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. 

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) …

Entertainment and Culture

There continued to be at West Smithfield  archery, wrestling and cock-fighting, a weekly horse fair, and an annual Bartholomew Fair every August, and also regular jousting tournaments.  At   East Smithfield a further fair;  on Undershaft an annual May Fair; and on Cheapside further tournaments. In the Tower of London, a menagerie; and on Bankside in  Southwark, animal-baiting.  

In Tudor times, Henry VIII is known to have witnessed a bear-baiting at Paris Gardens, from a barge moored offshore, in 1539.  In    1554, Henry Machyn wrote: “The sam day at after-non was a bere-beyten on the Banke syde, and ther the grett blynd bere [whose name was Sackerson] broke losse, and in ronnyng away he chakt a servyng man by the calff of the lege, and bytt a gret pesse away, and after by the hokyll-bone, that with-in iii days after he ded”.  And in 1599, the Swiss visitor Thomas Platter wrote: “Every Sunday [!] and Wednesday in London there are bear-baitings.  … The theatre is circular, with galleries … for spectators, [and] the space … below, beneath the clear sky, … unoccupied. In the middle of this place a large bear on a long rope was bound to a stake, then a number of English mastiffs were brought in and first shown to the bear, which they afterwards baited … .  [N]ow the excellence … of such mastiffs was evinced, for although they were much … mauled by the bear, they did not give in, but had to be pulled off by sheer force … .  … When the first mastiffs tired, fresh ones were brought in … .  When the bear was weary, another one was supplied … .  … When this bear was tired, a … bull was brought in … .  Then another powerful bear … .  Lastly they brought in an old blind bear which the boys hit  with … sticks; but he knew how to untie his leash and … ran back to his stall”.  In Stuart times, Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, having just been jointly  appointed “Master Overseer and Ruler of the Bears, Bulls and Mastiff Dogs”, announced sometime in 1604: “Tomorrow being Thursdaie shall be seen at the Bear-gardin on the bankside a great mach plaid by the champins of Essex who hath challenged all comers whatsoever to plaie v dogges at the single beare for V pounds and also to wearie a bull dead at the stake and for your better content shall have pleasant sport with the horse and ape and whipping of the blind beare”.  In  1623, John Chamberlain  wrote: “The Spanish Ambassador is much delighted in beare baiting: he was the last weeke at Paris garden [in Southwark], where they shewed him all the pleasure they could  … and then turned a white [polar] beare into the Thames, where the dogges baited him swimming, which was the best sport of all”.  And in 1666, Samuel Pepys wrote:  “[A]fter dinner, with my wife and Mercer to the Beare-garden [in Southwark], where I have not been, I think, of many years, and saw some good sport of the bull’s tossing of the dogs: one into the very boxes.  But it is a very rude and nasty pleasure”.  The old  animal-baiting arenas on Bankside in   Southwark eventually closed down in the later seventeeth century, although at the same time new ones opened up Hockley-in-the-Hole in Clerkenwell, “the home of low-caste sport”.  Animal-baiting was only finally outlawed, under the “Cruelty to Animals Act”, in the early nineteenth century, in 1835. 

On  the Thames, when it froze over, there continued to be  “frost fairs”.  In 1683-84 an entire street of stalls was set up on the frozen river, together with a press printing souvenir papers, one of which, entitled “A Winter Wonder of the Thames Frozen Over with Remarks on the Resort thereon” asked “ … [W]ho’d believe to see revived there in January, Bartholomew Fair?”.  The ice was evidently so thick that it was even possible to roast an ox on it!    In 1788-89, there was, according to the all-knowing Encyclopaedia of London, “one continual scene of merriment and jollity” on the frozen river from Redriff to  as far up as  Putney. And in 1813-14, thousands  attended the greatest fair of the nineteenth  century, although only after navigating a gap in the ice created by temporarily unemployed watermen, who demanded a fee of twopence for their assistance!  Then, in 1831, the  demolition of “Old London Bridge”, which had  twenty arches, and the construction of the new one, which only had five, allowed  the rate of flow of the river  to increase to the extent that it became  much less susceptible to freezing  over. 

And everywhere, there continued to be drinking and gambling and whoring.  The stews were temporarily closed in 1505 by the first Tudor King, Henry VII, after an outbreak of syphilis, although most re-opened within the year.   They were supposedly permanently closed in 1546 by a Royal Proclamation of  Henry VIII, who wished to end  once and for all the “toleration of such dissolute and miserable persons as have been suffered to dwell in common open places called the stews without punishment or correction (for) their abominable and detestable sin”.  

At this  time, there were twenty-two in operation in the “common Bordell(o)” of Bankside in Southwark  alone, namely, the “Antelope”, “Barge”, “Bear”, “Bell”, “Boar’s Head”, “Bull’s Head”, “Cardinal’s Hat”, “Castle”, “Cock”, “Crane”, “Cross Keys”, “Elephant”, “Fleur de Lys”, “Gun”, “Hart”, “Hart’s Horn”, “Horseshoe”, “Lion”, “Little Rose”, “Rose”, “Swan” and “Unicorn” (the more-or-less precise locations of which have been established by painstaking historical work involving a wide range of source materials, including a Tudor mural depicting Edward VI’s coronation procession in 1547, in which they all appear in the background).  Most, if not all, re-opened after Henry’s death in 1547. 

And the infamous “Holland’s Leaguer” in Paris Gardens opened during the reign of the first Stuart King, James I,  in 1603. 

Incidentally, the women who worked in the “stews” in Southwark were known as “Winchester Geese”, because many of the buildings belonged to the Bishops of Winchester.  Many of them ended up being buried, alongside the other “Outcast Dead” in the unconsecrated burial ground known as “Crossbones Graveyard” on Redcross Way, which remained in use until the mid-nineteenth century.  A MoLA monograph describes in detail the findings of recent archaeological excavations at the site.  Lesions in the bones of one of the excavated skeletons, of a nineteenth-century woman, aged only around sixteen to nineteen, indicated that she had been  suffering from advanced syphilis; and chemical residues, that she  had been treated with mercury.  Research undertaken for an episode of the BBC television series “History Cold Case” in 2010 indicated that this skeleton was likely to be that of one Elizabeth Mitchell, who is recorded as having been admitted to nearby St Thomas’s Hospital suffering from the running sores all over the body symptomatic of the disease, and as having died there, aged only nineteen, on 15^th  August,  1851.

There also continued to be  occasional royal spectacles, including increasingly lavish triumphal and coronation processions, not to mention  private court masques, to which only the favoured few would be invited; as well as  civic ceremonials such as the Lord Mayor’s Show.  In  1626, the visiting Alsatian Chevalier de Bassompierre wrote in his journal: “November 9^th, which is the election of the Mayor, I came in the morning to Sommerset [House] to meet the Queen [Henrietta Maria], who had come to see him go on the Thames on his way to Westminster to be sworn in, with a magnificent display of boats.  Then the Queen dined, and afterwards got into her coach and placed me at the same door with her.  The Duke of Boukinham also by her commands got into her coach, and we went into the street called Shipside to see the ceremony, which is the greatest that is made for the reception of any officer in the world.  While waiting for it to pass, the Queen played at primero with the Duke, the Earl of Dorchit and me; and afterwards the Duke took me to dine with the Lord mayor, who that day gave a dinner to more than 800 persons”.

And   there were enormously popular history plays, tragedies and comedies performed initially in inns, or in Inns of Court, and eventually in purpose- built or –adapted playhouses and theatres.  Inns where plays were performed included the  “Bell Savage”, “Bell”, “Bull” and “Cross Keys”; and Inns of Court, Middle Temple, in whose Hall, as noted above, “Twelfth Night” premiered in 1602 (and was staged again in 2002, in celebration of the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of the event, with an authentic all-male cast,  hand-made costumes,  and period music and instruments).  Open-air playhouses and indoor theatres included   the – recently rediscovered – “Red Lion” in Whitechapel, purpose-built by John Brayne in 1567; an unnamed building in Newington Butts, purpose-adapted by Jerome Savage in 1576; the “Theatre” in Shoreditch, built – on the site of the dissolved Holywell Priory –  by James Burbage in 1576; the “First Blackfriars” in the City, adapted – on the site of the dissolved Blackfriars Priory – by Richard Farrant in 1576; the “Curtain” in Shoreditch, built by Henry Lanman in 1577; the “Rose” on Bankside in Southwark, built by Philip Henslowe in 1587; the “Swan” in Southwark, built by Francis Langley in 1596; the “Boar’s Head” in Whitechapel, built by Oliver Woodliffe in 1598; the “Globe” in Southwark, originally built by Cuthbert Burbage in 1599, and subsequently rebuilt, following a fire in 1613,  in 1614; the “Second Blackfriars” in the City, adapted  by James Burbage in 1596-1600; the “Fortune” in Cripplegate, built by Edward Alleyn, in 1600; the “Red Bull” in Clerkenwell, built by Aaron Holland in 1606/7; the “Hope” in Southwark, built by Philip Henslowe in 1613, after  the “Globe” was burned down and before it was rebuilt; the “Whitefriars”, just off Fleet Street, by Thomas Woodford, in 1606; the “Cockpit” on Drury Lane in the West End, originally built by John Best, Cockmaster to the Prince of Wales, in 1616, and subsequently rebuilt, and renamed the “Phoenix”, in 1617; the “Salisbury Court”, just off Fleet Street, built by William Blagrave and Richard Gunnell, in 1629;  and the “Theatre Royal”,  on Bridges Street, just off Drury Lane, built by Thomas Killigrew in 1663, where the favourite of the restored King’s thirteen mistresses, “pretty, witty” Nell Gwyn(ne), performed from 1665-71.   Theatrical performances were publicised by, among other means,  the running up of flags on the premises: a black one  for a traged;  a white one for a comedy; and a red one for a history play.  The success or otherwise of those staged in the “Rose” is detailed in its owner Philip Henslowe’s diary and accounts covering the period 1592-1609, which, rather remarkably, survive (in Dulwich College).

“The Theatre” in Shoreditch was an evidently at least approximately circular structure and performance space, and it was long assumed that the “Curtain” was also circular, although  recent archaeological evidence has shown it  to have been in fact rectangular, i.e., not unlike an inn. 

The “Globe” in Southwark was another circular structure, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it was actually built out of materials salvaged from “The Theatre” after its twenty-one year lease ran out.  According to one contemporary account, on or around 28^th December, 1598,  a number of Burbage’s men “did enter upon the premises [of “The Theatre”] and take down the said buildinge … [and] … take and carrye away from thence all the wood and timber ther of unto the Banckside in the parishe of St Marye Overye and there erected a newe playe howse … ” (albeit “in an other forme”).  In a letter to Sir Edmund Bacon, reproduced in Reliquiae Wottoniae, Henry Wotton wrote  of the fire at the “Globe” in 1613, which took place during a performance of Shakespeare’s “Henry VIII”:  “Now, King Henry making a Masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s House, and certain Cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the Paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the Thatch, …  and … kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole House to the very ground.  This was the fatal period … wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw … ; … one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale”; and John Chamberlain wrote: “[I]t was a great marvaile and fair grace of God, that the people had so little harm, having but two narrow doors to get out”. 

The “Second Blackfriars” was,  like the “First”, a – polygonal  – indoor theatre, and was capable of being used  by theatrical companies throughout the year, including in the  winter,  when open-air playhouses such as the “Globe” on Bankside in Southwark were rendered unusable by bad weather.   The “Second Blackfriars” was also an “all-seater”,  seating 6-700 in some – although not much – comfort, and charging a minimum of 6d a head (in contrast, the “Globe” seated or stood more (2-3000), but charged less (a minimum of only 1d a head)).  In time, the theatre became extremely popular with the fashionable set, and equally profitable.    From 1600-8, it housed performances by a troupe of boy-actors, variously known as the “Blackfriars Children”, “Children of the Chapel Royal” or “Children of the Queen’s Revels”, under Henry Evans and Nathaniel Giles.   Some of the boys were evidently forcibly taken from their homes and families and pressed into service through “impressment warrants”, authorised by the Crown. One, Nathan Field (1587-1620) went on to achieve fame as both an actor and as a dramatist in his own right, and, incidentally,  to be portrayed  “in character” in a picture painted in around 1615,  now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery.  In  1609, the theatre came to be  owned by and to stage performances by Shakespeare’s company, by then known as the “King’s Men”, after the incumbent troupe had given grave offence to the King, James I,  during one of the performances they put on there  in 1608!   It was eventually closed down by the Puritans in 1642, and demolished in 1655.  

A modern replica of the Elizabethan “Globe” open-air playhouse, the brainchild of the American film director and all-round good guy Sam Wanamaker,  stands on Bankside in Southwark, a stone’s throw from the site of the original, which stood opposite the “Rose”, on what was once Maiden Lane and is now Park Street.  Here it is possible to experience performances as the common man would have at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,  standing in the open as a  “groundling”- and surrounded by “penny stinkards”!   

On a plot adjoining the reconstructed “Globe” is a modern replica of a Jacobean indoor  theatre, fittingly named the “Wanamaker”.  Its design was in part based on a set of plans once – although no longer – thought to have been of the “Phoenix”, and its interior conveys a real sense of what an indoor theatre     such as the “Phoenix” or the “Second Blackfriars” would have been like.  A   sense of enclosed space, of intimacy, of proximity to the players, of exclusiveness perhaps.  Of  being surrounded by the shadowy  light of dancing candles, and the reflecting costumes and  jewellery of the actors and audience, “So  Glisterd in the Torchy Fryers”.  And, perhaps even more particularly,  of being surrounded by sound; and in enforced interludes in which the wicks of the lighting-candles are trimmed, by the sound of music.  Note in this context that the music in certain of Shakespeare’s later  plays, such as   “Cymbeline”, “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”, was not only well suited to, but probably also  specifically written for, performance in the indoor arena of the “Second Blackfriars”. 

The  theatre   was enormously popular with the  citizens of London and with visitors alike in Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration times.  In  1599, Thomas Platter wrote:“After dinner … , I went with my companions over the water [to Southwark], and in the strewn roof-house [possibly the newly-built “Globe”] saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted.  At the end … they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance.  Two in men’s clothes and two in women’s gave this performance, in wonderful combination with each other”.And:“On another occasion, I saw … a comedy; if I remember right, in Bishopsgate.  Here they represented various nations, with whom … and Englishman fought … , and overcame them all except the German … .  [H]e outwitted the German … .  [E]very day at two o’clock  … two and sometimes three comedies are performed, at separate places, wherewith folk make merry together, and whichever does best gets the greatest audience.  … What they … produce daily by way of mirth … every one knows well, who has happened to see them … playing … .  With such …  pastimes … the English spend their time; … [and] …  learn what is going on in  other lands … ”.  And in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote: “Thence … into Covent Garden to an alehouse … and … to see an Italian Puppet Play, that is within the rayles there, which is very pretty, the best that ever I saw … “.  He added:   “So to the Temple and by water home, and … in the dark there played upon my flageolette [a type of flute], it being a fine still evening … ” (incidentally, Pepys was evidently also proficient on the five-stringed seventeenth-century guitar). 

The theatre was equally as unpopular with the City authorities, who objected to its “profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices, and scurrilous behaviours … that … give opportunity to … evil-disposed and ungodly people …  to assemble themselves … ”.  During  the post-Medieval period, plays were first organised, and later  either approved, or in some cases censored, by the so-called “Office of the Revels” (the most famous “Master of the Revels” was Edmund Tilney, who held the post for essentially the entirety of Shakespeare’s time in the London theatre).  In 1564,  Edmund Grindal (then Bishop of London and later  Archbishop of Canterbury) wrote in a letter to William Cecil, the  1^st Baron  Burghley: “[I]n my judgement, ye should do very well to … inhibit all plays for one whole year (and if it were for ever, it were not amiss) within the City or three miles’ compass, upon pains as well to the players as to the owners of the houses where they play their lewd interludes”.    And in 1594,  even such a figure as Henry Carey, the 1^st Baron Brunsdon, the son of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary (possibly by Henry VIII), and the cousin of the Queen, Elizabeth I, as well as a patron of Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men”, was forced to write in a letter to the Mayor of London: “Where my now company of players have been accustomed … for the service of her majesty  …  to play …  at the Cross Keys in Gracious [Gracechurch] Street; these are to require and pray your lordship … to permit and suffer them to do so.  The which I pray you rather to do for that they have undertaken to me that … they will now …  have done between four and five and will not use any drums or trumpets at all for the calling of people together and shall be contributories to the poor of the parish where they play, according to their abilities”.  Additionally, in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, there were  numerous    actual attacks on playhouses and bawdy-houses, by bands of apprentices and others, on Shrove Tuesdays (the so-called “Shrove Tuesday Riots”).  John Chamberlain wrote in a letter to  Dudley Carleton in 1617: “On … Shrove Tuesday, the ‘prentices, or rather the unruly people of the suburbs, played their parts in divers places, as Finsbury Fields, about Wapping, by St Catherine’s, and in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, …  in pulling down of houses, and beating of guards that were set to keep rule, specially at a new playhouse, some time a cockpit, in Drury Lane, where the queen’s players used to play.  Though the fellows defended themselves as well as they could, and slew three of them with shot, and hurt divers, yet they entered the house and defaced it, cutting the players’ apparel into pieces, and all their furniture, and burnt their playbooks, and did what other mischief they could… .  There be divers of them taken since and clapped up, and I make no question but we shall see some of them hanged next week, as it is more than time they were”.  The  performance of plays was indeed temporarily banned by the Puritans in 1642, under an Act of Parliament forced through by them that read, in part:  “It is … thought fit, and Ordained, …  That, while these sad … Times …  do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease, … instead of which are recommended … the profitable and seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God, which probably may … bring again Times of Joy and Gladness to these Nations”.  The  ban was then reaffirmed in 1647, and made permanent in 1648, when the second and third measures for theatre closure, respectively,  were passed.  Note, though, that there is some evidence to suggest that plays continued to be performed illegally, for example, at the “Red Bull” in Clerkenwell.  The theatres only officially re-opened after the  Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660.  After the Restoration, the  audiences’ tastes were mainly for bawdy comedies (note that the court at this time was notoriously dissolute).

London was   the home of William Shakespeare (1564-1616).   It was also the home of an extraordinary company of other Renaissance men and women:  the playwrights and/or poets Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), Edmund Spenser (1552-1599), John Lyly (1553-1606), Philip Sidney (1554-86), Anthony Munday (1560-1633) (who was also an anti-Catholic propagandist and a  “pursuivant”), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), John Donne (1572-1631), Thomas Dekker (1572-1632), Ben Jonson (1572-1637), John Fletcher (1579-1625), Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), John Webster (1580-1634), Francis Beaumont (1584-1616), Mary Wroth (1587-1651), William Davenant (1606-68), John Milton (1608-1674), Thomas Killigrew (1612-83), Andrew Marvell (1621-78), John Bunyan (1628-1688), John Dryden (1631-1700), George Etherege (1636-92) and Aphra Behn (1640-89); the philosophers Thomas More (1478-1535) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626); the composers John Taverner (1490-1545), Thomas Tallis (1505-1585), William Byrd (1543-1623), John Dowland (1563-1626), Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625), William Webb (1600-57) and Henry Purcell (1659-95); the artists  Hans Holbein (1497-1543),   Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619), John Bettes the Younger (c. 1550-1616), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) and Peter Lely (1618-80); and the architects Inigo Jones (1573-1652), Christopher Wren (1632-1723) and Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661-1736).    Interestingly, de Vere, Marlowe and Bacon have all been identified by one or other source as the authors of the works conventionally attributed to Shakespeare.    Note, though, that neither de Vere nor Marlowe could possibly have written “Macbeth”.  The play was written in 1606/7, and  contains an allusion  to the “equivocation” of Father Henry Garnet in the aftermath of the “Gunpowder Plot” of 1605, by which time they were  both dead.

Shakespeare  was born and died in Stratford-upon-Avon, but spent almost the entirety of his productive working life in London, and in truth is much more a London than a Stratford figure.  He  is known to have arrived in London  sometime between 1585 and 1592,  and  to have lived in the parish of St Helen, near  “The Theatre” and the “Curtain” in Shoreditch, in 1596; in the Liberty of the Clink in Southwark, near   the “Globe”, in 1599;  and in the parish of St Olave Silver Street, a short walk and ferry-ride from the   “Globe”, in 1604; and also to have purchased  a property in Ireland Yard, near the “Second Blackfriars”, in 1613 (according to the Deed of Conveyance in the London Metropolitan Archives, which incidentally bears one of the few surviving examples of his signature, it cost him  £140, at a time when the average annual salary for a professional person was £20).  At least some of his  early  plays are known to have been performed in the “Rose”, by “Lord Strange’s Men”, in around 1592; in the “Theatre”, by the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men”, a troupe he both acted and wrote for, from 1594; and in the “Curtain”, also by the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men”, from 1597 (after the twenty-one year lease on the “Theatre” had expired).  His later plays are known to have been performed in the “Globe”, by the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men” and their successors the “King’s Men”, who owned it, from 1599; and in the “Second Blackfriars”, by the “King’s Men”, who owned it, from 1609.   Incidentally, as Ackroyd (2005) put it, in his marvellous “Shakespeare – The Biography”:  “Shakespeare did not need to address London directly … ; it is the rough cradle of all his drama”.  However, as Crawforth et al.  (2014) have suggested, in their thoughtful and thought-provoking “Shakespeare in London”, he may have indirectly referenced the violence of Tyburn in “Titus Andronicus”; the political machination of Whitehall in “Richard II”; the class distinction of the Strand in “Romeo and Juliet”; the legal machination of the Inns of Court in “The Merchant of Venice”; the religiosity of St Paul’s Cathedral in “Hamlet”; the madness of Bedlam in “King Lear”; the misery of imprisonment for debt in the King’s Bench Prison in Southwark in “Timon of Athens”; the strange new world of the “cabinet of curiosity” on Lime Street in “The Tempest”; and the rich variety and cosmopolitanism of one of the first true World Cities in the form of an ever-present back-drop: the City was the World, in Microcosm.  Moreover, he did set one of his most famous scenes here, in Ely Palace: that in “Richard II” in which John of Gaunt utters the immortal words: “This royal throne of Kings, this sceptr’d isle,|This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,|This other Eden, demi-paradise,|This fortress built by Nature for herself|Against infection and the hand of war,|This happy breed of men, this little world,|This precious stone set in the silver sea,|Which serves it in the office of a wall,|Or as a moat defensive to a house,|Against the envy of less happier lands,|This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”.   

Shakespeare’s sometime mentor  Christopher or Kit Marlowe was a  poet and playwright of the Elizabethan era, best known for the “mighty line” of his blank verse, and for his plays “Dido, Queen of Carthage”, “Tamburlaine the Great”, “The Jew of Malta”, “Doctor Faustus”, “Edward II” and “The Massacre at Paris”, many of which premiered at the “Rose”, and indeed are still performed on the site to this day.  Marlowe was a colourful character, an avowed lover of tobacco and boys, a supposed spy, and a sometime resident of the Liberty of Norton Folgate, where a warrant was once issued for his arrest.  In 1593, he  was fatally stabbed in a tavern in Deptford, apparently in a dispute over the bill, and is buried in the nearby church of St Nicholas.  His  death is alluded to in his friend Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” as “a great reckoning in a little room”. 

Benjamin or Ben Jonson was  a playwright and poet of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, best known for his satirical plays “Every Man In His Humour”, “Volpone”, “The Alchemist” and “Bartholomew Fair”, and for his associations with the “Curtain” and “Hope” (his so-called “lost” play, “The Isle of Dogs”, performed at the “Swan”, earned him a brief spell in the Marshalsea Prison by way of its  libellous  and seditious content).  He himself, though, wrote that  his “best piece of poetry” was his first son, also Benjamin, who died of the plague in 1603, aged just seven.  Jonson senior is buried – famously, upright – in Westminster Abbey. 

It seems that Jonson and his friends, possibly  including Shakespeare and Marlowe, were wont of an evening to gather at the “Mermaid Tavern” in Bread Street, for what we might now call  a  “bard-off”.  Beaumont memorably wrote of the exchanges that took place there: “What things have we seen|Done at the Mermaid!  Heard words that have been|So nimble, and so full of subtle flame|As if that every one from whence they came|Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,|And had resolv’d to live a fool the rest|Of his dull life … ”. 

Milton was a metaphysical poet, man of letters and sometime statesman of the slightly later Caroline, Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration eras.  He is best known now as the author of the epic poem “Paradise Lost”, published in 1667, which Samuel Johnson argued “with respect to design may claim the first place … among the productions of the human mind”.  During the Civil War and Commonwealth, though, he was known as the author of a number of – non-fiction – prose works  opposing  the monarchy and episcopacy, and supporting Republican and Parliamentarian causes.  These included the polemical “Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” and “Eikonoklastes” (a counter-blast to “Eikon Basilike”, popularly attributed to Charles I himself), both published in 1649; and “Defensio pro Populo Anglico”, published in 1652 (“First Defence”) and 1654 (“Second Defence”).  His Republicanism led to his arrest and temporary imprisonment after the Restoration, his release being secured by, among others, Andrew Marvell (then a Member of Parliament).  He is buried in the church of St Giles Cripplegate, half a mile  from his birthplace on Bread Street.

Aphra Behn was a  playwright, poet and writer, not to mention sometime spy, of the Restoration Era (writing under the pastral pseudonym “Astrea”).  She is now known as much for her importance as a role model to later female writers as for her writings, which include “The Forc’d Marriage”, “Abdelazer”, “The Rover”, “Sir Patient Fancy”, “The Feigned Courtesans”, “The Roundheads”, ”The City Heiress”, “The Lucky Chance” and “The Emperor of the Moon”.   Interestingly, she was  not  the first woman in England to publish a play: Lady Elizabeth Cary, in 1613, and Margaret Cavendish, in the 1650s, both  accomplished this achievement  before her.  However, it is probably fair to say that she was more  influential than those who had gone before her.

London  was also an important centre of  publishing, of books, tracts, pamphlets, handbills, and, eventually, newspapers.  William Caxton’s apprentice  Wynkyn de Worde set up the first printing press in the City, at the sign of the “Sun”, on Shoe Lane, off Fleet Street, in 1500, publishing  his first book there the following year, in 1501.  The industry boomed almost from the start, and by 1640 there were 837  separate publishing businesses in London, most of the reputable ones in the area  around  Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill and St Paul’s, and  the less reputable ones  on Grub Street (now renamed Milton Street).  Foreign-language texts were published in French from the fifteenth century, in Greek from 1524, in Italian from 1553, in Spanish from 1594, and in Dutch from 1615; English-language newspapers, from 1621, and dailies, from 1702.  The Stationers’ Company was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1557.  In 1631, the Stationer  who published what became known as the  “Wicked Bible” – with the word “not” omitted from the Commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” – was fined was fined £500, and a copy of the offending book was  burned in front of the Company’s Hall.  The  Hall, in Stationers’ Hall Court, off Ludgate Hill, was burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, alongside a number of bookshops in nearby St Paul’s Churchyard and surrounding areas, and a large number of books removed to the cathedral for supposedly safe keeping.  The present  Hall was built on the same site in 1673 (and burned down during the Blitz of the Second World War, alongside a number of bookshops in Paternoster Row, and up to six million books).  Many important dramatic works of the English Renaissance, including some of Shakespeare’s, were published by the stationer Edward Allde (d. 1628), whose business was located at the “Long Shop” on Poultry, adjoining the church of St Mildred, and, from  1593, at the sign of the “Gilded Cup” on Fore Street.  Incidentally, the future  playwright, pageant-writer and “poet to the City” Anthony Munday  served as an apprentice to Allde in 1576-7.  The first complete edition of Shakespeare’s plays, collated after his death in 1616 by his fellow “King’s Men”  John Heminge and Henry Condell,  was published by the stationers Edward Blount and Isaac and William Jaggard in 1623, and is now colloquially known as the “First Folio”.  Heminge and Condell, who had been parishioners at the church of St Mary Aldermanbury, are commemorated on the bust to Shakespeare in Aldermanbury Square, the inscription on which reads in part as follows: “To the memory of John Heminge and Henry Condell, fellow actors and personal friends of William Shakespeare.  … To their disinterested affection the world owes all that it calls Shakespeare.  They alone collected his dramatic writings regardless of pecuniary loss and without the hope of any profit gave them to the world.  They thus merited the gratitude of mankind”.  The Jaggards’ place of business was at the sign of the “Half-Eagle and Key” in Barbican.  Incidentally, one of my distant ancestors,  Simon West (1614-79), was also a stationer, apprenticed to John Bull in 1629, and “made free by servitude” in 1636/7. He owned a shop under the sign of the “Blackamore’s Head” in Wood Street, off Cheapside, and was also a Warden of St Peter Westcheap, both of which were burned down in the Great Fire of 1666.  In 1647, he  wrote  a book about short-hand, entitled “Arts improvement or short and swift writing”.

It was the nourishing womb  of the English Renaissance. 

Dress

Dress underwent  something of a revolution in the post-Medieval period.  In Tudor times, during Henry VIII’s reign, in imitation of the King, men began to wear   elaborately embroidered and quilted “doublets”, over  short “breeches” and “hose”, and under short sleeveless “jerkins” and fur-trimmed three-quarter-length overgowns,  and feathered flat caps, and to at least attempt  to  convey  an image of masculinity  – emphasised by enormous “cod-pieces” (witness  any of the many reproductions of Holbein’s famous portrait of Henry of 1536 – the original  of which, housed in Whitehall Palace, was lost in a  fire in  1698).  Women began to wear figure-hugging corsets, and to convey an image of femininity.    

During Elizabeth I’s reign, women began to wear hooped, crinoline-like devices called “farthingales” under their gowns, which imparted flare, and enabled flounce; and increasingly elaborate “ruffs” around their necks (see the statue of  Elizabeth on the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West, dating to 1585). 

Men also attempted, almost entirely unsuccessfully, to rock the  ruff look (see the memorial in the church of St Olave Hart Street to the Florentine merchant – and rumoured informant to Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham – Piero Capponi, who died of the plague in 1582).  Puritan men and women  dressed modestly and simply, and in sombre colours, although not always in black, as is often thought  (black dye was expensive, and mainly used in the manufacture of legal and clerical garb).    In  Stuart times, during James I’s reign, men began to wear buttoned tunics with high-standing collars in place of the previously fashionable ruffs, long boots in place of  shoes, long  coats, and high and pointed hats (see de Critz’s portrait of James of c. 1606   in the Dulwich Picture Gallery).  Women also began to wear high-standing collars in place of ruffs. 

During   Charles I’s reign, men began to wear unbuttoned tunics with falling collars,  shirts, long breeches, short boots and cloaks (see le Sueur’s equestrian statue of Charles  of 1633 in Charing Cross).  “Cavaliers”   dressed extravagantly and flamboyantly, with   low hats  with wide brims and with or without plumed trims.  French-style  wigs became de rigueur – among men – in fashionable circles after the Restoration (Charles II had spent some time in exile  in France during the Republic). 

Pepys wrote in his diary in 1663 of one that his wig-maker Jervas had attempted to sell to him that had been “full of nits”!

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) …

Social History contd.

Population

From various accounts, it appears that the population of London was of the order of 60,000 in the 1520s; 80,000 in 1550; 120,000 in 1583; 200,000 in 1630; 460,000 in 1665; and 360,000 in 1666, after the “Great Plague”: it is evident that it took until 1550 for the population to recover following the “Black Death” of 1348-9.  The population of the large “East End” parish of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney in 1606-10  was estimated by the haberdasher and pioneer demographer John Graunt in 1663  to have been approximately 13280, based on the multiplication of the number of – non-plague – deaths of 145 by a factor of 32.    The death rate among native Londoners continued to exceed the birth rate, significantly so during outbreaks of Plague (note in this context that life expectancy in the city’s poorer  parishes was only 20-25, around half the national average, and that even that in the  wealthier parishes was only 30-35).    The city’s population could only be maintained and grown by immigration.  In 1541, 652 out of 3,433, or 19%, of assessments for tax purposes were of “aliens” or “strangers”; and in 1582, 1,358 out of 5,900, or 23%.  And in the parish of St Dunstan and All Saints, Stepney in 1606-10, 84 out of 2620, or 3%, of burials were of “immigrants”. 

Interestingly, persons of colour (“Blackmoors”) were present in some numbers in London by Tudor to Stuart times, and indeed may be  demonstrated  by surviving records  to have  come to constitute 5% of the population of the conspicuously ethically diverse parish of St Botolph-without-Aldgate.  Among them were John Blanke, a court-musician to  Prince Arthur’s –  and later King Henry VIII’s – wife Catherine of Aragon, possibly  originally from “Moorish” Spain; Reasonable Blackman, a silk-weaver of Southwark during the reign of Elizabeth I, possibly a refugee from the former Spanish Netherlands; Mary Fillis, a maid-servant to the Barker family of Mark Lane also in Elizabethan times, originally from Morocco, and a Muslim, who converted to Christianity; and Anne Cobbie, a “Tawny Moor with Soft Skin”, and  courtesan of Westminster,  in the Jacobean era. 

Rather remarkably, there is a surviving portrayal of the aforementioned John Blanke – in  a turban, trumpeting – on the “Westminster Tournament Roll” of 1511, which resides in the Royal  College of Arms.  Elizabeth I wrote in 1596,  in an open letter to her  Lord Mayors: “[T]here are of late divers blackmoors brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here too many, considering how God hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our own nation … , whereof many for want of service and means to set them on work fall to idleness and to great extremity. Her majesty’s pleasure therefore is that those kind of people should be sent forth of the land”.  She went on to write, in 1601, in a draft Royal Proclamation: “Whereas the Queen’s majesty … : hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people shall be avoided and discharged out of this her majesty’s realms; and to that end and purpose hath appointed Casper van Senden, merchant of Lubeck, for their speedy transportation … ”.     It appears, though, that this was proclamation was never actually acted upon, and that no deportations of persons of colour ever actually took place.

The unprecedented rise in population in the (late) Tudor and Stuart periods made London one of the first true world-cities, alongside Madrid, Lisbon and Amsterdam, and was accompanied for the first time by significant growth beyond the old City wall, especially westward along the Thames towards Westminster.  The growth beyond the City wall took place  even despite the issuing of “Proclamation of Queen Elizabeth against new buildings in and about London”, in 1580; and of further such,  by the succeeding Stuart Kings.  The area between the Cities of London and Westminster became a particularly fashionable one in which to live in  the post-Medieval period.  Also at this time, the  many high-status Bishops’ Inns in the area were appropriated by the Crown, and either became Royal residences, or else  disbursed among the aristocracy.  These included those  of the Bishops of Ely and Lincoln on Holborn; those of the Bishops of Salisbury, Exeter, Bath & Wells, Llandaff, Chester and Worcester on the Strand; and that of the Archbishops of York on Whitehall, which became  Whitehall Palace.  Well-heeled  suburbs also began to nucleate around elegant purpose-built squares in the west-central districts of Covent Garden and Bloomsbury in the early to mid seventeenth century.

Administration and Governance

The   City of London  remained  at least in part self-governing, under the Corporation and its officials, namely the Mayor, Sheriffs, Aldermen and Common Councilmen.  And the Corporation continued to be responsible for the education of the populace, and the maintenance of the law. 

Education

Benefactors continued to found educational establishments.    

Christ’s Hospital School was  originally founded by Edward VI  in 1552 on the site of the former conventual buildings of the Greyfriars Priory, subsequently  burned down in the Great Fire, and rebuilt, and eventually relocated to Horsham in Sussex in 1902.    The Merchant Taylors’ School was originally founded by  the Merchant Taylors’ Company in 1561, on the site of the former estate of the Dukes of Suffolk, and subsequently relocated to Northwood.  Gresham College was originally founded in 1597 through the benefaction of the financier Thomas Gresham, on the site of his house on Bishopsgate, and subsequently relocated initially to Gresham Street, and eventually  to Barnard’s Inn.  The  College of Physicians was originally founded in 1518, at Amen Corner, subsequently burned down in the Great Fire, and rebuilt, and eventually relocated to Regent’s Park.  The Choir School attached to Westminster Abbey was founded in the sixteenth century.

The Law

The law of the land continued to be maintained locally; and legal training, to be provided by the Inns of Court.    “Revels”  are known to have been held on a number of occasions  for the entertainment of the lawyers and student-lawyers in the Inns, for example in 1561, 1594/5, 1616 and 1617/8; the famous lawyer, statesman, philosopher, “natural philosopher”, writer, and all-round Renaissance Man Francis Bacon (1561-1626) being involved with the organisation of the 1594/5 ones.  Note also that  Shakespeare’s plays were performed in his lifetime in certain of the Inns’ Halls, and that  “Twelfth Night” premiered in Middle Temple Hall   in 1602. 

The Inns of Court, incidentally, played a formative, if  little-known, role in the founding of the United States of America.   The aforementioned Francis Bacon, who was of those instrumental in the creation of the first English colonies in the Americas in the seventeenth century, and is  widely regarded as one of the “founding fathers” of the United States, received his legal training in Gray’s Inn.   Later, many of the court  officers  who worked on the establishment of the legal infrastructure in the colonies in  the period prior  to the Revolutionary War in the eighteenth century also received their initial training in the Inns (as noted by as William Taft, the sometime Chief Justice and President).  Some have even suggested that the principles of secession originated in the Inns.  Certainly, Peyton Randolph trained in Middle Temple, before going  on to become the first President of the Continental Congress in 1774; as did John Dickinson, before going on to help draft the Declaration of Independence in 1776; and John Rutledge, before going on to chair the committee that drafted  the Constitution in 1787.  And a number  of Templars were signatories to one or other, or both, of the aforementioned documents.

The law continued to be upheld through a judicial system that placed particular emphasis on punishment as a deterrent to crime.  The least serious or petty crimes continued to be  punishable by fines or corporal punishment; more serious ones by deportation to the colonies in the Americas, once founded, in the early seventeenth century  (deportation to Australia did not begin until after the loss of the colonies in the Americas in the American War of Independence in the late eighteenth century); and only the perceived most serious by capital punishment.  And imprisonment continued to be used essentially as an expedient rather than as a punishment per se.

Corporal punishment might include  the  use of the pillories and stocks, which restrained convicted criminals and allowed them to be harangued or to have missiles thrown at them by the general public (Daniel Defoe, who was  perceived to have been unjustly convicted, was garlanded with flowers).   It also might include the nailing of one’s ears to the pillory, as in the cases of John Daye and of an unnamed surgeon, who had been convicted of “seditious words”, the former “speaking of the Queen’s Highness”, and the latter “speaking of the preacher at the sermon at Paul’s Cross”, in 1553 (“and when they had stood onn the pillory 3 houres the nails were pulled out with a pair of pincers”).   Or whipping, sometimes “at a cartes arse”, as in the case  of Hugh Weaver, who had been convicted  of “misusing the mayor … and strykinge his officer”, in 1545.  In  1612, John Chamberlain wrote: “This last Sunday Moll Cut-purse, a notorious baggage (that used to go into man’s apparel and challenged the field of diverse gallants) was brought to [Paul’s Cross], where she wept bitterly and seemed very penitent, but it is since doubted she was maudlin drunk. Being discovered to have tippled off three quarts of sack before she came to her penance”.  Moll Cut-purse, whose real name was Mary Frith, was  the model for Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s “The Roaring Girle”, written in 1611.

Capital punishment might include  hanging, burning, or hanging, drawing and quartering.  Executions were  carried out in various parts of the city, most famously at Tower Hill and West Smithfield, and also at Tyburn.    Among those executed at Tower Hill were John Fisher, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Wyatt the Younger, Robert Devereux , William Laud and Harry Vane (on a macabre note, the headless bodies of Fisher, More and  Laud were temporarily buried in the church of All Hallows Barking  before being moved to their  final resting places – Fisher’s and More’s in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London).  Among  those executed at West Smithfield were John Forest, Anne Askew and John Rogers.  And among those executed at Tyburn were not only Elizabeth Barton, John Houghton  and Thomas Harrison, but also,   in 1499, Perkin Warbeck, for pretending to the throne; in 1541, Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham, for treason against the King’s majesty in misdemeanour with the Queen [Catherine Howard], and Rafe Egerton and Thomas Herman, for counterfeiting the King’s Great Seal; in 1564, three unnamed persons, for  “ye stelynge and receyvynge of ye Queens lypott [chamber pot] … and … other small ware out of hir chambar in her progresse”; and in 1610, John Roberts, a Catholic Priest, for  contravening the “Act Forbidding Priests to Minister in England” (the watching  crowd, who revered Roberts for the work he had done among them during an outbreak of  the plague in 1603, saw to it that he died by hanging and was spared  the suffering of drawing  and quartering: one of his finger bones is preserved as a holy relic in Tyburn Convent).  In  1660, the disinterred corpse of Oliver  Cromwell was ritually hanged and beheaded  there!  In 1661, a highwayman was hanged and gibbeted close to the scene of his crime on Shooter’s Hill, and Samuel Pepys wrote “and a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh is shrunk to his bones”.  Capital sentences could be commuted in the cases of those who could claim the “benefit of clergy”, by reciting a psalm that came to be known as the “neck verse” (“Miserere mei Deus secundum misericordiam tuam iuxta multitudinem miserationum tuarum dele iniquitates meas”).  One such case was that of the playwright, poet, actor and bricklayer  Ben Jonson, who had killed a man – a fellow actor named Gabriel Spencer – in a duel in Hoxton, and was still able to get off “scot free”. 

Newgate Prison remained in use, going on to be rebuilt again in  1672, after having been burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and yet again in 1782, after having been destroyed during the Gordon Riots of 1780.    Until 1783, condemned prisoners continued to be taken from Newgate to Tyburn to be executed.  On the day of the execution, the sexton from the nearby church of St Sepulchre would ring his handbell, and recite a brief prayer, ending with the words “And when St Sepulchre’s bell in the morning tolls, The Lord above have mercy on your soul”.

The  handbell of 1605 may still be seen in the church.  From 1783 onwards, the condemned were executed in  the prison  itself, at first in public, and then, from 1868, in private.  The last execution here was in 1902, the year the prison was decommissioned (it was demolished in 1904, whereupon the present Central Criminal Court  – colloquially known as the “Old Bailey” – was built in its place).

Interestingly, there are indications that even as long ago as the Tudor period, crime was already becoming what we would now call organised.  In 1585, the Recorder of London, William Fleetwood, wrote in a letter to William Cecil, the 1^st Baron Burghley: “[W]e did spend the daie … searching owt sundrye that were receptors of ffelons … .  Amongst our travells this one matter tumbled owt by the way, that one Wotton a gentilman borne, and sometyme a marchauntt man of good credyte, who falling by tyme into decaye, kept … neere Byllingesgate … a schole house sett upp to learne young boyes to cut purses.  There were hung up two devises, the one … a pockett, the other … a purse.  The pockett had yn it certen cownters and was hunge abowt with hawkes belles … ; and he that could take owt a cownter without any noyse, was allowed to be a … ffoyster; and he that could take a peece of silver owt of the purse … a Nypper.  Nota that a ffoyster is a Pick-pockett, and a Nypper a Pick-purse, or a Cutpurse”.

Trade and Commerce

Trade continued to prosper alongside religion, and the port to remain central  to it. 

The Royal Exchange in the City was built  by Thomas Gresham between 1566-7, and officially opened by Elizabeth I in 1570/1.  It was modelled on the “Bourse” in Antwerp, itself built  in 1513.  By Tudor to Stuart times, the port extended as far east as Wapping, Shadwell, Ratcliff, Limehouse, Poplar and Blackwall on the north side of the Thames, and as far east as Bermondsey and Rotherhithe on the south side.  This is is evident not only from written but also from pictorial records, including a number of panoramas  and maps, and Marcus Gheeraerts’s  painting “A Fete at Bermondsey”, dating to  1569/70.   

Perhaps my favourite tombstone in all of London is the crudely fashioned and poignantly inscribed one in  the church of St Dunstan and All Saints in Stepney to “Honist Abraham Zouch of Wappin, Rope Maker”, who died in  1684.  In Shadwell and Ratcliff (“London’s Sailortown”), there were docks, wharves, roperies, and smithies, including, in a survey of 1650, in Stuart times, four docks and 32  wharves along a 400-yard section of river.  Tellingly, in 1606-10, 48% of the recorded working population of 250 were involved in “river and sea” crafts and 12% in shipbuilding, and the remainder in  provisioning and “land” and other crafts.  And in  1650, 53% were mariners, 10% ship-builders and 7% lightermen, and the remainder  carpenters, smiths, rope-makers and other ancillary tradesmen, tanners and, of course,  brewers. In Poplar, there were more docks, and sail-makers’ warehouses.  In Tudor times, Sir Thomas Spert and 54 mariners lodged here while sails were made for Henry VIII’s  great ship “Henri Grace a Dieu”  (which later saw action against the French at the Battle of the Solent, in which the “Mary Rose” sank;  and later still transported the King to the peace summit with the French at the Field of Cloth-of-Gold).  In Blackwall, there were still more  docks.  And in Rotherhithe, docks, wharves, and ship-building- and timber-  yards, where mast-makers,  anchor-smiths, coopers  and others plied their trades.  Annual exports – even excluding  “shortcloth” – were valued at approximately £700,000 at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  In modern terms, this equates to approximately £100,000,000  (according to  the National Archives “Currency Convertor”). 

Hugh Alley’s “A Caveatt for the Citty of London” of 1598 shows that by  this time there were open street markets selling fish on New Fish Street as well as Old Fish Street; meat on Eastcheap, at the St Nicholas Shambles on Newgate Street, and in Smithfield; and grain and general goods at Billingsgate and Queenhithe, on Cheapside, Cornhill, Gracechurch Street, Leadenhall Street and Newgate Street,  and in Southwark.  There were also  covered markets selling general goods on Leadenhall Street and at the Stocks.

Livery Companies

The Livery Companies continued to establish working practices and maintain standards, and to make money.    The Goldsmiths’ Company became so wealthy it even lent money to Charles II, in the 1660s, in exchange for promissory notes, and in effect became the first national bank (the Bank of England was not founded  until 1694).  In 1671, the Mayor’s Court in the  Guildhall ordered that defective spectacles discovered  in the possession of one Elizabeth Bagnall be “with a hammber broken all in pieces” by the Master of the Company of Spectacle-Makers “on the remaining parte of London Stone” (damaged  during the Great Fire five years earlier). 

Interestingly, the companies also played an important role in the Protestant Plantation of Northern Ireland (the “Ulster Plantation”), and the subjugation of the native Catholic population, in the early seventeenth century, which is how Derry came to be known as Londonderry.  The Livery Companies’ involvement  in the plantation began under James I in 1609, that is, shortly after Tyrone’s and O’Doherty’s rebellions;  and continued under Charles I, who at one point was evidently forced  to take action against the companies to ensure their continuing – if unwilling – co-operation. 

Of the total of 77 Livery Companies   in existence in London at the time of the Great Fire of 1666, 13 (17%) were involved in the cloth and clothing sectors of the economy; 12 (16%) in food and drink; 10 (13%) in construction and interior design; 10 (13%) in metal-working; 5 (7%) in wood-working (including shipwrighting); 4 (5%) in leather-working; 3 (4%) in arms manufacture; 3 (4%) in equestrian accoutrement manufacture;  3 (4%) in the medical profession; 2  (3%) in chandlery; 2 (3%) in the clerical profession; 2 (3%) in entertainment;  2 (3%) in transport; and the remaining 6 (8%) in sundry trades (author’s own analysis of data in Melling, 2003).  London’s economy was evidently still dominated by the manufacture of goods, rather than by services, at this time.

The Hanseatic League

The Hanseatic League continued to control  overseas trade with the ports on the coasts of the North Sea and Baltic, although the former privileges extended to the German merchants of the Steelyard  were revoked by Edward VI in 1551, and those  who stayed on after that date were expelled – albeit only temporarily – in 1598.  The Steelyard went on to be burned down in the Great Fire of 1666, and rebuilt  afterwards, only to be demolished in 1855, to make way for Cannon Street Station.   

It was in the Steelyard in 1532 that Holbein painted his portrait of the Hanse merchant Georg Gisze, from Danzig [Gdansk], which now hangs in the Staatliche Museen zu  Berlin.  The painting depicts a self-confident – possibly even self-important- man posing  in a fine white shirt, ruched pink silk doublet, and black velvet three-quarter-length overgown and matching cap.  Surrounding him in his wood-panelled office are some of the tools of his evidently lucrative trade: on the shelves in the background, a wooden box and chest, a bunch of impressive-looking keys hanging from a hook, weighing-scales, an account-book, and various papers, perhaps including  shipping contracts, bills of lading  and cargo manifests; and on the table  in the foreground, a gold ring bearing his seal, a pewter desk-set comprising a low circular storage box  cum   ink-pot, a  pounce-pot, and  two matching stands  holding quills and  a rod of sealing-wax, a letter-opener, a clock, and a pestle, all on a section of geometrically-patterned Anatolian carpet.  Also on the  table  is a Venetian glass vase of carnations, symbolising his recent engagement to Christine Kruger (the couple would go on to marry in 1535, and to have ten children).

Other Overseas Trade Links

Other ultimately immensely important overseas trade links became  forged through  the establishment by charter of the Muscovy or Russia Company, an outgrowth of the even more venerable “Company of Merchant Adventurers to New Lands”, or, in full, the “Mystery and Company of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown”, in 1555; the Levant Company, in 1581; the East India Company, in 1600; the Virginia Company, in 1606; and the Royal African Company, originally the “Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa”, in 1660.    By the middle of the seventeenth century, goods were being brought in from all over the New World as well as the old.  The so-called Cheapside Hoard, believed to have been buried on the eve of the Civil War, includes not only various types of jewel and jewelry from continental Europe, and Sinai, Iran,  Afghanistan, India and Sri Lanka in Asia,  but also heliodors from Brazil and emeralds from Colombia.  The hoard includes a carnelian intaglio  bearing the arms of William Howard, First Viscount Stafford, and therefore must date to some time  after his ennoblement in 1640.

The Muscovy Company, and later its semi-independent subsidiary the Greenland Company, came to dominate the lucrative whaling industry until the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  At this time, whale-oil was used for lighting and for  lubrication (and whale-bone for stiffening garments). 

The Levant Company dealt with trade with the Levant, that is to say, the eastern Mediterranean, at the time substantially under the control of the Ottoman Empire.  One of its London merchants  was the sometime Mayor John Gayer, whose life was spared by a lion in Syria on October 16^th, 1643, and in whose honour the “Lion Sermons” are given on or around that day each year in the church of St Katharine Cree, where he is buried. 

The   East India Company had a monopoly on trade with the Indian sub-continent, and came to make a colossal fortune exploiting its resources, and indeed eventually effectively running it,  until after the “Indian Mutiny” or “First War of Indian Independence” of 1857. 

The Company’s London head-quarters was at East India House on Leadenhall Street. 

And the Virginia Company established and controlled  trade with the Americas.  In 1606, the merchant-adventurer, Citizen of London, and Cordwainer Captain John Smith set sail, aboard the “Susan Constant”, from Blackwall, to found  the first successful English colony in the Americas, at Jamestown in Virginia, “from which began the overseas expansion of the English-speaking peoples” (an ultimately unsuccessful colony had earlier been founded at Roanoke in Virginia in the mid-1580s).  Smith later returned to London, and died here in 1631, and is buried in the church of St Sepulchre. 

There is a statue of him in nearby Bow Churchyard on Cheapside, and a memorial to all the “Virginia Settlers” on what is now Virginia Quay in Blackwall.    Incidentally, the   Algonquin  princess Pocahontas, who famously saved Smith’s life in the Americas in 1607, visited London in  1616-7, with her by-then husband the tobacco planter John Rolfe, staying at the “Bell Savage”  off Ludgate Hill.  She died in Gravesend in 1617.  In 1621, in response to a call from the Virginia Company, fifty-six “young and uncorrupt” women crossed the Atlantic to look for husbands among the settlers in Jamestown in Virginia, and to become “Jamestown Brides”.  Famously, in the previous year of 1620, the “Mayflower” had sailed from  Rotherhithe and  Plymouth with 102 passengers – including families – aboard to found the Plymouth colony in Massachussets.  Among the passengers or “pilgrims” were William Bradford, late of Leiden and of Aldgate in London, who went on to be the first Governor of the Plymouth Colony, and his wife Dorothy or Dorothea, nee May, who tragically drowned while  the “Mayflower” was moored off the coast of Massachusetts.  Four others  also died on the voyage, and a further forty-five during  the first harsh winter of the settlement.  Francis Bacon set out his utopian vision of how life might be in the English colonies in the Americas in his novelised book, “New Atlantis”, published, the year after his death, in 1627.

The “Slave Trade”

To the City’s – and indeed the country’s – eternal shame, some of its trade from as long ago as the late sixteenth century onwards was in enslaved persons.  In 1562, John Hawkins took three ships from London or Plymouth (sources differ) to Sierra Leone, where he  seized 300 Africans, “by the sword”.   Then,  in the “Middle Passage”, he  transported them across the Atlantic to Hispaniola in the Spanish West Indies, where he sold them – as commodities – in order to purchase sugar, ginger and other goods.   And finally, he returned to London and sold his cargo to City merchants for a fortune, completing the repugnant triangle.  Hawkins’s venture  was backed by the Mayor of London, Thomas Lodge.  It was also  supported by the Queen, Elizabeth I, although apparently only after she had been – falsely – assured  that the enslavement was unforced.   She actually described forced enslavement as  “detestable”, as something that would “call down the vengeance of Heaven upon the undertakers”.   In 1567, Hawkins wrote to the Queen, requesting her permission for another slaving voyage, in part as follows: “The voyage I pretend is to lade negroes in Guinea and sell them in the West Indies in truck of gold, pearls and emeralds, whereof I doubt not but to bring home great abundance for the contentation of your Highness … .  Thus I … do most humbly pray your Highness to signify your pleasure by this bearer, which I shall most willingly accomplish”.    In 1619, under Elizabeth’s successor, the Stuart King, James I, the trade in enslaved Africans spread to the English Americas for the first time, with  “twenty and odd Negroes” being transported to Jamestown in Virginia, presumably to work on the tobacco plantations there.  Many more would soon be sent to back-breaking  toil under an  unforgiving tropical sun in the sugar plantations on St Kitts and Nevis, Barbados and elsewhere in the English West Indies (including, from the 1670s, Jamaica).  In the late 1640s and 1650s, one London merchant, John Paige, made a fortune transporting  enslaved persons from Guinea in West Africa  to Tenerife in the Canary Islands, which at that time was technically illegal.  Even when the captain of one of his ships, the “Swan”, died in the Bight of Biafra, and the ship, under the command of  mate, became “staved upon the seas” and “was utterly lost” at Rio del Rey, he was able to keep his losses within acceptable bounds by selling the nineteen enslaved persons who survived.

The trade in enslaved persons was to continue to grow further, and faster, after the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713, when Spain was compelled under the terms of the  Treaty of Utrecht to grant to Britain the “Asiento”, or – exclusive – “Contract … Allowing …  the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America”.  The trade  was only finally abolished throughout the British Empire in 1843.  By this time, 3351 slaving voyages had begun in London, which had become the fourth  largest centre involved in the trade in the world, after Rio de Janeiro, Bahia and Liverpool.    Shockingly, given that each vessel could accommodate  anywhere between 250-600 enslaved persons, those 3351 voyages beginning in London would have transported, in round numbers, between 850,000 and 2,000,000 persons; of whom, again in round numbers, between 100,000 and 250,000 would have died (assuming an average  mortality rate of 13%).

Wealth and Poverty

The rich remained rich, and the poor, poor, and deprived of any opportunity of mobility; and indeed,  if anything, the divide  between the wealth classes widened during the “price revolution” of the sixteenth century, which witnessed a four-fold increase in the cost of living.  There continued, though,  to be an  informal  system of  charitable patronage and donation from the churches,  other rich institutions such as the Livery Companies, and rich individuals, to the poor.  As John Stow wrote: “Sir Thomas Roe, Marchant Taylor, Mayor, 1568, gave …  lands or Tenements, out of them to bee given to ten poore men, Clothworkers, Carpentars, Tilars, Plasterers, and Armorers, 40 pounds yearely, viz., 4 pounds to each, also 200 pounds to bee lent to 8 poore men”.  The rich and poor continued to live rather uneasily together, although there continued to be concentrations of wealth in the wards in the centre of the  City, and of poverty in those around its margins, and without the walls.   In the sixteenth century, as indicated by the subsidy rolls of 1541 and 1582, the wards containing the highest number of householder tax assessments in the highest bracket were Bread Street, Broad Street, Cheap, Cordwainer, Cripplegate, Tower and Walbrook; the ones containing the highest number of assessments  in the lowest bracket, Aldersgate, Aldgate, Castle Baynard, Cripplegate, Farringdon Within and Farringdon Without.  It is interesting that Cripplegate falls into both categories, Cripplegate Without being “where the noble, the rich and the famous lived … because they wanted space, which had become scarce within the walls”; Cripplegate Within, home to a more mixed community.

After the passage of the  “Old Poor Law” in 1601, there was a formalised further charge on ratepayers to provide for relief at the level of the local parish. This saw the  “impotent poor” cared for in alms-houses; the “able-bodied poor” either put to work   in “Houses of Industry” (the fore-runners of work-houses) in exchange for board and lodging,  or else provided with “out-relief” payments or payments-in-kind; and the “idle poor” sent to  “Houses of Correction” (essentially prisons).   Trinity Hospital in Greenwich, founded in 1613, would admit into its alms-houses only  “a man that is decayed, and is become poor by casual means, and not through his own dissolute life, and one that  hath always lived in honest name”.  And “No common beggar, drunkard, whore-hunter, haunter of taverns nor ale-houses nor unclean person infected with any foul disease, nor any that is blind, or … not able, at the time of his admission, to come to prayers daily … nor any idiot, nor any other that is not able to say, without book, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed and the Ten Commandments”.

Indidentally, after  the  passage of the  “New  Poor Law” in 1834, the – “deserving” – impotent poor continued to be cared for in alms-houses, and the – “undeserving” – idle poor  to be sent to “Houses of Correction”.  However, the – “deserving” – able poor were now refused “out-relief”, and made  to work in work-houses, where conditions were quite deliberately made sufficiently inhumane  as to deter extended stays.  The work-house system was only finally abolished as recently as 1930, and indeed many former work-houses remained in use until 1948.

It might seem incongruous to discuss poverty and poor relief in what is now the – at least outwardly – conspicuously wealthy City of Westminster.  However, throughout much of its long history, including the Medieval and post-Medieval periods, Westminster was at the poverty-blighted ragged outer edge of the built-up area of London.  Tothill Fields Bridewell was built here in 1618; the Palmer alms-houses,  in 1656 (and the St Margaret’s Work-House, in 1692).

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) …

Social History

Everyday life in London in post-Medieval  times would have revolved around the requirement and search for sustenance for body and soul.   For most women, it  continued to  revolve around the “daily grind”.  For some, there would have been  opportunities for advancement in education,  in paid employment  or self-employment, albeit in the trades rather than in the professions, and in public office.  However, as the anonymously-authored “The Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights” pithily put it in 1632, “Women have no voice in Parliament, they make no laws, they consent to none, they abrogate none”. 

Religion

Christianity

The predominant religion of the period  before the Reformation was Catholicism; and after the Reformation, either Protestantism – or a hard-line form thereof known as Puritanism – or Catholicism, depending upon Royal patronage.   Sadly, if not entirely atypically of human history, there  was much  persecution of the one sect by the other, such that the fortune and fate of a man could  be determined by his faith and allegiance, or by scheme and intrigue, as by the toss of a coin. 

In 1597, the Jesuit priest Father John Gerard was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get him to reveal the whereabouts of Father Henry Garnet (who eventually went on to be executed in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605).  And in 1655 “one of earliest Sufferers [among the early “Quakers”]  in the City of London was Anne Downer, a Maiden about thirty Years of Age, the first Person of that Sex who preached publickly in that City:  … , committed to the House of Correction, …  detained there ten Weeks, and because she refused to work, …  beaten with a Rope’s End”.  There was also persecution of believers in  other faiths, and of non-believers. 

Judaism

Jews had been expelled from the country in 1290, and for the most part for the next few  hundred years lived there only either  as coverts or “Marranos”, or as converts to Christianity, some of the latter in  London in the Domus Conversorum on Chancery Lane. 

There was, though, at least one acknowledged Jew in a position of prominence in London in Tudor times – the Portuguese Roderigo Lopez, the sometime Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen, Elizabeth I (who was eventually executed for allegedly attempting to poison her in 1594).  And another in early Stuart times – the Portuguese Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, a wealthy Leadenhall Street merchant and trader in silver, gunpowder  and cochineal (who went on to be the first Jew to be endezined as an English citizen in 1655). 

Jews were finally  formally readmitted,  under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and following a personal approach to Cromwell by  one Menasseh ben Israel, in 1656.  The first to arrive were Sephardim, escaping religious persecution in Portugal, Spain and elsewhere in western Europe.  Slightly later came the Ashkenazim, from central and eastern Europe.   A  Sephardic Synagogue was built on Creechurch Lane, on the eastern fringe of the City, in 1657, and later relocated torebuilt on an adjacent site on  Bevis Marks in 1701, where it still stands.  The Bevis Marks Synagogue was built by Joseph Avis, a Quaker, who refunded to the congregation the difference between the final cost of the construction and his original – higher – estimate, not wanting to profit(eer)  from working on a House of God. And the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue was built on nearby Duke’s Place in 1690.  Sadly, it was destroyed during the bombing of the Blitz of the Second World War.  The old Jewish cemetery in Cripplegate, until 1177 the only one in all England, to which bodies would be brought for burial from as far afield as Exeter and York, was also destroyed in the War.  New  cemeteries  were opened in  Mile End in the East End of London in the late seventeenth century (Betahayim Velho), and in the early eighteenth (Betahayim Novo).  The latter lies in what is now  the Mile End campus of Queen Mary College.

Some Londoners were curious as to Jewish  observances; others suspicious, mistrustful or fearful.  In 1662, one Joseph Greenhalgh wrote in a letter:  “Lately … I lighted upon a learned Jew with a mighty bush beard, …  with whom … I fell into conference … ; at which time he told me that he had special relation as Scribe and Rabbi to a private Synagogue … in London, and that if I had a desire to see their manner of worship … he would give me such a ticket,  as, upon sight thereof, their porter would let me in … .  When Saturday came, … I … was let … in … , but there being no Englishman but myself, … I was at first a little abashed to venture alone amongst all them Jews, but my innate curiosity to see things strange …  made me confident … .  I … opened the inmost door, and … went in and sate me down among them; but Lord … what a strange … sight was there … [as] would have frightened a novice … .  Every man had a large white … covering … cast over the high crown of his hat, which from thence hung down on all sides, … nothing to be seen but a little of the face; this, my Rabbi told me, was their ancient garb, used in divine worship in … Jerusalem … : and though to me at first it made altogether a strange … show, yet me thought it had in its kind, I know not how, a face and aspect of venerable antiquity ”.

And in   1663, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: “[A]fter dinner my wife and I, by Mr. Rawlinson’s conduct, to the Jewish Synagogue [on Creechurch Lane]: … Their service all in a singing way, and in Hebrew. And anon their Laws that they take out of the press are carried by several men, four or five several burthens in all, and they do relieve one another; and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing. And in the end they had a prayer for the King, which they pronounced his name in Portugall; but the prayer, like the rest, in Hebrew. But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service … would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this”.  Unbeknownst to him at the time, he had witnessed the service of Simchat Torah (“Rejoicing in the Torah”), marking the end of the Sukkot(h), the  annual cycle of readings from the Torah, which is always a celebratory rather than a solemn event.  The associated activity  that most bewildered him was the Hakafot (dancing with the Torah).   There would almost certainly also have been drinking of ritual wine (symbolising life), although he does not mention it.  Indeed, a traditional source recommends performing the priestly blessing earlier than usual in the service, to make sure that the priests are still sober  when the time comes!

Islam

The earliest records of Muslims (“Mahometans”) visiting if not living in London are from the Tudor period.  There were a number of important emissary visits by Muslims to London during the reign of Elizabeth I, as she sought to build  an alliance between the Islamic World and Protestant England against Catholic Spain. 

One was by Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, the principal secretary to the King of Barbary, depicted in an extraordinary contemporary portrait of 1600  in turbaned dress, an exotic scimitar on his left hip, a full beard – and forthright expression – on his face.  The alliance essentially ended when the Anglo-Spanish War ended in 1604 (the first full year of the Stuart King James I’s rule).

Food and Drink

The rich  continued to gorge themselves on meat, and the poor, whose wages were still only 2s/week or less,  to subsist on potage, as in the Medieval period.  According to surviving records, the guests at a banquet in the Great Hall in Ely Palace in 1531, who included  Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, managed over the course of five days to work their way through 24 oxen, 51 cows, 91 pigs, 100 sheep, 168 swans, 444 pigeons and 720 chickens – not to mention 340 dozen, that is, 4080, larks!  The lack of fibre in the diet of the wealthy evidently led to  widespread constipation!  In  Pepys’s time, it was common practice to  take  purges to relieve the condition – and days off work to recover from the consequences! 

By the sixteenth century, the water supply system had become inadequate  to meet the demands of the rising population (it had also become subject to much abuse and over-use by individuals and by commercial and industrial concerns).  A short-term solution to this problem  was provided  by the construction by the Dutchman Pieter Maritz in 1582 of a – rather rickety – apparatus under one of the arches of London Bridge that  allowed water to be pumped from the Thames  into the heart of the City – or, in the case of the original demonstration to City officials, over the spire of the church of St Magnus the Martyr!  The apparatus was destroyed in the Great Fire, but thereafter replaced by Maritz’s grandson, and  continued in use, after a fashion, until the early nineteenth century.   

A longer-term solution was provided by the construction by the Welshman and wealthy merchant, goldsmith, banker and Member of Parliament Sir Hugh Myddelton or Myddleton in 1609-13 of a  10’ wide and 4’ deep canal, or “New River”, all the way from springs at Amwell and Chadwell in Hertfordshire into the City, an incredible 37 miles away, parts of which  may still be seen along the “New River Walk”, for example in Canonbury Grove in Islington.  The “New River” was formally opened on September 29^th, 1613, by Myddelton’s older brother Thomas, the Mayor of London.   The playwright, poet and writer of pageants Thomas Middleton (no relation)  wrote in “The manner of His Lordships entertainment … at that most famous and admired worke of the running streame from Amwell head, into the cesterne neere Islington … ”: “Long have we laboured, long cherished and prayed|For this great work’s perfection, and by th’aid|Of heaven and good men’s wishes ‘tis at length|Happily conquered by cost, art and strength.!And after five years’ dear expense in days,!Travail, and pains, besides the infinite ways!Of malice, envy, false suggestions,!Able to daunt the spirits of mighty ones|In wealth and courage, this, a work so rare,|Only by one man’s industry, cost  and care|Is brought to blest effect … ”.  Myddelton had to overcome any number of technological  obstacles, and much land-owner and political opposition, to see this major civil engineering project through to completion, (the “New River” relied on gravity to allow flow, and hence had to be constructed on a gradient, of as little as two inches per mile).  He did so with a mixture of drive and determination, the financial support of 29 investors or “adventurers”, and the tacit backing of the King.  His backers had to wait some time until they   profited from the enterprise (actually, until 1633, although by 1695 the New River Company ranked behind only the East India Company and the then newly-constituted  Bank of England in terms of its capital value).  The public  health benefits of Myddelton’s project were immediate, though,  and immeasurable,  and indeed it has been described as “An immortal work – since men cannot more nearly imitate the Deity than in bestowing health”.  Myddelton died in 1631, and was buried in the church of  St Matthew Friday Street, where he had served as a warden.  Concerted  attempts to locate his coffin and monument following the church’s demolition in 1881 were ultimately unsuccessful.  However, fittingly, there is a statue to the great man on Islington Green in Islington.  And some of the fittings from the New River Company’s offices, including Grinling Gibbons’s (?) “Oak Room”, may still be seen  in the  London Metropolitan Water Board building, also in Islington.

Ale and beer  continued to be staple drinks.  By 1656, there were a quite literally staggering 1153 drinking establishments in the City, ranging from basic ale-houses through middling taverns, where wine could  also be had, to up-market inns, where there would be food and drink of the finest, accommodation and often also entertainment.  Among them were the “Bell Savage” of 1452 on Ludgate Hill; the “Olde Mitre” of 1546 in Ely Court; the ”Devil and St Dunstan” of 1563,  the “Olde Cheshire Cheese” of 1584, the “Cock” of 1600, and the “Mitre” of 1602/3 all on Fleet Street; the “Seven Stars” of 1602 on Carey Street;  the “Wig and Pen” of 1625 on the Strand; and the “Olde Wine Shades” of 1663 on Martin Lane.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, drunkenness became something of a social problem.  So  did the so-called “dry-drunkenness” caused by  smoking tobacco, first introduced from the Americas  in the 1570s.   In the post-Medieval period, tobacco was smoked in clay pipes, the remains of which came to litter  the City like the cigarette ends of today, and are common finds on the foreshore of the Thames. 

More socially acceptable was the consumption of equally addictive, although less harmful, coffee and tea, first imported from Arabia and China respectively  in the 1650s.  Coffee and tea were expensive commodities in the later seventeenth century, and  consumed  exclusively  by  the  rich.  The coffee- and tea- houses that began to spring up all over London at this time became places where respectable wealthy gentlemen, who would not be seen dead in ale-houses, might congregate to converse,  and to transact  business: one, Lloyd’s, eventually evolved into an entirely separate  business enterprise, and another, Jonathan’s, into the Stock Exchange.

The very  first of the coffee-houses to open was at the sign of  “Pasqua Rosee’s Head”, just off Cornhill, in 1652.  The eponymous Pasqua Rosee was employed as a man-servant by one Daniel Edwards, a London merchant,  member of the Levant Company and trader in Turkish goods; and he, Rosee,  appears to have run the coffee-shop as a sideline, in partnership with one Christopher Bowman,  a freeman of the City and former coachman of Edwards’s father-in-law, Alderman Thomas Hodges.   It is thought that Rosee and Edwards  met in Smyrna in Anatolia, although also that Rosee was ultimately of ethnic Greek extraction.  The “Coffee House”, also just off Cornhill, the “Globe” and “Morat’s”, in Exchange Alley, and an unnamed coffee-house in St Paul’s Churchyard, were also all open by the early 1660s, and all referred to in Samuel Pepys’s diary, as was an unnamed tea-house, where in 1660 he   “did send for a cup of tee, a China drink, of which I had never drunk before”.  A contemporary advertising handbill  described the “Vertue of the Coffee Drink First publiquely made and sold in England by Pasqua Rosee” as follows:  “The Grain or Berry called Coffee”, groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia.  It is brought from thence, and drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigniors Dominions.  It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a Drink, by being dryed in an Oven, and ground to Powder, and boild up with Spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fasting an hour before, and not Eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured … .  The quality of the Drink is cold and Dry … .  It quickens the Spirits, and makes the Heart Lightsome … .  … It suppresseth Fumes exceedingly, and … will very much … help Consumption and the Cough of the Lungs [hmm, not so sure about that].  … It will prevent Drowsiness, and make one fit for business … ; and therefore you are not toe Drink it after Supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours”.  One  George Sandys    described the coffee of the time  as “black as soote, and tasting not much unlike it”.  Incidentally, the first chocolate-house opened in a Frenchman’s house in Queen’s Head Alley, off Bishopsgate, in 1657, and “Mr Bland’s”  in 1664, the latter  also referred to in Pepys’s diary, as the place where he went to drink his “morning’s draft in chocolate”.   Chocolate was a very considerable luxury in the mid 1600s, costing as much as 13s/lb (£50/lb in today’s terms, according to  the National Archives “Currency Convertor”). 

Bow on the River Lea remained  the site  of a cottage industry involving  the milling of grain for use in baking and distilling.  Indeed, milling  continued here  right up until the last century, and one – eighteenth-century – tidal mill, the House Mill, on Three Mill Island, has recently been restored as a working museum.

Sanitation

The systems and standards of sanitation remained as in the Medieval.  Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary one day in 1660 of how he had gone down into his cellar and “ … stepped into a great heap of **** ”, by which he found that his neighbour Mr Turner’s “house of office” was full to bursting!  The open sewer that the  River Fleet had become  by the fourteenth century was only finally  enclosed in the eighteenth.   The line of the river is followed by that of Farringdon Road, Farringdon Street  and New Bridge Street.

Medical Matters

The diagnosis and treatment of disease continued to be based essentially on Galenic principles.  Treatments remained largely plant-based, with medicinal herbs being widely grown both at monastic sites, for example at Syon Abbey, and also,  commercially, elsewhere, for example, in the herbalist and Apothecary John Parkinson’s garden in Long Acre in Covent Garden. 

Parkinson (1567-1650) made his living preparing and dispensing plant-based and other medicines from a shop on Ludgate Hill, a short walk from the Apothecaries’ Hall.   He  was one of the founder-members of the Apothecaries’ Company, and also the Apothecary to James I, and Royal Botanist to Charles I.   (Another of the co-founders of the Company, of whom there is a fine marble bust in its  Hall, Gideon de Laune, was the Apothecary to James’s queen, Anne of Denmark.)  Parkinson also wrote  “A Garden of All Sorts of Pleasant Flowers” in 1629, and  “The Theatre of Plants” in 1640. 

Another herbalist and writer – of “The Complete Herbal” –  Nicholas Culpeper,  of Spitalfields, died in 1654  of Consumption, or possibly of some other lung disease  caused by excessive smoking, and was buried in Bedlam.  (Note here, though,  that simply breathing the London air of the time, badly polluted as it was by the burning of coal, would also have had deleterious effects on health.)  Sad to say, the herbal treatments  remained largely ineffectual against the diseases of the day, including Sweating Sickness in addition to  Plague, Ague and Consumption (interestingly, the incidence of Leprosy  had become extremely low throughout Britain, and indeed western Europe, by the beginning of the post-Medieval period, possibly on account of an acquired collective immunity).

Sweating Sickness   was diagnosed by  “a … burnyng sweate … : by the tormentyng …  of which … men …  being not hable to suffre the … heat, … cast away … sheets & …  clothes”, leading to  delirium, and in almost all cases,  after a matter of hours, death (“all … after yelded up their ghost”).  The disease  is now thought to have been either Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome (HPS) or Pulmonary Anthrax (the latter caused by inhaling spores of the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, perhaps contained in contaminated wool).  It appeared in England – by way of Wales – with the arrival from France of Henry VII in 1485, and in the October of that year killed numerous people in London, sparing neither aristocracy nor bourgeoisie.   There were notable subsequent outbreaks in England in  1488, 1506/7, 1517, 1528/9 and  1551/2, after which last date the disease disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as it had appeared, never to return (it is also possible that it  killed Arthur Tudor at Ludlow Castle in 1502, while sparing  his wife, Catherine of Aragon, who went on to marry his brother, Henry VIII, in 1509).  The boy-king Edward VI wrote of the outbreak of  1551/2 as follows:  “At this time came the sweat into London, which was more vehement than the old sweat.  For if one took cold he died within 3 hours, and if he escaped it held him but 9 hours, or 10 at the most.  Also if he slept … , as he should be very desirous to do, then he raved, and should die raving”.  As Henry Machyn put it, it  “carried off many people both noble and commoners”.   Dyer estimates that 1-2% of the population died  of sweating sickness in England in 1551/2, based on analysis of surviving parish records.  However, the figures were at least locally   much higher  in closed religious communities, in which the disease was readily spread from person to person during services or even auricular confessions.   In the case of Syon Abbey, the Martyrologium records that 10% of the brothers and sisters died in the outbreak of 1488, including Robert Bryde on 16^th May, Thomas Westshaw on 1^st June, Robert Derham on 4^th June, Robert Hall on 7^th, Robert Frynge and Alice Hatton on 10^th June,  Isabel Lambourn on 15^th  June, Catherine Dymock on 17^th June, Marion Cross on 4^th July, Catherine Fogg on 2^nd October, and Joan Payne on 20^th October.

Surgical operations continued to be performed by Barber-Surgeons.  Somewhat against the odds, Samuel Pepys survived having a gallstone the size of a billard ball removed, without anaesthetic, by the skilled surgeon Thomas Hollier, on March 26^th,  1658.   Each year thereafter, he celebrated the anniversary of the event rather like a second birthday, writing  in his diary on March 26^th, 1660: “This day it is two years since it pleased God that I was cut of the stone at Mrs Turner’s in Salisbury Court; and did resolve while I live to keep it a festival, as I did last year at my house, and for ever to have Mrs Turner and her company with me.   … I can and do rejoice, and bless God, being at this time, blessed be his holy name, in as good health as ever I was in my life”.

Some of the   hospitals that had been attached to monastic houses in the Medieval period survived the Dissolution and into  the post-Medieval.  The mental hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem, or “Bedlam”, was cruelly depicted  a mad-house even on the  Jacobean stage.  And in 1669, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary: “I to the Office, while  the young people went to see  Bedlam” – to view and mock the antics of the inmates, as a low form of  entertainment.  It was subsequently rebuilt by Robert Hooke in Moorfields in 1676, relocated to  the junction of Kennington Road and Lambeth Road  in the Borough of Southwark in 1815, and relocated again to the site of a former country house estate in Beckenham in the Borough of Bromley in Kent in 1930.   The Danish sculptor Caius Gabriel Cibber’s (1630-1700) extraordinary statues of figures representing “Raving and Melancholy Madness”, that used to stand outside the old hospital in Moorfields, may now be seen inside the museum of the new one in Beckenham.  Also inside the museum may be seen  a padded cell, a strait-jacket and other restraints, and an Electro-Convulsive Therapy kit, from the hospital’s later days.

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) …

Stuart History

Under the Stuarts, it was a time of War and Plague and purifying Fire.  Of a bloody Civil War, between Royalist and Parliamentarian.  And of a peculiarly English revolution under the Parliamentarian Commonwealth and Protectorate  of Oliver and Richard Cromwell, which ended with the Restoration of the Monarchy – albeit, importantly,  a monarchy that could thenceforth  only rule with the  consent of Parliament. 

It was also, though, the time not only of a continuing Renaissance in the arts, but also of the birth of science, or “natural philosophy”, as it was known.  The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, nowadays generally known simply as the Royal Society, was founded in 1660, the  founding members being William Ball, William Brouncker, 2^nd Viscount Brouncker, Jonathan Goddard, Abraham Hill, Robert Moray, Paul Neile, William Petty and Lawrence Rooke.  The purpose of the Society, according to its Charter, was “To improve the knowledge of all natural things, and all useful Arts, manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engines and Inventions by Experiments – (not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysics, Moralls, Politicks, Grammar [or spelling, presumably], Rhetorick or Logick)”.  Its  first meetings were held at Gresham College.  Perhaps the most famous seventeenth-century collection of Naturalia, or “Cabinet of Curiosities”, was the Musaeum Tradescantianum, founded in around 1634 by the gentleman-travellers and collectors John Tradescant the Elder (c. 1580-1638), and his son John Tradescant the Younger (1608-62), and housed in  a building called “The Ark” in Vauxhall, which was the first such in England  to be open to the general public –  albeit at a cost of 6d.  In time, the Tradescants’ collection was  acquired by Elias Ashmole, and in 1691 donated by him to Oxford University, to form the nucleus of the Ashmolean Museum.  Incidentally, the Tradescants, who were actually employed as gardeners – John the Elder  by  Robert Cecil, the 1^st  Earl of Salisbury, and by William Cecil, the 2^nd Earl; and John the Younger  by  Charles II – are both buried in the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, which now incorporates a Garden Museum.

On March 24^th, 1603, John Manningham wrote: “This morning about three at clock her Majesty departed this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree … .  About ten at clock the Council and divers noblemen having been awhile in consultation, proclaimed James VI, King of Scots, the King of England, France and Ireland … ”. 

On March 15^th, 1604, James made a triumphal entry into the City of London, and thence processed to  Westminster to attend his first parliament, amid much pomp and pageant.  A number of contemporary accounts of the event still survive, including that of the King himself, who wrote,  with characteristic bombast: “The people of all sorts rode and ran, nay, rather flew to meet me, their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection, their mouths and tongues uttering nothing but sounds of joy, their hands, feet, and all the rest of their members in their gestures discovering a passionate longing and earnestness to meet and embrace their new sovereign.”  On its way through the City, the  procession passed beneath  a series of allegorically-themed triumphal arches, designed by Stephen Harrison, that formed the backdrops for entertainments by some of the finest writers of the day, including Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Webster.

James, like Elizabeth, was a Protestant, although one widely suspected of harbouring Catholic sympathies. 

One of his first acts as king, in 1604, was to help bring to an end the Anglo-Spanish War, that had begun in 1585, on terms that were publicly perceived to be favourable to Catholic Spain.

In 1605, he saw off the  Catholic “Gunpowder Plot”,  “a most horrible conspiracy of the Papish … ” to blow up the Houses of Parliament in the Palace of Westminster, and had Guy Fawkes and the other ringleaders executed,  and their remains exhibited, as a deterrent to others.  Sir Edward Hoby, the son-in-law of Elizabeth I’s cousin Henry Carey, the 1^st Baron Brunsdon, and the nephew of her chief advisor William Cecil, the 1^st  Baron  Burghley or Burleigh, and a courtier during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, wrote of the event: “On the 5th of November we began our Parliament, to which the King should have come in person, but refrained, through a practice but that morning discovered” (the discoverer, one Thomas Knyvet(t), the Keeper of Whitehall Palace, was rewarded by the granting of  an extension of the lease on his house, in what was to become Downing Street).  The plot was to have blown up the King at such time as he should have been set in his royal throne, accompanied by his children, Nobility and Commons and … Bishops, Judges and Doctors, at one instant and blast and to have ruined the whole estate and Kingdom of England.  And for the effecting of this there was placed under the Parliament house, where the King should sit, some 30 barrels of gunpowder … .  In a vault under the parliament chamber before spoken of one Johnson [Guy Fawkes’s  assumed name] was found … who, after being brought into … the court, and there demanded if he were not sorry for his so foul and heinous a treason, answered he was sorry for nothing but that the act was not performed.  Being replied unto him that no doubt there had been a number in that place of his own religion, how in conscience he could do them hurt, he answered a few might well perish to have the rest taken away.  … When he was brought into the King’s presence, the King asked him how he could conspire so hideous a treason against his children and so many innocent souls which never offended him? He answered that … a dangerous disease required a desperate remedy”. 

Popular   suspicion of James’s  supposed Catholic sympathies remained, even after the Gunpowder Plot, and in 1622, on the seventeenth anniversary thereof, the Dean of St Paul’s, John Donne, felt compelled to give a sermon at (St) Paul’s Cross reassuring the congregation as to the King’s  commitment to Protestantism.   In his sermon, he described him  as “in his heart, as farre from submitting us to that Idolatry, and Superstition, which did heretofore oppresse us, as his immediate Predecessor, whose memory  is justly precious to you, was”.  

The Civil War

When James I died in 1625, his son Charles I came to the throne, and, sadly, so abused his supposed “divine rights” as a King in the  eyes of Parliament, and of the population at large, as ultimately to trigger the  Civil War between supporting Royalists and opposing Parliamentarians, under Oliver Cromwell, in 1642.  In 1641, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and Lord Deputy of Ireland, an ardent supporter of the King in his power-struggle with Parliament in the period leading up to the Civil War, was executed on Tower Hill for high treason  (specifically, for allegedly saying to the King “You have an army in Ireland you may employ here to reduce this Kingdom”).  His last words, taken from the Psalms, were: “O put not your trust in Princes, nor in any child of man; for there is no help in them”.  A not particularly oblique reference to the sense of betrayal he felt toward the King, who had promised him that he “should not suffer in his person, honour or fortune”; and then, when expedient, signed his death warrant!  Then in the January of 1642, the King and his henchmen entered the Houses of Parliament and attempted to arrest five Members of Parliament, namely, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles, John Pym and William Strode (Hampden was Cromwell’s cousin, and one of his ablest military commanders during the early part of the war, dying of wounds sustained at the Battle of Chalgrove Field  in 1643).  It is said that when the King demanded to be told the whereabouts  of the MPs, the Speaker of the House, William Lenthall, retorted:  “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here”.   The attempted arrest,  which is ceremonially re-enacted each year during the State Opening of Parliament, when the Crown’s  representative, “Black Rod”, is despatched from the Lords to the Commons, there to have the doors slammed shut in his face, was essentially the last in the  series that eventually led to the outbreak of war  in the August.

The City of London  remained largely Parliamentarian in its sympathies throughout the course of the Civil War, and pivotal to its eventual outcome.  The  early political philosopher  Thomas Hobbes opined that “but for the City the Parliament never could have made the war”.  A leading  Royalist,  Charles I’s  Secretary of War Edward Walker, decribed London as “the head and fountain of this detested rebellion”.  And another went so far as to remark that “[if] posterity shall ask who would have pulled the crown from the king’s head, dissolved Monarchy, enslaved the laws, and ruined the country; say, ‘twas the proud, unthankful, schismatical, rebellious, bloody City of London’”. 

At the time of the outbreak of the war, the City of London’s militia, the so-called “trained bands”, comprised around 6,000 men organised into  twenty companies and four regiments (North, South, East and West).    Subsequently,  it grew to 8,000 men in forty companies and six regiments (Red, Blue, Green, White, Orange and Yellow).  And eventually to 20,000 men in fourteen regiments (five of them “auxiliary”).  The militia was at least partly  under the command of the Mayor and Aldermen.  Its primary role was the defence of London, although  it also contributed brigades of foot to Parliament’s armies in the field.   Its importance waned after the establishment of the New Model Army in 1645.  The  Honourable Artillery Company was unusual in that it, or rather elements of it, fought on both sides!   The  City’s civilian population, including large numbers of Puritans, broke its rule against working on the Sabbath  in order to construct  a ring of defences, eleven miles in circumference, known as the “Lines of Communication”.  There is now little trace of these defences, although the remains of one of the star forts that once formed part of of them have recently been unearthed in an  archaeological excavation in Spital Square in Spitalfields. 

On November 7^th,  1642, Giovanni Giustiniani, the Venetian ambassador to the court of Charles I, wrote,  in a letter to the Doge and Senate of Venice: “They do not cease to provide with energy for the defence of London … .  They have sent a number of parliamentarians to the surrounding provinces with instructions to get together the largest numbers they can of their trained bands, with the intention of despatching these subsequently to where the remains of the parliamentary army are quartered.  They have brought a number of the companies of these trained bands … into this city.  All the troops are kept constantly at arms.  There is no street, however little frequented, that is not barricaded …, and every post is guarded … .  At the approaches to London, they are putting up trenches and small forts of earthwork, at which a great number of people are at work, including the women and … children.  They have issued a new manifesto to the people full of the usual representations against the …King, for the purpose of arousing their enthusiasm still more in the support of this cause”.  And later, in 1643, William Lithgow wrote: “I found the … court before Whitehall Gate guarded, and what was more rarer, I found the grass growing deep in the … king’s house.  The daily musters and shows of all sorts of Londoners here are wondrous and commendable in marching to the fields and outworks … carrying … iron mattocks and wooden shovels, with roaring drums, flying colours and girded swords; most companies being interlarded with ladies, women and girls … carrying baskets to advance the labour … .  I saluted … two forts upon Tyburn Way and Marylebone Fields … , both pallisaded, double-ditched and barricaded with iron pikes, the one clad with eight demi-culverins and the other … with four … , both wondrous defensible”.    

The Battle of Brentford took place on November 12^th,  1642.  The site of the battle is marked by a granite memorial and by a series of informative plaques.  According to the plaques, what happened here was as follows:“Parliamentarians had arrived in the prosperous market town on Friday 11 November.  The following day the royalists marched from Hampstead Heath and in the early afternoon broke through a parliamentary barricade at the bridge over the Brent.  … [T]he royalists were delayed, fighting two or three hours until the parliamentarian soldiers fled.  This position was defended by about 480 of Lord Brooke’s regiment and survivors of the earlier fighting, with two small pieces of artillery. The royalists soon gained the upper hand.  There seem to have been no civilian dead despite the capture of the town.  About 20 royalists were killed, and perhaps 50 parliamentarians died in the fighting with more drowning in the Thames.  Parliamentary Captain John Lilburne was amongst those captured”.  And what happened next was as follows:  “Later that afternoon the royalists pressed on towards London.  There were more parliamentary troops in a large open area, probably Turnham Green and Chiswick’s Common Field.  These green-coated men of John Hampden’s regiment of foot charged five times, holding the royalists back.  But with night coming and the royalists exhausted from fighting both sides disengaged.  The royalist soldiers who had captured Brentford ransacked the town … The Battle of Turnham Green took place the following day”.  John Gwyn, a royalist soldier, wrote:“We beat them from one end of Brainford to the other, and from thence to the open field, with … resolute and expeditious fighting, …  push of pike and the butt-end of muskets, which proved so fatal to Holles’ butchers and dyers that day”.

The Battle of Turnham Green took place the following day, on November 13^th,  1642.  The site of the battle is marked by a series of explanatory  plaques.  According to the plaques, after losing the Battle of Brentford, the Parliamentarians took up a strategic defensive position at Turnham Green, with their left flank protected by the river, and their right by a series of enclosures.  It was here that the following day  they  essentially faced down the Royalists, who found themselves unable to manoeuvre past, in one of the largest-ever confrontations on English soil (albeit a substantially bloodless one), involving some 40,000 troops.   This was a decisive moment in the history of the war, the country, and its  capital. 

On May 2^nd, 1643, John Evelyn wrote in his diary: “I went from Wotton to London, where I saw the furious and zealous people demolish that stately Cross in Cheapside”.  The so-called Eleanor Crosses on Cheapside and at Charing Cross in Westminster, originally put up in the late thirteenth century by the then King, Edward I, in memory of his late wife, Eleanor of Castile, were both demolished in the Civil War, as symbols of Royal oppression.  The closest surviving one to London is in Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire.  In 1645, William Laud, sometime Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury, and a man well known for his “High Church” views and his fierce opposition to and persecution of Puritans, was executed as a traitor  on Tower Hill. Among the charges levelled  against him were: “That, by false erroneous doctrines, and other sinister ways and means, he went about to subvert religion, established in this Kingdom, and to set up popery and superstition in the church … ”, and “that, to save and preserve himself from being questioned and sentenced from these and other his traiterous designs, from the first year of his now Majesty’s reign, until now, he hath laboured to subvert the rights of parliamentary proceedings, and to incense his Majesty against parliaments … .” 

In   1647, with the war virtually  won, the Parliamentarian leadership gathered in the church of St Mary in Putney for the “Putney Debates”.  The debates, chaired by Cromwell and attended by officers and men of his New Model Army, many of whom were “Levellers”, addressed  nothing of less import than the post-Civil War future and constitution of England.  Among the issues debated  were whether power should be vested in the King and House of Lords or in the Commons, and  whether there should be universal – male – suffrage (“one man, one vote”).  Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, personifying the radical contingent, famously argued that:“ … [T]he poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee … ”.  Among the outcomes was a declaration of “native rights” for all Englishmen, including  freedom of conscience, and equality before the law.  Rainsborough went on to be killed during the siege of Pontefract, and to be buried in the church of St John in Wapping on November 14^th, 1648.  For a fuller account of his extraordinary life, the reader is referred to “The Rainborowes” by Adrian Tinniswood.    Then, on December 6^th,  1648, the Parliamentarian Colonel Thomas Pride expelled over one hundred Presbyterian Members of the “Long Parliament” from the Houses of Parliament, in what became known as “Pride’s Purge”.  At this time, the King and supporting Royalists were Episcopalians, and opposing Parliamentarians were divided among two factions, Independents and Presbyterians.  The Independents mistrusted the English Presbyterians because their Scottish counterparts had earlier entered into an alliance with the King, hence the purge.  The Independent Members who remained after the purge, constituting the “Rump Parliament”, then instigated the legal proceedings against Charles  that led to his trial for treason, and eventually to his execution. 

The Inter-Regnum

On January 30^th, 1649, having bid a heartbreaking goodbye to his young children, Charles was executed for treason outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall.  It was a freezing cold day, so he put on an extra shirt,  that no-one might see him shiver, and think him scared (“the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some observers may imagine proceeds from fear [and] I would have no such imputation”).  Eventually, after what must have been a harrowing wait, at 2pm, he delivered an almost inaudible address to the crowd, and at the end proclaimed  “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world”.  He then made a silent prayer,  laid his head upon the block, and had it stricken from his body.  Whereupon, according to an eye-witness account by one Philip Henry, “there was such a Grone given by the Thousands there present, as I never heard before & desire I may never hear again”.  The usually ubiquitous John Evelyn was pointedly not among those who bore witness to the event, writing in his diary: “The Villanie of the Rebells proceeding now so far as to Trie, Condemne, & Murder our excellent King … struck me with such horror that I kept the day of his Martyrdom a fast, & would not be present, at that execrable wickednesse … ”.

On May 19^th,  1649,  at what was effectively the end of the Civil War (although skirmishing was to continue for a further two years), the Long  Parliament passed an Act making England  a Commonwealth and Free State “where Parliament would constitute the officers and ministers of the people without any Kings or lords”.  The authoritianism of the Commonwealth – and later Protectorate – made it increasingly unpopular.  On December 25^th,  1657, John Evelyn wrote in his diary: “I went to London with my wife, to celebrate Christmas day, Mr Gunning preaching in Exeter chapel … .  Sermon ended, as he was giving us the Holy Sacrament, the chapel was surrounded with soldiers, and all the communicants and assembly surprised and kept prisoner by them … .  … In the afternoon came Colonel Whalley, Goffe, and others … to examine us one by one; some they committed to the marshal, some to prison.  When I came before them, they took my name and abode, examined me why, contrary to the ordinance made, that none should any longer observe the superstitious time of the nativity (so esteemed by them), I durst offend …, and … pray for  Charles Stuart … .  I told them we did not pray for Charles Stuart, but for all Kings, princes, and governors.  They replied … with other frivolous and ensnaring questions, and much threatening; and, finding no color to detain me, they dismissed me with much pity of my ignorance.  These were men of high flight and above ordinances, and spake spiteful things of our Lord’s Nativity”.  And in 1658, John Reresby wrote in his diary: “The citizens and common people of London had then soe far imbibed the custome and manners of a Commonwealth that they could scarce endure the sight of a gentleman, soe that the common salutation to a man well dressed was “French dog,” or the like. Walkeing one day in the street with my valet de chambre, who did wear a feather in his hatt, some workemen that were mending the street abused him and threw sand upon his cloaths, at which he drew his sword, thinkeing to follow the custome of France in the like cases. This made the rabble fall upon him and me, that had drawn too in his defence, till we gott shelter in a hous, not without injury to our bravery and some blowes to ourselves”.

The Restoration of the Monarchy

On April 25^th,  1660, which would have been Oliver Cromwell’s 61st birthday (he had died in 1658), the “Convention Parliament” was convened for the first time, in theory as a “free parliament”, with no allegiance to either the Commonwealth or the Monarchy, although in practice as one with overwhelmingly Monarchist sympathies.  Indeed, according to Trevelyan, it was “by the letter of the law no true Parliament, because the King did not summon it, on the contrary, it summoned the King”.      And on May 8th, it restored the monarchy to Prince Charles, making him King Charles II.   

On May 29^th, Charles  entered the City of London.  According to an unnamed source: “On Tuesday, May the 29th (which happily fell out to be the anniversary of his majesty’s birth-day), he set forth of Rochester in his coach; but afterwards he took horse on the farther side of Black-heath … .  … In magnificent fashion his majesty entered the borough of Southwark, about half an hour past three of the clock … ; and, within an hour after, the city of London at the bridge; where he found the windows and streets exceedingly thronged with people to behold him; and the walls adorned with hangings … ; and in many places … loud musick; all the conduits … running claret wine; and the … companies in their liveries … ; as also the trained bands … standing along the streets … , welcoming him with joyful acclamations.  …   From which place, … his majesty … entered Whitehall … , the people making loud shouts, and the horse and foot several vollies of shot, at this his happy arrival.  Where …  parliament received him, and kissed his royal hand.  At the same time … the Reverend Bishops … , with divers of the long oppressed orthodox clergy, met in that royal chapel of King Henry the Seventh, at Westminster [Abbey],  there also sang Te Deum, & c. in praise and thanks to Almighty God, for … his … deliverance of his majesty from many dangers, and … restoring him to rule these Kingdoms, according to his just and undoubted right”. 

On April 22^nd, 1661, Charles  ceremonially processed  on horseback through the City of London to Westminster, as portrayed by the Dutch artist Dir(c)k Stoop in a painting now in the Museum of London.   The route passed  through four specially-constructed allegorically-themed triumphal arches: one on Leadenhall Street; one at the Royal Exchange on Cornhill; one on Cheapside; and one in Whitefriars (the arches are thought to have been inspired by those designed by  Rubens for the triumphal entry of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria into Antwerp in 1635).   The associated lavish entertainments  were described in detail in print by the Scots stage-manager John Ogilby, in a book entitled, in part (!),  “The entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II, in his passage through the city of London to his coronation containing an exact accompt of the whole solemnity, the triumphal arches, and cavalcade … ”.   The following day, April 23^rd, Charles was formally crowned King at Westminster Abbey.  Samuel Pepys wrote of the occasion in his diary: “About 4 I rose and got to the Abbey, … and ..,  with a great deal of patience I sat … till 11 before the King came in. …    At last comes in the Dean and Prebends of Westminster, with the Bishops (many of them in cloth of gold copes), and after them the Nobility, all in their Parliament robes, which was a most magnificent sight. Then the Duke, and the King with a scepter (carried by my Lord Sandwich) and sword and mond  before him, and the crown too. The King in his robes, bare-headed [that is, without his customarily-affected wig], which was very fine. And after all had placed themselves, there was a sermon and the service; and then in the Quire at the high altar, the King passed through all the ceremonies of the Coronacon, which to my great grief I and most in the Abbey could not see. The crown being put upon his head, a great shout begun … ”

Before he had even been formally crowned, Charles instigated a massive man-hunt for  the surviving regicides who had signed his father’s death warrant, most  of whom had gone into hiding, many  in continental Europe, and some  even in the Americas.   He eventually executed them all,  in so doing  violating  the terms of his own “Declaration of Breda”, which had promised a pardon for all crimes committed during the Civil War and inter-regnum.  On October 13^th,  1660, Major-General Thomas Harrison was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn (“he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition” as Pepys drily noted); on October 14^th, Thomas Scot, Adrian Scroop, John Cook and John Jones at Charing Cross; and on October 15^th, John Carew, also at Charing Cross.  John Cook had been  the chief prosecutor at Charles I’s trial.  Shortly before his execution, he wrote: “We fought for the public good and would have enfranchised the people and secured the welfare of the whole groaning creation if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom”.  And on June 14th, 1662, Sir Harry Vane, who had been a leading Parliament but not a regicide, was beheaded at Tower Hill.  Pepys  wrote on this occasion: “[A]bout eleven o’clock, … we all went out to the Tower-hill; and there, over against the scaffold, made on purpose this day, saw Sir Harry Vane brought.  A very great press of people.  He made a long speech, many times interrupted by the Sheriff and others there; and they would have taken the paper out of his hand, but he would not let it go. … [So] trumpets were brought that he might not be heard.  Then he prayed, and so fitted himself, and received the blow … ”.  The composure and courage with which the regicides met their fate elicited much  sympathy from the watching masses – far from the reaction that  the authorities had wanted!

On January 19^th,  1661, the cooper Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason, for attempting, with fifty or so following so-called  “Fifth Monarchists”, to overthrow the recently restored King Charles II and seize  London in the name of “King Jesus”.  (They believed  Him about to return, in fulfilment of a prophecy in the Book of Daniel that Four Monarchies would precede the Kingdom of Christ – the Babylonian, Persian, Macedonian and Roman.)   Venner and his men, many of whom were veterans of the Parliamentarian New Model Army of the Civil War,  had earlier  in the month congregated in Swan Alley, descended  upon and occupied St Paul’s, accosted passers-by and asked them who they were for, and shot dead one man who answered that he was for Charles.   They had then  gone on the run, and on the rampage, for several days, with Venner personally responsible for   three murders, committed  with a halberd, on Threadneedle Street (a number of people killed in the  rebellion were buried in the Bedlam Burial Ground).    The men were finally surrounded  by  an overwhelmingly superior force of troops, according to one colourful account,  in the Helmet Tavern on Threadneedle Street and the Blue Anchor on Coleman Street, where they made a last stand,  and were either  killed or captured (after troops broke in from roof level, smashing aside the roof tiles with the butts of their muskets).   Venner himself was captured, after being wounded no fewer than nineteen times, and then tried and convicted at the Old Bailey for his crimes.

The Second Anglo-Dutch War broke out in 1665, as England and the Netherlands continued to vie for control of the seas and lucrative maritime trade.    The early exchanges mainly went England’s way.  In August 1666, the English Vice-Admiral Robert Holmes launched a raid on the Vlie estuary, razing to the ground the town of West-Terschellling on the island of Terschelling, and destroying around 130 Dutch merchantmen, in what was to become known as “Holmes’s Bonfire”.  The following month, the Great Fire essentially destroyed the City of London, and came to be widely interpreted by the Dutch as an act of divine retribution for “Holmes’s Bonfire”, and by the English as an act of Dutch sabotage.  The war’s later exchanges went the way of the Netherlands,  as England’s  economy and war effort suffered during and after the Great Plague in 1665 and Great Fire of London in 1666.  In 1667, the Dutch Admiral de Ruyter launched a raid on the  English naval base on the Medway, a tributary of the Thames, a short distance downstream from London, capturing the fort at Sheerness, and destroying eighteen naval ships, including the “Loyal London”, “Royal James” and “Royal Oak”, and capturing another, the flagship, the “Royal Charles”.  It was an ignominious defeat for the Royal Navy, and effectively  forced the English to sue for peace.  The war ended in 1667, with the  Dutch ascendant in the field.  In accordance with the terms of the  peace treaty, the  Treaty of Breda, the Dutch were allowed to retain control of the spice island of Pulau Run in the Moluccas in the East Indies, and also of the sugar plantations in Suriname in  South America.  In exchange, the English were able to keep factual possession of the perceived less valuable New Netherland in North America, the capital of which, New Amsterdam, they renamed New York, after James, Duke of  York (the future James II).

Also in 1665, London  suffered terribly  during an outbreak of Bubonic Plague that came to be known as the “Great Plague”.  There had also been outbreaks in the sixteenth century and in the earlier part of the seventeenth,  in 1563, 1578-9, 1582, 1592-3, 1603, 1625, 1636 and 1647.   One John Harvard of the Queen’s Head Inn in Southwark decided to sail to America to seek his fortune after the rest of his family died in the outbreak in 1625, and the  university that he helped found  there, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,  now bears his name.  The “Great Plague” of 1665 killed at least 70,000 people in London, and possibly as many as 100,000 – far more than the “Black Death” of 1348-9, although far fewer in proportion to the overall population.  This was despite, and perhaps in part because of, the  intervention  of the Mayor, John Lawrence, who issued “Orders … ”  to combat the spread of the disease  which included the shutting up – for twenty-eight days – of all houses which had been  “visited”, complete with all their inhabitants, whether  infected or not (the houses were marked with foot-high  red crosses and guarded by watchmen, who provided food for as long as any inhabitants survived, while  also making sure that none was able to leave). 

The Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks’ “Bills of Mortality” – now in the London Metropolitan Archives – show that of the 70,000 recorded Plague deaths in London in 1665, only 10,000 were in the 97 parishes within the walls of the City  – possibly because a significant proportion  of those inhabitants who could afford to do so had fled to the country.  The remaining 60,000  Plague deaths were in the 16 – generally poorer – parishes without the walls, the 5 in Westminster, and the 12 in Middlesex and Surrey.  St Giles Cripplegate, St Giles-in-the-Fields, St Margaret Westminster, St Martin-in-the-Fields, and Stepney, where there were “pest-houses”, were among the worst affected, with a total of well over 20,000 deaths – 6,500 of them in Stepney alone.  The bodies of the Plague victims were buried either in parish churchyards or in emergency “plague pits”, the latter including those of Tothill Fields in Westminster, to the west; Bedlam, Bunhill Fields and  Holywell Mount, to the north; Aldgate and the  Stepney pest-fields, to the east; and Crossbones Graveyard and Deadman’s Place, to the south. On a macabre note, the bulk of the parish church  of All Hallows Staining  collapsed  in 1671, due, it is thought,  to undermining of the foundations by burials of – 112 – Plague victims!

In his diary, Samuel Pepys wrote with mounting horror of the advance of the disease across Europe from October, 1663, of  the vain attempts to stem it by the quarantining of  incoming ships, of its eventual  arrival in London in June, 1665, and then of its devastating spread over the succeeding summer and autumn.  On August 31st,  1665, he  wrote: “[T]he plague having a great increase this week, beyond all expectation of almost 2,000, making the general Bill [of Mortality] 7,000, odd 100; and the plague above 6,000”.  On September 14^th: “[T]he Bill … in the City … is increased and likely to continue so, and is close to our house there.  My meeting dead corpses of the plague, carried to be buried close to me at noon-day …  in Fenchurch Street.  To see a person sick of the sores carried close by me by Grace-church in a hackney-coach.  My finding the Angell tavern, at the lower end of Tower-hill, shut up; and more than that, the alehouse at the Tower Stairs; and more than that, that the person was then dying of the plague when I was last there, a little while ago at night.  To hear that poor Payne, my waiter, hath buried a child, and is dying himself.  To hear that a labourer I sent but the other day to Dagenhams, to know how they did there, is dead of the plague; and that one of my own watermen, that carried me daily, fell sick as soon as he had landed me on Friday morning last, when I had been all night upon the water … is now dead of the plague.  … To hear that Mr. Lewes hath another daughter sick.  And, lastly, that both my servants, W. Hewers and Tom Edwards, have lost their fathers, both in St. Sepulchre’s parish, of the plague this week, do put me into great apprehensions of melancholy, and with good reason”.  And on September 20^th:  “But, Lord! What a sad time it is to see no boats upon the river; and grass grows all up and down White Hall court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets! And, which is worst of all, the Duke [of Albemarle] showed us the number of the plague this week, … that it is encreased …  more than the last, which is quite contrary to our hopes and expectations, from the coldness of the late season.  For the whole general number is 8297, and of them of the plague 7165; which is more in the whole … than the biggest Bill [of Mortality] yet: which is very grievous to us all”.  On the same day, one  John Tillison wrote: “Death stares us continually in the face in every infected person that passeth by us; in every coffin which is … carried along the streets.  … The custom was … to bury the dead in the night only; now, both night and day will hardly be time enough to do it.  … [L]ast week, … the dead was piled in heaps above ground … before either time could be gained or place to bury them.  The Quakers … have buried in their piece of ground [Bunhill Row] a thousand … .  Many are [also] dead in … other places about the town which are not included in the bill of mortality”.  The “Great Plague” was now at its peak in London, killing over a thousand people a day.  In the City, it had become so deathly still that there were weeds growing wild everywhere, even along Cornhill, Leadenhall Street, Bishopsgate and the other great streets, and in the Exchange.  So  silent  that far and wide the river  could be heard flowing under the score  arches of the old bridge.  My distant ancestor Frances West’s first husband, Citizen and Clothworker Robert Mickell, died of the plague on  September, 17^th, 1665, having written in his will only days earlier, evidently only too aware of his own mortality, “I … being well in body … praised bee God for the same but considering the frailty of man’s life and not knowing how soon it may please Almighty God my creator to call me out of this transitory world doe make and ordayne this my last will and testament … ”. 

Pepys  later wrote with  heartfelt relief of the Plague’s  ultimate departure  in the winter of 1665 (it is commonly thought that it  was only killed off by the Great Fire of September, 1666, but the “Bills of Mortality” confirm Pepys’s observation   that it died out at the beginning of the winter of 1665).  On October 5^th: “The Bill, blessed be God! is less this week by 740 of what it was the last”.  And on October 26^th: “The ‘Change pretty full, and the town begins to be lively again”.  The plague  was now well past its peak, and some semblance of normality was beginning to return to a stricken city.  And the heroic physician Nathaniel Hodges, the only one, it is thought, who had remained in London throughout the plague year to treat the afflicted, could finally rest.  Twice he thought he felt himself succumbing to the  symptoms of the disease, and twice he kept it at bay by drinking increased draughts of sack (he also took a preventive electuary as large as a nutmeg each day).  He went on write an account of his experiences entitled   “Loimologia, sive, Pestis nuperae apud opulum Londinensem grassantis narratio historica” in1672, lamenting therein the uselessness of bezoar stone, unicorn horn and dried toad as anti-pestilential treatments.  Tragically,  he died a pauper in Ludgate Prison in 1688, and was buried in the church of St Stephen Walbrook.

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) …

History

The Medieval period ended, and the post-Medieval or early Modern period  began, when the last Plantagenet or Yorkist King, Richard III, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in the Wars of the Roses, and the first Tudor King, Henry VII, came to the throne, in 1485.   The post-Medieval was a time of continuing historical, political, religious and social turmoil, over two hundred years, and under two royal houses  and a Parliamentarian – albeit authoritarian –  Commonwealth and Protectorate.  It  was also a time of  continuing  war: war between the English  and the  Scots and the Irish; war between the English and the French, and the Spanish, and the Dutch; and war among the  English (in the Civil War in the seventeenth century). 

There are sufficient surviving records of one kind or another to enable us to undertake a reasonably accurate reconstruction not only of the history of but also of the social history, of post-Medieval London.  These include court, corporation and ward records, and also parish registers, of “every wedding, christening and burying”, the keeping of which  was mandated in 1538, by Henry VIII’s Vicar-General Thomas Cromwell.    Personal contemporary eye-witness accounts include those of Andreas Franciscus, writing in 1497; Henry Machyn, writing between 1550-63; Charles Wriothesley, writing around 1558, and not later than  1562; Grenade, writing in 1578; John Chamberlain, writing between 1597-1626; John Stow, writing in 1598; John Manningham, writing between 1601-3; John Evelyn, writing between 1631-1706; James Howell, writing in 1657; John Reresby, writing sometime after 1658; and Samuel Pepys, writing continuously between 1660-9, and discontinuously between 1670-86, after his eyesight had begun to fail him.  Contemporary biographical sketches of some of the key historical figures of the period are given by John Aubrey in his “Brief Lives … ”, published in 1696.

The Venetian Franciscus wrote of London in 1497, in early Tudor times: “The town itself stretches from East to West, and is three miles in circumference.  However, its suburbs are so large that they greatly increase its circuit.   … Throughout the town are to be seen many workshops of craftsmen … .  This makes the town look exceedingly prosperous and well-stocked … .    The working in wrought silver, tin or white lead is very expert here, and perhaps the finest I have ever seen.  There are many mansions, which do not … seem very large from the outside, but inside … are quite considerable … .  All the streets are so badly paved that they get wet at the slightest quantity of water, and this happens very frequently … .  A vast amount of evil-smelling mud is formed, which does not disappear … but lasts … nearly the whole year round.  The citizens, therefore, in order to remove mud and filth from their boots, are accustomed to spread … rushes on the floors of all houses … .  Merchants not only from Venice but also Florence and Lucca, and many from Genoa and Pisa, from Spain, Germany, …  and other countries meet here to handle business with the utmost keenness … .   Londoners have such fierce tempers and wicked dispositions  that they not only despise the way … Italians  live,  but actually pursue them with uncontrollable hatred, and whereas at Bruges foreigners are hospitably received … by everybody, here the Englishmen use them with the utmost contempt and arrogance, and make them the object of insults.  They eat very frequently, at times more than is suitable … ”.  It is interesting to note how closely Franciscus’s description follows  the Venetian senate’s written instructions to its ambassadors on intelligence-gathering!  And the Frenchman  Grenade wrote in late Tudor times, in 1578: “[T]he city …  with its buildings is wondrously pleasing on the eye, and in its shape and situation alongside the river, describes an arc of very beautiful form.  …   This river conveys large vessels  of between two and 300 tons burden to the … city : … by which means all manner of goods from all countries abound here.  … She is encompassed on all sides by beautiful meadows … , gardens and cultivable lands, which, on account of their fertility, yield much produce each year.  The villages (of which there is a great number in the environs) are … only about two harquebus shots distant from the city”.  Machyn was  a merchant taylor or clothier but is now best known as a chronicler of Tudor times.  His  chronicles  cover  the Reformation, and the conversion of the country to Protestantism, under Henry VIII, and the Counter-Reformation, and reversion to Catholicism,  under his daughter Mary.  Judging from his actions, as well as from  the tone of his chronicle, Machyn would appear to have been at least  a closet Catholic.  In 1561, he committed the sinful act of “spyking serten [slanderous] words against Veron the [Protestant] preacher”, for which he paid penance at (St) Paul’s Cross. 

Stow was another merchant taylor, but also an amateur antiquarian, and the author of “A Survay of London … ”, recounting  in intricate detail not only the topography but also the social history of the City in  the Elizabethan era, and rather ruing most of the many changes that had taken place  over its course.  The famous last  words of the “Survay” of 1598 were “And so I end, wanting time to travel further in this work”.  An updated  second edition was published in 1603 (and updated versions by Anthony Munday in 1618 and in 1633, and by John Strype in 1720). 

Stow’s memorial in the  church of St Andrew Undershaft shows him with a quill-pen in his hand.  Every third year, on or around the anniversary of his death on April 5^th, as part of a special service in the church in his memory, he is ceremonially presented  with a new quill, and his old one is given to the  winner of an essay competition for local children, with London as its subject. 

Chamberlain is best known now as the author of a large number   of letters that, collectively, “constitute the first considerable body … in English history and literature that the modern reader can easily follow”.  His  letters  cover  such  events in late Tudor to early Stuart times as the trial of the Earls of Essex and Southampton, the Gunpowder Plot, and the execution of Walter Ralegh.  Most of the nearly 500 that still survive were written to Sir Dudley Carleton while the latter was serving as an ambassador in Venice and The Hague, and were evidently intended to keep the ambitious diplomat abroad  informed  of events – especially those befalling “the better sort of people” – at home.  They contain much court and City tittle-tattle (“who’s in, who’s out”), picked up, no doubt,  in St Paul’s Cathedral, which at the time had a reputation as  the fount of all such – it appears that  Chamberlain was an inveterate “Paul’s walker”! 

Evelyn was a gentleman of independent means, closely connected to court circles, a keen gardener, an author (of, for example, “Fumifugium” and “Sylva”); and also, like his friend Samuel Pepys,  a diarist.  His diary covers the Civil War and Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Great Plague, the Great Fire and much besides.   The  striking portrait of him painted by Robert Walker in 1648, and now in the National Portrait Gallery, shows a still youthful man with fine slender features, nonetheless wearing a melancholy expression, as he meditates on death, symbolised by a  skull at his left hand.  From 1653 onwards, Evelyn lived at Sayes Court in Deptford.  On February 6^th, 1698, he noted in his diary that he had leased his  estate out to “The Czar Emp: of Moscovy [Peter the Great], [his] having a mind to see the Building of Ships [in the nearby royal dockyard]”.  Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, the Czar, who had something of a  reputation for drunken riotous living, proved  far from a model guest.   He  proceeded to comprehensively  trash Evelyn’s house – knocking a hole in the wall to allow easier access to the shipyard, breaking over three hundred windows, twenty pictures and  fifty chairs, ruining all the paintwork, curtains and bedding, covering all the floors with ink and grease, and in all causing – in today’s terms – several tens of thousands of pound’s worth of damage!  Worst of all, he destroyed Evelyn’s pride and joy, the “impregnable” hedge  in his garden, “four hundred foot in length, nine Foot high, and five in diameter … [that] mocks at the rudest assaults of the Weather, Beasts or Hedge-breakers”, making a great play of being repeatedly pushed through it in a wheelbarrow – of the £162 7s compensation eventually paid to Evelyn  by the Office of Works, £1 was specifically to cover the damage   to his wheelbarrows!  Perhaps as an act of atonement, the Czar planted a mulberry tree in Evelyn’s garden, which still stands, albeit now ancient and gnarled, in what is now Sayes Court Park. 

Perhaps the best known of the chroniclers, though, is Pepys, a high-ranking civil servant in the Navy Office, and eventual Secretary to the Admiralty; and, also, famously, a diarist.  Pepys’s diary  covers such momentous events in late Stuart times as the Restoration  of the Monarchy of 1660,  the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.  Pepys  was an Establishment figure, well known in official and court circles; and, as such,  less an “everyman” caught up in events than one very much of his time, and, particularly, place, that is to say, his place in the prevailing social and class hierarchy.  His thoughts and deeds were often to greater or lesser degrees self-serving: he obsessed over his wealth (“To my accounts, wherein … I … , to my great discontent, do find that my gettings this year have been … less than … last… ”); employed sycophancy  and deceitfulness to increase  the same, or otherwise to get his way; and was not beyond resorting to emotional cruelty,  especially towards his wife, Elizabeth, and even to physical violence.  However, his written words were almost always honest and true, and unsparingly and disarmingly so when describing his own shortcomings, or otherwise to his detriment.  There was something of  a child-like quality to the man, characteristically beautifully described by Robert Louis Stevenson, in part as follows:   “Pepys was a young man for his age, came slowly to himself in the world, sowed his wild oats late, took late to industry and preserved till nearly forty the headlong gusto of a boy.  So, to come rightly at the spirit in which the Diary was written, we must recall a class of sentiments which with most of us are over and done before the age of twelve”.  His accomplishments  were many and varied, though, especially those at the Navy Office  (it has been said that, “without Pepys,   there could have been no Horatio  Nelson”).

Tudor History

Under the Tudors, it was above all a time of religious  Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and of religious war – not to mention cold war and espionage.  The Protestant Reformation of the Catholic Church may be said to have begun in Germany in 1517, with the publication by Martin Luther of the “Ninety-Five Theses” or “Disputation on the Power of Indulgences”, which, among other things,  roundly attacked the established practice of the sale of indulgences  (“When a penny in the coffer rings,|A soul from Purgatory springs”).   Protestantism  was to spread through much of northern Europe over the succeeding thirty years.

Henry Tudor was  crowned King Henry VII  of England in 1485.   In   1497, around 10,000 – lightly – armed Cornish rebels gathered on Blackheath preparatory to marching on London to protest against oppressive royal rule and punitive taxation (suspension of the privileges of the “Stannary Charter” of 1305).  Unfortunately for them, they failed to rally  any support there from the Kentish, who were rightly fearful of a reprisal of the sort that had been meted out to them for their support of the “Peasants’ Revolt” in  1381 and Jack Cade’s Rebellion in 1450.  It was thus a comparatively  weak force, further diluted by desertion,  that eventually lighted out  for London, and certainly one that was easily crushed by the King’s 20,000-strong professional army  at the Battle of Deptford Bridge (also known as the Battle of Blackheath).  Contemporary records indicate that between two hundred and two thousand Cornishmen were killed in the battle, along with between eight and three hundred of the King’s men.  The principal rebel leaders   Michael Joseph the Smith (“An Gof”) and Thomas Flamank were  captured at the battle and later hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, whereupon their heads were put up on pike-staffs on London Bridge.  Flamank was quoted as saying  “Speak the truth and only then can you be free of your chains”.  Nonetheless, the persecution and pauperisation of the Cornish continued for many years to come.

Henry’s son, also Henry, was crowned King Henry VIII in 1512, while still in his early twenties.  According to Hall’s “Annals”, on May Day in 1515: “The King and the Queen [Catherine of Aragon] accompanied with many lords and ladies rode [from the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich] to the high ground of Shooters Hill to take the open air, and as they passed by the way, they espied a company of tall yeomen, clothed all in green with green hoods and bows and arrows, to the number of two hundred.  Then one of them which called himself Robin Hood came to the King desiring him to see his men shoot, and the King was content.  Then he whistled, and all the 200 archers shot and loosed at once, and then he whistled again, and they likewise shot again; their arrows whistled by craft of the head, so that the noise was strange and great and much pleased the King, the Queen and all the company.  Then Robin Hood desired the King and Queen to come into the greenwood and see how the outlaws lived.  … Then the horns blew till they came to the wood under Shooters Hill, and there was an arber made of boughs with a hall and a great chamber and an inner chamber very well made and covered with flowers and sweet herbs, which the King much praised.  Then said Robin Hood: ‘Sir, outlaws’ breakfast is venison, and thereafter you must be content with such fare as we use’.  Then the King and Queen sat down and were served with venison and wine by Robin Hood and his men, to their great contentation”.  On and around May Day two years later, in 1517, the so-called “Evil May Day” riots, marked by attacks on “aliens” and on their places of residence and of business, took place in the City of London, following an inflammatory speech by a Dr Beal or Bell at St Paul’s Cross,  inciting the crowd “to cherish and defend themselves, and to hurt and grieve aliens for the common weal”.  At the time there was considerable popular resentment towards “aliens”  in general and “alien”  merchants in particular, on account of their perceived preferential treatment by City authorities.  The riots were eventually broken up only after thousands of troops were called in and  hundreds of rioters taken prisoner.  The ring-leaders were then more or less immediately hanged, drawn and quartered, and their remains gibbeted.  The remainder, though, despite also facing the death penalty for the treason of “breaking the peace of Christendom”, were eventually pardoned by the king, Henry VIII, probably largely thanks to pleas for mercy made by his queen, Catherine of Aragon, and by Thomas Wolsey. At this, the prisoners “took the halters from their necks and danced and sang”.  According to a contemporary account, in the  “The Chronicle of the Grey Friars”:“Thys yere was yell [evil] May Day, that yong men and prentes of London rose in the nyght, and wolde have had James Mottas an owte-landych mane … slayne … , but he hyde hym in hys gotters in hys howse; and from thence they wente un to sent Martyns, and there spoyled the … shoppes; and thane rose the mayer and shreffes and wolde have cessyd them, but they cowed not.  … And iiij or v days after … , … at the last there were dyvers of them hongyd within the citte on gallos  … .  And within shorte space the kynge satte in Westmyster halle, and there was commandyd the … rest of them …  to come with halters abowte their neckes … to ask pardone, and soo a generall pardone was gevyne unto theme alle that came that tyme”.  In the aftermath of the riots, the annual May Day celebrations that had taken place for hundreds of years were discontinued, and the May Pole that gave Undershaft its name was taken away. 

One of Henry VIII’s less-well-known contributions to English history was his consolidation of the country’s armed forces both at sea and on land – his construction of an island-fortress.   The Royal Naval Dockyard in Woolwich was opened early in  his reign, in 1512, and prospered in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before eventually closing down in the nineteenth (the Royal Arsenal here became operational  in 1671, and was decommissioned in 1967).  A number of historically important ships were built here, including the carvel-built “Henry Grace a Dieu” or “Great Harry”, in 1514; the “Prince Royal, in 1610; the “Sovereign of the Seas, in 1637; and the “Royal Charles”, in 1655 (not to mention the “Beagle”, in 1820).   The Dockyard in Deptford was opened  in 1513, and, like that in Woolwich, prospered in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before eventually closing down in the nineteenth.   Documentary evidence indicates that a number of naval vessels  were  brought to a  specially constructed “pond(e)” or wet dock here in 1520, possibly for repairs, among them  the recently-salvaged flagship, the “Mary Rose” (now in the Royal Naval Dockyard in  Portsmouth, where it was built), the  “Peter Pomegarnet” or “Peter Pomegranate”, the “Great Bark”, and the “Lesser Bark”.   The Dockyard  in  Erith was opened  in 1514, and closed in 1521, due to persistent flooding.   That  in Chatham in Kent was opened in 1567, that is, early in the  reign of Elizabeth I, and prospered in the late sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, before eventually closing in the twentieth.  Chatham enjoyed the considerable advantage over the London dockyards of being located twenty-five miles downriver, at the point at which  the Thames is met by the Medway, and obviously that much closer to the open sea.  The so-called “Gresham Ship”, an armed merchantman, recently (re)discovered, wrecked, in – and recovered from – the Thames Estuary, is an example of the sort built in the aforementioned dockyards in the Tudor period.  Dendrochronological – tree-ring – analysis of the ship’s timbers has yielded a construction date of around 1574, that is to say, during the reign of Elizabeth I.  Partial reconstruction indicates that the intact vessel  would have measured a little over 80’ from bow to stern, and a little under 25’ from side to side, and weighed some 160 tons, making it similar in size to Drake’s “Golden Hind(e)” (built in 1577).  It was carvel-built, of robust construction, and fitted with gun ports.  Significantly, one of the four cannon recovered from the ship bears  the initials T.G., together with the grasshopper insignia of the City merchant Thomas Gresham, which is how came to be known as “The Gresham Ship” (Thomas Gresham lived from 1519-79, founding what was to become known as the Royal Exchange in 1568, and, by bequest, Gresham College in 1597).  It is possible that  the “Gresham Ship” might actually be the “Cherabin”, which surviving historical records indicate was owned by the Levant Company between 1590-1600; served under Thomas Howard as a privateer in the Azores in 1591, capturing prize cargoes of sugar, ginger, sarsaparilla, brazilwood and suchlike, valued at £2,000 (at least £400,000 in today’s terms); and, significantly, sank, in the Kentish Flats, in 1603 (after losing its rudder in a storm, and striking a sandbank). 

Tilbury Fort in Essex was originally built  by Henry VIII in 1536, and was later extended and reinforced by Elizabeth I in 1588, to counter  the threat from the Spanish Armada. What is now known as the Honourable Artillery Company had its origins in the “Fraternity or Guild of Artillery of Longbows, Crossbows and Handgonnes”, incorporated by a Royal Charter of Henry VIII  in 1537 (and also known – although probably not to his face – as “Fat Hal’s Militia”).  The original roles of the unit were “the maintenance of the science of artillery” and “the better increase of the defence of this our realm”.  From 1572 onwards, it also assumed responsibility for training the City of London’s part-time militia, the so-called “trained bands”.  It remains the oldest unit still serving  in the Regular – if not the Territorial – Army (the Grenadier Guards were formed from its ranks in 1656, and the Royal Marines in 1664).   From around the time its formation in the middle of the sixteenth century up until the end of the seventeenth, the company trained in the Artillery Yard in Tasel Close in Spitalfields.  The remains of the Master Gunner’s House, dating to 1581, have recently been unearthed in an  archaeological excavation in Spital Square, together with the remains of firing platforms.  Nearby are Artillery Lane and Artillery Passage.

In 1527, Henry VIII’s  first wife, Catherine of Aragon, after nearly twenty years of marriage, having borne him a daughter (Mary), but not a longed-for son and heir, Henry decided to petition the Supreme Head of the Catholic Church, Pope Clement VII, to seek an annulment that would allow him to marry Anne Boleyn.  This quest was to become known as “The King’s Great Matter”.  In 1529, the Legatine Court, convened in the Parliament Hall in Blackfriars Priory, under  the Papal Legate, Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio, and the King’s representative, the Archbishop of York, Lord Chancellor and, in practice, alter rex, or “other king”, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey,  ruled against  any such action.  Wolsey  died in 1530, en route from York to London, where he had been due to face a trial for treason  over his failure to  secure the  annulment that Henry sought.  Among his last words were the following: “Had I but served my God with but half the zeal as I served my king [in his “Great Matter”], He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies”.  The most of his many notable earlier services to the state included arranging the “Anglo-French Treaty” in 1514, and the “Treaty of London” – essentially a pan-European non-aggression pact – in 1518, as well as the “Field of Cloth-of-Gold” (Camp du Drap d’Or) in  1520.

In the event, in the January of 1533, Henry proceeded to marry  Anne in spite of the Legatine Court’s ruling, albeit in secret, and in the June of the same year, had her  formally crowned Queen.  Three short years later, in  1536, he was to order her  execution   in the Tower for treason.  Henry also ordered the executions of Anne’s brother George, on trumped-up charges of an adulterous and incestuous relationship with her; and of William Brereton, Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton, and Francis Weston, also on charges of adultery.  Accused alongside the aforementioned,  but ultimately spared the axe, was the courtier Thomas Wyatt the Elder (incidentally, also a fine poet, widely credited with introducing the Petrarchan sonnet into English literature).  Wyatt the Younger would enjoy  no such good fortune  under Queen Mary.  On the scaffold, Anne gave a short speech to the assembled crowd, recorded  in Foxe’s “Actes and Monuments” as follows: “Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul”.

The King  made himself, rather than the Pope,  the Supreme Head of the Church in England, through the passing of the Act of Supremacy of 1534, whereafter his subjects were made to swear  oaths acknowledging not only his supremacy  (the Oath of Supremacy), but also that of his children  and  successors to the throne (the Oath of Succession).  Even after the break with Rome, and despite his excommunication by Pope Paul III in 1538, the King  – the erstwhile “Fidei Defensor” or “Defender of the Faith” – appears to have remained theologically essentially Catholic.  At  the same time, though,   the Church in England, and the country at large, became increasingly Protestant.   Among those primarily responsible for the rise of  Protestantism were Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury; and Thomas Cromwell, the King’s  Chief Minister from 1534, and Vicar-General, and Vice-Gerent in Spirituals, from 1535.  The spread of the word was facilitated  by the publication  of an English translation of the Bible, by Miles Coverdale, in 1535, and by the availability of copies thereof in every parish church in the land by between  1538-41.  It was Cranmer who established   the doctrines and liturgies  of the Protestant church, and  suppressed   – certain – Catholic sacraments, the practices of veneration of images and relics, and the belief in Purgatory, through the “Ten Articles” of 1536, the “Bishop’s Book” of 1537, the “Six Articles” of 1539,  and the “Forty-Two Articles” of 1553 (and also through his input into the “King’s Book”, attributed to Henry himself, of 1543).  The “enforcer” Cromwell  was beheaded on Tower Hill in 1540, having  been attainted, or  in other words found guilty without trial, of a range of charges almost certainly trumped up by his enemies, including the Duke of Norfolk and Bishop Stephen Gardiner  (King Henry  is said later to have regretted his execution).    He had finally fallen out of favour, and victim to the sort of court intrigue that to that date he had himself customarily been behind, over his ill-advised choice of Anne of Cleves as the new wife for the King.  The lawyer, politician and chronicler Edward Hall recorded that  “[H]e … committed his soule, into the handes of God, and so paciently suffered the stroke of the axe, by a ragged and Boocherly miser, whiche very ungoodly perfourmed the Office [Execution]”.  Cranmer would  be burned at the stake in Oxford in 1556, during the then Catholic Queen Mary’s Counter-Reformation, for Protestant heresy.  At the stake, he thrust into the rising flames the “unworthy” right hand with which he had signed the  earlier coerced recantation of his Protestant faith,  and retracted the recantation with the words: “as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ’s enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine”.  Coverdale would  be exiled under Mary, between 1553-8, eventually to  return to London in 1559, and die there in 1569.  His body would be buried in the church of St Bartholomew by the Exchange, and later, when that church was demolished, moved to St Magnus the Martyr.

Any Catholic threat to the Protestant Reformation, whether actual or interpreted, was dealt with without mercy.  By way of an example, in 1534,  Elizabeth Barton, otherwise known as the “Holy Maid of Kent”, was hanged and beheaded  at Tyburn for treason, for having prophesied that if the Henry were to break from  the Church in Rome, he would die, and be sent to Hell.  In 1535, John Houghton, the Prior of the London Charterhouse, two further Carthusian priors, a Bridgettine monk from Syon Abbey, and a parish priest from Isleworth, were  hanged, drawn  and quartered at Tyburn, for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy (later, a  further six  monks from the Charterhouse were executed; and nine allowed to die, of starvation, in gaol, in Newgate).  The Bridgettine monk,  Richard Reynolds, famously encouraged those  who suffered alongside him by promising them that after their “sharp breakfast” they would enjoy a “heavenly supper”.    Also in 1535, John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester and a Cardinal, and Sir Thomas More, the lawyer, humanist, social philosopher, author (of “Utopia”) and “the King’s good servant, but God’s first”,  were beheaded at  Tower Hill, also for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy  (interestingly, both Fisher and More are honoured as saints  by both the Catholic Church and the Church of England).    More had earlier witnessed, through the window of his prison cell in the Tower, Houghton and his co-condemned being taken to Tyburn to be executed, and had commented to his daughter, Meg Roper: “These blessed Fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage”.  His son-in-law William Roper wrote of his, More’s  execution:  “And soe was he brought by Mr Lievetenaunt out of the Towre, and thence led towards the place of execution, where goinge upp the Scaffold, … he sayde … ‘I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lievetenaunt, see me safe upp, and for my cominge downe let mee shift for my selfe’.  Then desired he all the people thereaboutes to pray for him, and to beare witnesse with him, that he should suffer death in and for the faith of the holie Catholique Church, which done hee kneeled downe, and after his prayers sayed, hee turned to the executioner, and with a cheerful Countenance spake unto him, ‘Plucke up thy spirittes, man, and be not affrayed to do thine office … ’.  Soe passed Sir Thomas Moore out of this world to God … ”. 

And in 1538, John Forest, a Franciscan friar and confessor to Catherine of Aragon, was burned at the stake in West Smithfield for heresy, for refusing to recant his faith; fuel for the fire, according to folk-legend, being provided by a statue of St Derfel from the pilgrimage site of Llandderfel in North Wales, which it had been prophesied would “one day set a forest on fire”. 

Neither were heterodox Protestants immune from persecution.  In 1538, two  unnamed Anabaptists were burned at the stake in West Smithfield for heresy, and the following year  a further three on  Newington Causeway – one named Mandeville, one Collins, and another unnamed.  And, famously, in  1546, the last full year of Henry’s reign, Anne Askew, gentlewoman, was burned at the stake in West Smithfield, for preaching against the then still orthodox  belief in transubstantiation.  She had previously been racked by the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and his henchman, Richard Rich, in the Tower of London, and   she had to be carried from there to,  and seated at,  the stake.    The Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs” of 1563,  gives the following as Anne Askew’s own account: “They said to me there, that I was a heretic, and condemned by the law, if I would stand in my opinion. I answered, that I was no heretic, neither yet deserved I any death by the law of God. But, as concerning the faith which I uttered and wrote to the council, I would not, I said, deny it, because I knew it true. Then would they needs know, if I would deny the sacrament to be Christ’s body and blood. I said, ‘Yea: for the same Son of God that was born of the Virgin Mary, is now glorious in heaven, and will come again from thence at the latter day like as he went up. And as for that ye call your God …  a piece of bread … ,  …  let it but lie in the box three months, and it will be mouldy, and so turn to nothing that is good. Whereupon I am persuaded that it cannot be God’“.

The Reformation was followed by the  Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536-40, which essentially resulted in the appropriation by the Crown  of all the monastic houses in England, Wales and Ireland, of which there were several hundred, and of all of their assets (monastic houses in Scotland were annexed by the Scottish King, James VI, in 1587).    The smaller  houses, with incomes of less than £200 per year, as evaluated by the Valor Ecclestiacus, were dissolved  under The Act for the Dissolution of the Lesser Monasteries of 1536; the larger  ones, by The Act for the Dissolution of the Greater Monasteries of 1539; and corresponding orders were  given to “pull down to the grounds all the walls of the churches, stepulls, cloysters, fraterys, dorters [and] chapterhowsys”.   

After the Dissolution, the lands and assets of the monastic houses were disbursed, under the auspices of Thomas Cromwell, and his Court of Augmentations.   In London, the change in land ownership and usage is evident in the marked contrast between the “British Atlas of Historic Towns” map of 1520 (Lobel, 1989), from before the event, and the “Copper Plate” map of c. 1559, the “Agas” one of c. 1570, and the Braun and Hogenberg one of  1572, from after the event.  Many of the properties of the monastic houses evidently became parish churches, hospitals, orphanages or schools, or combinations thereof, or playhouses, while others passed into private ownership.  For example, the priory church of St Mary Overie became the parish church of St Saviour, and eventually the collegiate church of St Mary Overie and St Saviour, or Southwark Cathedral; and that part of the priory church of St Bartholomew that was spared demolition became the  parish church of St Bartholomew the Great, the associated hospital remaining in use, and growing in importance.   The Charterhouse became initially a private residence in turn occupied by Sir Edward North, the Chancellor of the Court of Augmentations, from 1545; and eventually a charitable alms-house and school founded by a bequest from Thomas Sutton,  the one-time Master of the Ordnance of the Northern Parts and the richest man in England, from 1611 (the school relocated to Godalming in Surrey in 1872). Parts of the precincts of Holywell, Blackfriars  and Whitefriars Priories became playhouses.  For a while,  Blackfriars priory church housed  the “Office of the Revels”, where plays were either approved or censored, and then licensed, and also where theatrical  sets and costumes were procured, under the “Master of the Revels” Thomas Cawarden, who held the post from 1544-59.  After Cawarden’s death, the “Office … ” relocated to either the  Gate-House or the Great Chamber – sources differ – of the  Priory of St John in Clerkenwell, in 1560.  And later still, in 1608, to Whitefriars.   Incidentally, Whitefriars Priory  was not dissolved immediately, and its  precinct served  initially as a temporary sanctuary for its  friars, and eventually as a semi-permanent one  for the population at large.  Indeed, the right of  sanctuary,  and exemption from  local law, was upheld by Elizabeth I in 1580 and James I in 1608.  In consequence, the  area was to become notorious for its fugitive criminals and criminality, and,  eventually   to be known as “Alsatia”, after the – literally – lawless territory lying between   France and Germany and outside the jurisdiction of either.  Of the  former monks, nuns and priors of the dissolved monastic houses, of whom there were several hundred city-wide, and several thousand country-wide, most went to work in the newly created parish churches, although a still substantial number were forced to seek out entirely new ways of life.  Most were at least  offered more or less generous pensions.  Note also, though, that some  monks  were executed during the Reformation.

Henry VIII died in 1547, and was  buried in Windsor Castle (it is said that while his body was being transported there for burial, it was temporarily accommodated at at the former Syon Abbey, where it burst open in its coffin, and dogs lapped at  the liquid that seeped out).  On his death-bed, he handed over his kingly power, and with it the responsibility for the defence of the Protestant faith, to his young only son, Edward, borne to him by his third wife, Jane Seymour (who died in the process). 

There is an extraordinary at least broadly contemporary anonymous painting of the scene, entitled “An Allegory of Reformation” (now in the National Portrait Gallery).  It depicts  Edward with a defeated Catholic Pope at his feet!   Lying to Edward’s right is his dying father Henry.  Standing to his left is  his  uncle, Edward Seymour, the 1^st Duke of Somerset and Lord Protector.  Seated round a table, under a painting of image-breaking, are: in white vestments, Thomas  Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury; with a grey beard, John Russell, the 1^st Earl of Bedford and Lord Privy Seal; and five further gentlemen whose identities are either disputed or altogether unknown. 

Edward duly became the boy-King Edward VI on his coronation.  There  was   a painting of his coronation procession, of which copies survive, the original having been lost.  It is noteworthy for featuring a fine bird’s-eye view of the City of London.  Edward was  a hard-line Protestant.  And a literal iconoclast.  According to “The Chronicle of the Grey Friars”:  “Item the 5^th day …  in September [1547] began the King’s visitation at Paul’s and all the images pulled down: and the 9^th day of the same month the said visitation was at St. Bride’s, and after that in divers other parish churches … .  …  Item at this same time was pulled up all the tomes, …  altars, …  and walls of the quire … in the church that was at some time the Gray friars and sold, and the quire made smaller … . Item … following [1548] … was Barking chapel at the Tower hill pulled down, and Saint Martin’s [le Grand] … , Saint Nicholas in the chambulles [Shambles], and Saint [Audouen, Ewen or] Ewyns, and within the Gatte of Newgate these were put with the church that was at some time the Gray Friars: and also [St Mary] Strand church was pulled down to make the protector duke of Somerset’s place larger”.  There  was a regal and statesman-like side to the boy-King  as well.  In 1551, he wrote in his diary of how he had, amid much pomp, accommodated and entertained the Catholic Queen Dowager (and mother of Mary Queen of Scots) Mary of Guise at Westminster, after her ship had been forced ashore by bad weather en route from France to Scotland.  His entry reads in part as follows: “[D]ivers … lords and gentlemen, … ladies and gentlewomen went to her, and brought her through London to Westminster.  At the gate there received her the Duke of Northumberland, Great Master, and the Treasurer, and Comptroller, and the Earl of Pembroke, with all the sewers [messieurs], and carvers, and cup-bearers, to the number of thirty.  In the hall I met her, with all the rest of the Lords of my Council, as the Lord Treasurer, … etc., and from the outer gate up to the presence chamber, on both sides, stood the guard.  And so having brought her to her chamber, I retired to mine.  I went to her at dinner; she dined under the same cloth of state, at my left hand; at her rearward dined my cousin Francis, and my cousin Margaret; at mine sat the French Ambassador.  We were served by two services, two sewers, cupbearers, and gentlemen.  Her master hostel [Maitre d’Hotel] came before her service, and my officers before mine.  … After dinner, when she had heard some music, I brought her into the hall, and she went away”.

Edward had stipulated in his will that he wished to be succeeded not by his half-sister, Mary, Henry’s daughter, by his first wife Catherine of Aragon, who was a Catholic, but by Lady Jane Grey, who was a fellow Protestant.  Jane was indeed duly proclaimed Queen on 10^th June, 1553, but was overthrown by Mary only nine days later, on 19^th June.  She was later tried and convicted on a charge of treason in the November of  1553, and eventually executed in the February of  1554.   Her father, Henry Grey, was  executed a matter of a few days after her, for his role in “Wyatt’s Rebellion”.

Mary was proclaimed Queen on 19^th June, 1553.   Stow wrote: “In the year 1553 the 19. of July, the Counsell partlie moved with the right of the Lady Maries cause, partly considering that the most of the Realme was wholly bent on her side, changing their mind from Lady Jane lately proclaimed Queene, assembled themselves at this Baynardes Castle, where they communed with the Earle of Pembrooke and the Earl of Shrewsbury and Sir John Mason Clearke of the Counsell, sent for the Lord Mayor, and then riding into Cheape to the Crosse, where Gartar King at Armes, Trumpet being sounded, proclaimed the Lady Daughter to King Henry the eighth and Queene Katharen Queene of England … ”. As intimated above, she  evidently enjoyed a measure  of popular  support, at least initially.  Henry Machyn described how her coronation was accompanied by “song, and … belles ryngyng thrugh London, and bone-fyres, and tabuls in evere strett, and wyne and beer and alle … ”. 

Under Mary’s reign, the country reverted to Catholicism.  And, under her Counter-Reformation, a number of Protestants were executed for heresy  – hence her nick-name, “Bloody Mary”, and that of one of her most enthusiastic supporters, Bishop Edmund Bonner, “Bloody Bonner”.  The total  number of persons executed under Mary has been estimated to have been 290 (with a further several hundred going into exile).  Note in this context, though, that  the numbers  of those executed under her Protestant predecessors Henry VIII and Edward VI have  been estimated to have between 37,000-72,000, and 5,500, respectively; and the number executed under her Protestant successor Elizabeth I, 2-600. 

In late 1553 to early 1554,  Thomas Wyatt the Younger plotted a rebellion against Mary, and in particular her plan to marry the Catholic King of Spain, Philip. The aims of the rebellion were  to overthrow Mary, and to put in her place her half-sister Elizabeth (and also to  have Elizabeth marry the Protestant Earl of Devon, Edward Courtenay).  These aims were to be achieved by force of arms, with each of the four main rebel leaders responsible for assembling  an army in his respective corner of the country before marching on London: Wyatt in Kent; Henry Grey (the father of Lady Jane Grey), the Duke of Suffolk, in Leicestershire; Sir James Croft in Herefordshire; and Sir Peter Carew in Devon.  In the event, only Wyatt succeeded in raising much of a rebel  army, which grew further on its march to London through desertions from forces sent to oppose it, and eventually became some four thousand strong.     The  army arrived in Southwark in  the February of 1554, to find its way into the City of London blocked at London Bridge by further forces, responding to Mary’s stirring rallying-call at the Guildhall two days earlier (the army  was also  threatened by cannon in the Tower of London, commanded by the Lieutenant of the Tower, John Bruges or Brydges, who intimated that he was prepared to put them to use).   It then  withdrew, wheeled west to Kingston to cross the river there, marched back east and   attempted to enter the City again at Ludgate, where it was again faced down, and where it broke up.  After the failure of his rebellion, Wyatt was tortured at the Tower before being tried, convicted and eventually executed in the April.    His torturers had evidently hoped that he would somehow implicate Elizabeth, but he did not.  Elizabeth was herself temporarily imprisoned in the Tower while her supposed complicity was further investigated, but none was ever  proven. 

In the February of 1555, John Rogers, the vicar of the church of St Sepulchre, was burned at the stake in West Smithfield, becoming the  first of the so-called “Marian martyrs”.   John Foxe, in his “Book of Martyrs”,  gives the following account of Rogers’s execution:  “[He] was brought …  toward Smithfield, saying the psalm “Miserere” by the way, all the people wonderfully rejoicing at his constancy, with great praises and thanks to God for the same. And there, in the presence of … a wonderful number of people, the fire was put unto him; and when it had taken hold both upon his legs and shoulders, he, as one feeling no smart, washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been in cold water. And, after lifting up his hands unto heaven, not removing the same until such time as the devouring fire had consumed them – most mildly this happy martyr yielded up his spirit into the hands of his heavenly Father. A little before his burning at the stake, his pardon was brought, if he would have recanted, but he utterly refused. He was the first proto-martyr of all the blessed company that suffered in Queen Mary’s time, that gave the first adventure upon the fire. His wife and children, being eleven in number, and ten able to go, and one sucking on her breast, met him by the way as he went towards Smithfield. This sorrowful sight of his own flesh and blood could nothing move him; but that he constantly and cheerfully took his death, with wonderful patience, in the defence and quarrel of Christ’s gospel.”  A plaque in West Smithfield marks the site of Rogers’s execution.  Later in 1555, John Bradford and John Philpot were also burned in West Smithfield.  In this instance, Foxe gives this  account:  “ … When Bradford and Leaf came to the Stake … , they lay flat on their faces, praying to themselves the space of a minute of an hour.  Then one of the Sheriffs said … , Arise and make an end … .  At that word they both stood … and … Bradford took a Fagot in his hand, and kissed it, and so likewise the Stake.  … And so … Bradford went to the Stake: and holding up his hands, and casting his countenance to Heaven, he said thus, O England, England, repent thee of thy sins, repent thee of thy sins.  Beware of Idolatry, beware of false Antichrists, take heed they do not deceive you.  And … one of the Officers … made the fire … .  [And] Bradford … asked all the world forgiveness, and forgave all the world, and prayed the people to pray with him, and turned … unto the young man that suffered with him, and said, Be of good comfort Brother; for we shall have a merry Supper with the Lord this night: And so spake no more words that any man did hear … ”.  As in the case of Rogers, a plaque in West Smithfield marks the site of Bradford and Leaf(e)’s execution.  And in 1556, eleven  men and two women were burned in Stratford, in front of a crowd of 20,000.

When Mary died in 1558, her half-sister Elizabeth I, Henry’s daughter by his second  wife Anne Boleyn, became Queen, and the  country reverted once more to Protestantism.  The “Recusancy Acts”, intended to enforce  participation in Protestant religious activities, were passed in the first year of Elizabeth’s  reign, in 1558.   Breaches were punished by fines, property confiscations or even imprisonment (the fine for missing a church service was 1s – half a week’s wages for an unskilled labourer).  Elizabeth’s accession was extremely popular, and, as Henry Machyn put it: “All London did eat and drink and made merry”.  Her coronation procession in 1559 paused on its way to Westminster Abbey for the staging of various pageants in her honour (the date having been chosen as a  particularly auspicious one by her astrologer John Dee).  The first of these  symbolised her Genealogy, and emphasised her “Englishness” and Protestantism (in contrast to her late sister Mary’s “Spanishness” and Catholicism), and her descent from Henry Tudor and Elizabeth of York, whose marriage had  unified the country after the Wars of the Roses.  The second, her Government, and its virtues of True Religion, Love of Subjects, Wisdom and Justice.  The third, during which the Mayor presented her with a gift of gold, the Interdependence of the Crown and the City.  The fourth, during which a figure representing Truth presented her  with a copy of the Bible bearing the English inscription “The Word of Truth”, the Thriving – English, Protestant – Commonwealth.   The fifth, Elizabeth as Deborah, the prophetess of the Old Testament who rescued the House of Israel and went on to rule for forty years.  Elizabeth’s reign was  widely, although by no means universally,  regarded as some sort of “Golden Age” of – comparative – stability, peace and prosperity; of exploration and discovery, and of the arts, in particular the performing arts.  It brought  “Melody and joy and comfort to all true Englishmen and women”.   

The merchant-adventurer, privateer (that is, essentially, pirate), and naval commander Martin Frobisher set sail on board the “Gabriel” from Ratcliff in 1576 on the second of his three ultimately unsuccessful voyages in search of the North-West Passage through the Arctic to Cathay (China) in the Pacific, returning from Canada with a cargo of what turned out to be worthless “fool’s gold”.  The site in Ratcliff is marked by a “London County Council” plaque of 1922 in King Edward Memorial Park. Incidentally, the plaque also commemorates another merchant-adventurer, Hugh Willoughby, who had even earlier, in 1553, set sail on board the “Bona Esparanza” from Ratcliff, in search of the North-East Passage through the Arctic to the Pacific, getting as far as Novaya Zemlya before having to turn back,  and dying on the remote Kola Peninsula, east of Murmansk,   on what was supposed to have been an overwintering stop.  Frobisher went on to be knighted for his services in seeing off the Spanish Armada in 1588.  He died in 1594, of wounds sustained in another action against the Spanish.  His organs were buried in the church of St Andrew in Plymouth, and the rest of his body in the church of St Giles Cripplegate in London, where there is a memorial to him.  There is a portrait of Frobisher,  commissioned by the Cathay Company, and painted by the Dutch artist Cornelis Ketel in 1577, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.  It depicts a man of action, an “uncultured” man, with an “acutely violent temperament”, wearing a bosun’s whistle round his neck, and a scabbarded rapier  on his left hip, and brandishing a wheel-lock pistol in his right hand.   Frobisher also wears  a particularly splendid pair of baggy knee-length breeches called “Venetians”, and a matching jerkin, over a plain white doublet. 

The Devonian explorer, privateer and naval commander Francis Drake set sail from Plymouth on board the “Golden Hind(e)” in 1577 on a voyage of circumnavigation of the globe.  On his return to England in 1581, his ship was “drawn into a creek … at Deptford as a perpetual memorial for having circuited round about the whole earth”, and “consecrated it with great ceremonie, pompe and magnificence eternally to be remembered”, and Drake was knighted by the Queen, Elizabeth I.  The ship  remained at Deptford for about 100 years, until it started to disintegrate and had to be broken up.  A  plaque on the water-front there marks the site.   

There is a replica of the ship in St Mary Overie Dock in Southwark, a couple of miles upstream from Deptford. 

There is a fine miniature portrait of Drake, on the reverse of a playing card, painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1581, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. 

The Devonian landed-gentleman, writer, poet,  court favourite,  politician, soldier, spy and explorer Sir Walter Ralegh was granted a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I in 1584 to explore, colonise and rule any “remote, heathen and barbarous lands, countries and territories, not actually possessed of any Christian Prince or inhabited by Christian People [in the New World]”,  in return for one-fifth of all the gold and silver that might be mined there.  He first organised, although did not himself participate in, two voyages to Roanoke in Virginia in the 1580s, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to establish an English colony in North America, under the governorship of John White (it was not until 1607 that a successful colony was to become  established, at Jamestown in Virginia).   White first went out to Roanoke in 1587, but returned to England shortly afterwards in order to pick up further supplies.  He had intended to go back again within the year, but, for various reasons, was not actually able to do so until three years later than planned.  When he finally did arrive back in Roanoke, in 1590, he found no trace of the colony or of the colonists, other than an abandoned stockade, with one of its posts inscribed with the single word   “CROATOAN”.   Ralegh then himself participated in a voyage in  1595 in search of “El Dorado”, the fabled city of gold in South America, again with no success.  In between times,   in 1591,  he had been temporarily imprisoned in the Tower of London, for having married Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth I’s  ladies-in-waiting, without first having sought the Queen’s express permission.  Later, after  Elizabeth I died, and James I succeeded her to the throne, Ralegh was imprisoned again, this time on the altogether more serious charge of complicity in the so-called “Main Plot” against the new King in 1603 (which sought to remove him and replace him with his cousin Arbella Stuart).  He was eventually pardoned and released from captivity in 1616, in order to undertake a second voyage in search of “El Dorado”.  This time, he did find gold, albeit by the expedient of ransacking a Spanish outpost, in violation of the terms not only of his pardon, but also of   the Treaty of London of 1604, that had brought to an end the long-running Anglo-Spanish War.  On his eventual return to England in 1618, he was arrested and executed in Westminster Palace Yard, essentially to appease the Spanish.   

There is a miniature portrait of Ralegh, painted by Nicholas Hilliard in c. 1585, in the National Portrait Gallery, depicting him in the Queen’s colours of black and white.  Ralegh is of  course remembered  for supposedly once having made the chivalrous gesture of casting  one of his cloaks upon a puddle  so as to allow the Queen to walk over it without getting her feet wet.  He is also widely credited with  having supposedly introduced the potato, and tobacco, to England.

What is now known as the Anglo-Spanish War, between Protestant England and Catholic Spain, broke out, after a prolonged period of escalating tension,  in 1585, with the seizure of  English ships moored in Spanish and Netherlandish ports.  The war  would only finally be ended in 1604, that is, during the first full year of the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James I, with the signature of the Treaty of London in  Somerset House, an event commemorated by a painting now in the Queen’s House in Greenwich.    At its height, the threat of a Spanish invasion of England was very real, never more so than at the time of the ill-destined Spanish Armada in 1588.  In February, 1587, the Protestant Queen, Elizabeth I, had had the  Catholic Pretender, Mary, Queen of Scots, executed.  The Catholic King of Spain, Philip II, vowed revenge, and in July, 1587, obtained Papal authority to overthrow Elizabeth by force of arms and place whoever he chose on the throne in her stead.   To that end, he assembled an armada of 130 ships, and in 1588, despatched it under the Duke of Medina Sidonia to the Netherlands to “join hands” with an army  under the Duke of Parma,  the intention being that the two forces then cross the Channel together, and sail up the Thames to take London.  In the event, the armada arrived early at the rendezvous, harried by the English fleet under Howard and Drake, and the Duke of Parma’s men were not ready to embark.  Later, in attempting to escape English fireships, the armada was dispersed to the four winds, and many of its ships were wrecked, with great loss of life.    Elizabeth I, who had been in Richmond Palace or St James’s Palace in London throughout the crisis, and in consultation with Burleigh and Walsingham, addressed her armed forces at Tilbury Fort, as follows:  “My loving people, We have been persuaded by some that are careful of our safety, to take heed how we commit our selves to armed multitudes, for fear of treachery; but I assure you I do not desire to live to distrust my faithful and loving people. Let tyrants fear. I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good-will of my subjects; and therefore I am come amongst you, as you see, at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my Kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust.  I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a King, and of a King of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain,  or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.  I know already, for your forwardness you have deserved rewards and crowns; and We do assure you on a word of a prince, they shall be duly paid. In the mean time, my lieutenant general shall be in my stead, than whom never prince commanded a more noble or worthy subject; not doubting but by your obedience to my general, by your concord in the camp, and your valour in the field, we shall shortly have a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my Kingdom, and of my people”.  Interestingly, a   carved ivory sculpture  of Christ salvaged from an  Armada shop may be seen in the church of All Hallows Barking.

Interestingly, on April 6^th, 1580, London was hit by a large earthquake (there had previously been smaller  ones in 1247 and 1382).  This one actually had its epicentre in the Straits of Dover, but its magnitude was such – possibly 8 or more on the European Macroseismic Scale – that its effects were felt over a wide area of south-eastern England and the near-continent of Europe.    In London, it caused significant damage to property.  It also caused the deaths of   the child-apprentices Thomas Gray and Mabel Everite, who were struck by masonry falling from the roof  of Christ Church, Newgate Street (the boy was killed outright; the girl died of her injuries a few days later).  A number of contemporary publications  still survive that describe the earthquake, albeit as a supernatural rather than a natural  phenomenon, as a  divine warning and  call to repentance.  One, issued the day after the earthquake, contains “A godly newe ballat moving us to repent by ye example of ye earthquake happened in London ye 6. of Aprill 1580”, which reads, in part, as follows:

“It came at eve, as Aprill day
Shut up its water eye,
And fill’d all London with dismaye,
And that all suddenly.
In open streete
Did all men meete
Leaving their houses shaking fearfully.
The belles as of themselves did toll
The knell of all the people:
Huge stones fell downe, and others roll
From tower and from steeple.
These none could shun,
Though fast they run:
They soon o’ertooke and kill’d both whole and creeple.
In one short minute, strange to view,
The cittie stood amaz’d,
Confusion rang’d the wardes all through;
Eche on his neighbour gaz’d.
All were agast,
But soone it past:
If it continued, London had been raz’d”.

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign, in   1601, Robert Devereux, the 2^nd  Earl of Essex, led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow her and her court, a treasonous act for which he was later tried, convicted, and beheaded at the Tower of London.  Some of his supporters were also executed, although some others, including the Earl of Southampton, were spared.   Essex had earlier been publicly disgraced and politically and financially ruined by being placed under house arrest and removed from his office as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for  failing to execute Elizabeth’s orders to him to suppress an insurrection in that country (the so-called “Tyrone’s Rebellion” or “Nine Year’s War”).  His overthrow plan was once widely believed to have involved taking a  boat from Essex Steps to the “Globe” in Southwark on February 7^th, 1601, to bribe the  “Lord Chamberlain’s Men” to overplay the scene in that day’s performance of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” in which the King is deposed, with a view to encouraging support among the watching crowd.  Sadly, like  all too many good stories, this one has since been conclusively demonstrated to have had no actual basis in historical fact.   Essex’s actual plan, such as it was, simply to march from Essex House to the City of London, began to backfire on the morning of the fateful following day, February 8^th, when four of the Queen’s men arrived at the house  to arrest him, and he was forced to take them hostage.  He recklessly decided to carry   on regardless, but when he and his followers, numbering some two hundred, arrived at the City, they were  met with a   hostile reception, having by that time  already been denounced as traitors  (by Robert Cecil, the 1^st  Earl of Salisbury, the  Secretary of State).  At this, most of his followers deserted him, and he was forced to return to Essex House, where after a short siege, during which he attempted to destroy any evidence that might incriminate him, he found himself forced to surrender to the Queen’s men (under the  Earl of Nottingham).   

Ightham Mote is a Grade I listed Medieval moated manor house, one of the most complete of its kind, situated in the Kent Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty approximately thirty miles south-east of London.

The house was originally built in the fourteenth century, circa 1340-60. Its earliest recorded owner and occupier was Sir Thomas Cawne. On his death, it passed to his son-in-law Nicholas Haute, and remained in the Haute family for well over 100 years, until it was purchased by Sir William Clement in 1521. It was later purchased by Sir William Selby in 1591, and remained in the Selby family for just under 300 years.

Ightham Mote was rented out by the American railroad magnate William Jackson Palmer between 1887-89, when it became a centre for members of the Aesthetic Movement. Notable visitors to the house at this time included the artist John Singer Sargent, the writer Henry James, and the actress Ellen Terry.

In 1890, the Mote was bought by Sir Thomas Colyer-Fergusson, who undertook a substantial programme of repairs and restorations, and opened the property to the public on one day a week.

The New Chapel contains a wooden cross commemorating Thomas’s third son Riversdale, who was killed in the First World War, and awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Thomas’s first son Max was killed in in the Second World War.

Ightham Mote was eventually acquired by the National Trust in 1985.

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 Medieval sites around the City.

There are also a couple of recent popular books on the subject, “London in Fragments” by Ted Sandling, and “Mudlarking” by Lara Maiklem.

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

The commonest Medieval  finds on the foreshore of the Thames are sherds of – glazed or unglazed – pottery, fragments of  tile, coins and jetons, or trading tokens, and pins. 

Typical early Medieval  pottery  finds include  locally manufactured “London-Type Ware”; late Medieval ones, “Surrey White Ware” and “Mill Green Ware” (from Essex). 

Roofing tiles  are sometimes  found with  large rounded holes for  wooden pegs.

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