The King's City

by Don Jordan

  The petition, claiming to be from the ‘Undone Company of Poor Distressed Whores, Bawds, Pimps and Panders’, addressed itself to ‘The most splendid, illustrious, serene and eminent Lady of Pleasure, The Countess of Castlemaine’, The petitioners claimed that through the actions of ‘rude and ill-bred boys’ they had lost the practice of their ‘venerial pleasures – A trade in which your Ladyship hath great Experience’. The petitioners pleaded for speedy relief from the rioters ‘that a stop may be put unto them before they come to your honour’s palace, and bring contempt upon your worshipping of Venus, the great Goddess whom we all adore’. It went on to make a sideswipe at Barbara’s Catholicism, winding up by promising that in return for her help to the ‘inferior whores’ they would promote Barbara’s ‘honour, safety and interest’.

  Of the many satires published during the seventeenth century (or at least those that have survived), the ‘Poor-Whores Petition’ was among the finest. Perhaps its only comic equal was that other great mock petition, ‘The Women’s Petition Against Coffee’. The ‘Poor-Whores Petition’ chose as its basis an event of genuine and disquieting unrest, during which violence had to be faced down by troops called out by the government. The undercurrent of unhappiness with Stuart rule was not directly alluded to; the petition went instead for the King’s disliked mistress, who in turn stood for the London mob’s hatred of Catholicism. Homing in on Castlemaine in such a wicked and subversive manner, the petition pretended to be on her side while giving her, the monarchy and Catholicism in general a good kicking.

  While Londoners of all creeds were generally God-fearing and went to church on a Sunday, Creswell and Page represented an amoral undercurrent in the city, created out of need more than desire. Without a trade it was easy to starve in London. People born without money had to do what they could to make a living. For the masses, survival beyond early childhood was something of a miracle, and even then the battle was only just beginning. Most of London’s inhabitants lived a life in which they constantly both feared and hoped for what tomorrow might bring. A set of mid-seventeenth-century cards depicting London street sellers and their cries, once owned by Samuel Pepys, illustrates the lives of some of these Londoners: women dressed in long skirts of rough material carrying their goods – fish, oysters, buttons, puddings – as often as not in baskets on their heads, and men selling toasting forks, second-hand boots, firewood, meat or music played on a fiddle. This was the London of those who slept in overcrowded houses and spent much of their lives on the street.

  It was also the London of thievery, violence, burglary, murder and more. Extortion rackets and kidnappings were common. Former soldiers down on their luck were for hire for any sort of criminal exploit. Many of those in London’s gaols were not criminals, merely debtors. While the Tower of London accommodated those accused of treason and wayward aristocrats who had fallen foul of the King, debtors were put in the Bridewell, Ludgate prison or one of the lesser gaols south of the river.

  The line between success and failure, between freedom and debtors prison, was a fine one, easily crossed. The distinguished physician and chronicler of the plague, Nathaniel Hodges, ended his life in prison, despite the medical establishment recognising the value of his work during the plague. The Royal College of Physicians invited him to give the annual Harveian Oration, a lecture founded by William Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of blood. Harvey had stipulated that the lecture should be given to extol the virtues of the college and to exhort its members to improve medicine through experimentation. During the plague Hodges had done just that, putting old remedies to the test. Yet, soon after his recognition, came his fall. His medical practice failed and he ran into debt from which he never recovered. Hodges died in a cell in Ludgate prison in 1688 and was given a funeral service in his parish church, St Stephen’s Walbrook. The church, seriously damaged in the Great Fire, had been remodelled by Wren, who gave it an enormous dome based on that of St Paul’s, almost straddling the width of the building. This innovative church was a fitting venue for a eulogy for a man who strove at great personal risk to revolutionise medical practice.

  A major element of London’s criminal class was made up of religious dissenters. Thanks to various Acts, those who did not conform to the rites of the Church of England were gradually criminalised during the reign of Charles II, with stricter and stricter sanctions against them. It must be emphasised that these laws were enacted because of the views of Parliament and the Anglican bishops. Charles himself was well known to have broad-minded views on religion, having been defeated by Parliament in several attempts to liberalise the law. By the middle years of his reign, hundreds of Quakers in London were either in gaol or in hiding, or had taken themselves off to the colonies in America. Even there, these criminalised people could not always find peace, for the early Puritan settlers of Massachusetts (those who called themselves Pilgrims) were quite hostile to their fellow nonconformists.

  On 4 March 1681, Charles gave the astonishing gift of 45,000 acres to a Quaker and former convict, making him the largest non-royal landowner in the Western world. The land was in America and the recipient was William Penn the Younger. Given the untold numbers of men who had to trim, change their political spots, twist and turn one way or the other to thrive or merely survive in the whirlpool of seventeenth-century England, the case of Penn is singular and peculiar.

  From an early age Penn was interested in nonconformist religious ideas, finally settling on the ideology of the Quakers, whose belief in the spiritual equality of all, high or low, man or woman, did not sit well with the institution of monarchy. Yet Penn was a friend and confidant of the Duke of York, the heir to the throne. It has been speculated that what drew the two men together was their unity in difference.12 Both belonged to groups that suffered under the Test Act: the Duke, forced as a Catholic to resign as Lord High Admiral of the Navy; Penn, the Quaker, unable to swear any form of oath and so also barred from official office.

  Penn was imprisoned in Newgate and the Tower for his heretical beliefs, which held that no man was beneath the King; the Duke saw rioters in the streets of London call for his Catholic head. Apart from their personal beliefs, both men had strong experiential reasons for exposing religious intolerance.

  William Penn was a Londoner, born in 1644 in the family home on Tower Hill, in the shadow of the fortress and prison he would grow to know well in later years. His mother was Margaret Jasper, the daughter of a wealthy Rotterdam merchant, and his father Admiral Sir William Penn, himself a prime example of one who could turn in the wind to stay at the top. During the Civil War Sir William had been a naval commander for the Parliamentary forces. When it became clear that the King was returning from exile, he made sure he was on the Royal Charles when it sailed to bring Charles home. He then fought with valour under the command of the Duke ofYork during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, By all accounts he was a clever and courageous officer but a devious and untrustworthy colleague.13* His later neighbour and fellow employee of the Navy Office, Samuel Pepys, had a low opinion of him as a man but was taken by his intelligence.14

  Under Charles II, Sir William was appointed a Commissioner of the Navy. He hoped his son would use his undoubted intelligence and charm to forge a career under the patronage of the royal family, as he had himself. Young William had different ideas.

  Beginning at Oxford University, William developed an interest in nonconformist religion that would ultimately lead to him being asked to leave. His father became so annoyed by the young man’s beliefs that he threw him out of the family home, lashing him with a cane. After a time, William and his father were reconciled; it also appears that he and the university reached an understanding, only for young Penn to be sent down again later. The cause of the trouble was that William had fallen under the radical religious and political spell of the Quaker leader George Fox. The Quakers believed no one was above God, not even a king; therefore they did not support the monarchy. They also refused to swear oaths, making life difficul
t in a country ruled by those determined that its servants should swear oaths of allegiance and demonstrate their religious orthodoxy via the sacraments of the Anglican Church. The Quakers believed no person should act as an intermediary between another person and God. This led to the idea of the inner light, or the revelation of God within the individual.

  Penn campaigned for religious rights for minorities, writing pamphlets that resulted in his spending time in the Tower. Along with other sects, Quakers were seen as heretics, and under the increasing intolerance of those who strayed from Anglican orthodoxy, membership of the sect was punishable by deportation. Penn was undeterred and developed a heterodox group of friends, including the republican theorist Algernon Sidney, later campaigning for him in two parliamentary elections.

  In 1670, Sir William suffered a fatal illness and, knowing he was dying, appealed to the King and the Duke of York to protect his son. In view of Sir William s service to the Crown, they agreed to do so.

  Throughout the kingdom, persecution of Quakers intensified. Many now saw the only way forward to be emigration to America. Even there, all would not necessarily go well for them. Puritan settlements in New England were often as wary of Quakers as were Anglicans and the courts at home. Penn, who had inherited a large fortune from his father, joined with a group of prominent Quakers to purchase the colony of West Jersey. Despite his many transgressions in the eyes of the monarchy, by 1681 he gained such prominence that Charles II granted him ownership of a substantial tract of land, partially in settlement of a debt owed to Penns father, put at the sum of £16,000, but also to provide a safety valve against religious intolerance at home. By helping Penn promote the notion of religious freedom in the New World, Charles was potentially freeing himself from one of the country’s many perplexing religious problems. Penn’s idea was to found a colony of Quakers, free of monarchy, able to exercise their beliefs and to establish a religious Garden of Eden. The first 150 to travel to the new colony were, like Penn himself, Londoners, Quakers from the north of the city who keenly felt the oppression of the Anglican Church.

  The grant of a large tract of colonial land to one individual was not in itself unusual. By becoming proprietor of Pennsylvania (newly named after his father), Penn was in a line of colonial proprietors, taking charge of land on behalf of the King, who remained the ultimate owner. Previously established proprietary colonies included Maryland and Newfoundland. Colonies could be run in other ways, too. Virginia and Massachusetts had been established by joint stock companies. If other means failed, a new area of settlement could be set up directly as a royal colony, run by a governor on behalf of the King.‡ Penn’s warrant allowed him almost complete control over Ills new territory as a ‘seigniniorie’: ‘To Have, hold and possesse and enjoy the said tract of Land, Countrey, Isles, Inletts and the other premises, unto the said William Penn, his heires and assignes, to the only proper use and behoofe of the said William Penn, his heirs and assignes forever.’

  In return, Penn was to pay the King and his heirs ‘two Beaver Skins to bee delivered att our said Castle of Windsor, on the first day of January, in every yeare’. On a more practical note, Penn was to give the king The fifth parte of all Gold and silver Oare, which shall from time to time happen to bee found within the Limitts aforesaid’. Sadly for all concerned there was precious little precious metal to be found.

  More practical were the rides governing the right to trade to and from the new colony, ‘Provided alwayes, that they pay such customes and imposicions, subsidies and duties for the same to us, our heires and successors, as the rest of our subjects of our kingdome of England, for the time being shall be bound to pay, and doe observe the acts of Navigation and other lawes in that behalfe made.’15

  Quakers in the new lands were split on many issues, including the ownership of slaves. Penn was in favour of slavery and had slaves of his own, though he did say that they should be well treated and should be freed upon his death. Thus the distasteful labours of the London slave trade fed a free workforce for egalitarian Pennsylvania.

  Some of the slaves who came to Pennsylvania were landed by Boston merchants who skirted the embargo on all slave trading except via ships of the Royal African Company. The Bostonians evaded contact with the English traders off West Africa by sailing all the way to Madagascar to buy their slaves. Other Pennsylvania slaves were bought from neighbouring American colonies or from Barbados and Jamaica.

  Notwithstanding the new colony’s at best ambivalent position on slavery, Penn endowed Pennsylvania with radical ideas on government that would help form the basis for the American Constitution and of modem democracies in general. It was an unexpected outcome for a colony founded by individuals branded criminals and heretics at home. Even more unexpected was the fact that they were aided and abetted by a king.

  * The cause of syphilis would not be known until 1905, when the disease was shown to be caused by tbe bacterium Treponema pallidum.

  † Though rebuilt in a breathtaking four years, 1671-5, St Bride’s did not receive its unique Tiered wedding cake’ spire until 1701 as funds were yet to be raised.

  ‡ Such a system existed widely well into the twentieth century, most notably with India run by a viceroy. Today, the Queen nominally owns territories including the British Virgin Islands, run on her behalf by governors, with locally elected representatives.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE CITY COWED, THE CITY TRIUMPHANT

  The propaganda battle fought out on the London stage gradually became of less consequence. Not that the political situation had improved – far from it. But the power of the theatre, if it had existed at all, was now on the wane.

  Audiences were not increasing but declining. The unrest that had begun with the Popish Plot continued to be felt. Rather than put their fears aside for an hour or two in the theatre, the people of London chose to shun the pleasures of the stage. Since the death of Sir William Davenant in 1668, the quality of theatrical offerings had been patchy, with great plays and productions followed by the drab and makeweight. Though highs and lows were only to be expected in the theatre, quality had in recent years deteriorated greatly. To maintain a steady flow of new and familiar productions, interposing new plays with boiled-up versions of Shakespeare and Fletcher and offering endlessly thrilling coups de théatre, was a task that only those with the finest management skills and theatrical nous could handle. To keep up the momentum in just two theatres was too much to ask.

  With the slump in attendance figures, in 1682, the King’s Company, its management always rather ramshackle, collapsed completely. The Duke’s Company, though better run under the management of Thomas Betterton, was also in financial difficulties.

  The two companies amalgamated under the direction of the Duke’s Company management, with Betterton the guiding light. The new United Company made Wren’s Theatre Royal its headquarters. The Duke’s Company theatre at Dorset Square had always suffered from poor acoustics and the opportunity was taken to abandon it. The United Company had a monopoly on London theatre. Despite Betterton’s guidance, standards slipped further, fewer new plays were commissioned and a downward spiral began. Over a previous four-year period, sixty-eight new plays had been staged in London, the equivalent of twenty-seven a year. In the first four years of the United Company only nineteen new productions were put on, barely five a year. Actors’ conditions and pay suffered. The trouble was that Betterton did not have absolute control, and constant squabbling rendered clear financial and artistic objectives impossible. In truth, the United Company was far from united.

  As the theatre writhed within its self-made existential crisis, real life-or-death intrigue was taking shape in political circles. Among the nascent Whig alliances, extreme constitutional measures, not dissimilar to those that had led up to the deposition of Charles I, were being contemplated. In the salons of grand houses in Westminster and the home counties, plots to oust the government were considered, shelved, or discovered. Senior figures including Lord Shaftesbu
ry pondered ways to overthrow’ Charles II and the House of Stuart for ever, and to install the type of representative government envisaged by John Locke. In 1682 Shaftesbury became embroiled in discussions for a plan to depose the King and put his eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, on the throne.

  In London, feeling still ran high on both sides of the exclusion debate. The annual 5 November bonfire night demonstrations were held on 6 November, the fifth being a Sunday. Almost as soon as bonfires were lit, Tory crowds appeared, chanting pro-York slogans, and began to put out fires tended by anti-Yorkists. Rioting ensued. The homes of well-known Tories were attacked; Roger L’Estrange’s house was ransacked. The trained bands were called out but were unable to contain the crowds. Disturbances continued until the morning. Four days after the rioting, the government banned all firew’orks and bonfires during public celebrations.

  Charles had never forgotten the failure of the City to fund the second Anglo-Dutch War. He decided to clip the wings of the powerful Corporation, the City’s governing body. The Corporation dated from Anglo-Saxon times and had evolved over the centuries. Unlike the City of London, which had a royal warrant dating from the time of William the Conqueror, no royal charter seemed to have been issued for its governing body: the Corporation just was – it had always been. Charles took advantage of this lack of a defining legal foundation by issuing a writ questioning the Corporation’s powers. Quo Warranto (‘By What Warrant?’) directly attacked the Corporation’s authority, taking away its ability to award franchises or licences to trade. This was a huge blow’ to the City, aimed at reinforcing the monarchy’s power, prestige and coffers.

  Thanks to a partisan ruling by the court of the King’s Bench in 1683, Charles got his way.* By withdrawing the Corporation’s power, he was able to enforce his rule more closely over the City, appointing a Tory mayor and sheriffs. With major figures in the political opposition crushed, he now operated a government that was openly one-sided, favouring the Cavalier or Tory elements over all others. To the dismay of most, he dissolved the commission that had controlled the navy and reinstated his brother, the Duke of York, as head of the navy, a position he had had to resign years before when his Catholicism had become an issue.