by Ian Mortimer
A last general point you need to bear in mind before stepping into Restoration Britain concerns the weather. Do wrap up warm. Britain is still experiencing the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, which leads to some bitterly cold winters, harvest failures and food shortages. 1675 is known as a ‘year without a summer’, for obvious reasons.2 The Long Frost of December 1683 to February 1684 remains the coldest three-month period ever recorded. The River Thames remains frozen from 2 January to 20 February; the ground is frozen to the depth of three feet in Kent, and at the Downs ‘the sea is frozen above a mile about the shore’, as The London Gazette reports.3 Gentlemen with thermometers busily measure the temperatures in the staircases and libraries of their country houses and find that even indoor temperatures are well below freezing. Water freezes in ewers in the corners of bedchambers, as does the milk in dairies and the ink in shopkeepers’ inkwells. Across the country, snow lies in glistening stillness. Water wheels stand still. Ships remain motionless in their harbours, their rigging sparkling uselessly in the cold sunlight.
As you snuggle down in your feather bed in Restoration Britain and stare at the light of a guttering candle, trying to keep warm, you will probably start to wonder what you have let yourself in for. I want to add something else for you to think about. A well-respected historian once declared that ‘the changes in English society that affected England between the reign of Elizabeth and the reign of Anne were not revolutionary’.4 I suspect that reading this book and perhaps comparing it with The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England will make you think otherwise. Elizabeth died in 1603, Anne ascends the throne in 1702, and the years in between those two dates see many dramatic changes. We may think of the ‘bloody rebellion of nearly twenty years’ as the ‘English Revolution’, but in truth the decades that follow are just as revolutionary. In terms of the decline of superstition, enhanced individualism, greater professionalism and clearer scientific understanding, this is truly an age of radical development. In fact, some of the most profound changes the British people have ever experienced take place between 1660 and 1700. It is a time when the last dying notes of the medieval world are drowned out by the rising trumpet fanfare of modernity, and the rationalism that you take for granted comes to be the dominant way of thinking.
But don’t take my word for it. Read on. See for yourself.
1
London
It is Sunday, 2 June 1661 – and it is raining hard. Water trickles into puddles in the muddy alleys and swells in the drains that flow down the middle of the cobbled streets. Most people have returned from church to eat their dinner, peering out through windows spattered with raindrops as the church clocks of the city chime a dull midday. The few who are still braving the weather stride along beneath the overhanging jetties of the houses, hunched in their bedraggled hats and cloaks. They glance up at you as they approach: those gentlemen who are worried about their expensive clothes turn their shoulders to the wall to keep to the driest path, forcing you to step away from it. A horse-drawn coach speeds past, its wheels clattering over the uneven stones and sending water flying from the puddles. A stray dog hurries out of its path. But although you may find the weather inclement, there is a reason why you are out and about. This is when you get the clearest view of the city. Normally there are just too many carriages and people in your way. And that’s not to mention the pollution. Some days a pall of smoke hangs over the roofs: it gets in your eyes, and the stonework of every church in the city is blackened with it. Today the houses might be dripping from the eaves but at least you can see them.
When you walk through the heart of London you realise that the city is practically a living museum. It is not that the citizens are careful to preserve old structures, but rather that they are reluctant to pull them down. Almost every building you see is old. On the east side you have the Tower of London, the stern castle of the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England, which is now a storehouse for gunpowder and armaments and a prison for high-ranking figures. To the north of the Tower is the city wall, first built by the Romans and subsequently heavily patched, but still standing in most places to its battlement height of 18 feet. The wall encloses a mass of medieval streets, lanes and alleys, twisting and weaving intricately around old houses and churches. Some of the streets are too narrow to allow two coaches to pass, and some of the alleys so tight that even a single vehicle cannot enter. Thames Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares of the whole city, has pinch points just 11ft wide, where traffic frequently comes to a stop.
Many of the houses are several hundred years old, their blackened oak timbers deeply scarred with the fissures of so many seasons. The rat holes in their walls are similarly ancient and, like the houses themselves, are teeming with life. The older properties have been modernised with glass windows but they preserve their essential character, the first floor projecting out about 18 inches over the ground floor, and the second jettied out about a foot over the first, with a gabled roof facing the street. On narrow alleys, the occupants of second-floor chambers can reach out and touch hands with their opposite numbers on the other side. Such jetties block out much of the light, so they make the alleys dark at the best of times; on grey days such as today they are particularly dim. Grand old stone mansions are still to be found on the principal streets, their halls now heated by fireplaces and tall brick chimneys. But even the terraces of four-, five- and six-storey town houses date from between sixty and a hundred years ago. What’s more, if you take just a few steps down one of these dark alleys, you’ll see that tucked in behind these tottering edifices are older structures divided up into tenements without any regular plan. Here’s a chamber above a kitchen, there’s a chamber above a hall. Many of these were once the buildings of medieval monasteries and friaries. Even old barns have been turned into houses. As you can see, London has developed not by being demolished and rebuilt but by constantly adapting, little by little, to people’s changing demands.
Even if you are familiar with the twenty-first-century city, you will not recognise much here. The Tower may look more or less the same, but the other structures are all very different from their modern successors. The tall limestone obelisk bound with iron on the south side of Cannon Street is an ancient landmark called London Stone. Some people will tell you it was erected by King Lud, the mythical founder of London; others that it was the stone from which all milestones in Roman Britain measured their distances from the capital. Moving north to Cornhill, you will find the Standard, the great conduit that provides the citizens hereabouts with water. On the north side of the street you will see a fine old building of four arcades around a quadrangle: this is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir Thomas Gresham and named by Queen Elizabeth in 1571. You can see statues of all the kings and queens since the Norman Conquest in the niches above the arcades. Sometimes you’ll hear the Royal Exchange described as the most valuable three-quarters of an acre in the world, due to the trade carried on here, but on a wet Sunday afternoon it feels more like a sepulchral monument, dripping with raindrops and absence. Nearby is one of the city’s pillories, where trading offenders are publicly humiliated with their heads and hands trapped between wooden boards; today that too is as damp and silent as the puddles welling up across the courtyard of the Exchange.
Everything appears ancient – from the seven medieval gates of the city to the livery halls of the powerful guilds and the Guildhall itself, built in 1411. Some of the finest merchants’ and goldsmiths’ houses are to be seen on Cheapside, the main trading street, but these too are almost a century old. The buildings on the southern edge of the city, where the waters of the River Thames lap at the quays, are similarly venerable. If you can turn your attention away from the vast number of ships on the river you’ll see the waterline marked by a whole gamut of antiquated and decrepit walls and roofs. Here is London’s second royal fortress, the gaunt Baynard’s Castle, rebuilt in the fifteenth century and remodelled at the start of the sixteenth. Further along the bank ar
e the weather-boarded and pitch-covered warehouses of merchants whose ships have been returning for the last forty years with cargoes of Virginia tobacco or spices from the East Indies. On a weekday the rain would not have stopped the three wooden cranes on the wharf at Queenhithe from loading and unloading the tuns of wine but, today being Sunday, they too are motionless. Further along the river still is the Steelyard, where the merchants of the Hanseatic League have had their trading centre for the last seven centuries. They are no longer the powerful economic force they once were, and the old buildings are now sinking into decay.
The most striking structure along the river is London’s only bridge, built in the twelfth century. It stands 910ft long and connects London proper with its southern suburb of Southwark and the roads leading into Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Each of its nineteen arches has a name, such as ‘Queen’s Lock’, ‘Narrow Entry’, ‘Rock Lock’ and the charmingly named ‘Gut Lock’. These arches are built on boat-shaped starlings or piers in the water, forcing the fast-changing tides to gush through the channels between them. The roadway of the bridge is lined with houses that peer over the turbulent flow. At the southern end is the medieval gatehouse, where about two dozen decayed heads and skulls are to be seen – these being the remnants of traitors, placed there as examples to the citizens.1 At the northern end there is a gap between the houses, following a major fire in 1633. It is ironic that the most significant modern change to the bridge is an empty space.2
Gradually you will realise that there is almost nothing visible that dates from the seventeenth century. Here and there you’ll see a recent house, built where a fire has destroyed a dwelling, but two-thirds of the buildings within the city walls are medieval and almost all the rest are Elizabethan. Leathersellers’ Hall has an impressive portico dating from the 1620s. Denmark House, the queen’s royal palace designed by the royal surveyor, Inigo Jones, has some fine additions: a suite of royal apartments, new stables and coach houses. Otherwise, very little in the heart of the city post-dates 1600. The most significant piece of seventeenth-century architecture within the city walls is a 120ft-wide portico with Corinthian columns, which has been added to the west end of St Paul’s Cathedral. This too is the work of Inigo Jones. But just look how incongruous it appears, forced on to the massive church, whose high lead roofs look black and gloweringly gothic in the rain. Note too the contrast between Jones’s work and the worn sculpture of the masonry of the nave. One hundred years ago, lightning struck the tower and, in the ensuing fire, the spire collapsed; it has not yet been replaced. Shops and stalls have been constructed at the foot of the cathedral’s soot-blackened stone walls, between the mighty buttresses. When you step inside, you’ll see the pillars on either side are all out of alignment, sometimes leaning by more than six inches, even though they are a solid-looking 11 feet in diameter. Hundreds of monuments of London dignitaries and noblemen fill the spaces between the columns and cover the walls; among them King Ethelred the Unready, John of Gaunt, Sir Nicholas Bacon, Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Christopher Hatton, John Donne and Anthony van Dyck. Many have been defaced by vandalism or accidents. Much of the damage is a result of the Civil Wars, when the cathedral served as a stable for more than 800 horses – a sign of the contempt that Cromwell’s forces had for the old religion. At the same time the choir stalls, bishop’s throne and organ were destroyed, and saw-pits were dug in the floor. When a committee visits the cathedral in 1666 with a view to improving and updating it – and Christopher Wren first suggests topping the whole edifice with an enormous baroque dome – its members sadly conclude that the old building just won’t take the strain.
This then is the heart of London: a decaying mass of antiquity, adaptation and dilapidation, collapsing beneath the weight of its age. However, step beyond the city walls and into the suburbs and you will be amazed by the difference. First, pinch your nose and walk past the old warehouses and collapsing timber buildings that surround Fleet Ditch. As you cross the bridge over the River Fleet you will see all sorts of refuse floating in the swollen river below: ‘sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood, drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, dead cats and turnip tops’.3 Keep going westwards up Fleet Street; as you approach the bottom of Drury Lane and enter the area that will one day be called the West End, you will find yourself surrounded by tall flat-fronted houses that are made of fine red-brown bricks, with tall glass windows facing the streets. Between the windows are elaborate classical columns. The doorways are recessed and covered with elegant canopies and have glass panels above the doors to let light into the hallways within. Whole streets stand to a uniform height, so that ten or twelve town houses look more like a great palace than a series of private dwellings belonging to individual gentlemen and ‘men of ability’ (as contemporaries refer to the upwardly mobile). The eaves of these do not drip on a rainy day such as this, because they have gutters and downpipes that conduct the roof water into the streets. And, just as significantly, the streets themselves are not cobbled or dressed with gravel, but paved. They even have a camber, so that the rainwater does not run into a channel in the middle but into gullies on the sides, adjacent to a raised pavement.
Here, on the edge of the old city, the elegant town house has arrived.
What has brought on this transition? One of the reasons is simply the massive growth of London’s population. In 1550, there were about 50,000 Londoners. That number quadrupled to about 200,000 in 1600. It almost doubled again over the next fifty years, reaching about 375,000. Since 1650 it has increased by another 10 per cent, and now in 1661 stands at about 410,000. But the population increase only accounts for the need to provide more housing; it does not explain the change in the standard of architecture. For this you need to consider the attitude of the English monarchs, who reside at Whitehall Palace, at the end of the Strand. Queen Elizabeth I forbade the expansion of the city to the west of Drury Lane, just over half a mile from the palace. Her successors have similarly attempted to restrict all house building to previously developed sites. They have failed – partly because they have allowed the lords who own the land west of Drury Lane to buy licences to build on virgin soil, and partly because such fine new houses are now considered to contribute to ‘the honour of the nation’ and thus fall outside the scope of restrictive legislation.4 In other words, new houses in this area are not illegal as long as they are for the wealthy. But as these new buildings creep closer and closer to Whitehall, the royal family becomes more and more anxious about their architecture. Proclamations are issued stipulating how high and wide each house should be, how thick its walls, and how each one must fit in with its neighbour and thus form an elegant unity. This is why the lines of new housing look more like palaces than narrow town houses: the kings and their courtiers prefer to be surrounded by elegant buildings rather than the unplanned slums of the riff-raff.
The major showpiece is the Covent Garden piazza. The houses here are so different from the timber-framed buildings of the old city that you may be forgiven for thinking you are entering a different country. A wide, paved square greets you, with handsome three-storey mansions around the perimeter. On the south side are the gardens of Bedford House, the London home of William Russell, fifth earl of Bedford, whose father commissioned Inigo Jones to design the piazza in 1631. On the western side you find the parish church, also designed by Inigo Jones, and two brick-fronted town houses built by the fourth earl. To the north and east elegant residences have been developed by a string of private developers, all fronted with a 20ft-high arcade. Given that the fourth earl paid £2,000 to the king for the licence to build the piazza, and spent more than £4,000 on the church and £4,700 on his three town houses, you can see why Covent Garden in 1661 is a byword for high living.5 Anyone resident in the old heart of the city must feel like the poor relation of those rich enough to live here.
Covent Garden marks the beginning of modern town planning in Britain. It inspires many elegant developments to
the west and north of the city. No one builds jettied wooden houses any more; everyone wants flat-fronted brick ones, with wide streets, drains, neat gutters and lots of light. Gabled roofs are out – people want pilasters with Corinthian or Ionic capitals and balustrades along the roof. Most of all, those with money want to live in a well-proportioned square. Near Holborn, Lord Hatton has laid out Hatton Garden as a handsome street with a square of fine town houses at one end. Even more impressive are the recent developments in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and in Great Queen Street, both built by William Newton. The Dutch artist Willem Schellinks, who visits London in 1661, describes Lincoln’s Inn Fields as ‘a large square lying behind Lincoln College, where law students are taught. Round this square are many fine palace-like houses, all with forecourts behind high walls; one can count there seventy entrances with stone pillars and double doors, and many of the nobility live there.’6 A few years later, Lorenzo Magalotti, a Florentine nobleman travelling in the train of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III, adds his words of praise, calling Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘one of the largest and handsomest squares in London, in respect to both the uniformity and size of its buildings’.7 If your architect manages to impress both the Dutch and the Florentines – two of the most urbane and sophisticated nations in Christendom – then you are creating quite an impression.
