have been a late flowering of the experimental and revolutionary political movements of the 1640s and ‘50s. When Bacon offered to free every slave and servant who rallied to his cause, hundreds of Africans and Europeans fled their plantations to answer his call. Bacon now had an army. They took the capital Jamestown and burned it to the ground.
Governor Berkeley sent word to London requesting reinforcements. Before the extra troops could arrive, however, Bacon died and his rebellion petered out. Hundreds of rebels were persuaded to surrender by false promises of pardons. Berkeley showed no mercy, hanging dozens. The King was not pleased with his old friend, saying, ‘The old fool has taken more lives in his naked country than I have taken for my father’s murder.’7 When the thousand English troops ordered by London finally-arrived in Virginia, they had nothing to do. Sir William was replaced and retired to his London mansion, where he died the following year.
With another attempted uprising having to be put down in Maryland, the colonial governors were under orders from London to find a solution to the growing unrest, which was again a result of inequality and suppressed expectations among poorer settlers.8 In response, the governors played the race card. They passed laws depriving Africans and Native Americans of rights, downgrading their status relative to that of European servants. Freed Africans lost their right to own property and vote in elections, even the right to a family life. Enslaved Africans lost their right to freedom – even if their owners wished to free them.9 Within a few years, Africans were to be enslaved in perpetuity, a status inherited by their sons and daughters.
Against the tumultuous background of the uprisings across the western colonies, the slave trade was expanding at a tremendous rate. In the five years before Bacon’s Rebellion, London slavers shipped over 9000 men, women and children out of Africa; in the five years after it, 26,881 Africans were enslaved, a threefold increase. But although the uprisings threatened to destabilise the economic benefits accruing from the slave trade, London was slow to react. Partly this was because the colonies were designed to be self-regulating, but it was also because Charles’s government had suffered considerable blows to its sense of security.