The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  COFFEE, CHOCOLATE AND TEA

  The first coffee house in England opens in Oxford in 1650. It is soon followed by one in London in 1652. By 1660 coffee is so popular that the government decides to tax it, but this does not stop the craze; the number of coffee houses continues to grow – despite a fear that drinking coffee makes you infertile. By May 1663 there are no fewer than eighty-two in the capital, and by 1700 there are perhaps a thousand.81 You’ll also find them in Bristol, York, Exeter, Bath, Norwich, Yarmouth, Chester, Preston, Warwick, Edinburgh, Glasgow and probably many other large towns. They are male-only establishments; apart from serving maids, no women are allowed in (which perhaps explains the origin of the theory that men who drink a lot of coffee do not have children). Apart from that, they are non-exclusive, as long as you pay. In London, Lloyd’s and Garraway’s primarily cater for serious businessmen. St James’s Coffee House and the Cocoa Tree are for politicians – if you are a Whig, make sure you go to the latter and not the former, which is for Tories. Most coffee houses do not permit discussion of religious matters but those that do are to be found near St Paul’s. If you are keen on literature, then Will’s Coffee House in Covent Garden is the one for you, as that is where John Dryden holds court, informing everyone what he thinks of the latest book or play.82

  Generally speaking, coffee houses consist of just the one room with a few tables and chairs for the drinkers. Some premises are larger. Enter the Great Lower Coffee Room run by John Kimber in Bristol and you’ll see three tables with chairs, benches and stools, a clock, coffee dishes and glasses on the counter and a fireplace. There are bare boards on the floor, and a smell of coffee and stale tobacco in the air. A second coffee room upstairs is similarly equipped, but this one also has such luxuries as a couch, a mirror and window curtains.83 As with taverns, some proprietors use historical relics to attract customers. A few of these are hilarious: one London coffee house purports to have ‘Pontius Pilate’s wife’s chambermaid’s sister’s hat’.84 Pay 1d as an entry fee and you can stay as long as you want to, drinking dishes of hot black coffee from the great urns in which it is made, and smoking clay pipes of black tobacco, which are also available.85 There you might read the selection of weekly newspapers and newsletters, or debate important matters in your club – a ‘club’ at this time being an informal sharing of costs equally amongst a regular group of friends.

  If you want to buy coffee to drink in your own home, it costs about 3s per pound until 1689, when excise duties increase; thereafter it steadily rises to 6s per pound in the 1690s. You’ll need to buy a coffee pot and porcelain cups: the pot will cost you just 6d, but the cups are 1s 6d each, as they are imported from China.86 However, coffee remains predominantly a social drink, enjoyed in public establishments. There is something odd about someone in the seventeenth century who wants to drink coffee by himself. Wine, yes, but not coffee. And wherever you drink it, it still incurs the wrath of some. According to the author of A Satyr against Coffee, the drink is made with ‘the scent of old crusts and shreds of leather burnt and beaten to powder. It [is] the essence of old shoes … horse-pond liquor, witches tipple out of dead men’s skulls … a foreign fart.’87

  In the late 1650s, coffee houses near the Royal Exchange start to offer Chinese tea for sale. It is immediately popular, despite the enormous expense: the first dealers charge up to £10 per pound. In 1660 Thomas Garway, a coffee-house owner who wishes to expand his tea business, reduces his prices to as little as 16s per pound and advertises widely. That does the trick. Pepys takes his first sip on 25 September 1660.88 By the end of the year, tea has joined coffee in being taxed. Prices stabilise at about £3 per pound for the highest quality and less than £1 for the lowest, after the East India Company starts to import it in 1664.89 Thus if your visit to Restoration Britain leaves you gasping, a restorative cuppa is not out of the question – although you won’t find any familiar varieties. There are three main types, all from China (Indian tea won’t reach Britain until the nineteenth century). Boehea is a black leaf tea that leaves the boiling water looking brownish-red. Singlo is a leaf of a bluish-green colour that is strong enough to stand being reused three or four times. The third sort, Bing or Imperial, is a green tea, and the most costly of the three. All of them are drunk very weak by our standards and without milk, although many people add sugar and egg yolks.

  Tea is just as much a social drink as coffee but, in marked contrast, it is usually consumed by groups of people in private homes. It follows that you need the appropriate apparatus for serving such a luxury to other people of high status: tea dishes, teapot and sugar bowl, and a silver salver on which to place everything. The tea dishes and teapot should, of course, be genuine Chinese porcelain items, which the East India Company will be only too happy to supply – at a price of 4s per tea dish and 10s for the teapot. The alternative is an English silver teapot; London silversmiths start to make these from 1670. With such status attached to it, wealthy households want to have their own tea sets, and thus they domesticate the drink. Moreover, in the privacy of their own homes, ladies can partake in the ceremony of serving tea, in defiance of being excluded from male-only coffee shops. The bills at Woburn Abbey show that the earl of Bedford and his countess start to drink tea at home from 1685 and consume much more of it than they do coffee, investing in several tea sets and even tea tables.90

  The third new hot drink, chocolate, is even more outlandish and mysterious, being a product of the cocoa bean, to be found in the forests of Latin America. The Spanish and Portuguese have occasionally imported chocolate cakes to their own countries in past decades but their recipes have long been a closely guarded secret. This changes in 1655 when the English capture the island of Jamaica, where the Spanish have planted a number of cacao trees. Two years later a London entrepreneur starts advertising ‘an excellent West India drink called chocolate’. It catches on immediately and, like coffee and tea, is subject to taxation from 1660. Part of the allure is that it makes for an excellent breakfast drink, not least because it is believed that it settles the stomach: Pepys occasionally has chocolate for his morning draught, on one occasion choosing it specifically because he has been drinking heavily the night before.91 To make a chocolate cake, take 1lb of cocoa powder and add 6oz of white sugar, ½oz of cinnamon, one grated nutmeg and a vanilla pod. Blend these ingredients together with a roller over a gentle heat and press it into moulds while warm. To turn this into the drink, you will crumble some of the cake into red wine boiled with egg yolks and sweetened with sugar. Alternatives are made with milk, water and brandy, or purely with choice port or sherry.92 The last option makes for quite some breakfast.

  Smoking

  The final consumable commodity that we come to is tobacco. As you are probably aware, the Elizabethans introduced it to these shores in the 1560s and it has been popular ever since, despite King James I publishing a diatribe against it, in which he declared it to be ‘a custom loathsome to the eye … and hateful to the nose’. Every foreign visitor to England comments on how much the common people smoke. In the words of Lorenzo Magalotti:

  It is a common custom with the lower order of people, however, rather than with the nobility, who are less given to it, after dinner or at public houses, when they are transacting business of any kind, to take tobacco and smoke, so there does not pass a day in which the artisans do not indulge themselves in going to the public houses, which are exceedingly numerous, neglecting their work, however urgent it may be.93

  Willem Schellinks notes that one morning in Cornwall ‘a lot of country people were at the market – everyone, men and women, young and old, puffing tobacco, which is here so common that the young children get it in the morning instead of breakfast, and almost prefer it to bread’.94 Monsieur Misson and Celia Fiennes also remark on the very heavy consumption of tobacco by women and children in the western counties. Thomas Baskerville, riding through the Gloucestershire town of Winchcombe at 4 a.m. one morning, sees all the old women of the town seated in their doo
rways and smoking their pipes, doing their knitting.95

  You have got to wonder, in an age of so much hardship, why people smoke so much – especially the poor. One reason is that the government encourages smoking as it increases the revenue raised by taxation on tobacco imported from Virginia. Monsieur Misson volunteers another: smoking makes people philosophical. He suggests that no one smokes so well as an English clergyman, and that as English theology is so profound, then tobacco must encourage profound thinking.96 But the principal reason is, no doubt, sheer enjoyment – and it needs to be said that it is a pleasure unconfined by health warnings. In fact, most people believe that smoking is good for your health. It is widely seen as a prophylactic against the plague – hence boys at Eton College are liable to be beaten for not smoking. It is believed to give the smoker a clear voice, a sweet breath, clear sight, good hearing and a better sense of smell, and to be a cure for melancholy.97 With all these things going for it, you can see why people give it to their children and smoke it themselves in large quantities. Boys in some parts of Devon and Cornwall take a pipe to school with them and smoke it at designated hours in the company of their tutors, learning how to hold the pipe and draw in all that nourishing smoke.98

  So, how much is smoking ‘in large quantities’? The answer is a heck of a lot. The earl of Bedford personally consumes about 30lbs of tobacco per year; this amounts to well over an ounce and a quarter per day. Yet no one remarks on him being a heavy smoker. Moreover, none of that tobacco is smoked with any filters – why would you, when it is thought to be good for your health? Rather, the smoke is inhaled through disposable clay pipes (cigarettes are a nineteenth-century invention). These pipes can be used three or four times at most, but they are not expensive: ordinary ones are nine for a penny. Tobacco costs 3s 4d per pound for Virginia, 10s per pound for Spanish.99

  In case you are wondering, Lord Bedford lives to the age of eighty-seven.

  10

  Health and Hygiene

  ‘What should you do when you get ill?’ is one of the most important questions that confronts and defines a culture – and, indeed, civilisation in general. It does not matter whether the answer is based on medical observation, reason, superstition, religion or a combination of all of these things; what is important is that there is an answer of some sort and that it is convincing. For everyone lives with the knowledge that, at any moment in time, something could happen that will bring them to the point of suffering and death. No one wants to be told that there is no hope of alleviating their pain. No one wants to hear that their child’s sickness is incurable. Even if you are plainly going to die and the physicians’ attempts to help you have failed, you still need professional advice – even if it is just to know how long you have got to live, so that you can write a will and make your peace with God. For this reason, when we look at a society and take note solely of the healthy people, as if only healthiness is normal, we are missing a major part of what is going on. Indeed, when you consider the sense of shame associated with some infections, and the fear of death and the economics of medicine, as well as the impact of the sicknesses themselves, you can see that society would not function the way it does without illness.

  As you travel through Restoration Britain you are going to be left in no doubt that this applies to the rich every bit as much as the poor. In marked contrast to the last chapter, in which we compared the food and drink of the wealthy with the fare of their less fortunate contemporaries, illness strikes everyone equally, without regard for high status. When Charles II rides in procession through London on his birthday in 1660 he has two brothers, James, duke of York, and Henry, duke of Gloucester. A few months later, on 13 September, Henry dies of smallpox. Three months after that, the king’s sister, Mary Henrietta, dies of the same disease. Heartbreakingly, John Evelyn loses two of his daughters to smallpox within six months in 1685. In 1694 it claims the life of Queen Mary, wife of William III. The rich might be able to afford better food and better-qualified physicians but their life expectancy is no greater than that of ordinary people. In this period, a life of privilege also hangs by a thread.

  Nowhere is this more in evidence than with regard to the loss of children. Just look at the royal family. The average lifespan of Charles I’s nine children is just twenty-four; only Charles II and James II make it past thirty. Just two of James II’s eight children by his first wife live to adulthood, and only one of his ten by his second wife (not counting two miscarriages). Princess Anne is arguably the most unfortunate member of the whole family: apart from her seven miscarriages, five of her ten children are stillborn. Two die within hours of being born, two more die of smallpox at the ages of two and one, and the last dies at the age of eleven. Despite seventeen pregnancies, she dies childless. Adding this up, it appears that of the thirty-five legitimate royal pregnancies in the period 1660–1700, only three children live to see adulthood.

  Medical Thinking

  In order to find your way around the medical landscape, you need to know how contemporaries understand illness. They have no idea about bacteria or viruses; the microscopes of the day are not powerful enough to see anything so small. But this does not mean they don’t know – or think they know – what causes a disease. For more than a millennium there has been a basic understanding that the health of the body depends on a balance of four humours – blood, choler, yellow bile and black bile – just as the Earth is composed of four Aristotelian ‘elements’ (earth, air, fire and water). Too much choler makes you choleric, too much blood makes you sanguine, and so forth; combinations of these imbalances result in disease. The humours can be upset by any number of things. Eating rotten meat or breathing noxious vapours arising from stagnant water may be the cause, or an unfortunate alignment of the planets. Once the humours are out of kilter and the sickness has taken hold, then it can spread from you to other people and disrupt the balance of their humours too, and so on. Moreover, as the humours fluctuate in relation to one another, people think that one disease can morph into another, so food poisoning can lead to a fever, which can turn into measles.1

  Given the volume of experimental work being undertaken by the Royal Society and its Fellows, you won’t be surprised to hear that things are changing. Other philosophies are emerging: for instance, that the world is not made up of four elements but of many tiny particles or atoms. William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, published in 1628, has dispelled the ancient belief that there are two types of blood: venous, made in the liver, and arterial, made in the heart, both of which ebb and flow about the body. The awareness that classical writers were mistaken on this subject also permits physicians to be bold and question other aspects of ancient teaching. Practitioners working in the wake of Paracelsus propose ‘iatrochemical’ explanations of the health of the body – iatro being Greek for ‘medical’ – concentrating on salt-, sulphur- and mercury-based medicines to cure illnesses. ‘Corpuscular’ natural philosophers, such as Thomas Willis and Robert Boyle, who subscribe to the theories of Jan Baptista van Helmont, stress the importance of alkalis and acids on physiological processes. Those who favour ‘iatrophysical’ theories use the laws of physics to describe the process of breathing and similar bodily functions and, by implication, to explain why the body’s organs fail.

  The other strand of medical thinking that might confuse you is the degree to which it involves religion. We have already seen in chapter 4 how people judge each other according to their faith, so that people do not trust physicians of a different creed. The reason underlying this is that the physician has to act as a conduit of God’s healing power and, if he displeases God, then the cure will not work, no matter how skilled he is. This is why, when physicians apply for licences to practise from a bishop, they are examined not only on their medical knowledge but also on their personal life. However, that is just the start of the crossover between religion and medicine. Prayer is essential to a full cure, in many people’s eyes; medicine by itself is not enough. Then the
re is the problem of why a benign God makes us unwell. One answer to this conundrum is that sickness serves a purpose. Most good Christians still see diseases as being sent by God to give lesser sinners a chance to redeem themselves on Earth, partly or wholly, through physical suffering, so that they might still go to Heaven. This is why dying ‘a good death’ is so important: you must be grateful for your chance to feel pain. Even children suffering excruciating illnesses are expected to be stoic. On the other hand, many people believe that ailments are sent by God as punishments. Plague especially falls into this category. The fact that rich and poor alike can be wiped out gives it an egalitarian edge that people associate with divine judgement. As you can see, the all-encompassing religious outlook of the time means that people are in continuous dialogue with their faith about why they fall ill, why they are made to suffer and what they might do to relieve themselves of that suffering.

  Another spiritual angle on seventeenth-century illness is the belief that God did not just make all the diseases at the time of Creation, but created the cures too: the antidotes are to be found somewhere in the world, if you just look hard enough. All the medicinal herbs seem to confirm this. The fact that so many plants can ease pain also points to a merciful Creator: among these you will come across cloves for alleviating toothache, colchicum (a crocus) for easing gout, and guaiacum (a resin) for treating syphilis and many other ailments. Jesuit’s bark, or cinchona, in particular seems to be the clinching proof of this philosophy. The bark contains quinine and is a genuine natural remedy for the symptoms of malaria. The English physician Robert Talbor becomes internationally famous in the 1670s for his apparently miraculous cures, which employ Jesuit’s bark. This faith in the medical properties of Creation in turn encourages people to explore more of the world and discover more medicinal plants, giving further vitality to the ‘scientific crusade’ that we discussed in chapter 4.