Great Tales from English History, Book 2

by Robert Lacey

  LONDON BURNING

  1666

  AT TWO O’CLOCK ON THE MORNING OF Sunday 2 September 1666, Thomas Farynor awoke to the smell of burning. Farynor bore the title of King’s Baker — meaning that he baked ships’ biscuits for the navy rather than bread for the King — and he lived above his bakery in Pudding Lane, not far from London Bridge. Dashing downstairs, he met with a blaze of such intensity that he snatched up his family and fled. Modern excavations have unearthed the carbonised remains of twenty tar barrels in the cellar below Pudding Lane, and it was probably their explosion that catapulted burning debris into the stables of the inn next door, setting fire to the hay piled up in the yard.

  It had been a long hot summer. London’s wood and wattle houses, roofed with straw, were tinderbox-dry, and a warm wind was blowing from the east. By three a.m. the city’s fire-fighters were on hand, accompanied by the Lord Mayor Sir Thomas Bloodworth, tetchy at having had his sleep disturbed. He gave the conflagration a cursory glance, then returned to his bed.‘Pish!’ he sniffed,‘a woman might piss it out!’

  But while the Lord Mayor slept, the flames licked their way to the riverside, enveloping the wooden wharves and warehouses that were stacked to the rafters with merchandise waiting to burn. Tallow, oil, timber, coal — in no time an inferno was raging up the shoreline and had consumed a third of the houses on London Bridge.‘Rattle, rattle, rattle…’ wrote one eyewitness,‘as if there had been a thousand iron chariots, beating together on the stones.’ The fire was roaring along so fast that it caught any pigeons too slow to get out of its path, setting their feathers alight.

  By Sunday lunchtime, Mayor Bloodworth’s coarse complacency had turned to panic. Samuel Pepys found him sweating helplessly at the front line, a handkerchief tied round his neck.‘Lord, what can I do?’ he cried.‘People will not obey me!’

  Bloodworth’s only recourse was the one reliable defence that the seventeenth century could offer against fire — to pull down blocks of houses to create firebreaks. But he found himself up against the fiercely protective instincts of some of the city’s most powerful property owners, and it took royal intervention to get the firebreak policy under way. In fact, King Charles and his brother James were the fire-fighting heroes of that day, and of the three further days it took to bring the blaze under control. The King sent his Life Guards along to help, and the two brothers were soon out on the streets themselves, setting to with shovels and buckets of water. Working from five in the morning until nearly midnight, James came in for particular praise.‘If the Lord Mayor had done as much,’ said one citizen,‘his example might have gone far towards saving the city!

  Thirteen thousand two hundred houses, 87 churches, and 44 merchant guild halls, along with the City’s own Guildhall, Exchange, Custom House and the Bridewell Prison, were destroyed in the fire that started at Pudding Lane. For several nights the flames burned so brightly that they lit the horizon at Oxford, fifty miles away. One hundred thousand were made homeless — tent cities sprang up in the fields around the capital. And with no compensation available for rebuilding — at this date insurance existed only for ships — many were left destitute.

  It was hardly surprising that a catastrophe of such magnitude should prompt a witch-hunt. When MPs gathered at the end of September they agreed to a man that papist saboteurs were to blame, and they set up a commission to prove it, solemnly gathering gossip about sinister French firework-makers and Catholic housewives from Ilford overheard predicting hot weather.

  In fact, there is not the slightest evidence that the fire which started in Thomas Farynor’s biscuit bakery in Pudding Lane in September 1666 was anything but an accident. And there was a certain half-heartedness in the Protestant attempts to pin the blame on the papists. Coupled with the‘blow’ of the plague the previous year, people felt a depressing anxiety that the punishment might be the work of God himself — His judgement on a king and a monarchy that, in just a few years, had fallen sadly short of all that its restoration had promised.

  TITUS OATES AND THE POPISH PLOT

  1678/9

  KING CHARLES II WAS PROUD TO HAVE fathered no less than fourteen illegitimate children. His pursuit of pleasure summed up the spirit with which Restoration England threw off the drab constraints of the Puritan years. Strolling in the park with his knock-kneed, floppy-eared spaniels, the‘Merry Monarch’ privately believed in his divine right to rule as totally as his father had, but unlike his father, Charles II masked his mission with the common touch. Orange-seller turned actress Nell Gwynne was the most popular of his many mistresses, famously turning jeers to cheers when anti-Catholic demonstrators jostled her carriage. Red-haired Nelly leaned out of the window.’I am the Protestant whore!’ she cried.

  ’King Charles 11,’ wrote John Evelyn,‘would doubtless have been an excellent prince had he been less addicted to women.’ The King, explained Evelyn, was‘always in want to supply their immeasurable profusion’.

  Women and wars drained the royal coffers. Under Charles, England’s taxes rose to even higher levels than under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, but without the military triumphs that had made Cromwell’s wars palatable. In June 1667 a marauding Dutch fleet entered the Thames estuary and sailed up the River Medway, where its fire ships destroyed half the English fleet. The Dutch cannon were clearly heard many miles away in fire-devastated London, while the newly renamed Royal Charles was captured and towed ignominiously back to Holland.

  The humiliation in the Medway ended the Restoration honeymoon. Charles had been careful to avoid dissolving the‘Cavalier’ Parliament that had been elected in the first joyously royalist flush of his return — at the end of every session he used the mechanism of prorogation (the temporary suspension of the Lords and Commons) to keep the Cavaliers returning. But these loyal merchants and country gentlemen distrusted the Roman Catholicism that permeated the royal court, and they disliked wasted taxes as much as the next man.

  In 1670 Charles embarked on a disastrous course. Seeking extra funds that would diminish his reliance on Parliament, he made a secret pact with his cousin, the French King Louis XIV. In return for a French pension that, in the event, would be paid intermittently for the rest of his reign, he agreed not only to restore the rights of English Catholics but also, when the moment was right, personally to acknowledge the Catholic faith in which he had been brought up by his devout French mother, Henrietta Maria.

  The secret clauses were negotiated at Dover as part of a deal creating an Anglo-French alliance against the Dutch, and to camouflage his betrayal Charles appointed two of his ministers to negotiate a cover’ Treaty of Dover — without the sell-out over Catholicism. But it was not long before suspicions of under-the-table dealings emerged, and when Charles went before Parliament in 1674 to swear there had been no secret clauses, it was observed that his hand shook.

  The King’s problems were intensified by the fact that, despite his profusion of bastard children, he had produced no legitimate heirs. His marriage to the Portuguese Catherine of Braganza remained obstinately childless, and though faithless to his spouse in so many ways, Charles refused to discard her. This handed the succession squarely to his brother James, Duke of York, who, unlike Charles, was not prepared to disguise his faith. In 1673 James had resigned his post as Lord High Admiral rather than denounce the doctrine of transubstantiation (see p. 102) as required by the Test Act, Parliament’s attempt to exclude non-Anglicans from public office. Thus the heir to England’s ultimate public office openly declared himself a Roman Catholic.

  With the present King living a lie and his successor conjuring up the prospect of a re-enactment of the fires of Smith field, it was small wonder that Protestant England felt under threat — and on 17 October 1678 came the event that seemed to justify their wildest fears. The body of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a prominent London magistrate, was found face down in a ditch on Primrose Hill, run through with a sword. Godfrey had been a rare London hero of the plague year. He had stayed in the capit
al overseeing mass burials and prosecuting grave robbers, and shortly before his death, it now turned out, he had embarked on a still more heroic mission: he was investigating allegations of a sinister‘Popish Plot’ to murder the King and place James on the throne.

  The allegations had been laid before the magistrate by one Titus Oates, an oily and pompous con man of the cloth, who had been expelled from his school, two Cambridge colleges, his Church of England ministry, the navy, and two Catholic colleges in Europe for offences that ranged from drunkenness to sodomy — with an ongoing strand of perjury. Oates’s tabloid tales of dagger-wielding Jesuit assassins might normally have commanded little credence, but the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey — which was never solved — gave his‘Popish Plot’ a horrid plausibility. The magistrate’s body was put on public display, and enterprising tradesfolk hawked‘Edmund Berry Godfrey’ daggers to citizens newly concerned with self-defence. In the panic that followed, further informers came crawling out of the woodwork, leading to the prosecution of more than twelve hundred Catholics in London alone and the execution of twenty-four innocent men and women on charges of treason.

  Parliamentarians and Puritans now saw a pressing need to exclude the King’s popish brother from the succession, and the bitter battle to impose this‘exclusion’ on Charles produced rudimentary political parties. Campaigning for exclusion was a country’ alliance of Puritans, populists and old parliamentary diehards — derided by their opponents as‘Whiggamores’, a term of abuse for Scottish Presbyterian outlaws. In response, the’Whigs’ denounced the court’ party of High Anglicans and loyal monarchists as’Tories’ (from the Gaelic word toraighe — an Irish label for Catholic bandits).

  Outlaws versus bandits, Whigs versus Tories: thus, in mutual insult, was born the British two-party political system. By the early 1680s the rival groupings were proudly proclaiming their names, printing manifestos, financing newspapers and choosing candidates. They even issued coloured rosettes — red for Tories and true blue for Whigs — and in this, the first of their many great confrontations, the Whigs managed to build up the larger majorities in the House of Commons.

  But though the Whigs had the votes, they found themselves helpless in face of the King’s prerogative powers, which were still essentially those enjoyed by Charles I — it was as if Commonwealth, Protectorate and Restoration had never been. Whenever the Whigs got close to passing a bill that would exclude James, his brother dissolved Parliament, and after three bitterly debated sessions and three dissolutions, the exclusion crisis ran out of steam. The fabrications of Titus Oates were exposed, and for the last five years of his reign Charles II was able to rule without Parliament.

  The King’s guiding principle had always been that he‘did not wish to go again on his travels’, and through charm, deceit and a general unwillingness on the part of his subjects to fight another Civil War, he succeeded. Charles II never had to climb another oak tree or blacken his face with soot again. On his deathbed, he called for a priest and formally converted to the faith of his childhood. But as the Merry Monarch headed for his Catholic heaven, his farewell words paid due homage to his licentious past —‘Let not poor Nelly starve’.

  MONMOUTH’S REBELLION AND THE BLOODY ASSIZES

  1685

  JAMES, DUKE OF MONMOUTH, WAS CHARLES II’s eldest and favourite son, the product of his first serious love affair — in 1649, with Lucy Walter, an attractive, dark-eyed Englishwoman living in Paris. This was the year of Charles I’s execution, and it was later recounted that the nineteen-year-old prince, suddenly and tragically King in-exile, fell so deeply in love with Lucy that he secretly married her.

  Charles always denied that Lucy was his legitimate wife, but he showed great favour to his handsome firstborn, awarding him the dukedom — the highest rank of aristocracy — when the boy was only fourteen, and arranging his marriage to a rich heiress. Sixteen years later, in 1679, Charles entrusted him with the command of an English army sent to subdue Scottish rebels, and the thirty-year-old returned home a conquering hero.

  As the exclusion crisis intensified, the Whigs embraced Monmouth as their candidate for the throne — here was a dashing‘Protestant Duke’ to replace the popish James — and Monmouth threw himself into the part. He embarked on royal progresses, currying popular favour by taking part in village running races, and even touching scrofula sufferers for the King’s Evil (see Great Tales, vol. 1, p. 81). But Charles was livid at this attempt by his charming but bastard son to subvert the line of lawful succession. He twice issued proclamations reasserting Monmouth’s illegitimacy.

  The transition of rule from Charles to James II in February 1685 was marked by a widespread acceptance — even a warmth — that had seemed impossible in the hysterical days of the Popish Plot.‘Without forswearing his Catholic loyalties, James pledged that he would‘undertake nothing against the religion [the Church of England] which is established by law’, and most people gave him the benefit of the doubt. At the relatively advanced age of fifty-two, the new King cut a competent figure, reassuringly more serious and hardworking than his elder brother.

  But Monmouth, in exile with his Whig clique in the Netherlands, totally misjudged the national mood. On II June that year he landed at the port of Lyme Regis in Dorset with just eighty-two supporters and equipment for a thousand more. Though his promises of toleration for dissenters drew the support of several thousand West Country artisans and labourers, the local gentry raised the militia against him, and the duke was soon taking refuge in the swamps of Sedgemoor where King Alfred had hidden from the Vikings eight hundred years earlier. Lacking Alfred’s command of the terrain, however, Monmouth got lost in the mists during an attempted night attack, and as dawn broke on 6 July his men were cut to pieces.

  Nine days later the‘Protestant Duke’ was dead, executed in London despite grovelling to his victorious uncle and offering to turn Catholic in exchange for his life. It was a sorry betrayal of the Somerset dissenters who had signed up for what would prove the last popular rebellion in English history — and there was worse to come. Not content with the slaughter of Sedgemoor and the summary executions of those caught fleeing from the field, James insisted that a judicial commission headed by the Lord Chief Justice, George Jeffreys, should go down to the West Country to root out the last traces of revolt.

  Travelling with four other judges and a public executioner, Jeffreys started his cull in Winchester, where Alice Lisle, the seventy-year-old widow of the regicide Sir John Lisle, was found guilty of harbouring a rebel and condemned to be burned at the stake. When Jeffreys suggested that she might plead to the King for mercy, Widow Lisle took his advice — and was spared burning to be beheaded in the marketplace. Moving on to Dorchester on 5 September, Jeffreys was annoyed to be confronted by a first batch of thirty suspects all pleading‘not guilty’: he sentenced all but one of them to death. Then, in the interests of speed, he offered more lenient treatment to those pleading‘guilty’. Out of 233, only eighty were hanged.

  By the time the work of the Bloody Assizes was finished, 480 men and women had been sentenced to death, 260 whipped or fined, and 850 transported to the colonies, where the profits from their sale were enjoyed by a syndicate that included James’s wife, Mary of Modena. The tarred bodies and heads pickled in vinegar that Judge Jeffreys distributed around the gibbets of the West Country were less shocking to his contemporaries than they would be to subsequent generations. But his Bloody Assizes did raise questions about the new Catholic King, and how moderately he could be trusted to use his powers.

  THE GLORIOUS INVASION

  1688-9

  THOSE WHO DISLIKED ENGLAND HAVING AN openly Catholic monarch took comfort from the thought that James II could not live for even The King was comparatively old by seventeenth-century standards — in October 1687 he turned fifty-four, the age at which his brother had died — and his immediate heirs, his daughters Mary (twenty-five) and Anne (twenty-three), were both staunch Protestants. Mary, indeed, was marrie
d to the Dutch Protestant hero William of Orange, who had his own place in the English succession (see family tree p. xi), and who was leading Holland’s battle against the empire-building ambitions of Catholic France. (The’Orange’ in William’s title referred to the French town near Avignon that had once belonged to his family.)

  Mary and Anne were the surviving offspring of James’s first marriage, to Anne Hyde, the daughter of Charles II’s adviser in exile, Edward Hyde. Following her death in 1671 James had married an Italian Catholic, Mary, daughter of the Duke of Modena, and the couple had worked hard to produce a Catholic heir — Mary of Modena went through ten pregnancies in the decade 1674-84. But these had produced five stillbirths and five who died in infancy, so by the time James II came to the throne, Protestants could safely feel that his wife’s reproductive capacity posed them no threat.

  They had not reckoned on the visits that Queen Mary started making to the ancient city of Bath with its curative spa waters, and just before Christmas 1687 came alarming news — the Bath fertility treatment had worked. Mary of Modena was pregnant for an eleventh time, and early in June 1688, she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Named James and styled Prince of Wales, this new arrival displaced his Protestant sisters from the succession and suddenly offered England the prospect of a Catholic Stuart monarchy in perpetuity.

  English Protestants refused to believe James’s luck — the birth had to be a fake. Pamphlets were rushed out asserting that the strapping baby was a miller’s son, smuggled into the royal bed in a long-handled warming-pan. Vivid graphic images circulated, showing how the deception must have been carried out, and it was in vain that the King marshalled a chamberful of respected Protestant witnesses to swear to the genuineness of the birth. The story of the‘baby in the warming-pan’ proved one of history’s most persuasive conspiracy theories.