The King's City

by Don Jordan

  * The London Gazette can claim to be Britain’s oldest continuously published newspaper, having been established in 1665 when the royal court was at Oxford during the plague.

  † Metacom also had an English name, Philip, given in him by his father as a token of friend ship between the Wampanoag and the settlers.

  CHAPTER 23

  CITY LIFE

  With so much turmoil in the realm of foreign affairs during the mid-1670s, it would be easy to discount the wide variety of events simultaneously taking place in London. The shock of the war and disorder in the colonies had hardly died away before a very public attack was made on one of London’s new institutions – the Royal Society.

  The experimentalists were well used to criticism by now and must have considered themselves able to stand up to all types of sturdy argument, but the new assault was unexpected and difficult to counter. To their great surprise, the Royal Society’s virtuosi found themselves lampooned on the stage. The play was Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso, performed by the Duke’s Company at its sumptuous Dorset Gardens Theatre.

  Shadwell came from an old family of minor gentry in Norfolk. He studied at Cambridge, left without gaining a degree and went to London to train as a lawyer, taking lodgings at the Inner Temple in 1658. His very first play, put on by the Duke’s Company in 1668, when Shadwell was twenty-eight, dared to lampoon not just one fellow playwright but three, one of them being the pre-eminent John Dryden himself. In The Sullen Lover (the title role of which was played by the authors wife Anne), Shadwell mocked the kind of heroic tragedy written both by Dryden and Dry den’s brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. Word quickly spread among the theatre-going public that Sir Robert was portrayed as Sir Positive At-All, an insufferably self-important know-all. Sir Roberts brother Edward, also a playwright and poet, was lampooned, it was said, as Poet Ninny. The play was a huge hit, with the Duke of York and a great number of London’s society turning out to enjoy the fun. Its notoriety allowed it to run for twelve nights, making it a smash hit for the time.

  Although not a man of money, Shad well’s wit and social prowess allowed him entrance to the company of well-bred and well-heeled Wits – the group including Charles Sedley, George Etherege, the Earl of Rochester, Charles Sackville, later Earl of Dorset, and the Duke of Buckingham – who dictated the prevalent London society taste for style over substance, and for wit over benevolence. Among this set, those who wished could write for the stage without having to write for money. Shadwell, like Dryden, was a professional writer, and so while others had the luxury of favouring witty conversation over the written word, Shadwell had no alternative but to survive by polishing his wit upon the page.

  The plot of The Virtuoso centred on a character named Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, a rich virtuoso who carried out many oddball experiments, including giving a man a blood transfusion from a sheep, bottling air from different locations around the country to store in his cellar like wine and studying a frog to see how a man might swim on dry land. A particularly absurd moment saw Sir Nicholas read a bible by the light of a leg of pork in order to demonstrate phosphorescence. The play seemed to be perfectly in tune with the King’s amused view – as reported by Samuel Pepys – of some of the experiments carried out by the Royal Society.

  Many of Sir Nicholas’s freakish experiments had actually been performed. One of the most notorious was the transfusion of animal blood into a human. On 23 November 1667, a Dr King (possibly the physician who would later be present in Whitehall Palace when Charles II was taken fatally ill) had transfused a small quantity of sheep’s blood into a mentally challenged workman named Arthur Coga. Miraculously, Coga survived to receive twenty shillings for his pains. When asked why he thought sheep’s blood was chosen for the experiment, he replied that it was symbolic, Christ being the Lamb of God.

  There was much speculation over precisely who was the target of the play’s satire – the Royal Society as a whole, the gentlemen amateurs, or the entire project of experimentalism?1 It seems fair to say that while it was not an attack on the society per se, it was aimed at some of its activities. As Shadwell would have understood all too well, however, for any satire to work it must have a flesh-and-blood target, someone for the audience to hold in its collective mind’s eye while it enjoyed the fun on stage. Indisputably, that person was Robert Hooke. No member of the Royal Society exemplified the ideal renaissance man better than he.

  The Virtuoso of the play, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, spends a great deal of his time viewing his menagerie of worms and insects through his microscope. When not so engaged, he views the geography of the moon through a telescope. The parallels with Micrographia are impossible to ignore. ‘I’he possibility of human flight, suggested by no less a virtuoso than Robert Boyle, is used to great comic effect. It is unknown if Boyle went to see the play, but Hooke did, and he found the attack particularly hurtful. In his diary, he exclaimed, ‘Damned Dogs!’

  Hooke had by now many enemies, real and imagined. He found consolation in his unorthodox private life. He never married but had sex with a succession of maids. He shared his quarters with two relatives: young Tom Giles, the son of a cousin, and his niece Grace, to whom he became increasingly attached. When Hooke began keeping a private diary in 1672, Grace was already living with him. She was a vivacious young girl known for her good looks. Hooke doted on the girl, recording in his diary the necklaces and other items he bought for her.

  On Friday 26 May 1676, a fire started among the ramshackle streets of Southwark, across the river from the availed city. Hooke took Grace to witness the flames of a second Great Fire. The pair watched from the top of the 200ft high Doric column he and his friend Wren had designed as a monument to the Great Fire, which was nearing completion. According to a contemporary account, the Southwark fire destroyed at least 500 houses, the meal market, several notable inns and ‘the prison of the counter’, a small gaol or compter dating from medieval times, used chiefly for the incarceration of debtors and religious dissidents.2 Later estimates put the destruction at between 600 and 900 houses. Although this was very much smaller than the number lost in the Great Fire of 1666, it was still destruction on a very large scale.

  As Grace grew up, Hooke’s feelings towards her changed. On 4 June 1676, the couple had sexual intercourse for the first time. Hooke was a few weeks from his forty-first birthday. They continued to have intercourse until Hooke, perhaps in a fit of guilt, decided he should send her back to her family on the Isle of Wight. However, the separation did not take place; Grace continued as her uncle’s lover, while becoming more attractive to other men. Hooke’s diary records his anguish over these episodes when Grace took other lovers, though she continued to be attached to Hooke until his death.

  Hooke’s unorthodox private life may illustrate his lack of confidence. He was unable, or reluctant, to strike up relationships with women of his owm social standing, preferring housemaids and his own much younger and less sophisticated niece. Perhaps he was all too aware of his own physical imperfections. Even his closest friend John Aubrey described his physical appearance as ‘somewhat twisted’. A further blow to his esteem came when Isaac Newton, making one of his rare visits to London, remarked to him, ‘If I have seen further it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants’, doubtless ensuring that Hooke was under no illusions about his own position.

  As if to remind people of his brilliance, Hooke chose 1676 to publish the solution to his anagram ceiiinosssttuv, which had gone unsolved since he first published it in 1660. He revealed the solution to be ut tensio, sic vis — as the tension, so the force. The phrase referred to Hooke’s discovery of the relationship of force to the extension or retraction of springs. Hooke’s Law, as it came to be known, stated that the force necessary to extend or depress a spring was directly proportional to the distance of extension or depression, expressed as F = – kx, where F is the force, x is the displacement of the spring and k is specific to the spring. Thus, for example, if a 50 gm weight stretched a spring by
2 cm, 100 gm would displace it by 4 cm.3 The law, used widely today in science and engineering – in seismology, acoustics and molecular mechanics – would take its place in the history of technology as the basic principle behind devices such as the spring scale, the nanometer, or pressure gauge, and the mechanical clock.

  The year 1676 saw success for Hooke in another area: architecture. On 29 August, the King went to Moorfields, where nine years before he had visited the homeless after the Great Fire. Now he came to view a new hospital for the insane, known as Bedlam or, more correctly, as Bethlehem Hospital. The old Bedlam, situated in the walled city near Bishopsgate, had burned down in the fire. Hooke’s new hospital outside the city walls was a large, handsome classical building of forty-nine bays, built in a hurry in little more than a year.* When the King came to visit, Hooke realised that he had forgotten to give orders to carry out Wren’s recommendation to widen the central path through Moorfields to the building, which would have allowed the King and his entourage to approach his building in style.4 Somehow, for Hooke even his successes tended to be marred by some disagreeable incident or other.

  At the Navy Office, Samuel Pepys wrestled with the inadequacies he felt the Dutch wars had highlighted in the Royal Navy. The problems, he thought, fell into three categories: the recruitment and training of officers, the provision of sufficient new ships, and the provisioning and maint enance of the fleet. In the mid- to late 1670s Pepys set out to remedy these problems. The Test Act, which had compelled James to resign as Lord High Admiral of the Navy, had the collateral effect of enhancing Pepys’s career. With the Duke retired, the King put in place an Admiralty Commission to oversee control of the navy. Pepys was made its secretary, giving him enormous power. The navy was the single greatest enterprise in the kingdom, its monumental size and structure taking up the endeavours of tens of thousands, employed either directly or indirectly. It was not only the largest organised entity in England, it was the most important. Without the navy, mercantile capitalism could not operate and London would be unable to compete in international markets.

  This was the body that Pepys set out to reorganise. In 1676 he instigated examinations for lieutenants, so moving command onto a professional basis and away from the old system of patronage and promotion through experience alone. The deficiencies of the navy’s all-important victualling service had also long been of special interest to Pepys. The entire organisation of the navy was already under increasingly critical review, from the design of ships to the methods of supplying them; Sir William Petty had written on the subject some years before, for it was of great interest within the Royal Society, of which Pepys was a Fellow, as well as to the sailing-mad King.5 Now, together with his recently appointed Surveyor for the Navy, Sir John Tippetts, formerly head of the naval dockyard at Portsmouth, Pepys put together an ambitions plan to build thirty identical frigates. It was the most sustained building programme the navy had ever known. Pepys used his considerable skills of persuasion to gain the agreement of the House of Commons to the necessary expenditure of £20,000 per ship, £600,000 in total.

  One of Sir John Tippetts’ protégés, a carpenter named William Keltridge, produced a manuscript containing measurements and detailed plans for the various types of ships required by the navy. This was followed by work by the skilled Hampshire shipwright Edmund Dummer, who had been appointed by Pepys as Controller of the Victualling Accounts as part of his programme of reorganisation and improved efficiency. Under Tippetts’ guidance, Dummer drew up ideal plans of ships’ hulls, based on vessels they surveyed at Harwich. From this, he produced a book of sectional drawings through the hulls of various ships, showing how the ideal sweep of their lines changed along the length of the vessel. In a letter to Pepys, Dummer expressed his dissatisfaction with the long-established practice of ship design being ‘delivered man to man’ rather than by maxims deduced from reason and experiments’.6

  Dummer, Tippetts and Pepys had lofty ideas about how the new scientific approach might benefit the navy. But they were perhaps too ambitious for their time. What were required were more down-to-earth plans provided by men like Keltridge, on the basis of which ships might easily be built. The man chosen to oversee the construction of the new ships, however, was not Keltridge but the skilled ship designer and builder Sir Anthony Deane, the head of the naval shipyard at Woolwich. Known for building fast ships that handled well, Deane had come to Pepys’s notice when he was still a young man at Harwich shipyard. At Pepys’s encouragement he had written what has been described as the clearest account before the eighteenth century of how a ship’s hull was constructed’.7 According to Pepys, one of Deane’s ships, the seventy-gun Resolution, launched in 1667, was ‘the best ship by report in all the world’.8

  Deane’s reputation for constructing successful ships was enhanced by his gift of the gab and Pepys’s patronage.9 He was therefore the first choice when it came to shipbuilding in bulk. Pepys appointed him head of the important shipyard at Portsmouth, which had the capacity to construct large numbers of big ships. Building a large number of identical ships required great organisational ability and knowledge of naval architecture; it would however have the benefit of shared designs for masts, spars, etc., and the same advantages when it came to spare parts. What Pepys was proposing was nothing less than the creation of a centralised planning apparatus controlling a standardised fleet, run by uniformly trained men given the means to run successful campaigns at sea. His vision would pay off handsomely in the next century when Britain would become the premier world sea power.

  There were further developments in the world of theatre as Thomas Killigrew’s tenuous hold on the reins of the King’s Men finally slipped from his grasp. The man who tugged them away from him was his son William, convinced he could make a better job of running the company than his father.

  Having made Killigrew’s and Davenant’s original warrants hereditary, Charles could hardly interfere in a family spat over money. Unlike his former sparring partner Davenant, Killigrew was not steeped in the workings of the theatre. He saw it as one of a number of irons in the fire, all designed to make money, but none of which seemed to amount to much. He spent much of his time at court as the King’s unofficial jester, although in between jokes he was always asking for favours, few of which amounted to anything much; the King preferred to keep him around rather than economically afloat.

  It cannot have helped Killigrew’s humour that in the same year, the Duke’s players performed not only Shadwell’s hit The Virtuoso, but the finest comedy of the age, The Man of Mode, or, Sir Fopling Flutter, by George Etherege, staring Thomas Betterton. The play remains the best example of a comedy of manners. Its convoluted plot revolves around a group of stylish characters trying to disentangle themselves from the wrong sexual partners – a situation caused largely by their being too clever for their own good – and all the while trying hard to retain their fashionable froideur. Within two years Killigrew would be dead at the age of sixty-six, having outlived Davenant by ten years.

  *

  In the world of music a teenage prodigy named Henry Purcell began to make a reputation in London. Purcell was bom in St Anne’s Lane, off Old Pye Street, in 1658 or 1659, two hundred yards from Westminster Abbey, where his father, Henry senior, a gentleman chorister at the Chapel Royal, had sung at Charles Is coronation. The younger Henry’s fluent musicianship enabled him to display his genius early. At the age of twelve, while himself a scholar and chorister at the Chapel Royal, he wrote a choral piece for the King. He went on to be appointed organist at Westminster Abbey, and two years later was given a similar post at the Chapel Royal. As well as writing when required various sacred pieces and odes to the royal family, Purcell wrote a great deal of both religious and secular music.

  Purcells precocious skill at composition was soon noted in the theatrical world. In the cut-throat business of London’s playhouses, customers had come to expect novelty. The playhouses’ impresarios had to pander to a demand they themselves had c
reated, coming up with new stage effects and songs on a regular basis, transforming plays old and new by the introduction of dances and songs. In this frenetic whirl, Purcell found himself much in demand. At the age of eighteen, he was asked to write music for two plays by the prolific Thomas Shadwell. These were the racy comedies of manners, Epsom Wells and The Libertine. He also wrote the music for plays by Dryden and Aphra Behn. The following year, he wrote the music for another of Shadwell’s plays, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. In these so-called dramatic operas, th e lead actors recited their lines while musicians and singers filled out the dialogue with songs and musical interludes. The form was much admired at the time, largely thanks to William Davenant’s shameless iconoclastic dicing and slicing of plays, no matter how’ good the original.

  Despite his work for the commercial theatre, Purcell still found time to create operatic pieces including Dido and Aeneas, which with no spoken parts was the first true English opera. His masterpieces were to include a glorious Te Deum and Jubilate; an opera, King Arthur, with words by Dryden; and music for The Fairy Queen, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s D ream written by Davenant, and Dryden s adaptation of The Tempest

  While young Henry Purcell was making his mark, the veteran poet Andrew Marvell became embroiled in a banking scandal. Two of Marvell’s relatives, the merchants Robert Thompson and Edw’ard Nelthorpe, headed a banking partnership taking in deposits from a large number of merchants and wealthy individuals. Thompson and Nelthorpe claimed they owned parts of East India shipping (i.e, the East India Company) and that this was one of several advantageous and profitable trades’ in which they invested. In other words, they speculated with their clients’ money. They invested in silk, wine, lead mining in Wales, Russian trade and Irish linen, omitting ‘nothing within the compass of our ingenuity’. When some of these speculative trades failed, word got out and there was a run on the bank. Unable to pay its depositors, soon it was adrift by £175,000.