The King's City

by Don Jordan

  The Popish Plot mania was to last three years. At the height of his fame Oates was hailed by many as the saviour of the kingdom, a notion he held on to until the end of his days. He adored his fame and made much of his sudden elevation from poverty’ to well-fed celebrity:

  I had my guard of Beefeaters to protect me from being insulted or assassinated, my ten pounds a week duly paid without deductions, Venison Pasties and Westphalian I lams flew to my table without sending for, I was as much stared at, at the Amsterdam Coffee House and at Dick’s as a Foreign Ambassador, when he makes his entry through Fleet Street.6

  The plot hatched by the gullible Tonge and the exploitative Oates ultimately led to the execution of fifteen innocent men, among them the hapless Edward Coleman. Shortly after the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, one of the Queen’s servants had been arrested on suspicion of his murder, taking the plot right to Catherine herself. The accused servant, Miles Prance, himself a Catholic, was tortured in Newgate, admitted his guilt and named three others. He then recanted his confession and veered between admissions and denials of guilt until on his evidence the three luckless individuals he had named were executed.

  The flames fanned by the plot reached their zenith in the summer of 1679 with a series of trials and executions. The trials caused a sensation in London, which by now was stoked up into a fervour of anti-Catholicism. All those found guilty declared their innocence. Charles himself believed them to be so, though it was politically expedient for him to let all fifteen go to their deaths.

  Amidst the crisis, it was believed by some that the Duke of York, sent by the King into exile in Brussels, was plotting a coup. The Duke of Monmouth, who had been sent to Scotland to crush a Covenanter uprising, was asked to return to London† He did so, in late November 1680, to great jubilation on the streets of the city. With the King refusing to call a Parliament to discuss the deteriorating situation, a huge petition was organised in London, Some 20,000, including Shaftesbury, signed it. The King’s response was to announce he would call another Parliament, saying he would listen to reasonable proposals to deal with people’s concerns, barring any discussion of the royal line of descent. In other words, he would listen but not act.

  Finally, a backlash began against Oates and the Popish Plot. A turning point was reached when Oates accused the Queens physician, Sir George Wakeman, of plotting to poison the King with the assistance of the Duke of York, When this clearly ridiculous charge went to court, Wakeman was acquitted. Although his trial helped turn opinion against Oates, the hunt for plotters went on. The final victim of Oates’s fabrications was the blameless Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Oliver Plunkett, hanged in July 1681 for complicity in the plot. With this final travesty, the country had had enough of Popish plots. Oates was told to leave Whitehall Palace. In response, he made accusations against the King and the Duke ofYork. They were accusations too far. Oates was accused of sedition and taken to the Tower.

  As the grotesque nonsense of the Popish Plot played out, the interlinked and more important political struggle over the royal succession continued to pose danger to the House of Stuart. Many feared the country might stumble into a new civil war.

  The Popish Plot, and the ensuing exclusion crisis, during which concerted efforts were made to have the Duke ofYork prohibited from succession to the throne, caused political turmoil throughout London. Public figures found themselves forced to make open declarations of support for one side or the other, for or against the royal family, especially the Duke. John Dryden declared himself for the King against the emerging Whigs, who were primarily opposed to the Duke of York because of his Catholicism. Whipped up by the King’s enemies, crowds paraded through the capital in November, carrying effigies of the Pope to be burned. Similar demonstrations would be repeated each November during the rest of Charles’s reign.

  The King was widely criticised in Whig circles for his effeminacy’, a seriously derogatory charge in the seventeenth century, meaning a lack of both masculine’ leadership and sexual potency. Proof was offered in the fact that the Queen had failed to provide an heir and that he preferred pawing – in Evelyn’s telling phrase, ‘toying’ – his mistresses rather than having sex.7 Even though the slurs on the king’s sexuality were obviously without foundation – he had many illegitimate children – they had a political point: that he was effeminate or ineffectual in dealing with the perceived threat of French Catholicism that was spreading into the land.8

  Towards the end of 1679 a vicious anonymous satire appeared, attacking the King, his French Catholic mistress Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth, the King’s on-off favourite the Earl of Rochester and others. Rumours began to circulate that the author was John Dryden, despite the fact he was poet laureate. On the night of 18 December, as Dryden made his way home from Will’s Coffee House to Gerrard Street in Soho, he was attacked by a gang of thugs armed with cudgels. The assailants staged their ambush in a dark alleyway beside the Lamb and Flag pub in Rose Street, Covent Garden. It was rumoured they had been hired by Rochester, whose friendship with the poet had turned to loathing following a literary spat. Other rumours put the blame on the Duke of Monmouth, or on the Duchess of Portsmouth, anxious to defend herself from public defamation.

  A reward was offered for information as to the identity of the attackers. They were never identified. In fact, the true author of the satire was not Dryden, but John Sheffield, the Earl of Mulgrave. The agent behind the misdirected attack on Dryden was indeed his former friend Rochester, who wrote a form of confession, saying he would leave ‘the repartee to black Will with a cudgel’.9 By the distorted code of the day, it was thought quite honourable to hire a gang to attack someone from whom one had received some slight or insult. Despite the severity of the assault, Dryden recovered.

  In reaction to those promoting various Exclusion Bills, designed to deny James the throne, a posthumous book was published in 1680 setting out the arguments for monarchy and the divine right of kings. This was Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, written almost fifty years before, during the period when Charles I ruled without calling a Parliament.10 According to Filmer, the correct form of government was based on the model of a family ruled by its father. Patriarcha was the subject of much debate, particularly as it came at a time when the House of Stuart was under assault from former members of the government, senior political opposition figures, and an increasingly vocal and restive London population.

  Soon afterwards John Locke began writing Two Treatises of Government, in which he argued against the view that civil society was best controlled by divinely ordained paternalism, asserting that the only legitimate form of government was byconsent. Locke’s work was in part an answer to Filmer and partly a reaction to the exclusion crisis. The political heat around the crisis was intensifying, fuelled by Locke’s patron, Lord Shaftesbury and allies including Lord Russell. In the political upheavals following various attempts to have James removed from the royal line of inheritance, London was further wracked with rumours of plots and counter-plots.

  It was certainly true that new groups of conspirators had arisen from an unexpected quarter. Far from being in the old Cromwellian mould, they were aristocrats. This was not so strange as it might first appear, for the attack was not on the Crown itself but on the possibility of a Catholic succeeding to the English throne. The aim was to reform the monarchy rather than to destroy it; as Shaftesbury put it, they didn’t want democracy. In 1680 an Exclusion Bill passed the Commons but was defeated in the Lords. The Commons was prepared to consider an alternative, whereby the powers of a Catholic monarch would be limited. Charles refused to consider it. By this time, the London mobs were parading effigies of the Duke of York through the streets.

  With so much at stake, it is hardly surprising that the government stepped in to censor the theatre. During the period of the exclusion crisis many plays, both old and new, were banned. Several of Shakespeare’s history plays dealing with his recurring themes of power and monarchy fell foul of the ban. Plays
by Shadwell, a Whig, were banned, as were works by Dryden, a Tory.11

  The problem was not so much the criticism of monarchy but the fear of incitement of the rabble.12 Quite how a theatre frequented by the well-to-do was likely to pander to the rabble was hard to explain. Dryden was so incensed by his work being caught up in the government’s paranoia that he wrote a public broadside against its actions – a bold action for the poet laureate. Dryden had another reason to feel aggrieved; he had recently written perhaps his greatest work, the political poem Absalom and Achitophel, in which he defended Charles II despite his philandering and castigated his enemies, including the Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury, for not sticking by the monarchy.13

  *

  In the winter of 1680, in the midst of the political turmoil, two comets appeared. Comets were seen as a portent of some great or dreadful event. The appearance of two comets, as had also occurred fifteen years before, was surely an omen of an event of cataclysmic importance. The sighting caused consternation in London. The people remembered the comets that had appeared in 1664 and 1665, and which had subsequently been said to have foretold the plague and fire. Pamphlets appeared, filled with foreboding about the new celestial appearances. One of these, entitled ‘An Alarm to Europe by a late prodigious Comet’, claimed to offer a ‘predictive discourse’ on some of the comet’s ‘sad effects’ on England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Holland, Germany, Italy ‘and many other places’.14 It was one of many attempts to cash in on the natural phenomena of the times. Astrology was still of great interest to many, especially physicians, so the notion of portents was not in any way unusual. The Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, had an abiding interest in the subject, though he tended to beep it under his hat, in much the same way that Isaac Newton never wrote a letter to the Royal Society about his life-long interest in alchemy.15

  While some pondered the astrological significance of the phenomenon, it rekindled the interest of Newton in astronomy. Moreover, it was the comet, rather than the fabled falling apple, that would initiate his work on gravity. At Greenwich, Flamsteed proposed that the comets, seen in November and December, were not two but one body moving towards the sun, then going behind it and finally moving away from it. At first Newton disagreed with Flamsteed, but later he realised the Astronomer Royal was correct. Much to Flamsteed’s annoyance, his friend and one-time assistant Edmund Halley allowed Newton access to measurements and data compiled by Flamsteed. As a result, Newton was able to theorise that like planets, comets went around the sun in elliptical orbits. It was this work that formed the basis of Principia Mathematica.

  Astonishingly, none of the astrologers making use of the appearance of the comet were able to foretell w’hat was about to happen. In answer to the turmoil of the exclusion crisis, and following repeated prorogations of Parliament, the King decided in the spring of 1681 to inaugurate absolute rule. The promised Parliament met on 21 March, not in its ancient berth in the old Palace of Westminster but in Oxford, a venue chosen by the King as a site well removed from London, where hordes hostile to the Duke of York had staged demonstrations through the winter. The Parliament barely met until the House of Commons brought in another Exclusion Bill, whereupon Charles promptly dissolved it. It had sat for one week. The signal was clear that Charles no longer wished to be pulled this way and that by those who despised his brother or his brothers religion, or who mistrusted the King’s own political or religious inclinations.

  In future Charles would rule if not as an absolute king, like his cousin Louis XIV in France, then at least without calling Parliament. The promises made in the Declaration of Breda were forgotten. Within the space of three years, 1679-81, three Parliaments had been elected, all of which had taken issue with the King over the question of the succession. From now on, Charles would rule without calling another Parliament. As for Shaftesbury, Charles had tried to neutralise the Whig leader by bringing him into the government and making him President of the Privy Council on the enormous sum of £4000 a year – a patent bribe. Now he sacked him, along with several other government officers who had dared to voice criticism of the King’s policies at home and abroad.

  In March Charles had made a new secret deal with Louis XIV. It allowed him to dissolve Parliament for good. In return for the sum of £4 million, payable over four years, Charles once again promised support for France’s expansionist policies. As England already had a treaty with Spain, this led to confusion in foreign policy. When Louis threatened the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish-controlled Luxembourg, Spain asked Charles for help under the terms of the treaty. Charles procrastinated until Louis took Luxembourg and the Spanish Netherlands. It became clear to the political opposition in London that Charles had made some sort of new deal with Louis. Further political tension in the capital ensued.

  The King’s finances, though, were now’ much improved. Together with reforms in tax collection put in place by Sir George Dowming and the Earl of Danby, the stream of money from customs and excise duty greatly increased. But the nagging questions about the King’s religion, his closeness to France and the future of the throne continued to be the talk of London’s coffee houses and political salons.

  The theatres were far from silent about the political situation. Charles was now interfering directly with aspects of London’s government, influencing the appointment of magistrates and officers of the trained bands. Plays were written from both the Tory and Whig perspectives. In The Duke of Guise, Dryden commented severely on Monmouth’s aspirations to succeed his father and chastised the Whigs for their support for the Duke:

  Do what in coffee houses you began;

  Pull down the Master, and set up the Man.16

  A more strident tone was adopted by Thomas D’Urfey in The Royalist, equating Whigs with the republicans who had escaped execution at the start of Charles’s reign. They should, he declared, be hanged ‘That have deserved it twenty years ago’.17

  In The Lancashire Witches, Thomas Shadwell took the Whig side, dedicating the published edition of the play to Shaftesbury. But it was John Crown, who wrote both pro-Tory and pro-Whig plays, thereby bending with the wind to maintain a living, who best summed up the sorry state of London’s political and public life when he admonished his upper-class audience at the Duke’s Theatre:

  ’Tis pleasant, Sirs, to see you fight and brawl

  About religion, but have none at all.18

  * He was to fall ill again the following May, T hese bouts may have been the first manifestations of a stroke, from which Charles would die in 1685.

  † The Covenanters were a Scottish Presbyterian movement named after the biblical covenant between God and the Israelites.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE FALL OF MADAM CRESWELL AND THE MIGRATION OF CRIMINALS

  As London’s population, from the lowest to the highest, continued to quarrel over the Popish Plot, one of the city’s most colourful characters was forced into retirement. In 1681, London’s foremost brothel-keeper, Elizabeth Creswell, was sent to gaol for ‘thirty years of bawdry’, Creswell ran a string of brothels across the city, catering to all price ranges and tastes. Her best establishments, it was claimed, were frequented by the King himself, though there is no evidence for this. They were certainly frequented by London rakes, some of whom may well have been members of Charles’s court. Creswell was the foremost of a large number of Londoners who made their living one way or another from sex. Thanks to her establishments, the city’s pox doctors had a steady trade, while the city’s many sweating houses always had customers hoping to sweat the pox from their pockmarked bodies.

  Little or nothing is known about Elizabeth Creswell s background. She was said to have been born into a middle-class family in Kent, though there is no proof of that. What is certain is that she thrived in London by being good at business. She never married and took to prostitution in order to support herself. By the 1650s she was running a brothel in Bartholomew Close, a few hundred yards north of St Paul’s Cathedral. She was diligen
t at scouring the countryside for new girls to bring into the city and for attracting well-bred women who had fallen on hard times. By keeping up her product range, and being adept at advertising her services, she ensured a loyal client list. She lived in style and was much represented in satires, plays and broadsides. Occasionally her brothels were attacked – most violently during the Easter apprentice riots of 1668 – but in general her businesses were protected thanks to her well-connected clientele.

  Madam Creswell was a target for those who supported the Duke of York during the exclusion crisis. Possessing a strongly Protestant perspective on the monarchy, she publicly and financially supported the Whig point of view. For her time, Creswell was unusual – she was a woman who became financially independent through her own endeavours, albeit from running a string of brothels, and publicly took part in the most important political debate of her time. Her choice of profession seems to have been purely pragmatic; as Aphra Beim also discovered, there w’ere few employment options open to women capable of doing better than selling victuals or gloves and ribbons from a basket in the street.

  With sexual licence went sexually transmitted diseases. Remedies were many and varied, ranging from purging to herbal remedies and, in extreme cases, the use of toxic substances including mercury. In seventeenth-century London, sexually transmitted diseases were rife and were looked upon as a natural hazard of love. All sections of society were at risk, from the lowest labourer to London’s social elite. In some ways, the latter had more to fear, having both the leisure to indulge in promiscuous behaviour that increased the chances of catching an infection and th e money to pay for the most dangerous remedies.