We are to imagine, then, Sir Thomas Gresham conversing with his great guest upon these grave matters, and she in time turning to her companion upon her left. La Motte Fénélon was an old friend of hers, and it is clear that they did some pretty sparring over the vexed question whether she should or should not marry the Due D’Anjou. It seems that Elizabeth was in great good humour that day. She had not visited the City for two years, and was received with so loving a welcome that probably nothing like to it was afterwards seen until the Jubilee processions of Queen Victoria. But “Gloriana” was not the woman to lose her head, and to hold out hopes that she would marry a foreign prince was one of her favourite tricks with foreign ambassadors. She told Monsieur La Motte Fénélon that she was well aware that the Due D’Anjou had not the best of reputations, but that she would, if she married him, do her best to be a loving wife and the mother of a fine boy. She broke off to ask him how he thought she was looking — we may be very sure she did not put this question to the great Sir Thomas Gresham. La Motto Fénélon replied that she was divinely beautiful. He could really under the circumstances say no less. He does not go quite so far in his account of this dinner party to his own Government, but he admits that since she was rising forty, as the phrase goes, she was really surprising.
We must take it that the dinner was a success, for it was nearly seven o’clock in the evening — a late hour for those days — when, accompanied by a great escort of torch bearers, she went on to the Exchange. The building was constructed almost entirely of foreign material. The alabaster came from the Low Countries; the stone from Flanders; even the little blocks of hone stones which still to-day pave the centre of the quadrangle came from Turkey. The Master who superintended the work was Flemish — one Henrik — and almost to a man the builders were from overseas.
It is curious that an Englishman, who was devoting his energies to the release of British commerce from the grasp of the foreigner, should have gone abroad for the material and the workmen for what was to be the monument of English commercial independence. Is it possible that Sir Thomas Gresham had just that touch of snobbery in small matters — so common a trait of the English character, which professes admiration for everything foreign so long as English interests are not seriously attacked? — the same sort of snobbery which a few years ago filled a suburban drawing room with cheap books and photographs of the Rhine and Switzerland, and found no place for any views of England. However that may be, the first Royal Exchange had little that was English in its composition, even that gallery in which Queen Elizabeth made her clear speech, declaring that henceforth the building was to be the Royal Exchange, must have an outlandish name. It was called the “Pawn,” and like the rest of the Exchange, was lit up — brilliantly for those days — in the Italian style with coloured glass cups full of burning grease, and great wax torches burning in sconces on the walls. The Pawn was decorated with rich hangings and carpets from the East, and the shops glittered with glass and jewellery, silver and gold.
From the ceremony the Queen returned to Somerset House through the lighted streets by way of Cheapside and Temple Bar — all London was abroad, jostling in the narrow ways, a torrent of splendid colour, ringing cheers, and the orange splashes of torch flames. The Queen could not but be moved. “It does my heart good,” she cried, “to see my subjects so loyal and myself so well beloved.” The tears came into her eyes, and she whispered to La Motte Fénelon, who rode at her side, “My people have only one regret — they know me to be mortal and that I have no child to reign over them after my death.” La Motte Fénelon was touched, as no doubt he was meant to be. Her sincerity was apparent to him, and he had greater hopes than ever that the Duc D’Anjou would sit by her side on the Throne of England. Very likely she was sincere, but she was too subtle a woman and too wary a Queen not to make use of her sincerity to fortify that throne of hers which meant so much to the prosperity of her people.
Thus ended a great day in the history of London, and seven years later Sir Thomas Gresham had his way. The Queen, encouraged by Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burleigh, and Sir Thomas Gresham, declared all the privileges of the Stillyard merchants of whatever nature, null and void for ever. The next year she struck a harder blow. She forbade them to export wool, thus depriving them of the most profitable branch of their business. The Stillyard merchants were unwise enough to appeal to the Diet of the Hanseatic League at Bruges. The Diet responded to the appeal. It threatened England that, unless the Stillyard was restored to its former privileges and rights, the English Company of Merchant Adventurers would be expelled from every town in Germany in which it had established a branch. The Diet, however, did not know the Lady with whom it had to deal. The answer came prompt and sharp in a proclamation which not only closed the Stillyard itself peremptorily, but bade every German merchant leave the Kingdom before the last day of February, 1597. This proclamation was carried out, the German merchants left, the Stillyard was handed over as a store house to the Admiralty, and thus disappeared an institution as pernicious to the trade of England as the Kingdom has ever known.
But these Germans had built their house well and the great walls of the Yard were still standing in 1863, when the South Eastern Railway built Cannon Street Station.
As for the Royal Exchange itself, it became at once the meeting place of merchants and the promenade of men of fashion. In the day-time grave people of business paced those Turkish hone stones, adjusted their disputes and engaged in transactions with outlandish people from all the then known countries in the world. In the evening the butterflies of fashion would flit from Paul’s Walk to the gaily lighted shops of the Pawn, where all they could want from lace, glass, strange curios, to that queer new useful invention — the common pin — was laid out to attract them. “What artificial thing,” says an old writer, “was there that could entertain the senses or the phantasies of man that was not there to be had? Such was the delight that many gallants took in that magazine of all curious varieties that they could almost have dwelt there, going from shop to shop like bees from flower to flower if they had but had the fountain of money that could not have been drawn dry.” The evening, however, was not apparently ended in the Pawn. There was a certain routine in the amusements of the people of fashion as there is to-day. From the Pawn the stream of gay people flowed to Bucklersbury, where were the Indian shops with their scents and perfumes, and the Italian Confectioners, where they took their supper before going home to bed. Thus for ninety years the first Royal Exchange played its important part in the life of London. In 1666 the Great Fire swept it away.
CHAPTER II.
THE GREAT FIRE AND THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.
POPULAR FAITH FOR a long time swayed between two ultimate reasons for the Great Fire. It was either a visitation from God upon London for its vices and its lack of religion, or it was a dispensation of Providence to clear the City altogether from the germs of the Plague. But, as a fact, mediæval London was neither more wicked nor more unhealthy than any large city of those days. More than one foreign Chronicler, indeed, pays his tribute to the beauty of the City, its gardens and clear springs, and to the orderly character of its inhabitants; though, to be sure, we must measure those eulogies by the standards of the times. London, like any other mediæval town, was especially liable to fire; its streets were narrow to begin with, and, to make things worse, permissions were readily granted for the extensions of the upper storeys upon pillars. These extensions called “Hautpas,” were no doubt conceded because they formed a protection against the weather to passers-by and the shops beneath. They were no less warmly welcomed by the owner because they increased the size of his house without necessitating the purchase of additional ground. London, indeed, was as crowded then as it is to-day. The streets and alleyways were thick with a jostle of people from morning until late at night, and decree after decree of the City Fathers sought in vain to restrain the invasion from the countryside. All this press of people made carelessness more common and the dan
ger of fire more likely, and when the King with his Court came to the Tower of London, the demand upon the City space became almost intolerable, for there was never room within the Tower for the retinue which he carried with him. There was a permanent officer upon his staff called the “Sergeant Harbourer,” whose business it was to find lodgings for the household servants and dependants of the King.
The houses were built of wood and roofed with thatch. Glass was rare — probably none was imported into England until the reign of Henry the Third, and although a hundred years afterwards, in the reign of Edward the Third, glass was so far known that a Guild of Verrers or Glaziers was definitely established, most of the houses, especially of the poorer class, were unprotected by it. Let a fire once get hold of one of these houses, in a dry season, it would roar through the narrow streets as through a funnel, driving burning fragments of wood and cloth and paper through the unglazed windows into the mansions on either side. London was thus ripe for fires, but she was chastised out of all measure. Both in the first year of Stephen’s reign and in 1212, fires ravaged the City. Indeed, in the latter case, many more lives were lost than in the Great Fire of 1666.
A singular feature of all these fires is that they took their origin in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. Thus the great Fire began early on a Sunday morning, the 2nd September, in the house of Farryner, the King’s baker, in Pudding Lane. Pepys, from a window of his house in Seething Lane, noticed the blaze at about 3 o’clock in the morning, but thought little of it and returned to his bed. The summer, however, had been hot; the houses were little better than tinder and a high wind was blowing. Appliances and regulations there were of a kind, but of too primitive a kind to check the progress of this fire. Each Ward, for instance, was equipped with a hook to pull down houses, two chains and two strong cords, all in charge of the Beadle. Large houses were compelled to keep one or two ladders and, during the summer, a barrel of water in the courtyard. Certain houses too had stone partitioned walls, since, by the Assize of Fitz-Ailwyne, special civic privileges were given to those who built in stone rather than in wood. But such houses were few. For instance, if a stone house stood at any boundary which you wished to indicate, you had but to say “The Stone House” and no one would mistake you. The fire spread up Thames Street, drove north and west along Gracechurch Street, Lombard Street, Cornhill, Austin Friars, Lothbury, Bartholomew Lane. All were devoured. The Exchange was utterly destroyed. “A sad sight,” says Pepys,” nothing standing there of all the statues or pillars, but Sir Thomas Gresham’s picture in the corner.” By September 4th the flames had reached St. Paul’s, round about the roof of which a mass of scaffolding had been erected, so that it fell an easy prey. The stones of the walls burst asunder with the noise of cannon under the heat, and the lead rolled down in streams. To recall the glory of that historic building with its marvellous rose-window, only Dr. Donne’s tomb and the charred stumps of a few cloister pillars remained. Eighty-four of the old City churches were swept away with St. Paul’s, and but for the courage and energy of the Duke of York, the Temple Church would have vanished too. Every kind of ill-luck, indeed, seemed to help on the work of destruction. London was afflicted by a weak and inefficient Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludworth. “Lord, what can I do?” he fluttered;” I am spent and my people pay me no heed. We pull down houses, but Oh! Lord, the fire goeth on the same, and burns others before we have done.”
On the other hand, Charles the Second and his brother kept their heads. They were about from morning till night. Westminster Abbey, the Tower although its outer precincts caught fire, Temple Bar, Lincoln’s Inn Gateway, Gresham College, Smithfield, Bishopsgate Street and Aldgate were saved. The river was crowded with the boats of fugitives; the heights of Hampstead were covered with tents and such rough huts as could be speedily set up. Volumes of black suffocating smoke hung over the burning city like a pall. Of the four hundred and fifty acres within the City walls from Ludgate to the Tower and from the river to Cripplegate, only seventy-five were left with houses still standing upon them, while of the liberties beyond the walls, sixty-three acres were consumed. Houses, however, could be rebuilt, even wonderful churches could be replaced if there were an architect with the genius to design them — and such an architect England had the good fortune at that hour to possess. But some irreparable losses were sustained, and amongst them none more grievous than the losses of the manuscripts of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists. It seems that a great many of these were taken from Paternoster Row, and placed for security in the crypt of St. Paul’s, where indeed they were safe from the actual touch of flame, even in such a fire as that which had raged during this first week of September, but so great was the heat that the manuscripts were all reduced to ashes.
On the afternoon of September 6th the fire was finally stopped at Temple Bar; and it must be reckoned an astounding example of the courage of the race that the houseless population set itself at once methodically to work to rebuild their city. Within a week, three plans for a new London were presented to Charles the Second; one made by John Evelyn, famous for his diary; the second by Robert Hook, the philosopher; the third by Sir Christopher Wren. This last was accepted. Had it been carried out, we should have had a London made beautiful by straight broad streets and central “Piazzes,” as he called them. But it would have been a London a little too formal perhaps to suit the English independence. As a matter of fact, the citizens did not wait for any plans, but returning to the sites of their old houses which must have been still smouldering and hot to the foot, they began forthwith to rebuild. Amongst the first of such undertakings was the Royal Exchange.
Sixteen days after the Eire of London had first broken out in Pudding Lane, a committee was formed to rebuild the Royal Exchange. The business of the Exchange, even to the shops of the Pawn, was transferred to Gresham College. The shopkeepers offered to pave the quadrangle of the new building in exchange for their accommodation in Gresham College: and with the hope — a vain hope as it proved to be — of preventing destruction by another fire, the City Surveyors determined to draw a street on the west and on the east of the new building. The credit for this second building, which was erected from materials as far as possible resembling those which had been used in the original building, has been improperly given to Sir Christopher Wren, but the records of the Building Committee make it clear that Mr. Jarman, the second City Surveyor, was the architect who designed the plan. It is to be noticed that once more the front of the Royal Exchange was upon Cornhill, with a fine portico, which earned the special favour of Charles the Second, no doubt because in a nitch upon one side was a statue of Charles the First, and in a nitch upon the other, one of his royal self. It is possible that his approbation would have been less hearty if he could have foreseen that after the next fire that same statue of him would be put up to auction and sold for £9. Almost within a year of the burning there was once more a royal procession, when Charles the Second rode on horseback with several persons of quality. He placed the first stone with the usual ceremonies in the presence of a great many people, and then in a special shed upon the new Scottish Walk, roofed with a canopy and hung with tapestry, he was entertained to dinner by the City and the Mercers’ Company. Pepys saw the King pass with his kettle drums and his trumpets on the way to the Exchange, and in his busy way hurried after him, but the poor man found the gates shut when he arrived at the building, and could only get in to see it after the stone had been laid and the King had departed. A month later, the Duke of York laid the foundation stone of the pillar on the east side of the north entrance, and a fortnight afterwards Prince Rupert performed the same ceremony on the east side of the south entrance. There was some delay in the building, and for reasons which strike home to-day. Bricks were dear; the only suitable bricks were to be got from Walham Green, and the supply was below the demand. The work however, except for the statues and no doubt other ornamentations, was completed within three years, and was opened without any great ceremony by Sir William Tur
ner, the Lord Mayor of the day, who “came and walked twice about it and congratulated the merchants of the Change on its account.” Charles the Second was expected, but he did not come: and we picture to ourselves the disappointment of the assemblage — disappointment mingled probably with a good deal of outspoken criticism, and not a few sarcasms as to whether some new beauty had not come to Court; and, probably, on the part of the Committee, sharpened by an uneasy recollection of a certain fine equestrian statue in white marble upon which they had turned their backs. This was a statue of the King on horseback, and it was offered by Sir Robert Vyner to stand in the middle of the Quadrangle. The Committee, however, came to the conclusion that it was too big for the site and would interfere with the main business of the building, which was the transaction of business by the merchants of the City. Charles the Second was not a man to take with humility any disregard for his Royal dignity, and it is quite possible that, with a chuckle of pleasure, he left his good citizens to wait for him on the Royal Exchange as a lesson to them in the future.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 833