London’s Triumph

by Stephen Alford

  By 1620 almost all of the Londoners we have met in this book, those born in the city as well as those adopted by it, were gone. Sir Richard Gresham had died in 1549, his son Sir Thomas in 1579, John Isham in 1596, John Stow in 1605, Anthony Jenkinson in 1610 or 1611, the younger Richard Hakluyt in 1616, and Michael Lok sometime between 1620 and 1622. Both Isham and Jenkinson had retired to country manor houses in Northamptonshire after distinguished careers. Stow died in the city he loved and celebrated and was buried in the church of St Andrew Undershaft. His monument survives, showing him writing in a book. The inscription reads (translated from Latin):

  John Stow, London citizen, piously awaits resurrection in Christ. Who having employed most careful diligence in bringing to light records of antiquity, deserved well of his own time and of posterity in writing with distinction the annals of England and the survey of the city of London.2

  Like Stow, Richard Hakluyt achieved his life’s ambition as the great expert on English navigations. He made his will in 1616, leaving his property and money to family, friends and charity. One of those friends was the younger Michael Lok, son of the unfortunate elder Michael, whose troubled career after the failure of the Cathay company led him to a disastrous posting as consul at Aleppo for the Turkey Company and ever-increasing debts. His life in a sense came full circle: he died on Cheapside at the sign of the lock.3

  The richest of these men left memorials and tombs as earlier generations had done, and these served as summations and celebrations of their careers. But a very few have survived. Sir Thomas Gresham’s beautiful tomb of alabaster and black marble in the church of St Helen, Bishopsgate, spoke to his contemporaries – and speaks to us today – of the riches and power of a merchant prince who had little need for ostentation or more words than were necessary: the mottled marble slab is simply carved with his name and the date of his burial.4

  Any Londoner of 1620 with the inclinations of John Stow, wandering about the city, noticing and recording, could find dozens of tombs and memorials in every city church. To Jacobeans, many of them would have been relics of a bygone age, a time before the Reformation when Londoners still believed in purgatory and prayers for the dead – remote and perhaps discomfiting monuments to past errors and superstitions. In St Olave, Hart Street, for example, was the memorial brass to Sir Richard Haddon, showing Sir Richard and his two wives; Dame Katherine Haddon, once Katherine Wyndout, is on the left, kneeling in prayer with her children, Bartholomew and Joan, behind her. It would have seemed extraordinary to a Londoner of 1620 that a century earlier a priest had actually been employed in the church to say prayers for the Haddons’ souls.5

  Other memorials in St Olave, Hart Street, would have had more immediate significance for Jacobeans. One fine monument is striking even today, a double celebration of the lives of two merchant brothers, Andrew and Paul Bayning, who died in 1610 and 1616 respectively. The Baynings were Turkey and Levant Company merchants; and Paul, like Andrew a city alderman, was one of the first directors of the East India Company.6 That Mediterranean and eastern trade would not have existed at all without the efforts of a merchant the Baynings knew well – Richard Staper, who died in 1608. A curious Jacobean would have found Staper celebrated in stone in the long disappeared church of St Martin Outwich: ‘He was the greatest merchant in his time, the chiefest actor in discovery, of the trades of Turkey, and East India, a man humble in prosperity, painful and ever ready in the affairs public and discreetly.’7 This would be an exaggeration for any merchant other than Staper, who had been tenacious and formidable over decades in pushing London’s interests out to the East.

  The legacies these grandees left were tangled up with the affairs of this world and the hopes of the next. Was it in the end vanity and self-aggrandizement, an effort to buy a kind of immortality? The glories of Sir Thomas Gresham’s Exchange and the grand hopes of his endowed lectureships in the arts and sciences were all but scuppered by his widow Dame Anne, who, resenting the vast amounts of money her husband had thrown at them, dragged her feet as much as she possibly could and tried to undo the complicated provisions of her husband’s will. A characteristic tussle occurred in 1581, when the queen’s Privy Council was obliged, gently but firmly, to prod Lady Gresham into repairing crumbling portions of the Royal Exchange. The deal was simple, their lordships explained: her responsibility under her late husband’s will was to maintain the Exchange, in return for which she received a portion of its annual revenue. At stake, for the comparatively tiny sum (for a Gresham) of about £20, were the honour of queen and kingdom:

  forasmuch as the charges and reparations of the said Exchange during her life are to be borne and supplied by her, and to that end a yearly revenue is accorded her out of that place: albeit they doubt not of her care to be had in the maintaining of that famous building in respect of the memory of her late husband … Yet for that it standeth with the honour of her majesty and the realm that so worthy a monument should not be suffered to fall into ruin and decay.8

  It was not the last time that she had to be reminded of her duty.9 But whatever grumblings and grievances she had, Anne Gresham was reconciled enough with Sir Thomas’s memory to want to be buried with him in St Helen, Bishopsgate.

  A merchant prince like Gresham wanted it all: wealth, legacy and heaven. But was it possible to have everything, and to reconcile the drive for profit with the expectation of eternal life? Those were the questions examined at Paul’s Cross in August 1619 by Immanuel Bourne, in a sermon printed and sold a few months later at the shop of George Fairbeard at the north door of the Exchange. Bourne himself lived among the merchants as the minister of St Michael, Cornhill, next door to the Exchange. He knew that London was a city where merchants were driven to buy and sell for money. In that, of course, he saw sin and the temptation of covetousness. He likened gain – material riches – to the apple with which Eve had been tempted by Satan in the Garden of Eden. Prizing the pursuit of godliness above everything, Bourne was mystified by the kind of energy and effort that drove merchants to the far corners of the globe:

  if we look into these our times, what strange … enterprises are daily undertaken, both by sea and land, on horse and foot, as if they would tempt the God of heaven to see whether he will punish their desperate boldness or no? It is not foul nor fair, nor wet nor dry, not cold or heat, that can hinder men in their passage from one fair to another, from one city to another, from one kingdom to another, and all to get this much admired gain.10

  Yet of course this was the secret to the success of a Bayning, a Gresham or a Staper, or any one of the merchants in this book: unflinching tenacity in the face of often apparently overwhelming odds. It was not generally the sort of energy deployed by the earnest godly preacher in his pursuit of heaven – though we should make an exception for the younger Richard Hakluyt, for whom discovery and mercantile endeavour represented God’s will in action.

  It would be easy at the end of this book simply to catalogue the dead: in the small churchyard of St Olave, Hart Street, the Inuit baby boy brought home by Martin Frobisher as a curiosity and buried without record, or the scores of parishioners killed by the terrible outbreak of plague in 1563, or even Thomas Hacket the stationer and translator, who in his lifetime had communicated to Londoners the promise of the new continent of America.11

  But London was not in 1620 what Charles Dickens later called ‘The city of the absent’ – of deserted and spooky churchyards and quiet nocturnal wanderings.12 The Jacobean city was very much of and for the living. In that year there were fifty-three baptisms at St Olave, Hart Street, and seventy-six at the Jesus Temple in Austin Friars. Multiply those numbers by over a hundred and take into account the thousands still arriving in London in search of work, and then mortality had its counterweight. Londoners continued to live, work and enjoy themselves. Parish life had its familiar structures and rhythms. At St Bartholomew the Less in 1620 the churchwardens dutifully recorded gifts and bequests from wealthy parishioners that were deployed for the bene
fit of the worthy poor. It was a busy time for the church, as a whole team of workmen spent three months repointing its steeple and replacing its windows.13

  For those on the outside of city life things could be difficult. The government of King James saw in London’s rich merchant strangers the opportunity to raise great sums of money. Between 1618 and 1620 a case rumbled through the court of Star Chamber in which it was alleged that strangers were sending bullion and coin abroad to the impoverishment of the kingdom: at one point the utterly fantastic sum of £7 million was mentioned. The king got money out of the strangers in two ways: first through loans, secondly by means of huge fines imposed on foreign merchants.14

  As harsh as this was, perhaps in the end all was fair in trade and finance. Certainly London merchants in India and investors in Virginia had a far from straightforward time. To read the reports from 1620 of the East India Company’s agents at their base in Surat is to encounter the growing pains of global corporate endeavour. They kept a close eye on Portuguese and Dutch competitors, fumed at negligent factors in Persia and complained about the ‘inborn cunning’ of the people of India and the corruption of their government. The commodities they were dealing with were far removed from the traditional English cloth trade, and included items such as glass beads, unicorn horn, ivory, polished coral, quicksilver (liquid mercury), animal hides all the way from Russia, cloth of gold, cochineal and sea-morse (walrus) teeth. They hinted at the need for an armed force to protect trade – a presage of the future.15

  There were difficulties even greater, however, for the adventurers and planters of Virginia, for whom 1620 was a crunch year. In private session, the Virginia Company met in London to agree a plan for the better government of the plantation. They began with the need for unity by removing the company’s ‘late distractions’ by ‘partialities and factions’ – corporate life was so easily disrupted by powerful characters and interest groups. In the case of the Virginia Company, the disagreements had been provoked by differences of opinion over how the colonies should be governed and the management of accounts.16

  Like any struggling corporate endeavour, the Virginia Company published in the summer of 1620 a kind of investors’ and planters’ brochure that made Virginia sound irresistible. There had been ‘many disasters’, operations of divine providence in which the devil and his agents had tried to disrupt ‘this noble action for the planting of Virginia with Christian religion and English people’.17 But the Virginia narrative was as steady and as unwavering as it had been since the time of Hakluyt and the other early prophets of an English America:

  The rich furs, caviary, and cordage, which we draw from Russia with so great difficulty, are to be had in Virginia, and the parts adjoining, with ease and plenty. The masts, planks, and boards and pitch and tar, the pot-ashes and soap-ashes, the hemp and flax (being the materials of linen) which now we fetch from Norway, Denmark, Poland and Germany, are there to be had in abundance and great perfection. The iron, which hath so wasted our English woods, that itself in short time must decay together with them, is to be had in Virginia … for all good conditions answerable to the best in the world. The wines, fruit, and salt of France and Spain; the silks of Persia and Italy, will be found also in Virginia, and in no mind of worth inferior.18

  The reality was more complex. America would be no easy substitute for other continents, and England’s trade with Europe was both fixed and essential. But the spark of possibility is there in this luxurious description: surely from the New World there was so much more to be gathered in? The 1620 prospectus concluded with a long list of noble, gentry and merchant investors. Who, this was meant to communicate, could resist such an opportunity?

  One specific issue in 1620 especially exercised the Virginia Company of London, and that was King James’s well-known aversion to tobacco: ‘tending to a general and new corruption both of men’s bodies and manners’, as the king put it in a proclamation of that year. James’s economic objection to tobacco was that it drained the kingdom of bullion, as well as resulting in the trading of England’s staple commodities below their real value, thus enhancing the price of tobacco, all to ‘the great disturbance and decay of the trade of the orderly and good merchant’.19 The governing court of the Virginia Company saw in the restrictions about to be placed on the unlimited importation of tobacco, ‘the utter overthrow and destruction’ of its plantations. It petitioned the king through the Earl of Southampton, the company’s treasurer (he had East India Company interests too, and had been Shakespeare’s literary patron); King James said that ‘it was never his meaning to grant anything that might be prejudicial to any or both those plantations’.20 Hard and coordinated lobbying of the royal government was essential; it was clear in 1620 that the lucrative tobacco leaf had friends in high places. And, with the nimbleness of powerful interests, the company prepared itself for new markets: if it became impossible to import tobacco into England, then they would shift their operations to Flushing and Middelburg in the Low Countries. Where there was a problem, there might also be a corporate opportunity.

  After 1620, London continued to grow and fill out. Metropolitan fashion took over. The 1630s saw the development of Covent Garden near the Strand, outside the city boundary. London blurred into Westminster; its geographical weight was shifting. What we think of today as London was to Elizabethans a very long way from the old city, which, if we map it now, is bounded by a tiny handful of Tube stations. That change began in the seventeenth century. And so, where in a view of Westminster from the 1590s ‘the Convent Garden’ was shown as open space, by the time of Wenceslaus Hollar’s captivating bird’s-eye view of the new Covent Garden in about 1660, it was a tidy city planner’s dream, with grand houses of three and four storeys, some with elegant arcades, built in an ordered way around gardens and a central piazza. There was, at long last, the sense of a city of order and design.21

  Everything changed in September 1666 with a fire of barely comprehensible intensity. Though the suburbs beyond the Roman wall survived, the Great Fire reduced the old city to ashes. Almost all the buildings mentioned in this book, with the exception of those towards Bishopsgate and Aldgate and the Tower of London, were destroyed: the church of St Antholin and the hospital of St Thomas of Acon (where this book began), St Lawrence Jewry, Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and so much else.

  The scholar and diarist John Evelyn watched the Great Fire from the safety of Bankside in Southwark. He tried to make sense of the scale of an event that struck him like a physical blow; the tautness of his prose only emphasizes the horror of what he and his family saw. ‘We beheld that dismal spectacle, the whole city in dreadful flames near the waterside; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames Street, and upward toward Cheapside down to the Three Cranes, were now consumed.’ Nothing could stop the fire as it leapt ‘after a prodigious manner’ from house to house and street to street, burning ‘the churches, public halls, Exchange, hospitals, monuments, ornaments’. ‘The stones of Paul’s,’ he continued, ‘flew like grenados, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ The destruction was so complete that John Evelyn felt he had witnessed in the Great Fire ‘a resemblance of Sodom, or the last day’. But the other point of reference for Evelyn was the destruction of ancient Troy. Now New Troy, like the old, was gone: ‘London was,’ Evelyn wrote, ‘but is no more.’22

  And yet London survived. Just as the Romans had twice rebuilt Londinium after the rising of Boudicca and the first great fire, so, now, the city was carefully surveyed and the ancient streets and buildings meticulously recorded, along with the old ward boundaries. London grew up again around the streets and lanes walked by generations of Londoners. The Gothic leviathan of St Paul’s Cathedral was replaced by Sir Christopher Wren’s domed masterpiece. If Wren’s proposed model for a new city had been used, London within the walls would have been tidied up into long boulevards and ordered piazzas, of
which the focus would have been a new Exchange – from Newgate and Cheapside, Dowgate and the Customs House, London Bridge and Bishopsgate, all roads would have led to the merchants’ bourse.

  But it never happened; perhaps Londoners preferred the familiar tangle and jostle, a kind of deep ancestral imprint of disorder. Sir Joshua Reynolds later wrote of Wren’s ideas that their ‘effect might have been … rather unpleasing: the uniformity might have produced weariness, and a slight degree of disgust’.23

  The story of London after the Great Fire belongs to other books. But one further event – this time in the twentieth century – should be mentioned. The Temple of Jesus at Austin Friars somehow survived the inferno of 1666, but in the early hours of the morning of 16 October 1940 it was hit by a landmine attached to a parachute. The last functioning part of London’s medieval Augustinian friary – the simple church of rag-stone and chalk, with dressings of Reigate stone – was smashed by high explosive down to rubble.24

  To try to navigate the modern city with Elizabethan maps and views is an utterly dislocating experience: even someone with decent skills in map-reading and a fair sense of direction will find himself or herself wandering backwards and forwards, frustrated and disoriented. We have to work hard to get our bearings. Old street names both direct and deceive.

  It should be possible, more or less. Even given all the alterations, whether by fire, bombs, routine demolition and all the changes that are bound to happen over centuries, a portion of the old city’s pattern and structure has survived, like the major bones of a skeleton upon and around which a new body has been built. When we do find small miracles of survival, like the city’s few medieval churches, they seem tiny and shrunken standing next to enormous office blocks. They have been tenacious in holding back modernity from total victory – or at the very least showing that there was once something else here – another world, other lives. It is hard not to feel the vast historical distance between then and now, and with it a twinge of melancholy.