Today I remember the men of the Royal Fusiliers who were killed in the Great War, in particular those of my grandad Charles Reuben Clements’s Battalion, the  24^th (2^nd  Sportsmen’s) …

The Royal Fusiliers (the City of London Regiment)

The Royal Fusiliers – the City of London Regiment – was founded as long ago  as  1685, in the aftermath of the failed Monmouth Rebellion, from two companies of guards from the Tower of London.  It went  on to see service in, among others, the American War of Independence,  the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the Crimean War, the “Indian Mutiny”, the Second Afghan War, the Boer War, the Great War, the   Second World War, and the Korean War, before being   incorporated into the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers in 1968. 

There is a  fine Fusilier Museum in  the Regimental Headquarters in the Tower of London, which houses  an extensive archive together with a range of artefacts, including the colours of the 24^th Battalion. 

There is also  a regimental   war memorial, dedicated  “to the glorious memory of the 22 000 Royal Fusiliers who fell in the Great War” at  Holborn Bars at the western entrance to  the City of London.  The memorial, designed by Alfred Toft, features the figure of a fusilier  on a parapet, “encircled by the vast radius of air that extends from head to bayonet tip to trailing foot”, with  “this framing circle … [rendering] … the sculpture …  both more powerful and more vulnerable, …  fixing our attention, as if through a sniper’s sights, on the soldier at its dead centre”. 

And,  in the city church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate (Holy Sepulchre London), on Newgate Street, a few minutes walk east of  the war memorial, there is a Royal Fusiliers  Memorial Chapel, and a Garden of Remembrance, dedicated in 1950.  

The 24^th (2^nd Sportsmen’s) Battalion

The 24^th (2^nd Sportsmen’s)  Battalion was  a “Service” Battalion, a part of Lord Kitchener’s “New Army”, raised in 1914,  in the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London, part of which served for a while as a Drill Hall. 

It  was raised by a remarkable woman named Emma Pauline Cunliffe-Owen.  Emma was born in 1863, to an English father, Sir Francis Philip Cunliffe-Owen, the Director of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert), and a German mother,  Jenny von Reitzenstein, whose father, a Baron, had been an  aide-de-camp to Frederick Wilhelm of Prussia.  She married her cousin, Edward Cunliffe-Owen, a barrister, in 1882, and the couple settled in London, and had four children together, before becoming estranged.  The story goes that in 1914, on the outbreak of war, Mrs Cunliffe-Owen chanced to meet two big-game hunters of her acquaintance while walking down Bond Street, and,  half-jokingly, asked them why they had not yet enlisted in the Army.  They in turn,  and in similar vein,  asked her why she had not yet raised her  own battalion.  And so she did.  She and her husband, with the sought approval of the Secretary-of-State for War, Lord Kitchener, advertised in The Times for “Sportsmen, aged 19 to 45, upper and middle class only”, to sign up at the Hotel Cecil “at once”, to constitute  a Sportsmen’s Battalion around fifteen hundred strong.   In  the event, the response was such that two Sportsmen’s Battalions were constituted, the 23^rd (1^st Sportsmen’s), the Royal Fusiliers, on September 25^th, 1914, and the 24^th (2^nd Sportsmen’s), on November 20^th. 

Before it began its  basic training at Hare Hall Camp in Romford, the 24^th Battalion was  marched through London for inspection, in the presence of Mrs Cunliffe-Owen, at  Horse Guards’ Parade.    After its basic training, the 24^th Battalion  deployed to the Western Front, and received its “first taste of the trenches”, in November, 1915.  It went on to fight  in the Battles of the Somme  in 1916, in  the Battles  of Arras and Cambrai in 1917, and finally in the   First and Second Battles of the Somme, 1918, the   Battles of the Hindenburg Line, and the Final Advance in Picardy, in 1918. 

The 24th Battalion sustained 1 853   casualties over the course of the war, including 557  fatalities.  It is believed that only six men from the 1914 cohort served with it throughout the Great War. 

Being  the Great War story of my maternal grandfather Charles Reuben – “Charlie” – Clements (CRC), a Private in the 24^th (2^nd Sportsmen’s) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers (the City of London Regiment).

Before the Great War

Charles Reuben Clements  was born at  home in Hammersmith in Middlesex on January 12^th, 1896, the son of Charles Ernest Clements, a carman and contractor, and his wife  Jessie Clements, nee Percy, a part-time music teacher.    Home was 109 Yeldham Road, a small end-of-terrace Victorian house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac off Fulham Palace Road, with a large yard attached, where it is believed that Charles Senior kept his horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  Charles Junior received his  education at Latymer School in Hammersmith.  However,  he was forced  to leave school early, aged seventeen, in 1913, after his father died suddenly, aged only forty-two, in order to enter the workplace – as an assistant in a gentlemen’s shop – to help provide an  income for his  family. 

At  this time, his  family consisted of him; his widowed mother, familiarly known to him as “Ma”; and his two younger sisters, Jessie Winifred (“Jess”), who had been born in 1901, and Lilian Edith (“Lily”), born in 1904.  His elder brother John Edwin, who had been born in 1893, had  died in 1894; and his younger brother, John Percy, who had been born in 1900, in 1901.  

CRC was evidently a conscientious man, with a strong work-ethic.  He never gambled, although he did “do the Pools”, which he considered to be a game of  skill rather than chance.  And, after an unfortunate early experience at  a friend’s coming-of-age party, he never drank.  He had a dry sense of humour.  When my mother wrote to inform him of my – premature – birth in 1958, he wrote back that he was “delighted of course to hear that Robert Wynn is progressing so well” and “flattered at first to hear he resembled myself but on reading  … that he was short of …  hair and putting on weight  am rather in doubt”.  In his free  time, he enjoyed a range of sporting pursuits.

The Great War

CRC voluntarily enlisted   in the 24^th (2^nd Sportsmen’s) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers on May 30^th, 1915, and was given the regimental number 3526.  

It is evident from his  surviving “Medical History” (Army Form B178), in the National Archives, dated June 4^th, 1915, that he lied about his age when he volunteered, claiming to be twenty-two when he was actually only nineteen – possibly because he looked about sixteen.  Also, that he was only 5’6” tall, and only weighed 9st4lbs.

After enlistment, CRC  was sent to Hare Hall Camp in Romford in Essex, where the 24^th Battalion had just set up its base, for training.   He emerged from training as a Private soldier and 1^st Class Signaller.  As a Signaller, one of his responsibilities   on the battle-front would be to  relay  communications.  In the Great War, this was generally done by using field telephone networks, rather than by the hitherto conventional means of signalling with flags (using Semaphore), or with lamps or mirrors, or with a Heliograph (using Morse Code).  It  would  involve  the laying and constant  repairing  of miles of telephone cable in and around front-line trenches, often under fire.   And it would be dangerous work. In April, 1917, the then  Signals Officer for the 24^th Battalion, Second Lieutenant Cyril Francis Stafford,  would suffer a   mortal wound  while supervising the laying of telephone cables near Vimy Ridge  while under heavy shell-fire.  Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers wrote, “Signallers who went into attacks with their companies had to muck in with the scrapping until the objective was taken and then if they were still on their feet were generally converted into runners [tasked with  delivering messages by hand].  A runner’s job was very dangerous: he might have to travel over ground from where the enemy had just been driven and which now was being heavily shelled.  In  shell holes here and there might be some of the enemy who had been missed by the mopping-up party or who had been shamming dead; they would pop up and start sniping at him.  I remember one show we were in … where extra runners had been detailed off for the day, losing fifteen out of twenty”. 

CRC went on to serve with the 24^th Battalion on the Western Front  for three years, fighting in the Battles of the Somme  in, 1916; in the Battles of Arras and  Cambrai in 1917; and in the First and Battles of the Somme, and  the Battle of Havrincourt, the first of the   Battles of the Hindenburg Line, in 1918.  At one point during the First Battles of the Somme, 1918, specifically on March 23^rd, 1918, he  would have been very close to where his future brother-in-law, my paternal grandfather, Able-Bodied Seaman Francis Wynn Jones (FWJ) of the Anson Battalion of 63^rd  (Royal Naval) Division, was captured by the advancing Germans, somewhere between Havrincourt and Bertincourt, on the Flesquieres-Havrincourt Salient. 

According to his “Casualty Form – Active Service”, CRC was twice treated for “d. C.T. [?disease of Connective Tissue] Foot” – which I take to be “Trench Foot” – in the Winter of  1916/17.  The first time was in the field,  at No. 47 C.C.S. (Casualty Clearing Station),  in Beauval, somewhat to the  west of Beaumont-Hamel, on November 27^th, 1916.     The  second time was to the rear, at No. 8 Red X.H. (Red Cross Hospital), in Paris-Plage (Le Touquet), on the coast, near Etaples Camp, on December 27^th.     CRC was granted two ten-day periods of home leave over the three-year course of his service, the first between January 20^th-30^th, 1917, and the second between February 12^th-22^nd, 1918.

CRC was reported in the “Nominal roll of casualties sustained during month of SEPTEMBER 1918” in the “Battalion War Diary” as having been killed on September 10^th! 

In fact, according to his “Casualty Record – Active Service” (Army Form B103), he  had been seriously wounded by shrapnel, or possibly shell fragments,  in the left arm (elbow) and leg (thigh, knee and ankle) on 12^th.  He was carried from the field to  the  5^th F.A. or Field Ambulance, and from there he was  taken – either by an actual ambulance or a  horse-drawn cart – to No. 46C.C.S or Casualty Clearing Station at Bac du Sud, near Bailleulval, just south-west of Arras.  From No. 46 C.C.S. at Bac du Sud, CRC was  transferred to  No. 12G.H. or General Hospital   in Rouen on September 13^th.  

And from there he was  repatriated to the U.K., on board His Majesty’s Hospital Ship “Formosa”, on 15^th.  He spent  the remaining two months of the war receiving treatment in hospitals in Keighley and Shoreham, and some time after the war convalescing in the  Star and Garter  Home in Richmond in Surrey.    On September 20^th, 1918, while he was at Shoreham, an X-Ray was taken of his wounded arm, and, according to his medical records,  “a piece of shrapnel was found, localised and measured”, but “the surgeon thought an operation inadvisable + it was left in situ”.  A later “Statement As To Disability” noted  “metal fragments still in arm”, and occasional “shooting pains”, on account of which he was entitled to  a Disability Pension of “5/- Dept Allowance + 3/6d  allot weekly”.    He had “copped a Blighty one”.  His only visible scar was the size and shape of a teardrop, under his eye.

CRC was almost certainly  wounded in an  operation  in the Battle of Havrincourt,  the first of the Battles of the Hindenburg Line, which took place on September 12^th, 1918.  The “Battalion War Diary” contains a narrative of operations.  According to this narrative, ‘D’ Company was subjected to “ … a very heavy barrage …  and Captain CHESTON  posted his men in shell-holes well in advance of the trench line [an old German defensive tactic devised on the Somme in 1916] and saved a good many casualties by doing  so as the trenches were very badly knocked about indeed”.  ‘C’ Company “ … tumbled up against quite unexpected German opposition in the portion of FAGAN SUPPORT … west of the Canal with several machine guns firing from shell-hole positions in the triangle to the south between it and the Canal [the Canal du Nord, which formed part  of the Hindenburg Line]”.  And ‘B’ Company “had to fight for every yard of the 700 of trench to be cleared … [and] …  did so in a way that speaks for itself of the spirit of the Company and its leaders.   … .  Twelve Machine Guns (heavy and light) were … taken by the Company, probably many others were over-ran and overlooked”.    The 24^th  Battalion’s total casualties in the action were recorded as “KILLED 8 + WOUNDED 49 + MISSING 1 = 58”.  The  men  recorded as killed were Privates  Frederick Child, W. Gowland, C. Hamilton, John Alfred  Mayes and Percy Charles Pereira on September 12^th, and Lance-Corporal Robert Burns, and Privates George Louis  Parris and John Robert  Warriner on 13^th; and the missing man was Private F. Coley. 

After the Great War

After the war, in 1919, CRC returned to work,   in Harrods, a luxury department store in Knightsbridge in the fashionable West End of London, which at the time provided  employment for  large numbers of  ex-Servicemen. 

In 1921, he came   to own and manage his own gentlemen’s outfitter’s shop at 180 South Ealing  Road in Ealing in Middlesex, and to live in the modest rooms above.  As  befitting for  someone in that line of  work, he was always very smartly  turned out.  In 1933, he bought his first car, a  “Baby Austin”, and thereafter spent a certain amount of time  each year travelling round the south of England selling his wares.  Besides his retail business, he also dabbled in property. 

CRC also returned to his sporting pursuits. 

He  played football for the amateur  side Ealing Wednesday, so-called  because most of the players were independent shopkeepers, and they preferred to play on early closing day, which was Wednesday, rather than on Saturday, so as not to lose their best trading day’s takings. 

The team had a particularly successful season in 1923-24, ending up as winners of the Ealing Hospital Cup, the Harrow Charity Shield, the Kingston and District Wednesday League, the Philanthropic Cup, and the Roose Francis Cup, and as runners-up in the Hounslow League and the Middlesex Mid-Week Cup.   They also won the London Mid-Week Cup in 1930-31.  CRC reportedly  also played on an ad hoc basis  for the professional side Fulham, who were in the Second Division of the English League, in  the early 1920s.   However, he always  supported, and would have liked   to play for, his local team, Brentford.  Notwithstanding this, he never really seriously  thought about  becoming a professional footballer, because the pay was poor – difficult to believe as that is today.   He  did, though, represent  the Thames Valley Harriers at long-distance running, and Middlesex at bowls, both, again, on an amateur basis.  He also played tennis to a high standard, including at the prestigious Queen’s Club in West Kensington in London, which, incidentally  his father had helped to build in 1886.  Here, he played with Fred Perry, who went on to win three Wimbledon Men’s Singles titles, in 1934, 1935 and 1936. 

On October 21^st, 1921, CRC  married Gladys Mabel Millard, familiarly known to him as “Mabs”. 

“Mabs’s” mother,  Sarah Ann Millard, incidentally, had served as a Voluntary Aid Detachment or V.A.D. nurse on the Home Front during the Great War.  In   1934, “Mabs”  had  a baby daughter, Peggy Anne, my mother.  The family would come to  enjoy taking in  not only sporting events but also sundry other entertainments such as comedy shows or musicals at the Chiswick Empire or the “Q” Theatre (in Kew), or, on special occasions,  in the West End.  During the Second World War of 1939-45, CRC  joined the Middlesex Home Guard (of “Dad’s Army” fame),  one of whose duties was to help to man  a heavy anti-aircraft  gun battery in Gunnersbury Park.  According to one family story, which may or may not be entirely true, at the beginning of the Vergeltungswaffen or Vengeance-Weapon campaign directed against  London, in June, 1944, he and his comrades, while attempting to shoot down a low-flying V-1 flying bomb or “Doodlebug”, instead inadvertently shot up  part of a nearby building!  

After the Second World War,   in 1954, his daughter Peggy Anne married Emrys Wynn Jones.  Then, in 1956,  his wife “Mabs” died; and,  in 1957, he  married his second wife, a divorcee, Alice Elizabeth Ashton, nee Gooding. 

CRC remained close throughout his later life to a number of his comrades from the Great War, especially to  William “Billy” Bentley, who he regarded as once having saved his life, and who was his best friend; and to Archibald  “Archie” Bannister, who was his best man.  The old soldiers  would all meet up in London every November, on the Friday closest to Remembrance Sunday, and would then all go together to the Cenotaph in Whitehall to attend the  National Service of Remembrance.  Like so many of his generation, CRC  scarcely ever spoke, at least outside this closed circle, of his wartime experiences.  However,  he did  once allude to the suffering of the horses on the Western Front (he had grown up  around horses).  He  never  committed to paper any of the thoughts or feelings he might have had about the war.  These he took with him to his grave.  

CRC died, after a sudden unexplained illness, on April 27^th, 1958, aged sixty-two, and was cremated in Mortlake Cemetery on May 2^nd.  I was only three months old when he died, and, sadly, have nothing to remember him by bar these bare  facts about his life, some faded   photographs, and  replacements for his lost 1914-15 Star, British War and Victory medals (“Pip, Squeak and Wilfred”).  I am strangely comforted, though, by the knowledge that he would have had memories of me.  My mother told me that she took me with her to see him when he was in what turned out to be his final days, and that he regained consciousness long enough to recognise  me,  and to lay his hand on my head,  before drifting away again, for the final time.

Today I remember Private Ernest Jackson of the 24th (2nd Sportsmen’s) Battalion, the Royal Fusiliers (the City of London Regiment), the last man from the battalion to be killed  in the Great War, aged thirty-two.

Ernest Jackson was born in Covent Garden  in central London in 1886, the son of Edward William Jackson and his wife Mary Anne Jackson, nee Hill.  He was 5’7” tall, with brown hair and green eyes. Before the war, he had been employed as an  errand-boy.  He had also spent two years in H.M. Prison Wandsworth for larceny.   

He was conscripted into the Army in July, 1916, and sent to the Western Front in the November of that year.  He had later gone Absent Without Official Leave in 1917, for which he had been sentenced to  two years imprisonment with hard labour.  Upon his early release, he had  gone A.W.O.L. again in September, 1918, near Flesquieres, and yet again in October, 1918, near Noyelles. 

On  October 8^th, 1918, Jackson was   court-martialled on the capital charges of desertion and “shamefully casting  away his arms, ammunition and equipment  in the presence of the enemy” on the second of these occasions.   He argued in his defence that he suffered from “mental disease caused by worries”, and added that both his parents died in an asylum.   But he was shown no mercy, and indeed not even given a psychiatric evaluation.  Rather, he was summarily convicted, and sentenced to death, his own Commanding Officer insisting that “cowardly action of this kind should be made an example of”.   

Private Ernest Jackson was shot at dawn only four days before the end of the Great War, on November 7^th, 1918.  He  is buried in Romeries Communal Cemetery Extension, with nothing on his headstone to indicate his fate.  He is not mentioned either in the “Battalion War Diary”, or in the volume of “Soldiers Died in the Great War … ” pertaining to the Royal Fusiliers.   

Incidentally, over the course of the Great War, 346  British and Empire soldiers –  and others subject to the Army Act – were executed, following  capital courts-martial that, in many cases, as in Private Jackson’s, essentially  ignored   mitigating evidence offered on their behalf.   Nearly a century later, on November 7^th, 2006, the British Government issued posthumous  pardons to  the 306 who had been executed for offences other than murder or mutiny, including the 284 who had been executed for  desertion or  cowardice.  These men are  also commemorated on the “Shot at Dawn” Memorial in the National Memorial Arboretum in Alrewas in Staffordshire. 

The last in the series on the history of London up to the time of the Great Fire of 1666, largely taken from my book, “The Flower Of All Cities” (Amberley, 2019) …

The Aftermath of the Great Fire of London

Would the City ever be rebuilt, or be the same again?   

Well, of course it would, not least because the prosperity of the City was essential not only to that of the country as a whole but also to that of powerful men with vested interests, watching anxiously from the sidelines as “day by day the City’s wealth flowed out of the gate” to other boroughs. 

The Mayor initiated the process essentially straight away, within weeks commencing  a detailed survey and map of the fire-damaged area of the City to assist with the assessment of compensation claims, and to use as a  template for reconstruction plans.  The survey was actually commissioned by the King, Charles II, in his “Proclamation …  to Prohibit the Rebuilding of Houses after the Great Fire of London without Conforming to the General Regulations therein premised”.  His actual words were as follows: “[W]e do hereby direct, that the  lord mayor and court of aldermen do, with all possible expedition, cause an exact survey to be made and taken of the whole ruins occasioned by the late lamentable fire, to the end that it may appear to whom all the houses and ground did in truth belong … .  … [W]e shall cause a plot or model to be made for the … ruined places; which being well examined by those persons who have most concernment as well as experience, we make no question but all men will be pleased with it, and very willingly conform to those orders and rules which shall be agrees for the pursuing thereof”.   Among the other stipulations in the “Proclamation … ” were one reading: “ … [T]hat no man  whatsoever shall presume to erect any house or building, great or small, but of brick or stone … ”; and another, that “ … Fleet Street, Cheapside, Cornhill, and all other eminent and notorious streets, shall be of such a breadth, as may, with God’s blessing, prevent the mischief that one side may suffer if the other be on fire … “.  Priority was to be given to the reconstruction of churches: “ … [W]e do heartily pray unto Almighty God, that he will infuse it into the hearts of men, speedily to endeavour by degrees to re-edify some of those many churches, which, in this lamentable fire, have been burned down and defaced … ”. 

The survey was undertaken by one John Leake; and the map drafted by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77), a Bohemian who had travelled widely before eventually settling in London, and  earning a reputation as an engraver and print-maker of some considerable skill, specialising in landscape scenes.  Another map was made in 1666 by Doornick; a later one in 1673 by Blome (and yet later ones, documenting the progress of the rebuilding,  in 1676 by Ogilby and Morgan, and in 1682 by Morgan). 

A number of revolutionary reconstruction plans for the City were submitted, by, among others, Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and John Evelyn.   Any one of these plans,  if implemented,  would have given it a radically new look and feel, much more like  that of the great European cities of the day, such as Paris and  Rome, with their broad boulevards and   open piazzas – Evelyn wrote that “In the disposure of the streets, due consideration should be had, what are the competent breadths for commerce and intercourse, cheerfulness and state”.  But these  plans were soon abandoned on the grounds of practicality and expediency in favour of  one involving much less legal wrangling and groundwork, and much more like the old one.  Note also that, according to the Earl of Clarendon, “[V]ery many, with more expedition than can be  conceived, set up little sheds of brick and timber upon the ruins of their own houses, where they chose to inhabit rather than in more convenient places, though they knew they could not long reside in those new buildings”.  So in some ways the City that might have been never came to be, and  that that had been would come  to be again:  for the most part neither  particularly beautiful nor harmonious, but, rather,   “lived in”  and fractious; and yet, familiar and loved.  The  new City was to differ from the old one, though, in several  important respects.  The old narrow streets would  be replaced with new wide ones, designed to  simultaneously hinder the spread of fire and unencumber the flow of traffic.  In accordance with the aforementioned Royal Proclamation of 1666 and the  “Act for the Rebuilding of the City of London” of 1667 (further acts would follow in 1707, 1709 and 1774), old  houses would  be replaced by new ones of four categories of standard build, of fire-proof stone and brick rather than timber: those of the first category, fronting “by-streets and lanes”, of two storeys; those of the second category, fronting “streets and lanes of note, and the Thames”, of three storeys; those of the third category, fronting “high and principal streets”, of four storeys, with storey heights specified; and those of the fourth category, designed for” people of quality”, also of four storeys, although with storey heights unspecified.      The old  breeding-grounds for disease would  be swept aside in the process, although incidentally rather than  by design.  As another incidental, the old organic economy would be replaced by a modern mineral economy, considerably ahead of its time, fuelled by (sea-)coal rather than wood.

The committee appointed by the Court and the City to oversee and implement the chosen reconstruction plan included  the aforementioned Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the aforementioned Robert Hooke (1635-1703),  and four others, namely, Hugh May, Roger Pratt, Peter Mills and Edward Jerman. 

Wren was an architect and a  member of an aristocratic family who had finally found favour in the Restoration, after years in the wilderness during the Protectorate and Commonwealth. He was also an anatomist and astronomer (one wonders whether he, like Sartre’s autodidact, acquired his learning by reading an encyclopaedia, starting with the letter “A”); a follower of the “New Philosophy” of Francis Bacon; and an early member of the Royal Society.   He was, in short, an archetypal Renaissance Man, and, most definitely, the right man, in the right place, at the right time – an unusually happy conjunction in the history of the City. 

Hooke was similarly an  architect and surveyor.  He was also a pioneer microscopist and polymath, although curmudgeonly as well as brilliant, and memorably described by  Samuel Pepys as  “the most,  and promises the least, of any man in the world that I ever saw”.  In 1665, he published a book on his microscopical observations, described by Pepys as “the most  ingenious … that ever I read in my life”.

Wren and his  office set about their reconstruction work as speedily  as practicable, so as to provide  the City with the opportunity of re-establishing itself with the minimum of delay and loss.  In all, they rebuilt 51 churches – 49  within the walls and 2 immediately without –  that had been destroyed in the Great Fire, that is, a little over half of the total number of 86 (together with St Clement Danes on the Strand, which had actually survived the fire).  They  also rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, and numerous other public and private buildings.  Most of the rebuilding work was   in  the – English –  High Renaissance or Baroque style.  That on the church of St Magnus the Martyr resulted in  what T.S. Eliot described – in his 1922 poem “The Waste Land” – as an “inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold”.  Much of the work was completed within a few short years; the cost covered by a tax on coal imposed by Act of Parliament.  Samuel Pepys even noted in his diary as early as  December 24^th, 1666: “  So … to the [rebuilt] Upper ‘Change, which is almost as good as the old one; only shops are but on one side. 

Of  the 51 churches rebuilt  by Wren, 30 are still standing, together with St Paul’s Cathedral, and 21 are not.  Of  the 21 that are no longer  standing, 17,   far more than one might have hoped, were demolished on the orders of  our own  town planners – in some cases justifiably, for safety reasons; in others, at least arguably  so,  either for security reasons, or to allow for site redevelopment; but in still others,  simply because they had been deemed, under the incomprehensibly philistine Union of Benefices Act of 1860, to be surplus to requirements!  Only 4, far fewer than one might have feared, were destroyed during the Blitz of the Second World War, although  a number of others were also damaged to varying extents at this time, some of which were subsequently restored, and  some left as empty shells.  Two, St Mary Aldermanbury and St Stephen Coleman Street, were destroyed,  and a number of others damaged, on a single, fateful night, 29^th/30^th  December, 1940, when tens of thousands of incendiary bombs  were dropped on an essentially unguarded City (St Paul’s was saved: some would say, due to divine intervention; others, due to the heroism of the St Paul’s Watch).    At  least many of the  original plans of the recently lost churches still survive, as do some later images, including photographs. Remarkably, St Mary Aldermanbury has been  rebuilt, using   Wren’s plans, and material salvaged from his church, on the campus of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri (where Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech).

The most famous of Wren’s many  famous achievements  was undoubtedly the reconstruction of St Paul’s Cathedral, eventually completed after thirty-five years’ work  in 1710/1.  The cathedral is faced in plain Portland Stone, wonderfully reflective of the City’s light and mood.  A staggering 66000 tons of the stone  was used to face St Paul’s, having been quarried in Portland in Dorset and  brought round the coast and up the Thames to London in barges.  (Portland Stone was also used in the construction of essentially all the other churches rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire, although it was first used in London in the construction of the Banqueting House in Whitehall by Inigo Jones).  St Paul’s it is crowned  with a glorious and iconic dome, making it unique among all the cathedrals of England.     The stone-work is by the Master Masons  Joshua Marshall and the brothers Edward and Thomas Strong and their team, overseen by Grinling Gibbons; the wood-work by the Master Carpenter John Langland and his team, also overseen by Grinling Gibbons; and the demi-grisaille paint-work inside  the dome by the Painter-Stainer James Thornhill and his team.  Wren’s simple epitaph inside the cathedral reads “Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice”, meaning “Reader, should you seek his memorial, look about you”.  On the pediment above  the  south door is a stone bearing  the image of a Phoenix rising from the ashes, together with  the inscription “Resurgam”, meaning “I shall rise again” (a different stone bearing the same inscription had happened to be found among  the smouldering ruins of the old  cathedral – a positive portent if ever there was one). 

And so, out of the ashes arose  a new London. 

The last-but-one in the series on the history of London up to the time of the Great Fire of 1666, largely taken from my book, “The Flower Of All Cities” (Amberley, 2019) …

On the evening of Saturday 1st September, 1666, the King’s baker Thomas Farriner, whose premises were on Pudding Lane, went to bed evidently leaving the fire that heated his oven still burning, in contravention of the curfew law passed six hundred  years previously  by William I (the word curfew deriving from the Norman French “couvre-feu”, meaning, literally, “cover fire”).  In the early hours of the following morning, Sunday 2^nd September, a spark from the fire settled on a pile of firewood stacked nearby for use on the following working day, and set it  alight.  Flames soon engulfed  the house,  and although  Farriner  and his family were able to  escape by climbing through an upstairs window and along the outside of the building to a neighbouring one, his unfortunate maid-servant, being afraid of heights, stayed put, and burned to death, becoming the first of – reportedly – mercifully few to die in what was about  to become the Great Fire.  According to some sources, her name was Rose.

The fire soon spread from Farriner’s bakery to nearby Fish Street Hill, burning down the “Star Inn”, where flammable faggots and straw were stacked up in the yard, and the church of St Margaret  Fish Street Hill; and thence on to Thames Street, where wood, cloth sails, rope, tar and coal were stacked up on the river-front.  It  went on to take a firm hold of the City, largely built of wooden houses, weatherproofed with pitch; and separated by only a few feet at ground level, and even less at roof level, on account of the”jettying”  of successive storeys, allowing flames to  leap from one to another with ease. The  spread of the fire was further facilitated by the weather, with the strong easterly wind that had been creaking and rattling shop signs on their hinges now fanning it and carrying it towards the heart of the City; everything in its path tinder dry from the preceding exceptionally long, hot, dry summer, which also meant that the supply of water with which to fight it was short.  (Note, incidentally, that most of the old signs of London were destroyed during the Great Fire, and the few that remained had to be taken down after a Proclamation of 1667 ordered that they not hang across the street, as had been the fashion, but instead that they be fixed to buildings.)

We are fortunate to have a number of vivid contemporary eye-witness accounts of what followed, the best-known being those of the aforementioned John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys.  We also have a number of more or less contemporary paintings of the fire at its height.  One of these, attributed to Waggoner, now hangs in the Guildhall Art Gallery; and another, by an anonymous artist, in the Museum of London.  Other  paintings of the fire and its aftermath also survive, although mainly outside London.  A significant proportion are by foreign artists, one of whom entitled his work “Sic Punit”, or “Thus He Punishes”  –  remember that England was at war with the Netherlands and France at the time of the fire.

John Evelyn wrote of the spread of the fire, on September 2^nd:  “[W]ith my Wife and Son, took Coach & went to the bank side in Southwark, where we beheld that dismal speectaccle, the whole Citty in dreadful flames neere the Water side, & … consumed … from the bridge … towards Cheape side … ”.  On September 3^rd:   “The fire having continud all this night (if I may call that night, which was as light as day for 10 miles round …) when conspiring with a fierce Eastern Wind, in a very drie season, I went on foote to the same place, when I saw the whole of the … Citty burning … to Bainard Castle, and … taking hold of St Paule’s Church, to which the Scaffalds contributed exceedingly.  The Conflagration was so universal,  & the people so astonish’d, that from the beginning … they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so … there was nothing heard or scene but crying out & lamentation, & running about like distracted creatures … as it burned … , … leaping after a prodigious manner from house to house … at great distance one from the other, for the heate … had even ignited the aire, & … devoured after an incredible manner houses, furniture, & everything: Here we saw the Thames coverd with goods floating, … barges & boates laden with what some had time & courage to save … [and] Cartes &c. carrying out to the fields, which for many miles were strewed with movables of all sorts, & Tents … to shelter both people & what goods they could get away.  O … miserable & calamitous spectacle … : God grant mine eyes never behold the like [again], who now saw ten thousand houses all in one flame, … the fall of houses, towers & churches … .  Thus I left it … burning, a resemblance of Sodome … : London was, but is no more … ”.  And on September 4^th: “The burning still rages; now gotten as far as the Inner Temple, al Fleetestreete, old baily, Ludgate Hil, Warwick Lane, Newgate, Paules Chaine, Wattling-streete now flaming & … the stones of Paules flew lie Granados, the Lead melting down the streets in a stream, & the very pavements … glowing with a fiery rednesse, so as nor horse nor man was able to tread on them, … : the … Wind still more impetuously driving the flames forewards: nothing but the almighty power of God … able to stop them, for vaine was the help of man”.  Fortunately,  the spread of the fire across the river to Southwark was halted at a gap in the buildings on London Bridge that formed a natural firebreak  – ironically,  the result of another fire some thirty years previously. 

And Samuel Pepys wrote, on September 2^nd:   “ … I down to the waterside, … and there saw a lamentable fire. … Everybody endeavouring to remove their goods … into the river or …  into lighters that lay off; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the waterside to another”.    And: “Having stayed, and in an hours time seen the fire rage every way, and nobody to my sight endeavouring to quench it, … to Whitehall and there up to the King’s closet in the Chapel, where I did give them an account that dismayed them all, and the word was carried to the King.  So I was called for, and did tell the King … what I saw; and that unless His Majesty did command houses to be pulled down, nothing could stop the fire.  … [T]he King commanded me to go to my Mayor from him, and command him spare no houses”.  And at the King’s behest, he returned to the scene, and:  “At last met my Mayor in Canning Streete … with a hankercher about his neck.  To the King’s message, he cried like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do?  I am spent!  People will not obey me.  I have been pull[ing] down houses.  But fire overtakes us faster than we can do it’”.    Famously, Pepys went on to write, on September 4^th: “Sir W. Pen[n] and I did dig … [a pit] …  , and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese”. 

Pulling down or even blowing up buildings to create firebreaks eventually proved a partially successful strategy in fighting the fire.  Evelyn again, on September 4^th:  “[T]he blowing up of … houses, as might make a [wider] gap than any yeat made by the ordinary method of pulling them downe with Engines: This some stout Seamen proposed … : … was … commanded to be practised, & my concern being particularly for the Hospital of st. Bartholemeus neere Smithfield, … made me al the more diligent to promote it … : So as it pleased Almighty God by abating of the Wind, & the industrie of people, now when all was lost, infusing a new Spirit into them … the furie of it began sensibly  to abate, … so as it came no farther than the Temple West-ward, nor than the enterance of Smithfield North … ; … It … brake out again in the Temple: but the courage of the multitude persisting, & innumerable houses blown up with Gunpowder, such gaps & desolations were soone made, … as the back fire did not so vehemently urge upon the rest, as formerly”.  And Pepys again, also on September 4^th: “Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower Street, … which at first did frighten people more than any thing; but it stopped the fire when it was done … ”.  And on September 5^th: “[G]oing to the fire, I find, by the blowing up of houses … by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it … ; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and … was there quenched”.  Unfortunately the strategy was also one that was implemented too late to make much of a difference to the outcome (probably for fear of law-suits from “avaratious” property owners). 

The fire eventually essentially halted in its own tracks, spent, after the wind dropped, on the fourth day, September 5^th, although in places there were also some fresh outbreaks on  the fifth day, September 6^th, when Pepys wrote: “Up about five o’clock … , … to go out, … to see how the fire is, to … Bishop’s-gate, where no fire had been near, and now there is one broke out: which did give great grounds to people, and to me too, to think that there is some kind of plot in this, … but … we did put it out in a little time; so that all was well again”.    

In  the immediate aftermath of the fire, on September 7^th, Pepys went on to write: “Up by five o’clock; and, blessed be God! find all well; and by water to [Paul’s] Wharfe.  Walked thence, and saw all the towne burned, and a miserable sight of Paul’s church, with all the roofs fallen, and the body of the quire fallen into St Fayth’s; Paul’s school also, Ludgate, and Fleet Street. My father’s house, and the church, and a good part of the Temple the like”.  And, equally if not more fretfully:  “I home late to Sir W. Pen’s, who did give me a bed … ; … but still both sleeping and waking had a fear of fire in my heart, that I took little rest.  People do all the world over cry out of the simplicity of my Lord Mayor in … this business of the fire, laying it all upon him.  A proclamation is come out for markets to be kept at Leadenhall and … several other places about the town; and Tower Hill, and all churches to be set open to receive poor people”.  Also on September 7^th, Evelyn wrote, almost elegiacally: “I wente this morning on foote … thro the Late fleete streete, Ludgate hill, by St Paules, Cheape side, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, & out to Morefields, thence thro Cornehill, &c; with extraordinary difficulty, clambring over mountains of yet smoking rubbish, & frequently mistaking where I was … : in the meane time his Majestie got to the Tower by Water, to demolish the houses about … which …  had they taken fire, & attaq’d the white Towre, where the Magazines of Powder lay, would undoubtedly have … renderd … demolition …  even …  at many miles distance:  At my returne I was infinitely concerned to find that goodly Church of St Paules now a sad ruine, & that beautiful Portico (for structure comparable to any in Europe, as not long before repaird by the late King) now rent in pieces, flakes of vast Stone Split in sunder, & nothing remaining intire … .   … It was astonishing to see what immense stones the heat had in a manner Calcin’d, so as all the ornaments, Columns, freezes, Capitels & projectures of massie Portland stone flew off, even to the very roofe, where a Sheete of Leade covering no lesse than 6 akers by measure, being totally mealted, the ruines of the Vaulted roof, falling brake into St Faithes, which being filled with …  books … belonging to the Stationers … carried thither for safty, they were all consumed burning for a week following … .  … Thus lay in ashes that most venerable Church, one of the antientest Pieces of early Piety in the Christian world, beside neere 100 more: The lead, yronworke, bells, plate &c all mealted: the exquisitely wrought Mercers Chapell, the Sumptuous Exchange, the august fabrique of Christ church, all the rest of the Companies Halls, sumptuous buildings, Arches, Enteries, all in dust.  The fountains dried up & ruind, whilst the very waters remained boiling; the Voragos of subterranean Cellars, Wells & Dungeons, formerly Warehouses, still burning in stench & dark clouds of smoke like hell, so as in five or six miles traversing about, I did not see one load of timber unconsum’d, nor many stones but were calcind white as snow, so as the people who now walked about the ruines, appeard like men in some dismal desart, or rather in some greate City, lay’d waste by an impetuous & cruel Enemy … ” .

Recriminations rapidly followed, with  the Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth singled out for criticism over his initial complacency and subsequent indecisiveness (when first informed of the fire, he is reported to have remarked that a woman might have pissed it out, which indeed she might, if she had acted promptly, but he did not, and must soon have come to rue his rash words).  The rudimentary fire brigade was also criticised, for acting in an un-coordinated fashion, and,  in its desperation, digging up roads and cutting pipes to get at the water to fill its  buckets, in so doing cutting off the supply to others.  This was a little unfair, given the chaotic situation they found themselves confronted with, and the tools at their disposal with which to deal with it, including primitive fire engines that looked and likely  handled more like tea trolleys, and extinguishers or “squirts” that looked like ear syringes!   Eventually, the Great Fire was ascribed  to an act of God, albeit one that the wit and hand of man would attempt to ensure was never repeated.  At  the time, though, many   falsely believed it  to have been deliberately set by a fanatical Papist or Saboteur.  And, sadly,   a Frenchman, Robert Hubert, was executed for having set it, after having confessed, probably under duress, and been convicted  in a court of law – in part on the evidence of  members of Farriner’s family, who had their own reasons to attach  the blame to  such a convenient scapegoat.   Evidence came to light shortly after his execution that Hubert had not even been in the country at the time of the fire.

The  stark fact remained that the fire had largely destroyed the City that had witnessed so much history in the making.  Eighty percent of the area within the walls was more or less completely burned out, and only the extreme north and east had survived substantially  intact (the walls had essentially confined the fire to the City within, although some areas without to the west had also been affected). 

St Paul’s Cathedral was gutted by the fire, although, somewhat miraculously,  some of its many memorials survived, …

… including Nicholas Stone’s funeral effigy of the cleric and metaphysical poet John Donne – albeit with   supposed scorch-marks around its base.  (Stone, incidentally, studied under Bernini.)   

A total of 86 churches were also lost  – 84   within the walls and 2 immediately without (St Andrew Holborn and St Bride Fleet Street).  So were 45  Livery Company Halls, Baynard’s Castle, the Custom House, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and the Royal Wardrobe, not to mention an  estimated  13,200 residences and places  of business.  One Thomas Vincent wrote vividly thus of the loss of the Royal Exchange: “The Royal Exchange itself, the glory of the merchants [was] invaded with much violence.  And when once the fire was entered, how quickly did it spread round the galleries, filling them with flames [and] giving forth flaming volleys … .  By and by, down fell all the [statues of] Kings [in the alcoves] upon their faces, and the greatest  part of the building after them, with such a noise as was dreadful and astonishing”.  Damage to property and trade was on an entirely unprecedented scale, as was associated homelessness and loss of livelihood.  The cost of the fire damage was  estimated at around ten million pounds  by John Strype in 1720.  In modern terms, this equates to anywhere between  one billion pounds  (according to  the National Archives “Currency Convertor”) and tens of billions  (according to the Association of British Insurers).  None of the cost of the fire damage was covered by insurance.  The fire insurance business only came into being after, and indeed at least arguably in response to,  the Great Fire (the first fire insurance company, founded by Nicholas –  “If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned” – Barbon in 1680, was the Fire Office, later, in 1705, renamed the Phoenix).  Insured properties came to be identified by  plaques known as “fire-marks”, surviving examples of which may still be seen on some  houses in London,  notably in Spitalfields.   Around  100,000 persons were made homeless by the fire, and had to be temporarily rehoused in camps, for example in  Moorfields, or in those – still substantial – parts of what we might think of as Greater London that were  not affected by the fire.  There would appear to have been a certain amount of profiteering by landlords at this time, and a little later, as rebuilding work began, by builders’ merchants, although the general mood would appear to have been  one of shared hardship and public-spiritedness, somewhat akin to that of the Blitz of the Second World War.

Loss of life in the fire appears to have been comparatively low, although it may have been higher than reported, given that the fire had evidently been sufficiently hot as to have been able bodies to ash within as little as an hour or two (hot enough to melt not only the lead on the rooves of the churches, and  the iron bells within, but also glass and even pottery).  The schoolboy William Taswell described encountering the body of  one of the victims after the fire, as follows: “Soon after sunrising I endeavoured to reach St Paul’s.  The ground was so hot as almost to scorch my shoes; and the air so intensely warm that unless I had stopped some time upon the Fleet Bridge to rest myself, I must have fainted … .  … And now … I perceived the metal belonging  to the bells melting; the ruinous conditions of the walls; whole heaps of stone of a large circumference tumbling down with a great noise … , ready to crush he to death.  [N]ear the east walls … a human body presented itself to me, parched up, as it were, with the flames; whole as to skin, meagre as to flesh, yellow as to colour.  This was an old decrepit woman who fled here for safety, imagining the flames could not have reached her …  . Her clothes were burned, and evry limb reduced to a coal”.

Another in the series on the history of London up to the time of the Great Fire of 1666, largely taken from my book, “The Flower Of All Cities” (Amberley, 2019) …

Archaeological Finds

A series of Museum of London and other publications either describe in detail or summarise the findings of archaeological excavations at various post-Medieval sites around the City.

There are some useful identification guides in Lara Maiklem’s new book, “A Field Guide to Larking“.

The more important archaeological finds  from post-Medieval  London are on exhibition in the City’s principal museums.    The Museum of London houses an extensive    collection. 

The commonest post-Medieval finds on the foreshore of the Thames are  sherds of – glazed – pottery, fragments of roofing, wall, hearth and floor tile, and clay pipes.   Roofing tiles are sometimes  found  with small angular holes for  metal nails.  Tobacco was expensive when it was first introduced in the late sixteenth century, but became cheaper over the course of the seventeenth, so early clay pipe bowls are typically small, and later ones larger.

Typical Tudor finds include imported German “Bartmann” or “Bellarmine” drinking-vessels; …

… Stuart ones,  locally manufactured imitation “Delftware” table-wares (from Potters Fields and elsewhere). 

Please note that the removal of any finds from the foreshore is now only allowed under licence from  the Port of London Authority.

Another in the series on the history of London up to the time of the Great Fire of 1666, largely taken from my book, “The Flower Of All Cities” (Amberley, 2019) …

Surviving Structures

Essentially nothing now  remains of the majority of the post-Medieval seats of power, religious houses and secular  buildings that stood within and without the walls of the City of London before the Great Fire.   

However, from  Tudor London, of the seats of power, parts of Whitehall  Palace, Lambeth Palace, and St James’s Palace survive still, as does the Savoy Chapel, part of the Savoy Hospital.  Much of Tudor Whitehall Palace was destroyed in fires in 1512  in 1698, but “Henry VIII’s wine cellar” in the what is now the Ministry of Defence building in Horse Guards’ Avenue still survives; as does the site of his tilt-yard in Horse Guards’ Parade; and part of his tennis court  in the Cabinet Office at No. 70 Whitehall.  The Holbein Gate, built in 1532, and notable as the probable  place of the clandestine marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn in 1533,  survived  both fires, but was demolished in 1759. 

Of the religious houses, the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey; …

… and the church of St Mary, Stoke Newington. 

Of North’s Elizabethan Charterhouse, the Great Hall and  Great Chamber.  Queen Elizabeth I once held court here, at great cost to her host (in 1558, Henry Machyn wrote in his diary “[T]he queen removed to the Tower from the Lord North’s palace, [which] was the Charterhouse.  …   And there was such shooting of guns as never was heard afore  … ”). 

Of the Inns of Court, the  Henrician  Lincoln’s Inn “Old Hall”; …

… the Elizabethan  Middle Temple Hall; …

… and the Elizabethan Staple Inn Buildings. 

Note in this context that Lincoln’s Inn “Old Hall” was built on the site of the Medieval Bishop of Chichester’s Inn, incorporating into its structure a Gothic arch from the  old inn. 

Of the private residences, Canonbury Tower in Islington; …

… and Sutton House in Hackney.   Of the places of business, the “Olde Mitre” in Ely Court. 

And of the charitable dwellings,  George Monoux’s alms-houses in Walthamstow, and John Whitgift’s ones in Croydon. 

The building on Portsmouth Street known since Charles Dickens’s time as “The Old Curiosity Shop” is also thought to date in part to the sixteenth century.  Sadly, though, nearby entire streets of Elizabethan  houses, including the particularly picturesque Wych Street, at the south-eastern end of Drury Lane, were cleared to allow for the construction of Aldwych and Kingsway in the early twentieth century. 

From  Stuart London, of the seats of power, we still have the Renaissance Banqueting House, part of Whitehall Palace; …

… and the Queen’s Chapel, part of St James’s Palace. 

Of  the religious houses, the churches of St Paul, Covent Garden; …

… Poplar Chapel; …

… and St Paul, Shadwell; and  the Renaissance additions to St Helen and St Katharine Cree (also the  – fire-damaged – memorials to Nicholas Bacon, Thomas Heneage and John Donne in St Paul’s, and that to Lancelot Andrewes in Southwark Cathedral).  St Helen also contains a memorial to Martin Bond (d. 1643), together with some brasses with their “superstitious inscriptions” deliberately defaced by order of the Puritans in 1644.  St Katharine Cree has associations from that same Civil War period with the Royalist cause, and even contains a wooden statue of Charles I, depicted as a martyr and saint.  Archbishop William Laud, who reconsecrated it  in 1631, was executed for his support of  Charles, his High Church views, and his persecution of Puritans, in 1645.  And famously, St Olave Hart Street contains memorials to not only Samuel Pepys but also his  long-suffering wife Elizabeth (whose expression suggests she is “admonishing her wayward husband”). 

Of Sutton’s Jacobean  Charterhouse,  we have the Chapel.   

Of the Inns of Court, the Jacobean Gate-House in Inner Temple, including  “Prince Henry’s Room”; …

… and the Jacobean Chapel in Lincoln’s Inn.    

Of   the Livery Companies’ Halls,  parts of the Apothecaries’. 

Of  the  private residences, 41/42 Cloth Fair (1614); …

… Master Mason Nicholas Stone’s York House Water-Gate (1626); …

… 59/60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields (1640); …

… and Newington Green Terrace (1658). 

Of the places of business, parts of the “Olde Wine Shades” on Martin Lane, the “Seven Stars” on Carey Street, and the “Wig and Pen” on the Strand (the “Hoop and Grapes” on Aldgate High Street is described by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as “possibly post-Fire, but unmistakably of an older type”). 

And of the charitable dwellings,  Thomas Ingram’s alms-houses  in Isleworth, Bishop Wood’s ones in Clapton, and Trinity Hospital in Greenwich. 

Edward Alleyn’s “College of God’s Gift” in Dulwich also survives, alongside a “New College” dating to the nineteenth century.

Another in the series on the history of London up to the time of the Great Fire of 1666, largely taken from my book, “The Flower Of All Cities” (Amberley, 2019) …

Building Works

New building activity continued in the City, and especially in Westminster and the West End beyond, in the post-Medieval period, in the Tudor, including  Henrician and Elizabethan, and in the Stuart, including  Jacobean and  Renaissance, styles. 

In the Tudor period, Bridewell Palace, Lambeth Palace, St James’s Palace, Somerset House, the Tower of London, and Whitehall Palace were built, rebuilt or extended  in the Tudor style, as seats of power; as, outside the continuously built-up area, although still within easy  reach, were, among others, Elsyng Palace, Eltham Palace, Fulham Palace (the principal residence  of the Bishops of London), Greenwich Palace (also known as the Palace of Placentia), Hampton Court Palace, Nonsuch Palace, Richmond Palace, and William Cecil’s “prodigy-house” Theobalds; and, still further afield, Windsor Castle.  The site of the dissolved Charterhouse was redeveloped, becoming  initially a private residence occupied by Sir Edward North, from 1545.   And the site of the former Savoy Palace, which was burned down in the “Peasants’ Revolt”, was also redeveloped, new buildings on the site including the Savoy Hospital, founded by a bequest from Henry VII, who died in 1509 (the hospital became a military one in 1642, and was used to treat some of the wounded from the Civil War, and parts of it later   became a military barracks and prison).   

Bridewell Palace was originally  built by Henry VIII between 1515-20, as Stow put it, “for the receipt of Charles V, who, in … 1522, … lodged … at the Blackfriars [Priory]”.    The Palace being on the opposite, western, side of the Fleet from the Priory, a gallery was built over the Fleet to connect  the buildings.  In 1529, Henry VIII again stayed in Bridewell Palace, and the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, in the Blackfriars. This was on the occasion of the Legatine Court in the Parliament Hall in the Blackfriars, convened to address the King’s “Great Matter”, his proposed annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. When Henry VIII died in 1547, the Palace passed to his son Edward VI, and when Edward died in 1553, he gave it to the Mayor, George Baron, again as Stow put it, “for the commonalty and citizens, to be a workhouse for the poor and idle persons of the city”. The  former palace was evidently used not only as a workhouse-cum-priso, but also as  an orphanage-cum-school, and as a hospital.   The Bridewell, as it was by then known, was burned down in Great Fire of 1666.  It was subsequently rebuilt in 1667,  and ultimately  demolished between 1864-71. 

It was in Bridewell Palace in 1533 that Holbein painted his portrait “The Ambassadors”, which now hangs in the National Gallery.  The painting depicts, on the left, Jean de Dinteville, the French ambassador, posing in a shirt, ruched pink silk doublet, black hose, black velvet jerkin, and fur-trimmed black velvet three-quarter-length overgown; and, on the right, Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur, and ambassador to the Emperor, the Holy See and the Venetian Republic, in a black shirt with a white clerical collar, and an expensive-looking dark brocaded and fur-trimmed full-length silk   overgown.  In the background behind them is a heavy emerald-green brocaded silk curtain; between them, a wooden unit displaying  on its  top shelf a celestial globe and various state-of-the-art precision astronomical and navigational scientific instruments on a section of geometrically-patterned Anatolian carpet,  and on its bottom shelf a terrestrial  globe, and a range of musical instruments, including a lyre with a broken string, and a box of flutes; and in the foreground in front of them an expanse of geometrically-patterned tiled floor.   Also in the foreground is a memento mori in the form of an anamorphic skull.

Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury,  was actually  originally built in the thirteenth century, and subsequently extended in the late fifteenth and sixteenth, under Henry VII and Mary respectively.  The Gate-House, built by Cardinal John Morton, dates to 1495 (the Chapel and the Lollard’s Tower to the late Medieval).  The Garden was probably also originally laid out in the late fifteenth or sixteenth century. 

St James’s Palace was originally built by Henry VIII between 1531-6, on a  site where, according to Stow: “the citizens of London, time out of mind, founded an hospital … for leprous women”.  It remained one  of the principal residences of the Kings and Queens of England for the next three hundred years. 

Somerset House was originally  built for the Lord Protector Somerset in 1547-50, and after his  execution in 1552, it came to owned, occupied and modified in turn by the then-future Queen, Elizabeth I, in 1553; by    the King, James I’s wife, Anne of Denmark, in 1603; by  the then-future King, Charles I, in 1619; and by the King, Charles I’s wife, the French Henrietta Maria, in 1626.  It later survived the Civil War and Commonwealth of 1642-60, during which time it was temporarily appropriated by Parliamentarian authorities, as well as the Great Fire.  In 1669, the King,  Charles II’s wife,  the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza, acquired it, and in 1692, shortly after Charles II had died and James II, who was a Catholic, had been deposed,  she relinquished it, fearing  for her safety there in the midst of what by that time had become a fiercely anti-Catholic populace.  It was then  allowed to fall into disrepair, and substantially demolished to make way for the present building in 1775. 

Some Tudor foundation stones survive,  in the “Archaeology Room”;  …

… and some Stuart  headstones from the former –  Catholic – chapel, in the “Dead House” (namely, those of Catherine Guilermet, French servant to Henrietta Maria (d. 1633); Jacques d’Angennes, French ambassador (d. 1637); Blasius Nunes Manhans, Portuguese doctor to Catherine of Braganza (d. 1673); Edmund Fortescue, usher to Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza (d. 1674); and Fr Hyacint(h), priest (d. 1692)).

The   Tower of London was repaired, extended and extensively remodelled  in the Tudor period, becoming, as  Raphael Holinshed put it, in his “Chronicles” of 1577-87, “an armouries and house of munition, and thereunto a place for the safekeeping of offenders [rather] than a palace roiall for a King or Queen to sojourne in”. A detailed plan of the precinct from around the end of the period was produced  by Haiward & Gascoyne in  1597.  The understated role that the Tower played in English Renaissance drama is discussed by Deiter (2008).

Whitehall Palace, formerly York Place, was acquired by Henry VIII from the then Archbishop of York, Cardinal Wolsey, in 1529, whence, from Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII”, “You must no more call it York Place: that is past; For since the Cardinal fell that title’s lost.  ‘Tis now the King’s, and called Whitehall”; and later extended both by Henry and by James I.  In 1542, according to an inventory taken in that year, the fixtures and fittings included  carpets, wall hangings, traverses, curtains, furniture, candles and sanitary apparatus, all of the finest quality.  In 1598, the Moravian aristocrat and gentleman-traveller Baron Waldstein described his visit to the palace in his diary, in part as follows:   “We … went into the royal residence known as … White Hall.  It is truly majestic, bounded on the one side by a park which adjoins another palace called St James’s, and on the other side by the Thames, and it is a place which fills one with wonder, not so much because of its great size as because of the magnificence of its … rooms which are furnished with the most gorgeous splendour.  First you come to a vast hall which leads through into a very large walled garden where they keep deer and all kinds of other animals.  We then went to see the rooms, every one of them furnished and arranged with perfect taste and elegance, with all sorts of statues and pictures to add to their beauty …  .  There is … a portrait of Edward VI in 1546 at the age of nine … .   Another room has … some very rich hangings.  A portrait here shows Queen Elizabeth when she was still young, in the dress which she wore when going to attend Parliament … .  In another place we saw … the Queen’s couch which is woven with gold and silver thread … .  The Queen’s bed-chamber has rich tapestries all around: The adjoining room is reserved for the Queen’s bath: the water pours from oyster shells … .  In the next room there is an organ on which two persons can play duets … .  The next room to this was the one where the Queen keeps her books, some of which she wrote herself … .  From here we were taken into a large and lofty banqueting hall …  .  In another room Henry VII and Henry VIII and their wives are painted … ”.   

Notable new religious building works of the Tudor period included the Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey, built between 1503-8; the church of St Margaret Westminster, rebuilt in 1523; and, further afield, St Mary in Stoke Newington, rebuilt by the local Lord of the Manor, William Patten, in 1563, and thus  representing  one of the earliest churches anywhere in the country specifically designed for Protestant rather than Catholic worship.  The Henry VII Lady Chapel in Westminster Abbey,  thought to have been  designed and built by Robert Janyns the Younger  (fl. 1499-1506), Robert Vertue (d. 1506), and William Vertue (d. 1527), is at the very pinnacle of the Perpendicular Gothic, with exceptional external flying buttresses and internal pendant vaults, and even known in its own time as “orbis miraculum”, or “the wonder of the world”.  Whittled away to a fine filigree of near-nothingness, the stone ceiling seems to hover like a second heaven high over  the head of the worshipper.  The magnificent effigial monuments of Henry VII and his Queen, Elizabeth of York, in what John Pope-Hennessy called “the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps”, were made by the Italian sculptor Torrigiano between 1512-7.  Incidentally, in 1540,  Westminster Abbey was made a Cathedral with its own See, and shortly  afterwards, was incorporated into the Diocese of London, at which time much of its estate was sold off to pay for repairs to “Old St Paul’s” – hence the expression, “robbing Peter to pay Paul” (the  current status of the abbey is that of a  “Royal Peculiar”).   “Old St Paul’s” itself suffered a certain amount of desecration  during the Dissolution, the visiting  Alessandro Magno observing “It is a pitiful sight to see the beautiful marble statues of saints and other decorations there broken and ruined because of their heresy”.  It later  lost its spire to a lightning strike in 1561.  A contemporary account of the event read as follows:  “… [B]etween one and two of the clock at afternoon was seen a marvellous great fiery lightning, and immediately ensued a most terrible hideous crack of thunder such as seldom hath been heard, and that by estimation of sense, directly over the City of London.  … Divers persons in time of the said tempest being on the river of Thames, and others being in the fields near adjoining to the City affirmed that they saw a long and spear-pointed flame of fire (as it were) run through the top of the broach or shaft of Paul’s steeple, from the east westward.  And some of the parish of St Martin’s [Ludgate] being then in the street did feel a marvellous strong air or whirlwind with a smell like brimstone coming from Paul’s Church. …  Between four and five of the clock a smoke was espied … to break out under the bowl of the said shaft … .  But suddenly after, as it were in a moment, the flame broke forth in a circle like a garland round about the broach, … and increased in such wise that within a quarter of an hour or a little more, the cross and the eagle on the top fell down upon the south cross aisle …  Some there were, pretending experience in wars, that counselled the remnants of the steeple to be shot down with cannons, which counsel was not liked … .  Others perceiving the steeple to be past all recovery, considering the hugeness of the fire and the dropping of the lead, thought best to get ladders and scale the church, and with axes to hew down a space of the roof of the church to stay the fire, at the least to save some part of the church: which was concluded”. 

New private buildings of the Tudor period included further  Inns of Court and Livery Company Halls.  New private residences of the period included Nonsuch House on London Bridge, built between 1577-9, and the merchant-trader and ambassador to the Ottoman court Paul  Pindar’s house on Bishopsgate, completed in c. 1599.   Nonsuch House was built, rather remarkably,   out of prefabricated  wooden sections shipped across from Holland flat-packed for assembly  on site, and would appear from a surviving Canaletto drawing of 1750 to have had a gaudily painted finish, carved carapace and ornate cupolas, making it a readily recognisable London landmark.  Sadly, it was demolished in 1757, to allow for the widening of the thoroughfare on London Bridge.  

Paul Pindar’s House would appear from surviving drawings, paintings and photographs to have been similarly extravagantly and flamboyantly appointed. 

It was only finally demolished as recently as  1890, but at least its carved oak façade was thereupon salvaged, and may now be viewed  in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

New private residences further afield included Canonbury Tower in Islington, originally built sometime between 1509-1532 for the Prior of St Bartholomew’s, William Bolton, and subsequently occupied by, among others, Thomas Cromwell and Francis Bacon, not to mention Oliver Goldsmith and Washington Irving; and Sutton House in Hackney, originally built in around 1535 for the courtier, and sometime “Keeper of the Great Wardrobe”, Ralph Sadleir.  Charitable dwellings  founded in the Tudor  period  included  George Monoux’s  alms-houses of 1541 in Walthamstow, and (Archbishop) John Whitgift’s ones of 1556 in Croydon. 

Later, in the Stuart period, the Banqueting House was built in Whitehall Palace  for James I, and the Queen’s Chapel in St James’s Palace for Charles I; and Theobalds was rebuilt, for James I, and Windsor Castle, for Charles II.  And the site of the dissolved Charterhouse was redeveloped again, becoming  a charitable alms-house and school founded by a bequest from Thomas Sutton,  from 1611 (the school relocated to Godalming in Surrey in 1872).   The Banqueting House  was built  by the Palladian architect Inigo Jones in 1622, and was  the first building in central  London in the  Renaissance style, with a ceiling by Rubens.  Work on the Queen’s House in Greenwich commenced earlier, but was not completed  until later.  The Queen’s Chapel was built  by the Inigo Jones between 1623-7.  It was first used by Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, who was a Catholic.  During  the Civil War, it was used by the Parliamentarian army as a barracks.  And after the  Restoration of the Monarchy, it was again used as a chapel by  Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, who was also a Catholic, and who established a friary adjoining (whence, Friary Court). 

Notable new religious building works of the Stuart   period included the Renaissance renovations to St Katharine Cree, in 1628-31; St Helen, in 1633; and “Old St Paul’s” by  Inigo Jones, in 1633-41, and by Christopher Wren in 1660  – it  appears that the Medieval Gothic style had well and truly gone out of fashion by the time of  Charles I!  They also included the rebuilding of the tower of All Hallows Barking in 1658, which Samuel Pepys later ascended to observe the Great Fire in 1666.  Slightly  further afield, in the West End, the parish church of St Paul, Covent Garden, “the handsomest barn in England”, was built by Inigo Jones in 1624.  And, still within the more-or-less continuously built-up area, the chapel that became the church of St John, Wapping, in 1617; Poplar Chapel, between 1642-54; and the chapel that became the church of St Paul, Shadwell, in 1656.  Poplar Chapel was built by the East India Company for its dock-workers  between 1642-54, that is, during the Civil War and succeeding inter-regnum, the date of construction making it unique in London, and indeed unusual in the country as a whole.  The  design of the chapel was originally “severely rectangular”, and as such ideally suited to the form of worship practised by Puritans, which emphasised the importance of the word over that  of the ceremony.  The chapel became a parish church, dedicated to St Matthias, when the East India Company dissolved in the 1860s, and the church in turn became a community centre in the 1990s.  The exterior of the building was rebuilt, by William Milford Teulon, younger brother of the more famous Samuel Sanders Teulon, in the mid-nineteenth century, although, remarkably, the interior remains to this day essentially as it was in the mid-seventeenth.   Still further afield, the church of St Luke, Charlton was built in 1630, and that of St John the Evangelist, Stanmore in 1632 (both in brick).

New private buildings of the period included yet further  Inns of Court and Livery Company Halls.   New private residencesincluded 41/42 Cloth Fair, completed in 1614; York House, completed in 1626; 59/60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, completed in 1640; and, further afield, Newington Green Terrace on Newington Green, completed in 1658.   The town-houses of the men of wealth and perceived substance were typically stone- or brick- built, with cellars below ground, store-rooms for merchandise and well-appointed living quarters on the ground floor, bedrooms upstairs, and long galleries on the projecting uppermost, third or fourth, storey, and with tiled rooves.  They would have provided ample accommodation for not only the owner and his extended family, but also his apprentices, and his many servants.   The lowlier  dwellings of the common man and his family would typically have been timber-framed (in violation of the ban), terraced, and conspicuously narrow-fronted, although comparatively deep, and had either only two storeys,  each with one room at the front and another at the rear, or at the most three, with a small attic or  garret room at the top. Those on Bishopsgate occupied by Luke Clapham, Richard Plowman and Edward Walker,  and surveyed in 1607 by Ralph Treswell, had four main rooms, each measuring something of the order of twelve feet square,   giving  a total internal area of  something under 600 square feet.  Note, though, that they also had  an approximately  comparable total amount of outdoor space in a long thin strip to the rear, where there were  gardens with ramshackle outhouses, perhaps for privies, and, in one case, a   well.  41/42 Cloth Fair, “the oldest house in London”,  was first owned by one William Chapman, who was evidently a businessman of some means.  It has been memorably described by the architectural critic Ian Nairn as “ … an embodiment of the old London spirit.  Chunky, cantankerous, breaking out all over in oriels and roof-lights, unconcerned with … anything else other than shapes to live in”.  York House was originally  built for the Bishops of Norfolk sometime before 1237.  It  subsequently came to be owned by Henry VIII’s brother-in-law Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, in 1536; by Queen Mary in 1556; by Francis Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, from 1617; by George Villiers Senior, the 1^st Duke of Buckingham, from 1621; by General Sir Thomas, Lord Fairfax, during the Civil War; and eventually by George Villiers Junior, 2^nd  Duke of Buckingham,  after the Restoration (by which time he had married Fairfax’s daughter Mary).  It survived the Great Fire, but was substantially substantially demolished in the 1670s, whereupon the site was developed by Nicholas Barbon, who, in deference to its former owner, set out new streets named George, Villiers, Duke and Buckingham – and even an alley named Of!   The dissenting priest and radical – some would say revolutionary – philosopher Richard Price, who numbered among his acquaintances Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestley and Mary Wollstonecraft,  moved into one of the houses in Newington Green Terrace  in the eighteenth century.  By this time, following the passage of the “Clarendon Code” in the late seventeenth century, Newington Green had become  an important centre for all forms of Non-Conformism.  The “Clarendon Code” comprised the  “Corporation Act” of  1661, the “Act of Uniformity” of 1662, the “Conventicle Act” of 1664, and the “Five Mile Act” (“An Act for restraining Non-Conformists from inhabiting in Corporations”) of 1665.  Charitable dwellings founded in the Stuart period  included  Edward Alleyn’s alms-houses of 1610 in the Soap Yard in Southwark, in Lamb Alley in Bishopsgate, and in Bath Street in the parish of St Luke’s; Dame Alice Owen’s alms-houses of 1610 on the Clerkenwell/Islington borders;  Thomas Ingram’s  alms-houses  of 1664 in Isleworth; Bishop (Thomas) Wood’s ones of 1665  in Clapton; and Henry Howard, the Earl of Northampton’s, Trinity Hospital of 1613 in Greenwich.  Note also that Alleyn’s “College of God’s Gift” of 1616 in Dulwich included alms-houses for six poor men and six poor women as well as an actual college for twelve boys.  It seems that “Good Master” Alleyn was a considerable philanthropist, although he is now better known as an  actor-manager and theatrical entrepreneur.  His alms-houses in Southwark were close to the “Rose” playhouse, which he acted in; those in St Luke’s, to the “Fortune”, which he  managed.

By the time of the Great Fire at the end of the post-Medieval period, there were over a hundred parish churches and other places of Christian worship within and immediately without the walls of  the City, despite a number having been closed down during the Reformation, including the church of St Mary Axe, for housing an unusual relic, namely “one of the two [axes] that the eleven thousand Virgins [accompanying St Ursula on her ill-fated pan-European pilgrimage] were beheaded with [by a Hunnish chief, possibly Attila]”. To be precise, as recorded in the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks’ “Bills of Mortality”, there were 97 churches within the walls of the City, and 16 without, making a total of 113.  In addition, there were 5 churches in the City and Liberties of Westminster, namely, St Clement Danes, St Paul Covent Garden, St Margaret Westminster, St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Mary Savoy; and 12 in the out-parishes of Middlesex and Surrey, including St Giles-in-the-Fields.  There was also one cathedral, “Old St Paul’s” within the walls, and a  number of  conventual churches and private chapels within and without, including St Etheldreda and “new” Temple Church.  Many of the places of worship were lovingly embellished with (bell-) towers and spires by their parishioners, as can be clearly seen in contemporary drawings, paintings and maps, and some also with churchyards and gardens, splashing colour onto an otherwise drab canvas (that of   St Andrew Hubbard was sown with hemp, which would probably be an arrestable offence these days); and numerous seats of power and Royal palaces, important secular public buildings, and private residences and places of business besides.  Illustrative drawings, paintings, panoramas and “pictorial surveys” of the City of the time include those of  Bol, Briot, Hollar, de Jongh,  Norden, Rembrandt,  Smith, Visscher, Wyngaerde and various anonymous artists.  The Wyngaerde panorama was published in 1543 (Text-Figure 37); the Visscher one, in 1616 (Text-Figure 38).   Maps include the “British Atlas of Historic Towns” one  of 1520, the “Copper Plate” one  of c. 1559, the “Agas” one of c. 1569, the Braun and Hogenberg one of  1572, the Norden one of 1593, the Agas one of 1633, the Newcourt and Faithorne one of 1658, and the Moore one of 1662.  The “Copper Plate” map must have been published no later than 1559, as it shows the church of St Botolph Bishopsgate still with its cross, which was lost  through fire in that year.  The “Agas” map must have been published no earlier than 1569, as it shows the Royal Exchange with its trademark grasshopper weather-vane, that was erected in that year.  The Braun & Hogenberg map was published in 1572, although still shows “Old St Paul’s” with the  spire it lost in 1561. 

The post-Medieval  street layout remained in the form of a maze or web.  By the end of the period, around a  hundred yards of land had been reclaimed from the river, and there was a dense network of quays, wharves, steps, alley-ways, passage-ways and lanes along  the foreshore.    Horse-drawn vehicles had begun to be  used to transport not only goods, as in the Middle Ages, but also persons; and Sedan Chairs had also begun to be used to transport persons. As long ago as 1636 (!), traffic congestion had become such a problem that it prompted  one Henry Peacham to write:  “It is most fit, and requisite, that princes, nobility, the more eminent and abler among the gentry should be allowed their coaches and carroches … but what I pray you are the coaches of these few, to that multitude at this day in England? when in London … and within four miles compass without, are reckoned to the number of six thousand and odd. … [I]n certain places of the City, … I have never come but I have there the way barricado’d up with a coach, two, or three, that what haste, or business soever a man hath, he must wait my Lady’s (I know not what) leisure (who is in the next shop, buying pendants for her ears: or a collar for her dog) ere he can find any passage. The most eminent places for stoppage are Paul’s gate into Cheapside, Ludgate, and Ludgate Hill, especially when a play is done at the Friars, then Holborn … , Hosier Lane, Smithfield, and Cow Lane … , then about the Stocks and Poultry, Temple Bar, Fetter Lane and Shoe Lane … ; but to see their multitude, … when there is a masque at Whitehall, a Lord Mayor’s feast, a new play … , … how close they stand together (like mutton-pies in a cook’s oven) that hardly you can thrust a pole between”.  Indeed, “An Ordinance for the Regulation of Hackney-Coachmen in London and the places adjacent” had had to be issued in 1654.