The past is a foreign country: this is your guidebook.
If you could travel back in time, the period from 1660 to 1700 would make one of the most exciting destinations in history. It is the age of Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London; bawdy comedy and the libertine court of Charles II; Christopher Wren in architecture, Henry Purcell in music and Isaac Newton in science – the civil wars are over and a magnificent new era has begun.
But what would it really be like to live in Restoration Britain? Where would you stay and what would you eat? What would you wear and where would you do your shopping? The third volume in the series of Ian Mortimer’s bestselling Time Traveller’s Guides answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to seventeenth-century Britain would ask.
How much should you pay for one of those elaborate wigs? Should you trust a physician who advises you to drink fresh cow’s urine to cure your gout? Why are boys made to smoke in school? And why are you unlikely to get a fair trial in court?
People’s lives are changing rapidly in a world moving from superstition and religious explanation to rationalism and scientific calculation. The period sees the tipping point between the old world and the new: fear, uncertainty, hardship and eating with your fingers give way to curiosity, professionalism, fine wines and knives and forks. Travelling to Restoration Britain encourages us to reflect on the customs and practices of daily life – and this unique guide not only teaches us about the seventeenth century but makes us look with fresh eyes at the modern world.
Dr Ian Mortimer is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England and The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies, and numerous scholarly articles on subjects ranging in date from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries. His work on the social history of medicine in the seventeenth century was published by the Royal Historical Society and won the Alexander Prize.
Mortimer is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. He also writes historical novels. He lives with his wife and three children in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor.
The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England, 1327–1330
The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation
The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-made King
1415: Henry V’s Year of Glory
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England
Human Race: Ten Centuries of Change on Earth
Portrait of Charles II by John Michael Wright (Royal Collection Trust; © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of James II by Peter Lely (© Boston Museum and Art Gallery, Lancashire/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Queen Mary II by William Wissing (Kenwood House, London; photo © Historic England/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of William III, prince of Orange, by Godfrey Kneller (Bank of England, London; photo © Heini Schneebel/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Queen Catherine of Braganza, studio of Peter Lely (private collection; photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Barbara Villiers, after Peter Lely (Geffrye Museum of the Home, London/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, by Godfrey Kneller (Sudbury Hall, Derbyshire; National Trust Photographic Library/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Nell Gwynn, after Peter Lely (Army and Navy Club, London/Bridgeman Images).
View of London from Southwark, Anglo-Dutch school (Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, © Derbyshire Collection, Chatsworth, reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees/ Bridgeman Images).
The Great Fire of London in 1666, by Lieve Verschuier (Museum of Fine Arts, Szepmuveszeti, Budapest/ Bridgeman Images).
The piazza in Covent Garden, hand-coloured etching (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
Golden Square, engraving by John Bowles (private collection/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Sir George Rooke by Michael Dahl (private collection; photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Lord Mungo Murray by John Michael Wright (private collection; photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Bridget Holmes by John Riley (Royal Collection Trust; © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Lady Anne de Vere Capel by Michael Dahl (Petworth House, West Sussex; National Trust Photography Library/Bridgeman Images).
Image of a flea, from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665 (Bridgeman Images).
Dentist examining the tooth of an old man, painting by Gerrit Dou (private collection; photo ©Bonhams London/Bridgeman Images).
Cheque of the Earl of Arran. Reproduced by kind permission of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc © 2017.
Frost fair on the Thames, winter of 1683–4, English school (Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection/Bridgeman Images).
The King’s Bath and the Queen’s Bath, drawing by Thomas Johnson (private collection/Bridgeman Images).
Sir Thomas Armstrong’s execution, engraving, 1684.
Titus Oates in the pillory, 1687, English school (Museum of London/Bridgeman Images).
View of a house and its estate in Belsize, Middlesex, 1696, Jan Siberechts (1627–c.1700) (© Tate London 2016)
The White Hart Inn in Scole, Norfolk, English school (private collection/Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images).
Clarendon House, engraving (private collection/Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images).
View of Chatsworth from the south-west, painting by Thomas Smith of Derby (Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, © Derbyshire Collection, Chatsworth, reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees/Bridgeman Images).
Carving of musical instruments by Grinling Gibbons (Petworth House, West Sussex; National Trust Photographic Library/Andreas von Einsiedel/Bridgeman Images).
Indian hanging, dyed and painted cotton, c.1680 (© Victoria & Albert Museum, London).
William and Mary striking table clock by Thomas Tompion (private collection; photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images).
The Heaven Room at Burghley House, by Antonio Verrio (reproduced courtesy of Burghley House).
Pigs’ knuckles on a pewter plate, Flemish school (private collection; © Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, New York/Bridgeman Images).
Edward Barlow’s ship, the Sampson, caught in a hurricane in 1694 (reproduced from Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of his life at sea in King’s ships, East & West Indiamen & other merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, ed. Basil Lubbock, 2 vols, London, 1934).
Portrait of Michael Alphonsus Shen Fuzong by Godfrey Kneller (Royal Collection Trust; © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of William Dampier by Thomas Murray (National Portrait Gallery, London/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images).
Mary Beale, self-portrait (National Gallery, London; photo © Stefano Baldini/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Aphra Behn by Mary Beale (St Hilda’s College, Oxford/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, by Jacob Huysmans (Warwick Castle, Warwickshire/ Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Samuel Pepys by Godfrey Kneller (Royal Society of Arts, London/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of John Evelyn by Godfrey Kneller (© The Royal Society).
Opening page of Pepys’ diary. Reproduced by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Portrait of Charles II by John Michael Wright (Royal Collection Trust; © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016/Bridgeman Images).
Habits of Quakers (Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images).
Whitehall, from Prospects of London (O’Shea Gallery, London/Bridgeman Images).
Portrait of Nell Gwynne after Samuel Cooper (Valerie Jackson Harris Collection/Bridgeman Images).
Richmond Palace engraved by Michiel van der Gucht (Bridgeman Images).
Frontispiece from The Theory of the Earth by Thomas Burnet (Warden and Scholars of New College, Oxford/Bridgeman Images).
Raised embroidery of flower (private collection/Bridgeman Images).
Letters patent issued by Sir Edward Walker, 1664 (Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images).
Broadside of the Great Fire of London, 1666 (Bridgeman Images).
Image of a flea, from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, 1665 (Bridgeman Images).
The ‘Definitive Design’ for St Paul’s Cathedral by Sir Christopher Wren (St Paul’s Cathedral Library, London/Bridgeman Images).
Ironwork design for Hampton Court Palace by Jean Tijou (Bridgeman Images).
This book is dedicated to my son, Oliver Mortimer, who ran a weekly parkrun with me during the writing of this book.
Running teaches us many truths, not least that happiness and satisfaction are not the same thing. I hope that you’ll be happy as long as you live but I hope even more that you’ll be satisfied.
A Handbook for Visitors to the Years 1660–1700
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, book one, lines 254–5
As you lie down on your feather bed on your first night in Restoration Britain, you will notice the quiet. If you’re visiting during the 1690s, maybe you can hear a longcase clock chiming downstairs, in the parlour. If you’re here in the 1660s, probably the only sound will be the creak of the staircase as the maid gently makes her way up to sleep in the attic, or that of a dog outside barking at the night watchmen. The bell in the church tower will ring the hour throughout the night, sounding in the starlit darkness beyond your shuttered window. Otherwise there is silence. Like many people, you may let the nightlight burn down, so there is a glow beyond the bed hangings. If you’ve left them open, you’ll see the candle flame shining on the wooden panelling of your chamber. On a linen-covered table are the looking glass you’ll gaze into in the morning, and the combs your maidservant will use to dress your hair in preparation for the day ahead. But therein lies a question: what does the day ahead hold?
The chances are that, even though you come from the modern world and can look back on the period from 1660 to 1700 with the benefit of hindsight, you don’t know what destiny awaits you here. These four decades are tumultuous. People experience everything from rapturous enthusiasm for one king to the violent expulsion of his successor. There are wars abroad and riots at home; persecutions of some religious minorities and greater toleration of others; expanding trade in the Far East and the disappearance of the plague from British shores. Most significantly, there is a marked rise of rational, scientific thinking. Professionalism enters many walks of life, the city of London grows into an international capital, and the middle sorts suddenly spring up, with their refined ways of living and fashion-conscious tastes. It is the age of many geniuses. It produces the greatest British architect of all time in Christopher Wren, the greatest British scientist in Isaac Newton and the greatest diarist in Samuel Pepys. It also heralds the greatest composer in Henry Purcell, the greatest woodcarver in Grinling Gibbons and the greatest clockmaker in Thomas Tompion. It sees the heyday of Peter Lely and Godfrey Kneller in the world of painting, the apogee of John Milton and John Dryden in poetry, and it applauds a mass of brilliant actors, actresses and dramatists, including Thomas Otway, Aphra Behn and William Congreve. And don’t forget those three other geniuses in science, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose achievements would place them in the front rank, if it were not for Newton. It is the age of innovations, of the arrival of tea, coffee and chocolate, exotic fruit, fine wines and new medicines. Great houses are built in the baroque style, their interiors filled with new fashions in Indian fabric and Chinese furniture and porcelain. Last but not least, this is the great age of the English constitution, during which the ideas of John Locke, the most influential philosopher in the English language, come to be espoused in the Bill of Rights, limiting the power of the king. As a result, whichever year in the late seventeenth century you visit Britain, the day ahead is likely to be full of surprises.
All these changes in society are confusing enough for the indigenous inhabitants. You, the modern visitor, will have the additional difficulty of not being familiar with even the basics of life in the seventeenth-century home. What are you going to eat for breakfast? How do you control the itching of nits and the lice in your clothes? What should you use to brush your teeth? As you wake, the noises of the carts and carriages in the cobbled thoroughfare outside sound strange; so too do the calls and greetings of the street vendors and the pedestrians on their way to market or to church. Open the curtains of your chamber and you will look down through the small panes of uneven, slightly distorting glass to see women’s bonnets and gentlemen’s periwigs as people greet each other in their various stilted or informal fashions. How are you going to get on in this society, which is so unfamiliar to you?
This book will tell you how to live, day by day, in the late seventeenth century. You will learn what to wear and what to eat and drink, which places are the best to stay in, what money can buy, and how to get around. You will learn about lice control and dental hygiene, even if the seventeenth-century practices cause you to squirm. As you will see, the general approach of a Time Traveller’s Guide is that the past is best viewed close up and personally – in contrast to traditional history, which emphasises the value of objectivity and distance. Hence you are very much at the centre of this story. The past might have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ for some, and grandiose and luxurious for others, but simply to be told these things does not compare with seeing life at close hand, albeit in your mind’s eye.
Before we travel to the Britain of 1660–1700, however, there are a few key facts you need to have at your disposal. First, you need to understand why we use the term ‘Restoration’ to describe the period. It refers to the return of the monarchy in 1660, after what the diarist John Evelyn describes as ‘a most bloody rebellion of nearly twenty years’. This ‘rebellion’ breaks out in 1642, when forces loyal to King Charles I gather to oppose those who support Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell. At stake is the matter of who has absolute authority in England. Are the people bound to obey the monarch because he rules by divine right, as a conduit of the will of God? Or do they have a right to self-government, through Parliament? It is one of the most profound questions of political life, and the answer can hardly be decided by a debate. Four years of intermittent warfare ensue. Judgement comes down first on the side of the people, led by Cromwell and Parliament. In April 1646, after a string of military setbacks, the king seeks refuge among his Scottish subjects. A few months later, the Scots give him up and send him as a prisoner to the English Parliament. After a brief second civil war in 1648, which ends in defeat for the royalists, Charles is tried for high treason: he is found guilty and beheaded at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. A few days later the monarchy and the House of Lords are abolished. England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland are collectively declared a republic – a ‘Commonwealth and Free State’ – and Parliament formally confirms itself as the source of all just power in the British Isles.
Parliament in these years is dominated by a Puritan outlook, characterised by a set of stringent religious and moral concerns that take precedence over the old traditions and customs of the country. The bishops are abolished, as are the church courts. A measure of how extreme things become in these years is the Adultery Act of 1650. Under this law, anyone found guilty of adultery is to be hanged. In 1654, Susan Bounty, the wife of Richard Bounty of Bideford, Devon, falls pregnant with another man’s child. She is tried at the Exeter assizes for the crime of adultery and sentenced to death. She pleads her pregnancy and is allowed to remain in gaol until her child is born. Then she is hanged.1
The truly frightening thing is that very few people criticise such ‘justice’. Indeed, many magistrates up and down the country want more people hanged for moral lapses, not fewer. The 1650s are probably the most religious decade Britain has seen since the Middle Ages – ‘most religious’ in the sense that society is completely dominated by Christian beliefs and more willing to punish people for ungodly behaviour than at any other time. If you have a choice as to which part of the seventeenth century you would like to visit and are not of a Puritanical disposition, I would strongly recommend avoiding the Commonwealth.
Times change, influential men grow old and die, and extreme forms of government sooner or later become unacceptable. The collapse of the Commonwealth is thus perhaps an inevitability. Its demise is helped by economic turbulence, which makes people question whether Puritanism is truly the right and godly path. When Cromwell dies in September 1658, the government is heavily in debt and both royalists and republicans realise they have a common enemy in religious extremism. A period of chaos follows. On 11 October 1659, John Evelyn writes in his diary: ‘The army now turned out Parliament. We had now no government in the nation; all in confusion; no magistrate either owned or pretended but the soldiers, and they not agreed. God almighty have mercy on us and settle us!’ Others record similar fears. In Essex, Ralph Josselin, the Puritan vicar of Earls Colne, writes on 14 October: ‘Heard … that the army … interrupted the Parliament. Our sins threaten our ruin.’ On 20 November he adds: ‘men’s minds exceedingly discontent; the soldiers at present give law unto us, God give a law to us all’. The following month, the London barber Thomas Rugg writes of his fellow citizens that ‘their minds were very unquiet, and all grieved … now to be ruled by the sword and the committee of swordmen, which was called the Committee of Safety’.
Into the midst of this crisis steps George Monck, the army’s commander in Scotland. He is widely respected, having proved himself in campaigns in Ireland and Scotland as well as at sea in the First Dutch War (1652–4). He communicates secretly with Charles I’s son and heir, Prince Charles, who is in exile in France, and then arranges for the surviving members of the last elected Parliament to gather at Westminster. On 1 May 1660 the MPs unanimously agree to invite the prince to take the throne. Charles II is duly proclaimed on 8 May, and lands at Dover on the 25th. On 29 May 1660, his thirtieth birthday, he rides in procession through the city of London. It is a brave move on both men’s parts: General Monck risks being branded a traitor to republicanism, and Prince Charles can hardly feel relaxed about returning to a country whose Parliament cut off his father’s head. But there is a general recognition that the Commonwealth has no other possible successor, and that only a man whose acknowledged authority transcends religious and secular factionalism has a chance of reuniting the nation.
To understand the outpouring of joy that greets Charles II’s accession you have to bear in mind the fear of another civil war erupting and of law and order breaking down again. You also have to remember the victims of Puritanism like Susan Bounty. The king not only represents stability and unity; he also stands for freedom from oppression (initially, at least) and the end of religious extremism. On the same day that Parliament agrees to ask Prince Charles to return, General Monck reveals that the prince has signed a declaration, later known as the Declaration of Breda. This document promises a pardon to all those who committed crimes against the prince and his father during the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth (except those who signed Charles I’s death warrant). The prince also undertakes to honour all sales and purchases of land in that time; to tolerate people of all religious faiths; to pay the army its back-pay and to recommission the troops in the service of the Crown. For the first time in over a decade, there is optimism in Britain.
The return of the king allows people to recover their cherished traditions and pleasures. People can look forward to dancing round the Maypole on Mayday again, going to the theatre, holding horse races and attending other forms of entertainment prohibited by the Puritans. They can expect the swift resurrection of the bishops and the House of Lords. As the proposed king has already acknowledged an illegitimate son of his own, it goes without saying that he will abolish the Adultery Act. Thus the ‘Restoration’ not only refers to the reintroduction of the royal family; it also denotes the restoration of principles of legislation, age-old institutions and ancient customs. Unlike most key dates that mark the beginning of a new historical period in British history, which often have little real significance except to denote the death of one monarch and the succession of another, 1660 has an enormous impact on daily life. In English history, probably the only year that stands comparison as a turning point is 1066.
So much for the start of the Restoration; when does it end?
Some historians apply the term ‘Restoration’ only to the 1660s, the period immediately after Charles II returned. The great diarist Samuel Pepys has unwittingly had a part to play in this, for he describes the years 1660–69 so vividly that the decade attracts almost all the attention, distracting people from the later years of the seventeenth century. At the other extreme, literary critics refer to English plays written as late as the 1690s and early 1700s as ‘Restoration Comedies’: stylistically, they are notable for their sexual innuendo, satirical wit and sense of immoral fun, all of which characterise English society after 1660. Thus the Restoration has no commonly accepted termination. I have chosen the end of the century for several reasons. First, there is a unifying spirit of licentiousness that is noticeable throughout the period, even if it starts to decline in the 1690s. Second, another ‘restoration’ of sorts takes place when James II’s daughter Mary and her husband William become monarchs in 1689. And third, very little has been written about ordinary people in the last three decades of the seventeenth century. Pepys dominates our understanding of the daily life of the period to such an extent that, apart from academic tomes, you won’t find many books on late-seventeenth-century England except those dealing with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the biographies of great men. But life after Pepys is fascinating too and deserves greater attention than it has hitherto received.
Geographically, the authority of the king of England expands considerably over this period. In 1660 Charles II reigns over the British Isles, the port of Dunkirk in France and ‘the Plantations’, which are the British territories in the New World. In that year these include the small colonies of Massachusetts Bay, New Plymouth, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Virginia, Maryland, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland on the eastern seaboard of North America; and Jamaica, the Leeward Islands and Barbados in the West Indies. By 1700 the Plantations have grown to include thirteen greatly enlarged colonies in North America as well as most of the West Indies. In addition, the king now rules stretches of the coast of India (including Bombay and Calcutta) and parts of the coast of West Africa. It is no exaggeration to say that the British Empire dates from this period, even if it does not yet go by that name. This book, however, is intended for those interested in visiting Great Britain, the largest island in the British Isles. It does not touch on Dunkirk, which is sold to the French in 1662; or Tangiers in North Africa, which is ruled by the English from 1660 to 1684. Nor is it intended as a guide for visitors to seventeenth-century Ireland. The emphasis remains on England, by far the most populous country in Great Britain, but elements of late-seventeenth-century Scottish and Welsh culture are also included. In this respect it is important to remember that the United Kingdom has yet to become a political reality: Wales has been administered as part of the kingdom of England since 1536, but England and Scotland will not become one state until 1707, even though both kingdoms are ruled by the same king. For the period covered in this book, Scotland remains a separate political entity, with its own legal system, Parliament, currency, language and culture.
A last general point you need to bear in mind before stepping into Restoration Britain concerns the weather. Do wrap up warm. Britain is still experiencing the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, which leads to some bitterly cold winters, harvest failures and food shortages. 1675 is known as a ‘year without a summer’, for obvious reasons.2 The Long Frost of December 1683 to February 1684 remains the coldest three-month period ever recorded. The River Thames remains frozen from 2 January to 20 February; the ground is frozen to the depth of three feet in Kent, and at the Downs ‘the sea is frozen above a mile about the shore’, as The London Gazette reports.3 Gentlemen with thermometers busily measure the temperatures in the staircases and libraries of their country houses and find that even indoor temperatures are well below freezing. Water freezes in ewers in the corners of bedchambers, as does the milk in dairies and the ink in shopkeepers’ inkwells. Across the country, snow lies in glistening stillness. Water wheels stand still. Ships remain motionless in their harbours, their rigging sparkling uselessly in the cold sunlight.
As you snuggle down in your feather bed in Restoration Britain and stare at the light of a guttering candle, trying to keep warm, you will probably start to wonder what you have let yourself in for. I want to add something else for you to think about. A well-respected historian once declared that ‘the changes in English society that affected England between the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of Anne were not revolutionary’.4 I suspect that reading this book and perhaps comparing it with The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England will make you think otherwise. Elizabeth died in 1603, Anne ascends the throne in 1702, and the years in between those two dates see many dramatic changes. We may think of the ‘bloody rebellion of nearly twenty years’ as the ‘English Revolution’, but in truth the decades that follow are just as revolutionary. In terms of the decline of superstition, enhanced individualism, greater professionalism and clearer scientific understanding, this is truly an age of radical development. In fact, some of the most profound changes the British people have ever experienced take place between 1660 and 1700. It is a time when the last dying notes of the medieval world are drowned out by the rising trumpet fanfare of modernity, and the rationalism that you take for granted comes to be the dominant way of thinking.
But don’t take my word for it. Read on. See for yourself.
It is Sunday, 2 June 1661 – and it is raining hard. Water trickles into puddles in the muddy alleys and swells in the drains that flow down the middle of the cobbled streets. Most people have returned from church to eat their dinner, peering out through windows spattered with raindrops as the church clocks of the city chime a dull midday. The few who are still braving the weather stride along beneath the overhanging jetties of the houses, hunched in their bedraggled hats and cloaks. They glance up at you as they approach: those gentlemen who are worried about their expensive clothes turn their shoulders to the wall to keep to the driest path, forcing you to step away from it. A horse-drawn coach speeds past, its wheels clattering over the uneven stones and sending water flying from the puddles. A stray dog hurries out of its path. But although you may find the weather inclement, there is a reason why you are out and about. This is when you get the clearest view of the city. Normally there are just too many carriages and people in your way. And that’s not to mention the pollution. Some days a pall of smoke hangs over the roofs: it gets in your eyes, and the stonework of every church in the city is blackened with it. Today the houses might be dripping from the eaves but at least you can see them.
When you walk through the heart of London you realise that the city is practically a living museum. It is not that the citizens are careful to preserve old structures, but rather that they are reluctant to pull them down. Almost every building you see is old. On the east side you have the Tower of London, the stern castle of the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England, which is now a storehouse for gunpowder and armaments and a prison for high-ranking figures. To the north of the Tower is the city wall, first built by the Romans and subsequently heavily patched, but still standing in most places to its battlement height of 18 feet. The wall encloses a mass of medieval streets, lanes and alleys, twisting and weaving intricately around old houses and churches. Some of the streets are too narrow to allow two coaches to pass, and some of the alleys so tight that even a single vehicle cannot enter. Thames Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares of the whole city, has pinch points just 11ft wide, where traffic frequently comes to a stop.
Many of the houses are several hundred years old, their blackened oak timbers deeply scarred with the fissures of so many seasons. The rat holes in their walls are similarly ancient and, like the houses themselves, are teeming with life. The older properties have been modernised with glass windows but they preserve their essential character, the first floor projecting out about 18 inches over the ground floor, and the second jettied out about a foot over the first, with a gabled roof facing the street. On narrow alleys, the occupants of second-floor chambers can reach out and touch hands with their opposite numbers on the other side. Such jetties block out much of the light, so they make the alleys dark at the best of times; on grey days such as today they are particularly dim. Grand old stone mansions are still to be found on the principal streets, their halls now heated by fireplaces and tall brick chimneys. But even the terraces of four-, five- and six-storey town houses date from between sixty and a hundred years ago. What’s more, if you take just a few steps down one of these dark alleys, you’ll see that tucked in behind these tottering edifices are older structures divided up into tenements without any regular plan. Here’s a chamber above a kitchen, there’s a chamber above a hall. Many of these were once the buildings of medieval monasteries and friaries. Even old barns have been turned into houses. As you can see, London has developed not by being demolished and rebuilt but by constantly adapting, little by little, to people’s changing demands.
Even if you are familiar with the twenty-first-century city, you will not recognise much here. The Tower may look more or less the same, but the other structures are all very different from their modern successors. The tall limestone obelisk bound with iron on the south side of Cannon Street is an ancient landmark called London Stone. Some people will tell you it was erected by King Lud, the mythical founder of London; others that it was the stone from which all milestones in Roman Britain measured their distances from the capital. Moving north to Cornhill, you will find the Standard, the great conduit that provides the citizens hereabouts with water. On the north side of the street you will see a fine old building of four arcades around a quadrangle: this is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir Thomas Gresham and named by Queen Elizabeth in 1571. You can see statues of all the kings and queens since the Norman Conquest in the niches above the arcades. Sometimes you’ll hear the Royal Exchange described as the most valuable three-quarters of an acre in the world, due to the trade carried on here, but on a wet Sunday afternoon it feels more like a sepulchral monument, dripping with raindrops and absence. Nearby is one of the city’s pillories, where trading offenders are publicly humiliated with their heads and hands trapped between wooden boards; today that too is as damp and silent as the puddles welling up across the courtyard of the Exchange.
Everything appears ancient – from the seven medieval gates of the city to the livery halls of the powerful guilds and the Guildhall itself, built in 1411. Some of the finest merchants’ and goldsmiths’ houses are to be seen on Cheapside, the main trading street, but these too are almost a century old. The buildings on the southern edge of the city, where the waters of the River Thames lap at the quays, are similarly venerable. If you can turn your attention away from the vast number of ships on the river you’ll see the waterline marked by a whole gamut of antiquated and decrepit walls and roofs. Here is London’s second royal fortress, the gaunt Baynard’s Castle, rebuilt in the fifteenth century and remodelled at the start of the sixteenth. Further along the bank are the weather-boarded and pitch-covered warehouses of merchants whose ships have been returning for the last forty years with cargoes of Virginia tobacco or spices from the East Indies. On a weekday the rain would not have stopped the three wooden cranes on the wharf at Queenhithe from loading and unloading the tuns of wine but, today being Sunday, they too are motionless. Further along the river still is the Steelyard, where the merchants of the Hanseatic League have had their trading centre for the last seven centuries. They are no longer the powerful economic force they once were, and the old buildings are now sinking into decay.
The most striking structure along the river is London’s only bridge, built in the twelfth century. It stands 910ft long and connects London proper with its southern suburb of Southwark and the roads leading into Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Each of its nineteen arches has a name, such as ‘Queen’s Lock’, ‘Narrow Entry’, ‘Rock Lock’ and the charmingly named ‘Gut Lock’. These arches are built on boat-shaped starlings or piers in the water, forcing the fast-changing tides to gush through the channels between them. The roadway of the bridge is lined with houses that peer over the turbulent flow. At the southern end is the medieval gatehouse, where about two dozen decayed heads and skulls are to be seen – these being the remnants of traitors, placed there as examples to the citizens.1 At the northern end there is a gap between the houses, following a major fire in 1633. It is ironic that the most significant modern change to the bridge is an empty space.2
Gradually you will realise that there is almost nothing visible that dates from the seventeenth century. Here and there you’ll see a recent house, built where a fire has destroyed a dwelling, but two-thirds of the buildings within the city walls are medieval and almost all the rest are Elizabethan. Leathersellers’ Hall has an impressive portico dating from the 1620s. Denmark House, the queen’s royal palace designed by the royal surveyor, Inigo Jones, has some fine additions: a suite of royal apartments, new stables and coach houses. Otherwise, very little in the heart of the city post-dates 1600. The most significant piece of seventeenth-century architecture within the city walls is a 120ft-wide portico with Corinthian columns, which has been added to the west end of St Paul’s Cathedral. This too is the work of Inigo Jones. But just look how incongruous it appears, forced on to the massive church, whose high lead roofs look black and gloweringly gothic in the rain. Note too the contrast between Jones’s work and the worn sculpture of the masonry of the nave. One hundred years ago, lightning struck the tower and, in the ensuing fire, the spire collapsed; it has not yet been replaced. Shops and stalls have been constructed at the foot of the cathedral’s soot-blackened stone walls, between the mighty buttresses. When you step inside, you’ll see the pillars on either side are all out of alignment, sometimes leaning by more than six inches, even though they are a solid-looking 11 feet in diameter. Hundreds of monuments of London dignitaries and noblemen fill the spaces between the columns and cover the walls; among them King Ethelred the Unready, John of Gaunt, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Christopher Hatton, John Donne and Anthony van Dyck. Many have been defaced by vandalism or accidents. Much of the damage is a result of the Civil Wars, when the cathedral served as a stable for more than 800 horses – a sign of the contempt that Cromwell’s forces had for the old religion. At the same time the choir stalls, bishop’s throne and organ were destroyed, and saw-pits were dug in the floor. When a committee visits the cathedral in 1666 with a view to improving and updating it – and Christopher Wren first suggests topping the whole edifice with an enormous baroque dome – its members sadly conclude that the old building just won’t take the strain.
This then is the heart of London: a decaying mass of antiquity, adaptation and dilapidation, collapsing beneath the weight of its age. However, step beyond the city walls and into the suburbs and you will be amazed by the difference. First, pinch your nose and walk past the old warehouses and collapsing timber buildings that surround Fleet Ditch. As you cross the bridge over the River Fleet you will see all sorts of refuse floating in the swollen river below: ‘sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, dead cats and turnip tops’.3 Keep going westwards up Fleet Street; as you approach the bottom of Drury Lane and enter the area that will one day be called the West End, you will find yourself surrounded by tall flat-fronted houses that are made of fine red-brown bricks, with tall glass windows facing the streets. Between the windows are elaborate classical columns. The doorways are recessed and covered with elegant canopies and have glass panels above the doors to let light into the hallways within. Whole streets stand to a uniform height, so that ten or twelve town houses look more like a great palace than a series of private dwellings belonging to individual gentlemen and ‘men of ability’ (as contemporaries refer to the upwardly mobile). The eaves of these do not drip on a rainy day such as this, because they have gutters and downpipes that conduct the roof water into the streets. And, just as significantly, the streets themselves are not cobbled or dressed with gravel, but paved. They even have a camber, so that the rainwater does not run into a channel in the middle but into gullies on the sides, adjacent to a raised pavement.
Here, on the edge of the old city, the elegant town house has arrived.
What has brought on this transition? One of the reasons is simply the massive growth of London’s population. In 1550, there were about 50,000 Londoners. That number quadrupled to about 200,000 in 1600. It almost doubled again over the next fifty years, reaching about 375,000. Since 1650 it has increased by another 10 per cent, and now in 1661 stands at about 410,000. But the population increase only accounts for the need to provide more housing; it does not explain the change in the standard of architecture. For this you need to consider the attitude of the English monarchs, who reside at Whitehall Palace, at the end of the Strand. Queen Elizabeth I forbade the expansion of the city to the west of Drury Lane, just over half a mile from the palace. Her successors have similarly attempted to restrict all house building to previously developed sites. They have failed – partly because they have allowed the lords who own the land west of Drury Lane to buy licences to build on virgin soil, and partly because such fine new houses are now considered to contribute to ‘the honour of the nation’ and thus fall outside the scope of restrictive legislation.4 In other words, new houses in this area are not illegal as long as they are for the wealthy. But as these new buildings creep closer and closer to Whitehall, the royal family becomes more and more anxious about their architecture. Proclamations are issued stipulating how high and wide each house should be, how thick its walls, and how each one must fit in with its neighbour and thus form an elegant unity. This is why the lines of new housing look more like palaces than narrow town houses: the kings and their courtiers prefer to be surrounded by elegant buildings rather than the unplanned slums of the riff-raff.
The major showpiece is the Covent Garden piazza. The houses here are so different from the timber-framed buildings of the old city that you may be forgiven for thinking you are entering a different country. A wide, paved square greets you, with handsome three-storey mansions around the perimeter. On the south side are the gardens of Bedford House, the London home of William Russell, fifth earl of Bedford, whose father commissioned Inigo Jones to design the piazza in 1631. On the western side you find the parish church, also designed by Inigo Jones, and two brick-fronted town houses built by the fourth earl. To the north and east elegant residences have been developed by a string of private developers, all fronted with a 20ft-high arcade. Given that the fourth earl paid £2,000 to the king for the licence to build the piazza, and spent more than £4,000 on the church and £4,700 on his three town houses, you can see why Covent Garden in 1661 is a byword for high living.5 Anyone resident in the old heart of the city must feel like the poor relation of those rich enough to live here.
Covent Garden marks the beginning of modern town planning in Britain. It inspires many elegant developments to the west and north of the city. No one builds jettied wooden houses any more; everyone wants flat-fronted brick ones, with wide streets, drains, neat gutters and lots of light. Gabled roofs are out – people want pilasters with Corinthian or Ionic capitals and balustrades along the roof. Most of all, those with money want to live in a well-proportioned square. Near Holborn, Lord Hatton has laid out Hatton Garden as a handsome street with a square of fine town houses at one end. Even more impressive are the recent developments in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and in Great Queen Street, both built by William Newton. The Dutch artist Willem Schellinks, who visits London in 1661, describes Lincoln’s Inn Fields as ‘a large square lying behind Lincoln College, where law students are taught. Round this square are many fine palace-like houses, all with forecourts behind high walls; one can count there seventy entrances with stone pillars and double doors, and many of the nobility live there.’6 A few years later, Lorenzo Magalotti, a Florentine nobleman travelling in the train of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III, adds his words of praise, calling Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘one of the largest and handsomest squares in London, in respect to both the uniformity and size of its buildings’.7 If your architect manages to impress both the Dutch and the Florentines – two of the most urbane and sophisticated nations in Christendom – then you are creating quite an impression.
As a result of this, there are really two Londons: the old and the new. The old is largely confined within the ancient city walls and in the areas immediately outside the gates, as well as the suburb of Southwark, on the south side of the river. The new London envelops the old, running from Spitalfields in the north-east across to Hatton Garden – including the new developments to the south of Theobalds Road – and as far as Piccadilly. But the new city is not stopping there: if you walk all the way around the perimeter, you will see a great deal of building work under way. Southampton Square (better known to you as Bloomsbury Square), laid out by the earl of Southampton in 1660, is currently being developed as a piazza of high-quality houses. Although it is still possible to see ‘the Lines of Communication’ – the half-moon defences constructed to defend London during the Civil Wars – these will soon disappear under the new streets. At the south-west extreme of the conurbation, the palaces of Whitehall and Westminster still sprawl in all their medieval angularity, but you cannot help but feel it is only a matter of time before these too are engulfed in the great tide of construction that is lapping at the city walls.
The heavy rain does not abate all day. In his house in Seething Lane, to the north of the Tower, Samuel Pepys looks out at the downpour. He is the Clerk of the Acts, one of the most important positions in the administration of the navy, and a prosperous man with interests in a great many subjects, including scientific innovations. However, having already spent a couple of hours drinking wine and eating anchovies with Ralph Greatorex, a maker of mathematical instruments, he has had enough of discussing the mathematical properties of levers. He is now wishing the rain would stop, so the man could go. But if you come back to call on him the following Thursday, when the weather is fine and warm, you’ll find him in a much better frame of mind, sitting on his roof terrace with his neighbour, Sir William Penn, playing his lute and drinking wine (again). And on that sunny day the old city will give you quite a different experience from the wet Sunday you have just seen.
Although the heat means that there are few domestic fires burning, the many industrial ones around the city make the air acrid with the smell of coal smoke. But it is not just burning coal that will affect your nostrils. You will gag on the noxious fumes coming from the riverside and those parts of the city where tanning and fulling take place. In the main streets, the piles of dung left by the horses also emit an aroma. So do the splashes of urine where men have pissed in alleyways. As the heat of the day intensifies, these smells tend to be overpowered by the stench of the cesspits in the cellars. Pigeons fly out from under the eaves of the old houses, their droppings leaving a white streak on the timberwork. Rats scavenge behind barrels and under and over crates. Kitchen rubbish collectors lead their horse-drawn carts from door to door, collecting rotting matter. Rakers, whose business it is to empty private cesspits, lead their horse-drawn carts filled with dung-pots through the streets. Flocks of sheep and herds of cattle are driven on the hoof to the abattoirs and meat markets, where their dung and their blood add to the stink of the street.
You could say that walking through old London is still the same multi-sensory experience it was in the Middle Ages. In fact, it is even more overwhelming, due to the larger population. Ten times as many people live here these days as did in the late fourteenth century, and that means ten times as many sheep and cattle, and ten times as much human waste. And it is not just the permanent residents who contribute to the sense of overcrowding: hundreds of thousands of people come into town daily for business or pleasure – to go to market, attend a fair, do business in the city or see a play at one of the theatres. As a result, there are crowds of people and animals everywhere you go.
Just