by A. N. Wilson
Apart from the callous sublimity of Pepys himself, this passage brings home to us the quite extraordinary peacefulness of the counterrevolution. The King “enjoyed his own again” on May 29. The first blood shed against his former enemies was nearly five months later. Compare this with the blood in the Parisian gutters in 1870 or 1944.
The prosperity of the new order depended upon a king who was financed by the City, and on a growing capitalist class, a bourgeoisie, that was protected by a stable political system. London was at the very center of this political compromise. London in every sense underwrote it—in Westminster in its Parliaments, in the City by its ever burgeoning wealth. When, after the death of Charles II, his brother James II unwisely attempted to establish an absolutist and Catholic form of monarchy on a Continental pattern, there was no doubt where power actually lay. The bloodless revolution of 1688–89, and the replacement of James by the biddable Protestant William of Orange and his Stuart wife, Mary, only confirmed what had taken place at the Restoration of Charles II, namely a new form of monarchy, a new form of government.
In 1666, the Great Fire destroyed medieval London, its wooden houses, its alleys, its churches. The great Gothic cathedral of St. Paul’s, restored in the time of Inigo Jones, had become woefully dilapidated in the intervening years. Dr. Christopher Wren, scientist-architect, had reported, two years before the fire, on the “ruin” of the roof and the “bending of the pillars.” The fire reduced the cathedral to a shell. John Evelyn, on September 7, 1666, noted,
It was astonishing to see what immense stones the heat had in a measure calcined, so that all the monuments, columns, friezes, capitals, and projections of massy Portland stone, flew off even to the very roof, where a sheet of lead (covering a great space no less than six acres by measure) was totally melted. . . . Thus lay in ashes that most venerable church, one of the most ancient pieces of early piety in the Christian world, besides near one hundred more.
The descriptions by Samuel Pepys of the fire itself are unforgettable: of the pigeons, flying with singed wings, or actually on fire, from their cherished eaves; of sick people carried out of houses in their beds; of the desperate urge to save property, some people piling their belongings into churches, or hurling them into the river to escape the flames; of the bridge forming a great arch of fire; of the panic-stricken crowds running, pulling carts, of the “horrid” “dreadfull” sky lit up at night; of oil cellars and brimstone bubbling and burning; of a cat, still alive, taken out of a hole in the wall of the Exchange with all its fur burnt away; of glass windows in houses and churches buckled and melted.
All this destruction provided Londoners with the chance to rebuild their city. Four hundred acres within the City walls and sixty-three acres outside them had been affected by the fire. Eighty-seven churches, forty-four livery halls, 13,200 houses, the Royal Exchange, the Guildhall were all partially or totally destroyed. Amazingly, only nine human lives were lost.
It is apt that the Monument, a tall column surmounted with a golden orb of flame, built in 1671–77 to commemorate the Great Fire and the rebuilding of the City that followed, should itself be a scientific instrument and contain the laboratory of one of the great scientists of the age.
Robert Hooke (1635–1703), astronomer, inventor of scientific instruments, speculative physicist, was one of the founder members of the Royal Society, that group of learned, chiefly Oxford, men, who had met during the Cromwellian years to discuss all aspects of learning, philosophy, and science. During the Protectorate they were centered on Wadham College, Oxford, but after the Restoration they made London their center and the King their patron. In November 1660, Charles II granted them their charter. The Royal Society still exists, the oldest scientific society in the world.
Hooke was a collaborator with Robert Boyle (1627–91) on his air pump, and his theoretical work on the weight, elasticity, and compressibility of air. Boyle’s law (that the pressure of a given mass of an ideal gas is inversely proportional to its volume at a constant temperature) is only one of the many scientific insights brought to the world by the founders of this London-based institution. All the great scientists and innovators of this period were royalists, all were religious—Boyle was a keen theologian, who knew Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldee, as well as Latin and Greek—and all were pious members of the Church of England.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was a keen and active member of the Royal Society, always making the journey from Cambridge to attend its meetings, and ending as its president. Newton’s is not a specifically London story, but it is worth noting that here he was, a Cambridge genius among the older Oxford men, in London. This was the place where it seemed apt to share with the world his world-changing and prodigious discoveries, about optics, about the foundations and principles of mathematics, about gravity and astronomy, and, ultimately, about the nature of existence itself. Newton, infinitely the greatest scientific thinker ever born in Britain, felt it natural to gravitate to London to disseminate his learning and it was in the new London, rebuilt after the fire, that the new spirit could be embodied.
It is of these things that we think when we see the Monument to the Fire, with its underground laboratory and, at the top, its astronomical observatory. It was always intended by Hooke and the other members of the Royal Society as a place of scientific experiment as well as being, at 202 feet, the tallest isolated stone column in the world.
Its chief architect was Hooke’s fellow scientist in the Royal Society, fellow Anglican, fellow son of the clergy, Christopher Wren. It was highly characteristic of the differences between the two men that Wren wanted the Monument to be crowned with a statue of Charles II and Hooke overruled him. Instead, Fire itself, that mysterious and destructive element, throws its gilt bronze flames into the London sky. The enormous cost of the Monument—£13,450 11s 9d—was borne by the Corporation of London.
To this day, the Square Mile of the City, London’s financial capital, contains no Roman Catholic church. The Monument originally bore an inscription that spoke, in Latin, of the Fire and the damage it had caused. In 1681, however, were added the words “But Popish frenzy which wrought such horrors, is not yet quenched.” There is no evidence that the Fire was the result of arson, still less of Catholic arsonists, but prejudice is as hard to quench as fire. Rather as, today, there is a link in public consciousness between Islam and terrorism, so, in seventeenth-century London, with its memory of November 5, 1605, when the plot to blow up Parliament was foiled, it was easy to identify Catholics with destruction. The insulting anti-Catholic inscription on the Monument was removed in 1831, two years after Parliament deemed it safe to allow Catholics to attend university, practice at the bar, and enter Parliament.
London’s insularity, its paranoia, its unwillingness to absorb foreign or alien elements goes hand in hand with its sense of itself as modern and new. There is much in modern London that reflects this duality, this divided self-perception—in relation both to immigrants and to the question of whether Britain should be “part of Europe.” Alexander Pope, himself a Catholic, alluded to the inscription on the Monument with the couplet
Where London’s column pointing at the skies, Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies.
Much of London’s strength has been a bully’s strength. Much of its beauty, certainly until the Second World War, was the creation of one man—Christopher Wren. When he died aged ninety-one, in 1723, his successor as architect in charge of St. Paul’s Cathedral caused to be placed over the choir the inscription “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (“If you want to see his monument, look around”). Wren’s full monument is not completed simply by looking around St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is the whole of rebuilt London which is his monument—the fifty-two churches, the reconstructed and enlarged Temple Bar, the thirty-six company halls restored or rebuilt, as well as the two great hospitals for retired or injured servicemen: the Royal Chelsea Hospital (1689–92) for soldiers, and the Greenwich Royal Hospital (1699–1703) for retired and
disabled seamen. In addition to the plenitude of magnificent and varied buildings must be considered Wren’s part in advising the King and Corporation about the whole restructuring of London after the Fire. A commission was set up, with Wren himself, Hugh May and Roger Pratt, Robert Hooke, Edward Jerman, and Peter Mills (the City surveyor). The first Rebuilding Act passed through Parliament on February 8, 1667. It laid down specific guidelines for the design of suitable houses, their height, the building materials, and the width of streets and guttering. The Act was less draconian than either Hooke or Wren would have wished, but one of the characteristics of London has always been its degree of architectural anarchy, the fact that it has never submitted itself to a single overall plan or planner.
A new Act was passed by 1670, to ensure that building regulations were being obeyed and that freeholders who lost property by street widening or the creation of new markets would be adequately compensated. By the 1667 Act, the City Corporation itself was granted the right to levy tax on imports coming into the docks. Coal, for example, was taxed at a shilling per ton, and this was tripled in 1670. The revenue from these taxes helped to finance the truly stupendous rebuilding program.
Wren is rightly remembered as a church builder, but he also built theaters, and this fact speaks volumes about the changes brought to London by the Restoration. The Rome of Bernini, the Paris of Le Nôtre were to have an English equivalent, with opera houses and theaters of a comparable style. The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (1674) was one of Wren’s great buildings. Such, indeed, was the extent of theater building in Restoration London that even in the heyday of Garrick, a century later, almost no new theaters needed to be built. The generation of Wren had done it for them.
After the period of the Protectorate, during which theater had been banned altogether, Londoners flocked to hear the old plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and their contemporaries. Pepys was typical in his enthusiasm. Like the architecture of the new theaters, the sets and scenery were works of art and immensely costly. In one of the many places known as Theatre Royal, that of Bridges Street, the actor-manager Killigrew (whose plays had gone on being surreptitiously performed in Cromwellian times) splashed out with amazingly elaborate scenery. Isaac Fuller took six weeks to paint the sets for Dryden’s Tyrannic Love. The vast cost was recouped. In an extraordinary two-week run (most plays were only put on for a day or two) they took £100 per day at the box office, compared with usual receipts of £40 or £50. On February 5, 1664, Sir Robert Howard saw Dryden’s Indian Queen and noted it was “so beautified with rich Scenes as the like had never ben seene here as happly (except rarely any where else) on a mercenarie theatre.”
Restoration theater differed markedly from the old Elizabethan-Jacobean traditions. For a start, women for the first time in English history took to the boards. The second great difference is that the new theaters were entirely roofed in— there was no open space for the groundlings to stand. Audiences were ranged in social hierarchy, with the upper galleries, according to The Country Gentleman’s Vade Mecum of 1699, full of servants; the middle gallery containing “the citizens’ wives and daughters together with the Abigails, serving-men, journey-men and apprentices,” and the pit reserved for “judges, wits and censurers . . . in common with those sit the squires, sharpers, beaus, bullies and whores and here and there an extravagant male and female sit.” Even the upper gallery cost a shilling for admission, much more expensive than the penny charged to stand in the yard of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Inevitably, Puritans found much to displease them about the revival of the theaters, nests of extravagance and license as they were. Many of the plays written by the new dramatists were risqué or absurd or both. The second Earl of Rochester (1648–80) set out to be shocking, and he embodied in his lyrics, many of them sung in the new theaters, all that the old Puritans found offensive:
I rise at eleven, I dine about Two,
I get drunk before Seven, and the next Thing I do
I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap
I dally about her and spew in her Lap.
In his retirement in Bunhill Fields, off the City Road, the blind republican John Milton meditated upon the tragedy of Samson, his eyes put out, pulling down the gaudy pillars of the Philistine theater and killing “Lords, ladies, captains, counsellors or priests,” a scene which more vividly recalls the London theater land of the 1660s and 1670s than it does Gaza in the Bronze Age.
Yet, though Milton deplored the oafs and “hooray Henrys” in the streets—“the sons of Belial full of insolence and wine”—visitors to the London of the Restoration, and to the London that was rebuilt in the decades after the Fire, are more likely to have been struck by the business and hard work going on all around, than by the dissolute behavior of the few.
Imagine yourself, on a December day in 1711, walking through Temple Bar in the Strand and up Ludgate Hill. Towering above you is the newly completed dome of St. Paul’s, a design which has all the baroque magnificence of one of the mightiest Roman churches, but that at the same time is mysteriously contained within a domestic scale. Do not let us enter the Cathedral, since, of all Wren’s buildings, it has the most disappointing interior. Let us rather climb the hill towards it, and then look about us in the winter air and see the well-proportioned brick-built streets, with their pediments of Portland stone; see the company halls, a whole variety of styles, ranging from medieval Gothic to contemporary Baroque, but all achieving what a much later architect called “unity by inclusion. ” See the new Guildhall, reconstructed by Wren out of the ruins of the great medieval hall. (George Dance would make even greater improvements to the courtyard in 1789 with a playful Gothic all his own.)
See the quite extraordinary variety and ingenuity of Wren’s fifty-one churches! The splendidly coffered dome of St. Stephen Walbrook mothers a quiet, pillared interior of extraordinary spiritual calm. The clear light of the windows in St. James Garlickhythe falls on what is in effect a quadrangle of free-standing columns, as if the mathematical genius of the Royal Society is contemplating the numerology of angels or the mathematical mystery of God himself. St. Lawrence Jewry, grand and pilastered, glows with gilded civic splendor, reflecting the wealth and self-confidence of the City merchants and burghers who have prayed there from its beginning. And here is St. Mary’s Aldermary—one of Wren’s Gothic surprises, a Perpendicular church of the fifteenth century, it seems at first when you step inside, but somehow, with its wide proportions, its great carved pulpit, and its sumptuous door case, very clearly an Anglican church from the heyday of Anglicanism.
No wonder that convert to Anglicanism T. S. Eliot so loved the City churches of Wren as he thought of where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
For, like The Booke of Common Prayer, which was revised and restored for public use in 1662, these churches of Wren’s (son of the royalist Dean) reflect a dignified but exuberant faith in the national Church. If anyone wanted to know what the true spirit of Anglicanism was, they would do better, rather than reading a book, to sit in one of these City churches, staring perhaps at a wooden reredos carved by Grinling Gibbons, with the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments beside the Holy Table. They are both like, and utterly unlike, the continental Baroque churches of the period. Each has its own distinctive feel, yet all have in common an atmosphere of calm and strength. Outside, in the London that Wren had built, their steeples and towers and cupolas defined the skyline for three hundred years, and filled the London air with the music of their bells.
James II, who succeeded his brother Charles II in 1685, was a convert to Roman Catholicism; he attempted to follow the path of Mary Tudor 130 years earlier and take his kingdom back into the fold of European Catholicism. In the West Country, Charles II’s illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth led a rebellion, which was ruthlessly suppressed. The trials of Monmouth’s supporters, condemned to death by the implacable Judge Jeffreys, were known as the Bloody Assizes. Monmouth himself was b
rought to London. At the age of thirty-six, he was beheaded on Tower Hill on July 15, 1685. His end was not the example of perfect Anglican piety that his friends the bishops had wished. Himself the son of Charles II’s more promiscuous mistress, Lucy Walters, he was no stranger to the Tower of London. When he was a child of seven, he and his mother had been imprisoned there by Oliver Cromwell. He had watched her in turn be the mistress of several men before becoming a prostitute. It is perhaps not surprising that he was churlish towards his lawful wife even to the end, expressing on the scaffold his love for his adored Lady Wentworth. “God accept your repentance!” murmured the bishops, “God accept your imperfect repentance!”
The beheading itself was an example of English incompetence at its most terrible. Monmouth gave the axman six guineas before he died: “Here are six guineas for you. Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell.” He might have been tipping the barber. “I shall say little,” he added in a loud voice, addressing the crowds that had assembled on Tower Hill to see the spectacle. “I come here not to speak but to die. I die a Protestant of the Church of England.”
John Ketch then set to work with his ax. The first blow merely wounded him, and Monmouth rose from the block with a reproachful expression before collapsing. There was another stroke, and then another, but still the head had not come off. The crowds were by now enraged, and Ketch flung down the ax in nervous anger. “I cannot do it, my heart fails me.”
“Take up the ax, man,” said the sheriff of the City.
“Fling him over the rails!” shouted the crowd. There was now a danger that the mob would come and tear the executioner in pieces. Two more blows of the ax were still insufficient to remove the head, which like some idiocy by a butcher’s apprentice had to be finished off with a sharp knife. The crowds then rushed forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood of a Protestant martyr.
