by Don Jordan
In the same year that Charles clipped the wings of the City of London, a plot against the Crown was uncovered that appeared to be the most dangerous yet. It was revealed shortly after Charles’s return to London from Newmarket, where he went regularly for the racing. According to an informant, a plot had been hatched to assassinate the King and the Duke of York as they made their way back to the capital from Newmarket. The plan was to ambush the King and his entourage as they approached a narrow section of road at an old manor called Rye House near Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire.
The scale of the plot, and even whether or not it in fact existed, have been hotly debated. In any event, the attack never took place, but it was used as the pretext for removing many of Charles’s most outspoken political enemies. It was the perfect moment for Charles to take the initiative and crush the Whig opposition. Those rounded up included members of the main parliamentary opposition, including Lord Russell, a virulent promoter of Exclusion Bills in the House of Commons. Once the round-up began, the Earl of Shaftesbury, also a promoter of bills to exclude York, was charged with treason, but was found not guilt)’ by a sympathetic jury of Londoners.
Before he could be returned to the Towner and tried again before a less amenable jury, Shaftesbury fled abroad. His protégé John Locke, feeling his position was now untenable, also fled, taking with him his unfinished manuscript of Two Treatises of Government. Locke knew that if the government discovered a copy of his work, particularly the Second Treatise, in which he argued for democratically elected government in place of divinely appointed kings, he would be tried for treason.
On Thursday 12 July the trial of the accused conspirators began at the Old Bailey before Judge Jeffreys. The five accused of high treason were William, Lord Russell, John Rouse, Captain Thomas Wallcot, Captain William Blake and William Hone. The evidence against them was that ‘the Lord Howard, Colonel Shepherd a Vintner in Cornhill, &c. who Deposed, that he had been at divers Consuls in order to raise Rebellion and Leavy War, and a General Rising throughout the Kingdom, and that a Declaration had been drawn to that purpose, and a Survey taken of the King’s Guards at the Savoy and Muse, in order to Surprize them, &c.’1
The trial lasted three days. Except for William Blake, who was acquitted, the accused were found guilty and sentenced to execution. On 20 July they were hanged at Tyburn. Others were rounded up and imprisoned but not hanged. They included the Earl of Essex, who committed suicide after being imprisoned in the Tower. The Duke of Monmouth admitted his involvement in plotting against the King, then recanted and fled abroad. In all, twelve men were executed for their part in one plot or another against the King. The list included several aristocrats, including political theorist Algernon Sidney, who believed people had the right to choose the type of government they wanted. At his trial for treason, Sidney had the unique experience of hearing his own works – which, published posthumously, were to have a profound impact on the genesis of the American Constitution – read out in evidence against him.2 The clampdown on conspirators, whether actually engaged in plots or not, put a temporary cap on schemes against the Crown.
The winter at the start of 1684 was one of the coldest on record. As usual during severe winters at that period, building work stopped on all major projects, including at St Pauls Cathedral. Temperatures stayed below freezing point for weeks on end. The low temperatures brought the danger that rain could enter the stonework already erected, freeze and crack the masonry. Sackcloth and straw were used to protect any vulnerable walls, but frost still caused some damage. The affected stones would be replaced in the spring.
The Thames froze over and a fair was held on the ice. The Frost Fair was one of a number held during the seventeenth century, beginning in the winter of 1608-9. During the severe frost of 1658-9, the fair had become so popular that there were said to be more people on the river than in the streets. During the winter of 1662-5 the sport of skating was introduced from Holland. The King watched skaters on the Thames but did not join in.
The ice fair held during the winter of 1683-4 was the greatest of all, with the Thames frozen over for two months. On Candlemas Day {2 February) 1684, a whole ox was roasted on the river near Whitehall Palace. The King and Queen went to see it and Charles was reported to have tried some. Londoners took to the ice in their thousands. John Evelyn was among them:
Coaches plied from Westminster to the Temple and from several other stairs too and fro, as in the streets; sleds, sliding with skeetes [skates], a bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, cooks, tipling and other lewd places, so that it seemed to be a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water.3
Among the novelties, a printer named Croom sold, at sixpence each, souvenir cards on which would be printed the purchaser’s name and the date, together with the information that the card was printed on the Thames. The King bought one. Croom was said to have made £5 a day, ten times a labourers weekly wage.
The cold weather was a cause not only for merriment but of hardship, as Evelyn explained: ‘The fowls, fish and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens universally perishing. Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear that there were great contributions to keep the poor alive.’ Returning to his pet subject of London’s dreadful air quality, he continued: ‘London, by reason of the excessive coldness of the air hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of the sea coal . . . that one could hardly breathe.4
As London stood still in the icy air, its population was acutely aware that the political world was in ferment. The old problems of the relationship between Church, Crown and Parliament still haunted the capital. As Charles II moved into late middle age, the city moved into its own mature phase. The scars of the fire had mainly healed. Charles’s health deteriorated gradually while London grew in strength. London was now the pre-eminent city in Europe, if not the world, having outstripped Amsterdam and Paris in trade. Of course, France and Spain remained the leading continental powers. But London sat at the centre of an international trade encompassing the Far East, India, Africa, the West Indies and America. The increase in trade brought new hurdles to cross: finance was always in short supply, while the bullion market could not keep up with the needs of investment. But no nation could challenge England’s power on the oceans, with the old enemy the Spanish no longer a serious sea power and the Dutch cowed despite previous English military disasters.
Since the Great Fire, architecture had flourished, as had the building of grand houses in the countryside around the city for merchants, bankers and the nobility. Thanks to Inigo Jones’s lead, Thomas Webb’s expertise and the genius of Christopher Wren and of his pupil Nicholas Hawksmoor, the architecture of London changed. In the new streets and buildings, classicism was the order of the day. Britain would never look the same again. From now on, when any stately home was to be built or remodelled, columns, pilasters and porticos were the thing. Finally, London itself had been redesigned to resemble other imperial European cities. The city’s population had increased from 350,000 in 1660 to more than 500,000. This growing populace was accommodated in suburbs, the first dispersed urban developments of their kind in the world.
London’s accelerated growth was of continuing interest to Sir William Petty. Petty took London to mean the entirety of the metropolis, including the old city within the walls, the liberties outside the walls, all of Westminster, the new developments Barbon was responsible for building between Westminster and the old city, Southwark and the suburbs that spread outwards into parts of Middlesex and Surrey. In all, Petty counted 84,000 houses. Taking an average residency rate of eight people per house, he reckoned that London’s population by 1682 had grown to 672,000.
In An Essay Concerning the Multiplication of Mankind, Petty outlined how this figure had been arrived at using the same basic information employed by his friend Graunt – the parish bills of mortality – and estimating the difference between the number who were bom each year and the
number who died. Petty’s figures relied on a series of assumptions that did not bear close scrutiny. If he was correct, then London had almost doubled in size since Graunt’s estimation of 384,000 only twenty years before. His far from accurate basic figures and assumptions led him to calculate that the city would double in size every forty years. Fortunately, he was incorrect, for such a growth rate would have put a great burden upon skeletal public utilities such as water and sewerage.† However, Petty foresaw no difficulties with a large population; in fact, he considered size to be an advantage in several spheres of public and commercial life: ‘As to the administration of justice. If in this great city shall dwell the owners of all the lands, and other valuable things in England; if within it shall be all the traders, and all the courts, offices, records, juries, and witnesses; then it follows that justice may be done with speed and ease.’5
Petty believed that taxes were necessary for the good governance of society and that rich and poor should shoulder their burden proportionately. A great city such as London was of greater benefit to the national wealth owing to the size and industry of its populace. This meant it could generate more taxes, which could be collected more economically thanks to the confined urban setting:
As to the equality and easy levying of taxes. It is too certain that London hath at some time paid near half the excise of England, and that the people pay thrice as much for the hearths in London as those in the country, in proportion to the people of each, and that the charge of collecting these duties have been about a sixth part of the duty itself. Now in this great city the excise alone according to the present laws would not only be double to the whole kingdom, but also more equal And the duty of hearths of the said city would exceed the present proceed of the whole kingdom.
Others saw it differently. For his part, William Penn envisaged a land of equality and opportunity for all, with each inhabitant playing his or her equal part in a Utopian dreamscape, while the property developer Nicholas Barbon saw the city as a repository for individual free enterprise.6 Petty understood society differently from either – as an economic organism serving a central cause, the state itself When it came to foreign trade he saw a tremendous advantage in having a large concentration of labour.
‘Whether more would be gained by foreign commerce? The gain which England makes by lead, coals, the freight of shipping, &c., may be the same, for aught I see, in both cases. But the gain which is made by manufactures will be greater as the manufacture itself is greater and better.’
The reason for this was a profound insight on Petty’s part that would be most significant when large-scale manufacturing became the norm. What he recognised was the benefit of the division of labour and economies of scale:
For in so vast a city manufactures will beget one another, and each manufacture will be divided into as many parts as possible, whereby the work of each artisan wall be simple and easy. As, for example, in the making of a watch, if one man shall make the wheels, another the spring, another shall engrave the dial-plate, and another shall make the cases, then the watch will be better and cheaper than if the whole work be put upon any one man.
Such economies of scale already operated. It was one of the reasons why the Dutch were able to build ships more quickly than the English. In Dutch shipyards, a specialised workforce worked on specific parts of each ship only – the keel and main ribs of the hull, the planking and decking, the masts, general fitting out, and so on. This enabled ships to be built on a form of production line, whereas in England each ship was built individually with shipwrights doing many different jobs.
Petty himself had used the advantages brought by economies of scale to his work in Ireland as a surveyor for Cromwell. The task of surveying the entire island, noting the area and ownership of all arable land, was a massive one. Petty completed it in a very short time thanks to his employment of a workforce who needed very little skill, because each man was allotted a specific task which could be quickly taught and applied. Petty’s methodology was among those used in surveying London for rebuilding after the Great Fire.
In almost all important fields outside politics and the theatre, London was thriving. Although monopolistic trade was increasingly seen more as a hindrance than a help, overseas trade was buoyant. Barbon made an interesting observation regarding political writers from Livy to Machiavelli: none of them had mentioned trade as being one of the key ingredients in the affairs of state. Trade, he observed, exercised ‘great influence . . . in the support and welfare of States and Kingdoms’.7 According to Barbon’s thesis, free trade was one method by which rulers could ensure the stability of the state.‡
The sciences were forging a way out of blind superstition and magic towards a world of reason and empirical observation. Belief in witchcraft and astrology were on the wane, battered by the new philosophy’s rationalist demand for evidence. Medical science was making strides in exploring and understanding the body, and illness was seen less frequently as an opportunity to ply the patient with ineffectual or harmful potions. Tentative steps were even being made towards an understanding of the nature of the human mind.
In January 1684 the city played host to an historic scientific meeting when the three sparring partners Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley and Robert Hooke met at the Royal Society. By now they were uneasy in one another’s company, but science had forced them together. They discussed the thorny problem of showing mathematically why planets did not move in circles around the sun, as Copernicus had said, but elliptically. Early in the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler had come to the same conclusion but had been unable to produce a satisfactory proof. The laws pertaining to gravitation and the movement of planets had engaged the members of the Royal Society and their circle since the 1660s. Hooke now claimed he had reached a mathematical proof of planetary-movement and of what became known as the inverse-square law governing gravitational attraction. Since Hooke produced no physical evidence of this work his claims were greeted with scepticism by Newton. Halley, ä better mathematician than Hooke, had reached a partial derivation of the inverse-square law, but had failed to make a proof for its general application.
Newton was spurred by the conversation to go away and provide what the other two had failed to do. This was the impetus to complete work he had begun as early as 1665 and was to become his masterwork, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. He became obsessed by it, for his personal appearance changed; he became scruffy, often neglected to eat, and between May 1684 and April 1686 ceased to make entries in his record books on his longstanding work in alchemy.
When Newton produced his proofs and prepared to publish the Principia, Hooke petulantly demanded recognition of his prior work in the field. The dispute between the two men has caused a great deal of argument and speculation over the years. Perhaps the best comment on the issue is that of the eighteenth-century French astronomer Alexis Clairaut, who acknowledged the work of both men but pointed out that Hooke’s exaggerated claims served ‘to show what a distance there is between a truth that is glimpsed and a truth that is demonstrated’.8
In the same year that Newton began sustained work on the Principia, a critical voice was raised against the great machine that was increasingly enriching London – the slave trade. Two pamphlets were published questioning the methods and legitimacy of slavery. Their writer and publisher was Thomas Tryon, a wealthy London merchant and self-made man. Born in Gloucestershire in such poor conditions that he worked as a child labourer in the wool spinning industry, Tryon was then employed as a shepherd. In his spare time he learned to read and write. Having mastered these basic skills he went to London and managed to find an apprenticeship to a hatter. His master converted him to the beliefs of the Anabaptist sect, but Tryon read the works of the German mystic Lutheran Jacob Boehme and became an independent thinker, combining Christian and eastern mystical texts into a personal religious theory.
Tryon then set out on an individual path to a spiritual and moral life. He became a fervent
pamphleteer, espousing vegetarianism, kindness to animals and a questioning attitude to slavery. When Tryon had visited Barbados in the 1660s with the intention of setting up a hat business, what he saw repulsed him. He returned to London and set up home in the fashionable leafy village of Hackney. In 1684 he published two essays, ‘The Negro’s Complaint of their Hard Servitude and the Cruelties Practised Upon Them’ and Ä Discourse in Way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean or Negro Slave and a Christian, that was His Master in America’.9
Tryon did not go so far as to say all slavery should be banned. His argument was that the hardship inflicted on slaves was unchristian. Given the importance of the slave trade to London and the colonial economies, his broadsides had little or no impact. They were, however, a sign that it was not only Quakers who were wondering about the morality of what was being done in the name of progress and trade. About the same time several other pamphlets were published that argued about the issue of slavery. One powerful voice raised in support of anti-slavery measures was that of Josiah Child, the mercantile grandee who had made the East India Company virtually his private fiefdom.
From London, Child watched over every corner of the company’s empire with a ferocious attention to detail. He kept an iron grip on the activities of the overseas agents. Long gone were the freewheeling days of William Langthorne and Sir Streynsham Master. The current agent in Madras, William Gifford, was completely under Child’s thumb.