London

by A. N. Wilson

  James II, who was as clumsy in his management of public relations as John Ketch was with his ax, then contrived to pick a public quarrel with the bishops of the Church. His Declarations of Indulgence, which he commanded to be read in churches, were pleas of toleration for Christians of all faiths, Protestant and Roman Catholic. The bishops of the established Church saw them as an unsubtle attempt to destroy their very raison d’être. For them the Church of England was precisely that: the national Church, Catholic yet reformed, which made rival Protestantisms and rival Catholicisms an irrelevance. The King demanded that his bishops sign this Declaration; seven refused. In so doing, they achieved instant iconic status, particularly among the Protestant population of London. The Bishop of London, Henry Compton, was one of the celebrated seven; he had actually signed a petition already to William, Prince of Orange, to accept the throne of England in James II’s stead. The others were Archbishop Sancroft of Canterbury; Turner of Ely; Lake of Chichester; White of Peterborough; the saintly Bishop Ken of Bath and Wells; and Trelawney of Bristol. Upon their refusal to sign, and the King’s insistence that they should do so, they were prosecuted for seditious libel and sent by boat to the Tower of London, crowds cheering them all the way. The churches of London were packed during their trial. The situation was seen by the London crowds, regardless of their enthusiasm for bishops, as a straight choice between the liberty of England versus the interference of Europe, Rome, and European-style Catholic despotism.

  “We have two duties to perform,” answered Bishop Ken when accused by the King of disloyalty. “Our duty to God, and our duty to your Majesty. We honour you, but we fear God.”

  Never before or since has a mob in England come out in favor of bishops, but James II managed to achieve this feat. They remained a week in custody, occupying the chapel of the Tower (which the King had set aside for Catholic worship) and reading the Anglican services. On June 15, the first day of the Trinity term, they were brought before the King’s bench. A huge crowd followed them, which they blessed. Trelawney of Bristol, head of a great Cornish dynasty, inspired the ballad sung on a march on the capital from the West Country:

  And shall Trelawney die, and shall Trelawney die?

  Here’s thirty thousand Cornish boys will know the reason why!

  The bishops crossed the whole of London and were tried in Westminster Hall. Even the soldiers guarding them burst into cheering and applause when they were acquitted. James II, waiting at Hounslow for the news, heard the troops there burst into cheering. When he asked the cause he was told, “It is nothing—the Bishops have been acquitted.”

  “Do you call that nothing? Tant pis pour eux, tant pis pour eux”: So much the worse for them.

  In fact, as he must have realized at once, the spontaneous reaction of the London crowds to the trial and acquittal of the bishops was the surest possible indication that his experiment in Catholic absolutism had failed. It was not long before, that autumn, he left his kingdom. William of Orange arrived at Torbay in November and the bloodless revolution had been achieved. England was henceforth to be a country governed by a Protestant, Whiggish aristocracy, with the monarch as figurehead. It was very much part of this new deal that the monarch could, if necessary, be dismissed. And an essential feature of the whole new constitution was that it was supported and bankrolled by the very City merchants and money men who, in a previous generation, had so implacable a republican bias.

  This is the era of the beginning of banking. During the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys anxiously buried his gold coins and valuables. In common with most Londoners, he kept his wealth at home in locked chests. In June 1667, when the Dutch fleet sailed up the Thames and there was a threatened invasion, Pepys sent his wife and servants into the country with as much gold as they could carry, some £2,300 worth, and kept another £300 hung from a girdle around his waist. He did not entrust his gold to the goldsmiths for safekeeping, as hundreds of other Londoners chose to do. Backwell the goldsmith had over half a million pounds on deposit from a thousand customers in September 1664. Scriveners (such as John Milton’s father had been) would also hold deposits. Morris and Clayton held one and a half million in the 1660s. The vastly rich East India Company offered interest-bearing security and loans to favored clients.

  Sir Francis Child (1642–1713) was a goldsmith, pawnbroker, alderman, and Lord Mayor of London, and by the 1690s he was concentrating exclusively on his banking activities. By the 1720s there were thirteen banks, mostly dealing with the great aristocratic families and largely located in the area of Fleet Street. (Child’s Bank in Fleet Street closed only a few years ago.) Herries Bank in St. James’s would advance loans to young aristocrats to pay for the Grand Tour. Hoares, Cootes, and Goslings were among the others. It was they, together with the East India Company, who underwrote payment for the army and navy. Edward, first earl of Clarendon, the historian of the English revolution and the father-in-law of James II, wrote that the bankers did not consist of above the number of five or six men, some whereof were aldermen and had been Lord Mayors of London. . . . They were a tribe that had risen and grown up in Cromwell’s time, and never heard of before the late troubles, till when the whole trade of money had passed through the hands of scriveners: they were for the most part goldsmiths, men known to be so rich, and of so good reputation, that all the money of the kingdom would be trusted or deposited in their hands.

  This is scarcely an exaggeration. Charles II “always treated these men very graciously,” as well he might. His wars, his building plans, his new and efficient navy, his theaters and his churches did not come free. They were supplied to him, and to his successors, by the tribe that had risen up in Cromwell’s time. It was now almost true that all the money in the kingdom was deposited in London. While the Treasury remained in Westminster, the institution that guaranteed national solvency was evolving in the City, eventually to be established formally as the Bank of England.

  7

  GEORGIAN

  The late seventeenth century is the beginning of the story of modern London not merely because London was Britain’s biggest port, handling 69 percent of total exports, 80 percent of all imports, and 86 percent of reexports. It was making itself unique in the world, because of what was happening in the City. But capitalism was never without its disasters as well as its triumphs.

  In the third number of The Spectator, Saturday March 3 1710–11, the anonymous author (Joseph Addison) rambles into “the great hall where the bank is kept and was not a little pleased to see the directors, secretaries and clerks, with all the other members of that wealthy corporation, ranged in their several stations according to the parts they act in that regular and just economy.” The congregation of City men are assembled to see “a beautiful virgin seated on a throne of gold. Her name (as they told me) was Public Credit.”

  The London of the early eighteenth century was the birth-place of modern banking and of the modern loan economy. Quite what money is—that is a question to which economists have never supplied a wholly satisfactory answer. But it is, among other things, the manifestation of power. What the brokers and bankers of early eighteenth-century London did was to change money from a portable commodity—actual trunkfuls of gold (though it always was, and is, this too)—into the ability to promise and command payment: for city planning, for wars, for the running of the nation itself. It was the canny Chancellor of the Exchequer for William III, Charles Montagu, who, in the 1690s, effectively invented the Bank of England. The Bank came into being as a state lottery scheme, with two flotations in 1693 and 1694 raising £1.2 million from the punters. Henceforward, the country was run on credit and the national debt, so called, was of a scale that could never be paid off. This gave a quite unprecedented power to those— a tiny handful of bankers—who could control the supplies of money. The institution was called the Bank of England, but the directors of the bank and the money they commanded were in no sense nationalized. The directors were wheeler-dealers acting privately and hugely enriching the
mselves.

  One of the many paradoxes about modern capitalism is that, while it was founded on the premise that the whole nation be placed in the debt of a few bankers, that private individuals should be in debt was considered profoundly wicked. In 1716, as many as sixty thousand debtors, some owing tiny amounts, were imprisoned in England and Wales. In London alone, between seven and eight hundred were imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, of whom three hundred, in the single year of 1719, died of hunger.

  The debtor government that allowed such fates to befall its debtor citizens ran into trouble by 1710. The governors of the Bank of England and the directors of the East India Company—the other body of financiers that bankrolled the government—were Whigs: that is, supporters of the Settlement of 1689, supporters of Dutch William, of Protestantism, and of a broadly antimonarchical government run by an alliance of aristocracy and City money. The new administration of Tories could not be sure that the City would go on underwriting their expenditure. Robert Harley became Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1710. There was a war with France to finance, and floating government debts of £9 million. An unsuccessful attempt to buy shares in the Bank of England and stage a Tory takeover bid failed. Another company had to be found to finance government borrowing.

  On September 10, 1711, that new company, formed by Harley, received the Royal Charter: the South Sea Company. Nine years later, this company, with investments of a sometimes nebulous character far away in the South Seas, had so many optimistic shareholders that it seemed to be in a position to take over the national debt itself. It was to take over £30 million of the debt (then standing at £51 million) in the first instance. With such a huge scheme in prospect, the South Sea Company found its shares dramatically rising. During 1720, they rose at a dizzying rate—130 percent in January, 1,000 percent in June. The prospect of watching savings multiply on such a scale was irresistible, and by now there were more than thirty thousand investors nationwide implicated in the fate of the company. After the increase of 1,000 percent, the overheated share price collapsed, falling from 780 percent to 180 percent by the end of June. By September the “South Sea Bubble” had burst and thousands of shareholders were ruined. “Work stopped on half-finished ships and partly-built houses. . . . Luxury trades, such as high-class tailoring, watches, plate, came almost to a standstill. . . . Unemployment and food riots were a serious possibility.” 1

  The phantasmagoric nature of money and capital had been demonstrated to and by London, with life-shattering consequences. William Hogarth, the greatest English painter of the age, would in the 1730s depict the moral squalor of his times in the unforgettable series of “Progress” paintings, popularized in large-edition engravings—A Harlot’s Progress, A Rake’s Progress, and Marriage à la Mode (which was later, 1743–45)— all depicting a society whose values were utterly materialistic and selfish, and where the only consolations for the misery of a poverty-stricken life were to be sought in the taverns of Gin Lane or the arms of clap-ridden whores. In a sense the key to Hogarth’s whole oeuvre and outlooks, however, is to be found in a print he made in 1720 (when he was twenty-three years old), An Emblematical Print on the South-Sea Scheme. Beneath what looks like a parody of Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire, money-mad speculators create their own conflagration and destruction on an infernal merry-go-round topped by the Golden Calf, on which apocalyptic horsemen ride.

  Hogarth’s was only one of many satirical responses to the Bubble. There was, for example, a set of playing cards with a mushrooming bogus company depicted on each one. Anti-Semites were not slow to observe that the radical change in the way that English fiscal and economic life was organized coincided with the arrival in the City of London of the Jews.

  Says a Rich Jew, to a Young Buxome Lady,

  I’ll give you so much stock to let me Bed ye

  Quoth she you Lewd, Old Circumsiz’d Tom Cony

  I’ve Stock enough, I deal for ready Money.

  In the period of the Protectorate, the Jews, who had been expelled from England during the Middle Ages, were invited back to reside in London. Menasseh ben Israel, resident in Amsterdam (though born in Madeira), was a theologian, an eloquent preacher, and a man of enormous personal charm. John Sadler, who met him in Amsterdam, described ben Israel as “a very learned Civil Man and a Lover of our Nation.”2 Another Puritan who met Menasseh ben Israel in 1652 wrote, “Lord, my heart questions not the calling home the nation of the Jews, thou wilt hasten it in thy season, oh my God.” In October 1655 Menasseh ben Israel’s petition “in behalf of the Jewish nation” called for the Jews to be allowed to return to London and live and worship freely. He wrote that he had “often perceived that in this nation [England] God hath a People, that is very tender-hearted, and well-wishing to our sore-afflicted Nation.” The synagogue in Creechurch Lane does not survive, but that of Bevis Marks does; it has much the atmosphere of a Wren church, and it is easy to see why many English non-Jews thought of Judaism as a branch, in effect, of Protestantism.

  Important as it was that the Jews of Amsterdam saw London as a place of tolerance, it is in some ways more important that they came from Amsterdam. The republican, newly emergent Dutch city had effectively invented modern capitalism— credit, insurance, banking. Menasseh ben Israel and his fellows brought Dutch skills, Dutch contacts, Dutch money to London. It is no surprise that the Dutch saw Cromwell’s London as their greatest rival and threat, a view that led to three Anglo-Dutch wars: 1652–54; 1665–67; and 1672–74. In the second of these, the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and came close to a bombardment of London itself. It was the Dutch threat that led to the reorganization and building of the Royal Navy.

  What the Dutch could see was that Britain had, in the East India Company, an outlet to Oriental trade that was fast outstripping all its rivals. In London, it had a port that was bigger and did more business than any other in Europe. And now, thanks to its contact with the money markets of Amsterdam, it had the makings of a modern financial institution.

  The City of London, in all its medieval power structures, its Corporation, its companies based on medieval guilds and trades, its vast holdings of gold, its actual assets, had been badly shaken by the South Sea crisis. The City, in three subsequent centuries, would always see itself as the embodiment of probity and sound money. But what it had invented in the era of Wren was something that to an ungrateful world outside the Square Mile would often seem like a con, like money for nothing. From its beginnings the City, in all its august trappings and its amazing wealth, has had within it an element, not of dishonesty, but of conjuring, justifying the puzzlement of John Maynard Keynes that the economy of the Western world could be run on the principles of the roulette wheel.

  It is no surprise that one of the great heroes of the age was Jack Sheppard, robber, highwayman, and prodigious jail-breaker. His Houdini-like ability to extricate himself from handcuffs, leg irons, and chains, and to escape such fortresses as the Clerkenwell Bridewell, made him a hero. His emblematic importance in the scheme of things was recognized by the court painter and muralist James Thornhill, who came to paint him in his prison cell in Newgate. His hanging, which took place on November 16, 1724, was accompanied by huge crowds, as had been his trial in the Court of King’s Bench, during which he told the judge, Justice Powis, that he had never had “the Opportunity to obtain Bread in an honest Way.”

  Jack Sheppard’s body, as befitted a London hero’s, was buried decently. The bodies of many hanged men and women, however, provided the raw material for another early-eighteenth-century obsession: dissection and anatomy. If the London of Wren and Hooke had led the world in chemistry and physics, then in the next generation the ancient medieval study of medicine was transformed into the modern science it is today.

  Only the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, the Royal College of Physicians, and the Royal Society were entitled to claim bodies for dissection. (In 1745, as a mark of its increasing distinction, the Surgeons’ Company separated from the Barber-Surg
eons.) The medical profession was moving up the social and intellectual scale. A body of men who in the seventeenth century had been functionaries wielding knives, some to shave and others to incise their clients, had divided, to form the Royal College of Surgeons.

  To the old medieval foundations of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Thomas’s, private philanthropists added four new general hospitals: the Westminster (1720); Guy’s (1725); St. George’s (1733) for the East Enders in 1740; and the Middlesex (1745). It was also a period when specialized hospitals were established: three maternity hospitals in the middle years of the century; the Lock Hospital for venereal diseases in 1746; and the Foundling Hospital set up in 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram in Lamb’s Conduit Fields, with its memorable murals by Hogarth of scriptural infants from Moses to Jesus.

  Medicine was learnt in the London teaching hospitals. Students followed eminent surgeons and physicians on their ward rounds and paid for the privilege. In the mid-century a “walking pupil” would pay a surgeon between £21 and £32 a year, rather less to a physician. A dresser, one who helped with operations and performed minor bleeding, would pay £50 as an apprenticeship to an individual surgeon. This was a very lucrative business for the more distinguished doctors, and since everything in eighteenth-century London was measured by money it was the surest indicator of the doctor’s change in status.

  Much the most eminent anatomist of the eighteenth century was John Hunter (1728–93), who moved to London, having been a cabinetmaker’s assistant in Glasgow, when he was twenty and who studied first at the Chelsea Military Hospital, then at St. Bartholomew’s. Hunter, who experimented on fish, lizards, blackbirds, hedgehogs, and almost any creature he could lay hands upon to dissect, was a true scientist, an explorer of truth, a doubter. His axiom was that “experiments should not be often repeated which tend merely to establish a principle already known and admitted but that the next step should be the application of that principle to useful purposes.” Dissection of corpses became, for him, more and more the means to establish a notion of the cause of disease.