The Stuarts in 100 Facts

by Andrea Zuvich

  In 1628, Harvey published his findings in Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. His work was met with the standard mixture of criticism and agreement. Some critics simply wouldn’t accept a deviation from Galenic principles. Being a proponent of such a radical new theory had its drawbacks. According to biographer John Aubrey in his The Natural History of Wiltshire, ‘In those times to have had an inventive and enquiring wit was accounted affectation which censure the famous Dr William Harvey could not escape for his admirable discovery of the circulation of the blood.’

  Almost a decade later, in 1636, he went over to the University of Altdorf on the Continent, where he gave a lecture on anatomy. He brought in a live dog and cut him open to show the heart. This was a time before any notion of animal rights was around, and so he tested his theory on living animals. Although we see this as cruel now, how else could he have observed and demonstrated his theory? Even if the ends did not justify the means, Harvey’s discovery had a huge impact on medicine, and no doubt this has saved lives in the long run. Towards the end of his life, the Parliamentarians hounded Harvey. When soldiers ransacked his house, many of his research papers were lost or destroyed. He died following a stroke in 1657.

  18. THE RESTORATION RAKES WERE OVERSEXED, OVERDRESSED AND OVER-THE-TOP

  Those of a more gentle persuasion, look away now! The Restoration Age is known as a bawdy era, and with good reason. Oversexed, overdressed and over-the-top, the libertines of the Restoration era remain some of the most popular bad boys in history. With their ostentatious suits (the original ‘Three Piece Suit’), fine lace cravats at their chin and curled periwigs, these handsome aristocrats were lascivious heartbreakers. They whiled away their hours in gambling at card tables and placing bets at the horseraces, they indulged every conceivable sexual whim at the whorehouses and debauched the young ladies of the court, and when they drank, they downed copious quantities of whatever alcoholic beverage was around.

  Who were these men who led such depraved lifestyles? King Charles II, himself a notoriously lovable lecher, was often surrounded by equally profligate friends who were called the Merry Gang. Some of these men were also in Charles’s Cabal ministry. George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, was the son of the 1st Duke of Buckingham, and this roué had an affair with a married woman, killed her husband in a duel and lived in a ménage à trois. Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, was another lothario and he took Nell Gwynn as his mistress before she became the king’s.

  James, Duke of York, was Charles’s younger brother, and he also had quite a sexual appetite. Unlike most of the other restoration rakes, however, James had the (mis)fortune of having a conscience. He was hopelessly unfaithful to both of his wives, Anne Hyde and Mary of Modena. James’s two most well-known mistresses were Arabella Churchill and Catherine Sedley, neither of whom were considered beauties. The latter of the two was the daughter of one of the most infamous of the rakes …

  Sir Charles Sedley is most infamously known for his sexually explicit stunt on a balcony in Covent Garden. Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary how Sedley had stood stark naked on a balcony and pretended to sodomise another man, and then he proceeded to make lewd comments at the large crowd of spectators below and then, in front of everyone, washed his penis in a glass of red wine. After that, he drank the contents of the glass! Sedley also sent a few thugs armed with sticks to beat up the actor Ned Kynaston. In spite of these antics, bizarrely, Sedley managed to attract the popular Restoration actress Margaret Hughes, who was his mistress for a few years (and then she upgraded to Stuart hunk Prince Rupert of the Rhine).

  They made merry, but most contracted some type of venereal disease such as the ‘French Pox’ (syphilis). Although there were condoms in use, they were nowhere near as good as modern condoms in preventing pregnancy or sexual diseases. They also needed soaking in milk or water to render them pliable for use. These Restoration rakes fathered many bastards. As for Wilmot, well, he gets his own entry.

  19. THE BANK OF ENGLAND WAS FOUNDED IN 1694 … AND CREATED THE NATIONAL DEBT

  King William III’s most pressing mission in his life was to thwart French King Louis XIV from further expansion. For most of his life, William had the constant concern that the French would conquer his country, the Dutch Republic. In 1672, known as the Rampjaar or ‘Disaster Year’, the French attacked and many lives were lost. The only way to stop Louis XIV was to engage in constant warfare against the French aggressor until the latter was soundly defeated. William’s wars understandably proved extremely costly, and by the early 1690s the royal coffers were already running dry. William needed money, and he needed it as soon as possible.

  Various financial schemes began to get floated about in an effort to solve this problem, and King William approved of one in particular. Scottish entrepreneur William Paterson concocted a system in which a large loan would be made to the government at a rate of 8 per cent interest. Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, William and Mary’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a major proponent of this scheme. All that was left was official royal approval, and on 24 July 1694, William and Mary founded the Bank of England.

  The creation of the Bank of England was not only a matter of economics but of politics. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, two distinct political groups came to the forefront, the Tories and the Whigs, and if there is anything about the political spectrum of the Late Stuart courts you need to know, it’s that these two groups did not get on well together. An overwhelming majority of those involved in the creation of the Bank of England were Whigs. Montagu, importantly, was a Whig. Robert Harley, who later became the Chancellor of the Exchequer under Queen Anne, became a notable critic of the Bank of England and created the rival Tory Land Bank (I did mention that they didn’t get along). Nineteenth-century historian G. M. Trevelyan stated that the Bank of England was established ‘against the opposition of the Tories, who were jealous of the monied interest’. The first Governor of the Bank of England (from 1694–7) was John Houblon, and he was also a director in the New East India Company. This company was very much a Whig-heavy company – once again adding to the political nature of the entire financial setup.

  £1.2 million was raised as the loan. This debt was never repaid and became the roots of what we call the National Debt. By 1700, only six years after the Bank of England had been founded, the debt had risen to £12 million. This is nothing in comparison to what it is today; in the 2010s, the National Debt exceeded £1 trillion – an astronomical sum its creators could never possibly have imagined. As for William defeating the French, well, that victory would be posthumous and Queen Anne would get the credit when John Churchill and Prince Eugene of Savoy teamed up and thrashed Louis’ army at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.

  20. CHARLES I WAS THE SPARE WHO BECAME THE HEIR

  While possibly not the nicest phrase to use, this situation wasn’t an extraordinary occurrence in history. After all, Henry VIII was another example of a second son that became an heir, following his elder brother Prince Arthur’s death in 1502. King Charles I was very different from Henry VIII and has gone down in British history as one of the most controversial and hated monarchs and yet, he was never supposed to have been king in the first place. Charles was the younger brother of Henry, Prince of Wales, and upon the latter’s death in 1612, the former was the ‘spare who became the heir’.

  Henry Frederick Stuart, born in Stirling Castle, Scotland, in 1594, was by all accounts the epitome of what an Early Modern prince should be: learned, athletic, intelligent, handsome, confident, fashionable – you name it, he had it. As the eldest son of King James I and Anne of Denmark, Henry was the beloved golden boy in the family and his staunchly Protestant, sober court put his father’s to shame. His morals were much admired; swearing was a punishable offence and drunkenness frowned upon.

  In late 1612, Henry suddenly came down with a terrible illness – which modern historians now believe to have been typhoid fever – and the handsome, robus
t eighteen-year-old died. Indeed, the tragic prince’s early and sudden demise sent shockwaves across the nation – for in him, all hopes of future stability had depended. Henry Stuart is one of those figures in history that historians think of with that hopeless question, ‘What if?’ Would the English Civil Wars have happened had he lived to be king? Charles, once the ‘spare’, was then violently thrust into the role of heir – a position for which he was neither fully prepared nor as good at as his deceased brother.

  Charles, now the heir, was considered the runt of the family for he had been a sickly child, suffering from both rickets and a pronounced stutter. But Charles was not without virtues of his own. Quite like Henry had been, Charles was very cultivated and had a great passion for art. He became a great collector of art and a major patron to artists, most famously Flemish Baroque painters Anthony van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens. The former painted many portraits of King Charles, including the ubiquitous equestrian portraits. Rubens is best known for the sumptuous and symbolically rich paintings that adorn the ceiling in the Banqueting House, Whitehall.

  Charles was also a devoted and loving family man; there can be no question of his attachment to his wife, Henrietta Maria, or their six children together. He was the opposite of his son Charles II in that Charles had an awful combination of stubbornness, a firmly entrenched belief in the Divine Right of Kings and the unfortunate ability to go along with whatever the last person advised him to do. Some historians state that Charles I’s finest moment was the time of his execution. He met his death bravely.

  21. THE REIGN OF WILLIAM AND MARY WAS THE ONLY DIARCHY IN BRITISH HISTORY

  Usually a monarch rules on his or her own – as was the case with Henry V and later Elizabeth I – and that makes a monarchy. Thus, when a king marries, his wife becomes the Queen consort – meaning not a queen in her own right. Anne Boleyn, for example, was Henry VIII’s consort. Queen regnant, which is what their daughter Elizabeth became, means a queen rules in her own right. Queen Victoria was the same, and although she was married to Albert, he never became king and remained prince consort. Queen Elizabeth II is a queen regnant, and her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, remained a prince consort.

  In the unique circumstance of William and Mary, the latter was the heir and was well within her right to rule as Queen Mary II and have her husband, William, as her prince consort. But Mary was very much a woman of her time – and very well respected for it – and she refused to become queen if William wasn’t king. She thought it highly unnatural that a woman should rule over her husband. William was half a Stuart too, as his mother was Charles I’s eldest daughter, who was also named Mary; his claim to the throne was legitimate, although not as strong as his wife’s. In April 1689, they became joint rulers and the diarchy of William and Mary began. Their reign remains unique in British history – there has been no other before or since. This diarchy lasted only five years as Mary died in 1694, leaving William to rule alone.

  22. HIGHWAYMEN AND FOOTPADS MADE JOURNEYS PERILOUS

  The Stuart period was a time in which occasional violence was a fact of life. In the Bills of Mortality, it was common to find ‘found dead in the street’ or ‘murdered’, so that gives us a pretty good idea of what it was like. Although most people had jobs – from mop seller to night-soil man to scullery maid and oyster seller – there was an underworld, one of crime and viciousness. In striking contrast to the romanticised notion many people now have of highwaymen and footpads, these criminals were very dangerous. A highwayman (usually on horseback) would stop travellers on the road and rob them at gunpoint. While not as common, there were also female highwaymen, including Moll ‘Cutpurse’ Frith. There were several Acts passed by parliament throughout the Stuart era in an attempt to clamp down on these criminals. There is one Act from 1652 against highwaymen and another in 1692 under William and Mary, which shows that the problem was bad throughout most of the century.

  A footpad was the seventeenth-century equivalent of a mugger. Some places became notorious for footpads and cutpurses, one of these being Blackheath, an area situated close to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Footpads were a problem all over the place but particularly in areas where they knew they could get a wealthy victim. Hyde Park was known for attracting these nasty types. Accordingly, the Route du Roi, or Rotten Row, which was a road that led from Kensington Palace to Whitehall, was ordered by William III to be lined with lamps. The road was completed in 1690 and is generally regarded as the first lighted road in England.

  23. SHAKESPEARE LEFT US THE GREATEST WORKS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE … AND AN ENDURING CONTROVERSY

  Arguably the greatest writer in all history, let alone British history, William Shakespeare has become a sort of demigod to admirers of his sonnets and plays. Born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, this son of a glover eventually travelled to London and became an actor and playwright. Shakespeare had an amazing range – able to write high-spirited plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well as extremely violent dark tragedy, such as Titus Andronicus. He wrote the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to his patron the Earl of Southampton. Several of Shakespeare’s plays were performed before royalty, Queen Elizabeth (who died in 1603) and her successor, King James I. Shakespeare, having left us with the brilliance that is Hamlet, Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and many more, died in 1616.

  Since then, there have been those who have questioned whether Shakespeare was actually the author of the works that are so beloved to so many people. Indeed, this topic can get some people really riled up. The Shakespeare Authorship Question leads to divided beliefs, and the most popular fall into the following categories: the Oxfordians, the Baconians, and the Stratfordians. Those who adhere to the Oxfordian theory claim the true author to be Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who was unable to publicly claim authorship because of being a nobleman. Others, the Baconians, believe Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Albans, who was an extremely intelligent philosopher and scientist who developed the Baconian method. The Stratfordians maintain that William Shakespeare was the sole author of the works attributed to him. Others believe the works were the result of collaborative efforts by several writers, including Marlowe. Even more think the whole notion of any controversy is downright absurd. Others think it intellectually snobbish to presume that someone who didn’t go to university would be incapable of writing Shakespeare’s works.

  Whatever the reader’s personal beliefs are about this matter, the fact remains that the works attributed to William Shakespeare are some of the greatest works in the English language. After Shakespeare’s death, a few of his plays were published, but these publications were not known for their good quality. Thirty-six of his plays were published in 1623 in what is known as the First Folio. The title page of this publication contains one of the most popular images of Shakespeare. First Folio editions are extremely precious books, and copies are found at some of the most prestigious institutions in the world, including the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, the British Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Three subsequent Folios of Shakespeare’s works were published in the Stuart period, in 1632, 1663 and 1685.

  Throughout London, visitors can see monuments dedicated to him, such as the fountain in the middle of Leicester Square, and the beautiful memorial to him at Southwark Cathedral. As for any controversy, well, to quote Shakespeare himself, ‘it’s all Greek to me’.

  24. WITCHCRAFT WAS A VERY SERIOUS MATTER

  Witchcraft, particularly in the early seventeenth century, was a very real concern for many people. This was a time in which people were much more religious and superstitious than most are in the twenty-first century. Outbreaks of plague and other diseases, combined with poor harvests and the misery of hunger, led to social problems including accusations of witchcraft. Personal or economic tragedies and misfortunes were usually interpreted as stemming from a super
natural cause. Generally speaking, angry, fearful people needed a scapegoat, so who better than the weird old and ugly woman who lived alone in the village? The odd one out in a parish was more than likely to be accused and condemned.

  There were several notable witch trials, including those of the Pendle Witches and the Samlesbury witches, both in 1612. Even King James I wrote Daemonologie in 1597. Yes, this was the same King James who commissioned the King James Bible, in which you’ll find Exodus 22:18 (KJV): 18 – ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. It was this line that had a direct impact on many trials. Although James was the opposite of a warmonger-king and was tolerant for his time, he was nevertheless a major witch-hunter. There is no exact number of those who were accused and put to death for witchcraft, but estimates generally run into the tens of thousands, if not higher.

  The ‘Witchfinder-General’ was one Matthew Hopkins, who was the author of the 1647 pamphlet The Discovery of Witches. Contrary to popular belief, Hopkins was not authorised by the government to do what he did – he gave himself that title. Hopkins went around East Anglia, trying people for witchcraft using some really horrible methods, including the swimming test. No one could really stop him because he was operating during the chaos of the English Civil Wars. Generally, if you were unfortunate enough to be accused of being a witch, you would die proving your innocence. A common myth is that those found guilty of witchcraft in the seventeenth century were burned. Unlike previous centuries, in which burning was used to kill so-called ‘witches’, in the seventeenth century, the method employed was most often hanging.