The King's City

by Don Jordan

  Under the EIC, Madras had expanded rapidly. By 1684 its population was around 500,000. In ä city of such a size, control over slaving was bound to be difficult. While Langthorne had, it seems, privately encouraged slavery, Master had been tasked with curtailing it, though without success. On 10 July 1684, at the behest of Child, Gifford introduced a law backed by a new Court of Admiralty to try those suspected of slavery This stricter regime was not to last – within a year, Madras was upgraded by the EÏC to a so-called presidency and its first president, the Boston-born merchant Elihu Yale, was a strong proponent of slaving.§ He insisted that every ship bound for England should carry at least ten slaves.

  Like most of his predecessors, Yale became wealthy through private trading, before he too was removed because of his corruption. Perhaps alluding to his corrupt private dealings and participation in the slave trade, his tombstone carries a poem containing the following lines:

  Much good, some ill he did; so hope all’s even

  And that his soul thro’ mercy’s gone to heaven10

  It would not be until 1693 that the first printed pamphlet would appear that explicitly argued against keeping slaves. It was published anonymously in New York and directed at the slave-owning Quaker society of Pennsylvania.11 The monopoly enjoyed by the Royal African Company had always been unpopular in Bristol, from where most of the transatlantic trade was carried out. After prolonged lobbying, the city’s merchants and ship owners had it lifted – even though, long before then, as we have seen, the monopoly was increasingly ignored. Though London would lose much of its slave trade as the century closed, its financial clout continued to grow along with the power and wealth of the East India Company, which ultimately grew to rule India.

  *

  While London thrived, the King did not. Old illnesses continued to afflict him. He may have had gout, he may have been feeling the symptoms of pulmonary disease, it may have been the syphilis he had contracted a decade before – any one of these diagnoses is possible. One thing is certain: Charles had tired of London. He had faced down Parliament, seen the Whigs destroyed as a force, reasserted his legitimacy and that of his heir, the Duke of York, and taken power from the City, withdrawing the Corporation’s warrant and imposing his royal will on the appointment of all office bearers from the mayor to the aider-men. There had been plots on his life, at least one of which had involved his own eldest son, on whom he doted. Now — although these difficulties had been caused not by London but in many cases by the Crowns inability to rule in accordance with the will of the people – he felt he should move away from the scene of his troubles.

  In AD 26 the Roman emperor Tiberius had moved from Rome to the island of Capri, tired of political wrangling and in fear of assassination. On Capri he built the fortified Villa Jovis, a pleasure palace Suetonius tells us was a scene of debauchery.12 Now Charles planned to leave London and rule from Winchester, the ancient seat of the King’s of Wessex. He commissioned Christopher Wren to build a great palace in the baroque style to rival Versailles, where he would rule a frenchified court, surrounded by his Catholic Queen, his French mistress and his Catholic brother, well away from the troublesome Protestants of the House of Commons and the City of London. The palace was to be sited on a hill beside the ancient castle, designed around a series of courtyards, with formal gardens descending to the River Itchen. Charles informed Wren that the building must be completed in great haste.

  Wren was able to keep up with the building works at Winchester as well as his other projects in London only thanks to a young clerk in his office named Nicholas Hawksmoor. Wren promoted Hawksmoor to deputy surveyor at Winchester, giving him responsibility to oversee the provision of finished drawings to be used by the builders. The new palace was being erected at a ferocious rate.

  In the meantime, Charles was forced to continue to reside in the haphazard maze of Whitehall Palace, a place he had come to hate as much as London itself.

  * Six years later, in 1689, following the Glorious Revolution, the order was rescinded, reinstating the Corporation.

  † Although wrong, Petty was, in ways, ahead of his time. With better hygiene and health care, by the 1800s Britain’s population almost doubled every fifty years.

  ‡ What seemed a solid proposition in the seventeenth century has proved to be less so in recent times.

  § The famous American university was named after him.

  CHAPTER 27

  DEATH AND LEGACY

  On 6 February 1685, Charles Stuart, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, died at the age of fifty-four, not in his new palace at Winchester, but at his hated Whitehall. He had collapsed five days before, early in the morning of 1 February, after spending an evening in the company of his maîtresse-en-titre, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and two of his former lovers, Barbara, Countess Castlemaine, and Hortense Mancini. The soiree had been held in the Duchess’s grand apartment in Whitehall Palace. Silver vases and urns graced inlaid French furniture, grand tapestries – a present from Louis XIV of France, presenting Arcadian dreamscapes in which sat French regal palaces – covered the walls. Those gathered in the grand room could have imagined they inhabited a glowing, golden work! beside the River Seine rather than an ageing palace beside which the oily Thames washed London’s sewage in and out with the tide. London’s filthy streets and grimy intrigues seemed far away. According to those present, the King had never been in better spirits.

  Over the days that followed, Charles floated in and out of consciousness before abandoning the faith of his father and his people and accepting the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church. The cause of his death is unknown, though the symptoms indicate he suffered a series of strokes. His demise left an unresolved dilemma over the fate of the throne and the Church. There were no legitimate children to inherit, so the crown went to his openly Catholic brother James. Charles had resisted calls to divorce and remarry or to declare his Protestant first son, James, Duke of Monmouth, legitimate. One can only conjecture as to his desires for the realm, for he left no instructions. However, he refused the ministrations of an Anglican priest, opting instead for the last rites of the Catholic Church. Whether he wished the country’ to convert to the Catholic faith is open to debate, as is the question of how this was to be achieved under James in the face of fierce opposition.

  As self-appointed master of the revels, Charles had presided over a profound change in behaviour among Londoners, albeit only for a few at first. During his reign, attitudes regarding sexual freedom and freedom of individual expression began to change. Between the intellectuals of London’s literary and theatrical world and the new hedonists such as Rochester and Behn, the idea of the individual began to shine more brightly than that of society in general. From these small beginnings in the West End of London, life would never be the same again, A few years after Thomas Hobbes wrote that mankind must be protected from itself by tyranny, with all the crushing conformity that implied, the age of the individual was at hand. John Locke, with his more generous view of mankind, saw individuals as capable of engaging in collectively choosing their ruler or rulers.

  Politically, Charles ruled at the tipping point between two worlds. Culturally and religiously he was a liberal, while politically he was an authoritarian. Several London residents wrote profoundly important works thanks to the political and social schisms that developed during his rule. John Milton, a native Londoner resident in the city almost all his life, produced Paradise Lost, one of the finest laments for lost freedom ever written, as a direct result of Charles coming to the throne. Though it never mentions the King by name, Paradise Lost was the greatest correction or indictment of his reign. Milton saw Charles, and all members of the House of Stuart, as a danger to society.

  Another London resident, John Dryden, wrote the satirical poem Absalom and Achitophel in praise of Charles as a king and as a man. These works by Milton and Dryden may be taken as the opposite poles of Londoners’ feelings about their ruler.

  Charles had begun
his era with a series of actions that boded well for London and Londoners. He proclaimed religious tolerance, meaning that Presbyterians and nonconformists, of whom there were many, would be able to worship as they wished. In fact, the introduction of the revised Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which was out of Charles’s hands, drove a wedge between many Anglican sects, and introduced a schism which continues to this day. However, Charles failed to control the series of Acts of Parliament excluding those who did not participate in the Anglican Eucharist from holding public office. This had a major effect on the make-up of many public bodies in London, throwing several Londoners out of office. The initially cordial relations between city and monarch gradually turned to enmity, fuelled by the question of the royal succession and the Popish Plot. Finally, Charles took an autocratic hold of London, dissolving its ancient Corporation and placing his own candidates in the offices of Lord Mayor and sheriffs. To some extent, Charles was as much a victim of circumstance as the city, though his wish to rule like a French king was a decisive factor in the breakdown of his relations with his capital.

  In other areas, Charless relations with London were more beneficial and fruitful. When a group of high-minded individuals came to him asking for his imprimatur for a Royal Society, he gladly gave it. Not only that, but Charles actively encouraged experimentation to produce navigational aids, including the elusive quest for a clock to fix longitude at sea. He also had an observatory built on land he donated to encourage the mapping of the skies. Thanks to Charles II, zero degrees longitude is measured at Greenwich, forming the basis of mean solar time at noon (though Greenwich Mean Time has recently been superseded by Coordinated Universal Time). Though he was a keen advocate of the new empirical sciences, Charless support for any cause rarely ran to financial backing — he was a spendthrift and never had sufficient funds to support his family, never mind any institutions. There was also the fact that Parliament underestimated the funds necessary to fund the monarchy.

  One enterprise where Charles did provide finance was the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, later renamed the Royal African Company. The King, his brother James and their cousin Rupert were key instigators of this joint stock company, set up for the purpose of sending traders to West Africa and returning first with gold and then with slaves. The importance of Charles and his family in making London the pre-eminent slaving city in northern Europe cannot be overestimated. During Charles’s reign, the royal family and many of the most important figures in the City benefited hugely from the wealth brought into London by the slave trade. In the final five years of Charless life, the numbers of slaves conveyed by London-based ships out of Africa rose to 37,854, double that in the previous period. If we estimate that each slaving ship carried on average a little fewer than 200 slaves, we can work out that almost every week a ship left London for the doleful triangular voyage to Africa, across the Atlantic and home again.

  Paradoxically, Charles’s support for such ventures also held them back. By his insistence on granting royal warrants to monopolistic companies, Charles prevented other enterprising merchants from joining in the trade. It was only with the lifting of these monopolies on the accession of William III that the slave trade grew to the enormous levels that enriched investors and practitioners throughout Britain, providing the engine for the ascendancy of the British Empire.

  On a less contentious note, Charles enriched London in other ways. By restoring its theatre he brought fun and entertainment back to those who could afford it. In turn, the theatre became a mirror for his licentious and amoral court, with the characters of the Restoration fop or wit becoming English archetypes. By licensing women to appear on the public stage, Charles brought to the stage both sexuality and new possibilities of portraying human emotion. By giving theatre warrant holders free rein, he enabled the London stage to catch up with continental production practices and perhaps surpass them. For those who could not afford to attend the theatre, the réintroduction of public celebrations brought gaiety back to London: May Day celebrations, fairs, Lord Mayor’s Day, Christmas celebrations and the rest all contributed to restoring sparkle to Londoners’ often difficult, unhealthy and short lives.

  Charles’s role in promoting new architecture deserves a special mention. Without a king who, like his father before him, appreciated the attractions of neoclassicism, London might have looked very different today. Charles left a string of unfinished royal buildings behind him, but in a stroke of inspired patronage, he promoted the work of the young Christopher Wren, directing him away from other possible careers towards architecture. For the shape and look of much of London today, we must thank Charles and Wren, along with Wren’s friend and collaborator Robert Hooke and a handful of other architects and planners.

  In a time of patronage, Charles could be as astute or as blind as the next man. Of several key areas where he chose wisely, his support of Samuel Pepys’s reorganisation of the Royal Navy must stand as his most important legacy for the future of Britain. Thanks to London’s greatest diarist, the navy was restructured into an efficient, properly trained fighting organisation. Thanks to Charles’s backing, the structure was put in place of the force that went on to overcome Napoleon’s navy. Britain thereby became master of the seas, greatly boosting London, the country’s great trading hub and, until the industrial revolution, the engine of the nation’s wealth and turmoil. Modern Britain was created in London.

  Given an impossible hand, Charles occasionally played it well, but as he became more embattled he reverted to autocratic ways that did him little favour. Throughout it all, London, the financial, economic and political heart of the nation, survived fire and plague to become the largest city in Europe. Restoration London provided the building blocks for modern life. By setting the scene for so much of modern political, sexual, scientific and economic thought and freedoms, making ready for the Age of Enlightenment, Charles II’s London, it could be argued, has made us all.

  EPILOGUE

  So what of the characters who made London great during Charles’s reign? How did they fare after His death and what legacy did they, their works and ideas leave?

  Christopher Wren lived to the age of ninety-one, more than long enough to see his great cathedral finished in 1710. His joyous baroque style would not thrive, losing out to a more restrained, perhaps more English, love of Palladianism, which went on to become the style of Empire. Nevertheless, Wren was one of the first in the modern age to see architecture as the means to represent national character. For Wren, architecture was not simply style, it was the embodiment of an ideal of the nation at its best.

  Wren epitomised a new age in architecture. The design of buildings, once the task of the artisanal architect/mason, became that of the educated gentleman. The major transitional figures in the process were Inigo Jones, who brought neoclassicism to England, and Wren himself, who made architecture into poetry, though towards the end of his life Wren regretted expending his talents on architecture, saying he wished he been a physician.1

  In medieval times, English architecture had been predominantly under the control of the Church. As a residt of the religious and political upheavals of the seventeenth century, old beliefs came under question. In the face of a less certain faith, classicism seemed to lead the way back to some form of verity, to ancient roots of civic and spiritual knowledge that could be tapped to restore a sense of balance. With this realisation, the educated classes took over architectural practice from the master builders, so that architecture became one of the attributes an educated man might have at his disposal. The new breed of architect did not necessarily have to earn a living from it (though Wren did), but needed to demonstrate an understanding of its form and rules. This change led to the rise of practitioners like James Gibbs, the Earl of Burlington and John Vanbrugh. The face of England, and of Britain, would be changed for ever.

  Thanks to Wren, Hawksmoor and those they enthused, new ideas in architecture bloomed in London. Classicism ensured that the archite
ct’s patron was seen as a person not only of substance but also of taste. The building of a new Palladian house could transform any country landowner or city merchant from rustic gent or city slicker into the epitome of enlightened and cutting-edge culture. Thus was born the rash of neoclassicism across the nation that culminated in the Barratt home in Dulwich, south London, bought by Margaret and Denis Thatcher – a red-brick suburban villa with an ersatz classical porch stuck on the front. How John Webb, the boy from Smithfield, would have wept.

  The London street changed utterly during the time of Charles II. Before the Great Fire, a typical London streetscape consisted of rows of medieval houses of different heights, each with its own patterns of wooden beams interposed with variously shaped areas of plaster. After the fire, the typical new street was a vista of conformitv, with rows of identical terraced houses, each one the same width – usually fifteen feet – and of identical detailing and height. This uniformity was partly due to the Rebuilding Act of 1667 and to the massive programme of reconstruction carried out by the developer Nicholas Barbon to the west of the old city. The need to rehouse the displaced, together with the need to house a growing population, led to the development of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century streets we know today. The Georgian and Victorian townscape had arrived.

  To his great credit, Charles commissioned religious music from the precociously talented Henry Purcell. Perhaps fittingly, Purcell’s groundbreaking works came not from commissions for sacred music but from the profane world of Greek myth. Dido and Aeneas, written around 1680, but not performed until 1688 or 1689 – and then only at a girls’ hoarding school in Chelsea – was the first English opera to feature continuous music. Until then, and despite Sir William Davenant’s best efforts, all English opera had consisted of spoken dialogue interspersed with lyrics set to music. Dido was an opera as we would understand the term today and is still much performed. It is no exaggeration to say it is one of the glories of English music.