The King's City

by Don Jordan

  Thompson and Nelthorpe had evolved their business into a new type of concern. Known as banker-scriveners, they took money in and issued paper (an IOU) for it, promising a return of around 4 to 6 per cent, while investing the deposits in other ventures. This new business arose because goldsmith-bankers could not keep pace with the need for investment in London’s growing economy. With the population expanding, and likewise the various trades with the new colonies in America, Bermuda, Jamaica and Barbados, along with the existing trade from the Baltic and the Mediterranean and the growing trade with India and the East, there was too little silver or coinage to deal with demand. The scriveners took up the shortfall with paper pledges.

  The combination of economic growth and the inflation due to the rapid influx of New World gold into European economies reinforced the need for a stable, centralised source of affordable credit. Unfortunately, there existed no such thing. All banking was run via goldsmiths, money scriveners, country banks and merchant bankers. Since goldsmiths already had stout vaults in which to store their gold, entrepreneurs entrusted their gold to them for safekeeping. It was not long before the goldsmith-scriveners realised that as well as investing the deposited money they could lend it out to others for a fee. This was the invention of modern British banking.†

  Goldsmith-bankers carried out numerous types of banking transactions. They distributed to their clients notes or bills, which in turn went into circulation, being used in buying and selling bullion and in international currency dealings. These operations were theoretically self-limiting, restricted by the amount of gold on hand to lend against. While it is true that many goldsmiths practised a version of what is called fractional reserve banking, and typically put more notes into circulation than they could actually redeem, there was also a limit to creditors’ faith in notes that were backed by an amount of gold that might not actually balance the paper. Having become in this way the equivalent of modern bankers, turning themselves into an investment vehicle using other people’s money, that was the predicament in whieh Thompson and Nelthorpe found themselves.

  Andrew Marvell rented a house in St Giles-in-the-Eields where Thompson and Nelthorpe could hide away from their creditors, dire bankers published a pamphlet telling their creditors to be patient – the company was doing only what other banks were doing. They explained it was unfair of their creditors not to settle for the six shillings and eightpence in the pound they were offering. Had not another company recently settled for only eighteen pence in the pound? As with the Great Stop, the Thompson-Nelthorpe affair demonstrated that a bank was not always a secure place for one’s money. The banking row would not be resolved until well into the next century.

  Marvell meanwhile continued to take an active interest in politics, particularly in the question of the royal succession and the King’s increasing wariness of Parliament.

  Wary of mounting antagonism, Charles now ordered Shaftesbury – his one-time chancellor and now leader of the opposition — out of London. It had been noted in government circles that Shaftesbury continued to foment anti-government moves, entertaining various opposition figures at his home, the ancient and rackety Exeter House on the Strand. At first, Shaftesbury refused to go, because Secretary of State Joseph Williamson had not signed the King’s order. Eventually he left for the country, but after a little time returned to London, setting up at Thanet House in Aldersgate Street. He and his allies distributed a pamphlet questioning the power of the monarchy, suggesting that Parliament could ‘limit, restrain and govern the descent and Inheritance of the Crown itself’.10 Because of his manoeuvres, Shaftesbury was put in the Tower, along with several other opposition figures, including Charles’s one-time friend the Duke of Buckingham.!

  In the meantime, Marvell brought out a pamphlet on the threat of popery and Stuart-style arbitrary government.11 Like Shaftesbury’s broadside, Marvell’s pamphlet railed against the prorogation of Parliament from November 1675 to July 1677; but it went further, suggesting some knowledge or suspicion of the secret deal Charles had done with Louis XIV.

  Feelings were running high in the city and the Tory camp had to reply. In the event it was the censor, Roger L’Estrange, who responded, with a pamphlet titled ‘An account of the Growth of Knavery’.12 Soon, though, the war of words would turn to something more concrete, as London was shaken by rumours of a plot to murder the King.

  * The speed of building seems to have had unforeseen consequences. In 1800 the hospital was judged unsafe and a new one ordered to he built in Southwark.

  † These receipts or notes from the gold smith-bankers, often taking the form of a letter, are some of the earliest surviving cheques in England.

  ‡ Buckingham and the others were released shortly after their incarceration; Shaftesbury was imprisoned until early 1678.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE CITY CONVULSED

  Charles first heard of a plot to kill him in the summer of 1678 as he went for his daily walk in St James’s Park. Christopher Kirkby, an experimenter who had assisted the King at his alchemical laboratory, came up to the famously approachable monarch and warned him that Catholics were plotting to assassinate him.

  By nature, Charles did not allow such tales to alarm him. Previous plots had dissolved into the air. But Kirkby insisted this one should be taken seriously. He said he could produce someone who had personal knowledge of the plot. Charles agreed Kirkby could bring what evidence he had to the Palace, and strolled on towards the park.

  When Kirkby arrived for the arranged meeting at Whitehall Palace he brought with him an elderly clergyman called Israel Tonge, who fostered an obsessional belief that Jesuits were plotting against Protestant England. He told Charles that the Jesuits were plotting to kill him and the Duke of Ormond and cause rebellion in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. With the help of the French, they would place James on the throne or give it to the Duke of Monmouth.

  Charles listened impassively. When Tonge produced a document he said would reveal all, Charles asked his servant William Chiffinch to arrange for the Earl of Danby, the first minister, to investigate. Charles appears to have thought that the matter would end there.

  Kirkby and Tonge knew one another because they had once lodged in the same house in Vauxhall, where Kirkby had boasted of his access to the King. This engaged Tonge’s attention, for he was already involved in fomenting one of the oddest conspiracies in British history. Some years before, he had come into contact with a failed clergyman named Titus Oates with whom he shared a hatred and fear of Catholicism.

  Oates had recently returned to England from living abroad. He was a con artist; the one constant in his life was the wheedling of money by deception. Unfortunately for him, his skills at dissembling were usually undermined by his foul-mouthed conversation and disreputable habits. Even his father, a radical cleric, disliked him. Despite this, a career in the Church seemed a natural choice. Being by all accounts lazy and dim, Oates failed to gain a BA from Cambridge, then lied about his degree in order to be ordained in the Church of England. He was sacked from his parish for incompetence and homosexuality, before conning his way into several jobs, all of which ended in scandal. With his options running out, Oates managed to find employment as a Protestant curate in the household of the Duke of Norfolk, a leading Catholic. In 1677, at the age of twenty-eight, he converted to Roman Catholicism.

  Seeking to turn his spiritual awakening to earthly advantage, Oates persuaded the Society of Jesus to enrol him in two Jesuit schools abroad, both of which later ejected him.1 By 1678 Oates was in dire poverty. He discovered a lifeline in Tonge, the obsessive vicar who was now printing regular exhortations against the Catholic menace. Acting as a man who had seen at first hand the Jesuits’ plots against England, Oates persuaded the gullible Tonge of his wish to reveal all. Tonge encouraged Oates to write down his experiences and his knowledge of the Jesuit plots.

  To what extent Tonge was complidt in fabricating the evidence rather than being merely a gullible stooge is
unknown, though he was at first the main engine of the enterprise.2 According to Roger L’Estrange, the official censor turned satirist, ‘the original design was to remove the Queen and to destroy the Duke of York’.3 Oates’s motives remain a matter for conjecture, as he maintained to the end that his invented evidence of a plot was true.

  Egged on by Tonge, Oates wrote forty-three papers on Popish plots. There had, he claimed, already been many attempts upon the life of the King; one had been foiled only because the weapons used by the assassins failed to fire their silver bullets. The first minister, Danby, thought it best to treat the claims with respect. After reading the papers provided by Tonge, Danby realised that neither the ageing cleric nor the eccentric chemist Kirkby alone could have compiled the evidence of multiple plots and schemes. Tonge reluctantly arranged for Titus Oates to come briefly out of the shadows to swear the truth of his evidence before a magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey.

  Among the most sensational of Oates’s claims was that the Duchess of York s former secretary, Edward Coleman, was a conspirator, In this Oates scored an unwitting bull’s-eye. Coleman had converted to Catholicism in the early 1660s and was said to have played a part in the conversion of the Duke of York. As a secretary for the Duchess of York, he had carried out a private mission to forge links with, and raise money via, Catholic priests close to the crowns of France and Spain. What better name for Oates to pick as a member of his fictitious plot? Coleman had been in private contact with Catholic priests who had the ear of Louis XIV, as well as that of the simple-minded Charles II of Spain, Two years before, the Earl of Danby and the Bishop of London had learned of Coleman’s activities and removed him from his post in the Duchess’s household.

  Two weeks after Godfrey witnessed Oates’s deposition, he vanished. His body was found five days later, 17 October, on Primrose Hill, with his own sword driven through it. Examination showed that Godfrey had been dead when impaled; the cause of death had been strangulation. The murder was the event Oates and Tonge required for their plot to be taken seriously. Suddenly it was the talk of London.

  A few days after Godfrey’s death, and thanks to the Duke of York urging his brother to take matters seriously, Tonge and Oates were called before the Privy Council to be interrogated. Charles attended and personally quizzed Oates on his evidence, discovering many inconsistencies. Oates stuck to his story, which by now he had embellished with more details. The entire inglorious confection was composed of names and events squirrelled away by Oates during his time with the Jesuits, and now to be spewed forth with the addition of a huge plot to overthrow Protestant England and Scotland. His list of plotters numbered more than five hundred Jesuits and many Catholic nobles and their associates.

  Charles ordered Oates to be arrested as a false witness; he thought Oates and Tonge had invented the entire conspiracy as ‘some artifice, and did not believe one word of the plot’.4 Unfortunately, he was almost alone in seeing through the conspirators’ fictions. Parliament ordered that Oates be freed and provided all assistance in tracking down the plotters. He was given an income of £1200 a year and an apartment inside Whitehall Palace. Charles must have been intensely irritated.

  Talk in the salons, political clubs and coffee houses was dominated by speculation about James. How would the Papists be contained if he succeeded his brother? Should he be allowed to sueceed? If not, who might replace him? Lack of money forced Charles to reconvene the Parliament he had prorogued eighteen months earlier in irritation at its attempts to bring in ever-tighter controls on religious observation. In his formal speech from the throne, he revealed the Popish Plot, calling it a design against my person by the Jesuits’. The news was delivered almost as a throwaway line, Charles saying only that it involved ‘foreigners contriving to introduce popery amongst us’.

  Charles, as we have seen, disbelieved in the plot, and was far from keen to have it investigated by Parliament. If members of the Commons started probing they might stumble upon ‘many things that were yet to be concealed’.5 Charles’s prime concern was keeping a lid on the secret payments from Louis of France. Danby had been instructed to bypass Parliament and leave the allegations of conspiracy for the judges to pursue. Always a hardliner on Catholic issues, and the most devious of men, he disobeyed his master, making details of the allegations available to the Commons. The King, though furious with Danby, had no option but to go along with him and announce the plot.

  The effect was immediate. In the words of the politician Sir John Reresby, the country ‘took fire’. In his memoirs, Reresby recalled, ‘It is not possible to describe the ferment which the artifices of some and the real fear and belief of others concerning his plot put the two Houses of Parliament and the greatest part of the nation in.’ Over the coming weeks even the most level-headed were persuaded that the King was in imminent danger from Papist assassins and the very future of Protestantism was in the balance. In London, Catholics went in fear of violence from mobs that toured the streets chanting anti-Catholic slogans.

  The furore developed into a threat to the throne itself, with the Earl of Shaftesbury playing a major part. Probably the ablest politician of the reign, Shaftesbury had helped restore Charles to the throne but had become increasingly alienated from the King because of his absolutism. Shaftesbury was the dominant figure among the loose grouping of constitutional monarchists, Presbyterians and radicals who would come to be known as the Whigs. Few historians think he ever believed in Oates’s plot, but he found it a useful weapon. He orchestrated an anti-Catholic campaign that had the crown wobbling on Charles’s head.

  Shaftesbury showed his hand a week after Charles’s speech. In the Commons, the Earl’s ally Lord Russell tabled an address calling for the removal of the Duke of York ‘from His Majesty’s presence’. In the following days a similar address demanded the banishment from Whitehall of the Queen and all her retinue. Then came a bill to ban Catholics from sitting in either house. The Lords voted by the narrowest of margins to exempt York.

  It was a limited reprieve in a darkening situation. Orders went out to arrest priests and Jesuits. Catholics were barred from the court, the army, and then from London. Search parties were sent to arrest those who had failed to leave the city. London’s prison population soared. The round-up netted some 2000, held in Newgate, the Fleet, the Marshalsea and other gaols. The anti-Catholic purge put the position of the King s chief mistress Louise de Kérouaille and even of the Queen herself under question, if not actual threat.

  In the midst of the turmoil, London’s greatest annual spectacle – the Lord Mayor’s Day – took place. Everyone turned out to watch the procession as the new mayor, Sir George Edwards, a grocer, made his way to Westminster to piedge his allegiance to the Crown. As usual, the procession included representatives of all strata of London life, ranging from pensioners and apprentices all the way up to aldermen and sheriffs. It was a chance for London to express civic pride and enjoy itself. Each year a series of elaborate pageants, chiefly written by Thomas Jordan and designed to illustrate a specific theme, was laid on at points along the route. In 1678 the theme was overseas trade and the East India Company. The choice was made by the sponsoring guild, which changed year by year. This year it was the grocers, whose overriding interest was in foreign trade. Billowing scenes of exotic Asian plenty erupted across the old city, with pasteboard elephants (the symbol of the EIC) carrying luscious baskets of vegetable and mineral riches, Indian youths, imported to add verisimilitude to these visions of excess and wealth, held bowls overflowing with spices. From beneath the visual bombast, actors dressed for the part read long panegyrics on the wonders and virtues of London.

  In Jordan’s verse, the message was clear: no one should mess with London and its ancient rights, for the city was where the wealth of the nation lay. A subsidiary message was no less important: this was a Protestant city, engaging in Protestant trade and holding allegiance to a Protestant Crown.

  By the spring of 1679, London was still in the throes of
antiCatholic sentiment and rumours of plots and counter-plots. The atmosphere remained virulent. In April anti-Catholic venom swerved towards Samuel Pepys and his close associates. Pepys was correctly seen as the Duke of York’s man. Even with the Duke removed from his position as admiral, Pepys still suffered from rumours that made him suspect of recusancy. Of course, although Pepys had long been close to the Duke he was not a Catholic. Despite this, he and the shipbuilder Sir Anthony Deane were suspected of espionage. Charged with leaking secret documents to the French, on 22 May they were sent to the Tower.

  Pepys’s powerful Whig enemies wished to depose anyone with connections to the Duke, while suspicion fell on Deane because of his association with the King himself. On Charles’s orders four years before, Deane had gone to France to design and build two sporting yachts for Louis XIV. This was enough to place him under suspicion. The prosecution had great difficulty constructing a case against either man and on 9 July Pepys and Deane were released on bail, although it would take until June the following year for the charges to be dropped.

  During the height of the crisis, in 1679, Charles was taken seriously ill and took some months to recover. The nature of the illness is not understood, but it may possibly have been heart trouble brought on by good living or the stress of dealing with a major national emergency.* In September, Charles banished the Duke of Monmouth to the continent, in order to prevent his continuing role as a rallying point for Whig dissent; his supporters included those who saw him as an alternative Protestant heir to the throne. By November he was back – without permission. Crowds turned out in London and elsewhere to greet him.