Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  At the root of all these changes was the emergence of the bourgeoisie. All those silks and spices brought to Europe from the Far East were not being purchased by the poor but by the new arbiters of taste, the enriched middle classes. For centuries their numbers had been growing, principally as a result of merchants in towns buying and selling profitably and making money. But previously there had been no ‘upper middle class’ as a distinct social group. When merchants saw their wealth rise to the level of the gentry or aristocracy, they sold up and acquired a country estate, effectively subsuming themselves in the ranks of the upper class. In sixteenth-century England, the largest fortunes were made by lawyers and public officials but still the successful few crowned their achievement by buying a landed estate. After 1600, however, the urban middle classes and their wealth increased dramatically. Gregory King, a pioneering statistician, estimated that in 1695, apart from the nobility, higher clergy and armigerous gentry (gentlemen with a coat of arms), there were 10,000 people in England living off the fruits of an office (excluding clergymen and military officers), with a collective income of £1.8 million. In addition, there were 10,000 international merchants, whose combined income amounted to £2.4 million; 10,000 lawyers, bringing in £1.4 million; and 12,000 unarmigerous gentlemen, sharing £2.9 million. At a time when the total income of the nation was £43.5 million, the upper middle classes had almost a fifth of the whole amount – about three times as much as the aristocracy and armigerous gentry combined.17

  Clearly not all these people could pretend to be aristocratic. However, most tried to emphasise their elevated position in society in some way or other. They dressed in the latest fashions and did all they could to be seen in public – going to the theatre or the opera, and travelling to appropriate social engagements in horse-drawn carriages. They equipped their houses with all the distinctions of modernity they could lay their hands on: large glass windows, paintings and decorative prints, musical instruments, board games with carved wood or ivory pieces, books, gilt-framed mirrors, carpets, cushions, curtains and valances, embroidered tablecloths, elaborate silver candlesticks, pendulum clocks, Venetian wine glasses, imported ceramics from the Far East, polished pewter plates engraved with the family coat of arms, and elaborately carved, turned or inlaid furniture. They also took pride in their education, and travelled widely in order to broaden their horizons. Many maintained ‘cabinets of curiosities’: items of a strange nature, usually reflecting life in distant or ancient places such as Ancient Egypt or the New World. They also enjoyed eating and drinking well. The seventeenth century saw the introduction of tea, coffee, chocolate, lemonade, orange juice and spirits such as brandy, aquavite and Dutch gin. They developed a taste for the fine wines newly emerging in France: Château Latour, Château Lafite, Château Margaux and Château Haut-Brion. The last mentioned was tasted by the London diarist Samuel Pepys in 1663. Sparkling champagne was also introduced to London and Parisian society at this time.18

  In many ways, it was this urban class that created the model for modern life. They lived not in vast halls but in houses of more modest proportions. The three-storey brick terraced houses built in London after the Great Fire of 1666 provided the blueprint for urban building for the next 250 years. These houses were divided into parlour, dining room and sleeping chambers. Smaller, more efficient fireplaces were employed, and coal was increasingly used for heating. Kitchens – which had often been located in separate buildings in previous centuries – were brought indoors and placed not too far from the dining room, with a separate scullery for all the dirty jobs, such as washing plates and bowls, scrubbing saucepans and preparing meat, fish and vegetables. The ideal was that everything should be in order. Genre paintings by Dutch artists reveal the striking differences between the taverns of the ordinary people, with their dark interiors, old planks of wood hanging at angles, crumbling fireplaces, puddles on the floor, broken earthenware, and people in torn and shabby clothes, and the light, clean and tidy houses of the prosperous middle-class families.

  In all those Dutch paintings, you can’t help but notice how often the bourgeois individuals are portrayed with serious, concerned expressions, while most of the laughing faces are those of the red-nosed drunken poor. Perhaps they were worried about trade or burdened with the weight of office. Or perhaps they wanted to be depicted as responsible. Social climbing was, after all, a serious business. And the ladder these people sought to climb reached very high. Although the bourgeois of seventeenth-century England, Holland and France were no longer under pressure to emulate the aristocracy, who maintained households of 40 servants or more, they aped their social superiors in almost every other respect. More and more families claimed to be entitled to bear coats of arms. Increasingly they sent their sons to universities to receive a degree. They claimed other marks of dignity too. In 1650, a French observer wrote that ‘before this century it was unknown for wives of secretaries, lawyers, notaries and traders to call themselves Madame’.19 In England, men increasingly insisted on being addressed as ‘Mister’ and women as ‘Mistress’ or, from the 1660s, ‘Miss’ if they were unmarried. New fashions became de rigueur. When Louis XIV received an ambassador from the Ottoman emperor in 1669, everyone became obsessed by all things Turkish – drinking coffee, reading Turkish stories, wearing turbans and lying on rugs and piles of cushions. For all those in subsequent centuries who have set such great store by ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, this is where it all began. The French dramatist Molière wrote a scathing satire on the aspiring middle class in 1670. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme tells the story of Monsieur Jourdain, the son of a cloth merchant who would do anything to be recognised as an aristocrat – and makes himself a laughing stock in the process.

  It should not be supposed that the middle classes arrived fully fledged overnight. In many ways, the consumerism of the late seventeenth century was just a prelude to the more extensive waves of social mobility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the seventeenth century saw the structure of European society swell in the middle – and bulge distinctly above the tight belt of social control.

  Conclusion

  It is tempting to say that this is the century that marks the threshold between the ancient and the modern worlds, as people’s hope for their well-being shifted from God to their fellow men. It reflects a change towards secular materialism that is to be found in everything from Hobbes’s social contract to the conduct of war. In earlier centuries, the outcome of a battle was seen as indicative of God’s will; in the seventeenth century, it was understood to be the result of how well or badly the commander performed with the assets available to him on the day. In other respects, too, the seventeenth century seems to have ushered in the modern world through the rapid diminution of superstitious beliefs, the commensurate rise of scientific rationality, and the continued decline of violence.

  Having said that, not all the novelties of the century mark a progressive march towards modernity. Puritanism in England and America, which had begun with great zeal for moral as well as theological reform, now nurtured monstrous injustices. In 1636 the Puritan preacher of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Cotton, drew up a model law code according to which a married couple who had sex while the woman was menstruating should be put to death.20 In May 1650 the Adultery Act was passed in England, which required the death penalty for sex outside marriage. It is shocking to read of a Devon woman, Susan Bounty, who was convicted of adultery. When her child was born, she was given him to hold for a few brief moments; then he was taken away and she was hanged. And yet just six years later, Charles II came to the throne – a married man who had at least eight illegitimate children by six mistresses. The mind spins. It spins even more when reading of the Salem witch trials of 1692–3, when 19 people were hanged, and one crushed to death for refusing to plead. Then you think of all the civil wars, revolutions and uprisings due to famine and social injustice. Despite scientific thinking, natural rights and bourgeois refinement, the truth is that the modern
world was not born easily. It struggled into existence, kicking and screaming like a new baby, bloody and hungry. If it seems to us now that the greatest achievement of the seventeenth century was its rational approach to the world, then we need to remember that tens of thousands of people laid down their lives at the same time – in the witch houses, at the stake and on the gallows of Europe.

  The principal agent of change

  There are three leading contenders for the seventeenth century – Galileo, Isaac Newton and John Locke. But we should also consider the outsiders, particularly William Harvey, Christiaan Huygens and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. Of these six, Newton is normally given the most credit for shaping the modern world. However, we have already seen that it took some time for people to come to terms with his work. The point of selecting a principal agent of change for each century is not to highlight someone who had a profound effect many years after his time. If that were the criterion, Aristotle, rather than Peter Abelard, would have been the principal candidate for the twelfth century. Therefore, I put Galileo first. He not only popularised the scientific method, but also led the way in instrument-making, basic physics, timekeeping and astronomy. He did more than anyone else of his time or any other to challenge the Church’s pretence to knowledge in order to maintain its authority. In expressing a profound belief in his scientific findings, even at the cost of his own freedom, he stood for much more than a set of scientific truths. He stood for truth itself.

  1701–1800

  The Eighteenth Century

  In 1738, a Devonshire rogue, scoundrel and rapscallion called Bampfylde Moore Carew, the self-styled ‘king of the Gypsies’, was arrested for vagrancy. He had been apprehended begging for money from travellers by impersonating a shipwrecked mariner. At his trial the judge demanded to know where he had been; on hearing the answer ‘Denmark, Sweden, Russia, France, Spain, Portugal, Canada and Ireland’, he sentenced him to be deported to Maryland in America. Carew thanked him for sending him to ‘Merryland’ and responded to the prospect of spending the rest of his days in servitude by escaping immediately on arrival in the New World. He was soon recaptured and fitted with a heavy iron collar. Undaunted, he escaped again, and made friends with some Native Americans, who sawed off his collar. The king of the Gypsies then set out for New York on foot, tricking and begging his way, and worked his passage incognito back to England. Not long after his return, strolling along the quay in Exeter with his long-suffering wife on his arm, he bumped into the captain of the ship that had transported him to the New World. An awkward moment ensued, as the law dictated that escapees from transportation should be hanged. Would the captain betray him? Damn right he would. But Carew was lucky: rather than being hanged, he was once more dispatched to ‘Merryland’. Needless to say, he escaped again, and had many more adventures on his way home. In 1745, at the grand age of 52, he dictated his memoirs, which became a nationwide best-seller. A hundred years later, people in England were still telling stories about ‘the notorious Devonshire stroller and dog-stealer’, comparing him to Robin Hood.

  Carew falls into the same category of eighteenth-century characters as the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and Henry Every, the ‘King of the Pirates’, whose exploits were recounted along with those of many other felons in Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724). You could put the highwayman Dick Turpin in that category of heroic villain too; his life story was published immediately after his execution in 1739. Hundreds of such criminals were celebrated in the cheap literature of the age, and in dramatic works such as John Gay’s enormously popular satire The Beggar’s Opera (1728). All this celebration of crime might make you pause. This was, after all, the century of the Enlightenment, of political economy and scientific experiment. It was the age of elegance, harmony and order: the music of Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart; rococo architecture; the furniture of George Hepplewhite, Thomas Chippendale and Thomas Sheraton; the landscapes of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton; Canova’s exquisite sculptures; the Venetian paintings of Canaletto and Guardi; and the French works of Watteau, Fragonard and Boucher. Even the English – at long last – managed to produce painters of international importance in Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright, George Stubbs, George Romney and William Hogarth. Above all else, this was the age of revolution – the American, the Industrial and the French. But the celebrity status of these eighteenth-century criminals is not as out of place as it first appears. Today’s society sees a very similar championing of social outcasts, misfits, reprobates and iconoclasts. John Gay has his successors too: crime fiction is one of the most popular genres, and films about real criminal organisations such as the Mafia are watched by millions. The stories about Carew, Blackbeard, Every and Turpin found favour with the eighteenth-century public, which hankered after the excitement and freedom that such men represented. Indeed, there is a certain modernity to the contradictions of the eighteenth century – a mixing of order and regulation with the romantic impulse, the desire to escape. That goes for most aspects of life, from sex and crime to religion and opera. By comparison to the taste of previous centuries, which could be salty, sour, bittersweet or just plain bitter as the circumstances dictated, the taste of the eighteenth century has a certain fizz to it – like fireworks and string quartets bursting above the mere mud of human tragedy.

  Transport and communications

  Prior to the introduction of semaphore signalling for military purposes at the end of the century, the speed of information depended on how fast people could travel. A number of factors affected this: how much daylight there was at that time of year; the condition of the roads, which also depended on the seasons; how rich the person sending the message was, which affected the number of fresh horses that could be hired along the way; and lastly, the remoteness of the destination. If there were good roads all the way to the door, a rider with several changes of horses could travel at great speed – up to 120 miles in a day in summer. But good roads were rare in 1700. If the destination was a remote rural backwater like Moreton, the winter quagmires and boulder-strewn trackways could severely hamper progress, and it might take a day for a messenger to travel just 20 miles. The greatest distance covered by a messenger in a day I have yet come across for the centuries before 1800 was part of Sir Robert Carey’s mission to inform James VI of Scotland of the death of Elizabeth I of England in March 1603. Sir Robert rode the 397 miles from Richmond to Edinburgh in less than three days, completing 162 miles on the first day and 136 on the second. The previous year, Richard Boyle had travelled from Cork to London in just two days, including the sea crossing between Dublin and Bristol, despite the state of the roads in January.1 Most long-distance travellers, it has to be said, could never have come close to these speeds, being lucky if they could cover 30 miles in a summer’s day.

  The late seventeenth century saw the first serious attempts to improve European transport links. For a start, carriages with suspension were developed and new lightweight coaches built. Even more importantly, governments improved the state of the highways. In England, the old legislation that made local people responsible for the upkeep of the roads fell into abeyance and was replaced by the principle that the users of a road should pay a toll for its maintenance. Parliamentary approval had to be obtained in the form of a Turnpike Act for the construction of a specified road and the establishment of a turnpike trust to maintain it, but after that permission had been granted, the trust had a monopoly on charging tolls on that section of the highway and could spend all the funds on its upkeep. By 1750 there were about 150 such turnpike trusts in England, providing greatly improved access to much of the south-east and the Midlands. Halfway through the century there was a sudden explosion of interest in road-building. More than 550 new trusts were established between 1750 and 1800 as the rest of the country was opened up to wheeled transport. In 1770 a Turnpike Act created a new road from Exeter to Moretonhampstead and
the first wheeled vehicles reached the town shortly afterwards. A road was built across Dartmoor ten years later. By 1799 a Moreton inn, the White Hart, was advertising single-horse carriages for hire, so tourists could embark on pleasure excursions over the moor. It marked quite a turnaround from 1646, when, during the English Civil War, General Fairfax’s army had tried and failed to pull wheeled cannon to this remote town.

  The most important aspect of this development was the improved speed of information. The post system in England had been in existence since the sixteenth century but it only covered four routes: from London to Ireland, Plymouth, Dover and Edinburgh. A cross-country route was added in 1696 when a post service from Exeter to Bristol was set up; this was followed by services from Lancashire to the south-west in 1735, and from Bristol to Salisbury in 1740.2 Joining up the spokes of the wheel emanating from the hub of London meant letters no longer needed to be sent via the capital, so messages travelled more quickly. The gravel-covered turnpike roads allowed information to be carried to London more quickly too. A new speed record was set by Lieutenant John Richards Lapenotière, who landed at Falmouth on 4 November 1805 bearing the news that the English fleet had defeated the French in a great battle at Trafalgar. He covered the 271-mile journey to the Admiralty in London in 37 hours, changing horses 21 times – at a cost of £46 19s. 1d.