The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  I have sometimes met in the streets of London a woman carrying a figure of straw representing a man crowned with very ample horns, preceded by a drum, and followed by a mob, making a most grating noise with tongs, grid-irons, frying pans and saucepans. I asked what was the meaning of all this; they told me that a woman had given her husband a sound beating for accusing her of making him a cuckold, and that upon such occasions some kind neighbour of the poor innocent injured creature generally performed this ceremony.66

  Between the alimony and the cuckold’s horns, you can see why many men live in fear of their wives.

  You might well ask whether things are getting better or worse for women. One of the few clear legal improvements is that, from 1691, women are allowed to claim Benefit of the Clergy in the same way that men are. This allows them to escape being hanged for a number of felonies if it is their first offence (for further details, see chapter 11). Beyond this, the answer depends heavily on your status. If you are a poor farmer’s wife, you will probably conclude that life is getting worse. For a start, everybody in this group is finding times tough, with high food prices and low wages. But on top of these problems, the enclosure movement has a particularly negative effect on the social position of country women. In the last century, many more wives worked alongside their husbands in the great fields. Now, however, as they lose their strips of land and their rights of firewood-gathering and pasturage, and their husbands are forced to find paid employment elsewhere, the wives are left at home doing all the functions that their husbands would otherwise do, in addition to their own duties. The result is that the husbands earn all the hard cash (and thus have a greater say in what it is spent on) and the wives’ role becomes increasingly that of unpaid drudge. Rather than being co-workers and joint contributors to the family coffers, the wives become the prime servants.

  Women who fall into the ‘middle sort’ face a different problem: the educational barrier. In this age of professionalisation, people increasingly expect their physicians and surgeons to be qualified in some way, and ideally to hold a medical degree. Self-taught women are perceived more and more often as second-rate practitioners, suitable only for consultation over children’s diseases and minor ailments. Experience becomes less important; education and formal qualifications more so. A bishop’s licence is required to be a surgeon or a schoolmaster, and women without a formal education cannot obtain one. The demand for qualifications means that men even start to impinge on that most female-dominated of all occupations, midwifery.

  It is the gradual collapse of Puritan ethics that most clearly benefits well-off women. The greater licentiousness of the court permits rich ladies to take a string of lovers in a way that would have been unthinkable before 1660. Creative women start to find a freedom that has hitherto been denied them. From 1661, women are no longer barred from appearing on the London stage, and many actresses become prosperous. Those who excel at painting can now make a living from it, whereas in the days of Puritan England it would have been frowned upon for them even to set up a studio. Women find it easier to publish their plays, poems and novels. And other wealthy women take on great building projects: Elizabeth Wilbraham personally oversees the building of Weston Park, her husband’s family’s stately home in Staffordshire. Other wives take on their husband’s accounts and business interests.67 Another freedom that gentlewomen discover in this period is travelling, as shown by Celia Fiennes. Prior to the Civil Wars it was rare for women to journey alone far from home. The conflict sees many royalist families go abroad, and as a result of this enforced wandering, many women discover the delights of travelling for the sake of self-education, and the taboos against them following such practices start to break down.

  Overall, most women have a tough time of it, but it is not as starkly one-sided as the law suggests. Indeed, some people think that working women are among the most contented people you could meet. One May evening Dorothy Osborne walks out across a common near where she lives:

  where a great many wenches keep sheep and cows and sit in the shade singing of ballads … I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels.68

  Despite all the sexism and the prejudices against the poor, the childbirth mortality and the hardships of poverty, you have to wonder whether these women aren’t just as happy as their descendants in the modern world.

  4

  Character

  Do you believe in witchcraft? Do you believe in God? You don’t have to say ‘yes’ to either of those questions, but it might help. Superstition and religion both underpin a great deal of seventeenth-century thought and behaviour. However, if you answer ‘no’, you might find it easier to understand the scientific outlook emerging in some parts of society. For it is really quite a remarkable change. The last death sentence for witchcraft in England is passed down in 1685; in 1687 the Royal Society publishes Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy’). Just two years separate a belief in witches strong enough to warrant the death penalty from the publication of the fundamental work underlying modern science. Now, this does not imply that one moment everybody is anxiously watching out for flying broomsticks, and the next they are all calculating the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth. In reality, if people are superstitious they tend to remain so for life; it is the younger generation who doubt their parents’ old-fashioned beliefs and let them die out. Similarly you should not think that hard-headed, evidence-based thinking is wholly new in 1687. Newton’s ideas about gravity may well fall out of a tree but he is not the first natural philosopher (or scientist, to use the modern term) to be a blue-skies thinker. But what makes the period you are visiting unique is that it is the tipping point for society – when the majority cease to uphold old superstitions and start to prioritise scientific ways of deducing the truth.

  The second half of the seventeenth century is a tipping point in several other respects too. We have already touched upon the shift from amateur to professional practice in education and medicine. Dramatic changes in military organisation started before the Restoration but it is after 1660 that the new professionalism becomes the norm. It is in this period that the nation first acquires a standing army, and that naval officers are selected and promoted on merit, not social status. As for architecture, it is in the Restoration period that traditional building styles give way to houses, churches, streets and squares designed by architects and professional developers working in the wake of Inigo Jones. Portraiture, drama and sports all have their watersheds, as we will see in chapter 12. A tipping point is also reached in political thinking. Society starts to care less about who is the rightful ruler and recognises that two things are far more important: what the ruler does, and whether he is accountable to his subjects. And in religion, people increasingly realise they can no longer expect to understand Creation simply by way of what is written in the Bible; they must go out into the world and investigate for themselves. Thus religion loses some of its authority but gives impetus to scientific enquiry, resulting in a huge number of discoveries – in physics, chemistry, botany, astronomy, mathematics, statistics, microscopy and economics.

  In all these things people are driven by an intense curiosity – a child-like sense of wonder – and this is the real spirit of the age. People look around themselves as if they have just emerged from a dark cave. And they look at themselves with a similar sense of amazement. Restoration men and women can open a Bible and read God’s words for themselves and explore what God’s will is for each of them. They are increasingly interested in themselves as individuals. Indeed, they think of themselves as private people more than they ever did in the past. In the old days of communal living and farming there was little personal life, and people consider
ed themselves to be primarily members of a larger group – their parish, tithing, manor, hundred or town guild – but now an individual’s sense of himself is much more like our modern one. It is not surprising that this is the great age of diary-keeping. The individual person is now the centre of his or her own world, whereas before, for most people, that position was occupied by God.

  The fact that so many aspects of society alter fundamentally in these years means that you need to be careful about the assumptions you make as you travel the length and breadth of the country. For example, blithely predicting the return of Halley’s Comet in rural parts of the country in 1682 is likely to shock the natives. Conversely, declaring someone guilty of being a witch at a ball in a smart London mansion in 1699 is likely to see people swiftly look for alternative dance partners. Just as there are two Londons before the Great Fire, so there are two sides to British society – the old and the new – but there is no clear geographical divide between them. England, Wales and Scotland are a patchwork of ideas, attitudes and prejudices, and you generalise at your peril.

  Superstition and Magic

  You’d have thought that after sixteen years at sea Edward Barlow would have given short shrift to anyone claiming to work magical incantations. This is, after all, a man who has sailed to Japan, Indonesia, China, Africa and Brazil and has seen the strangest animals that the world has to offer, including lions, porcupines, elephants, rhinoceroses, ostriches, toucans and monkeys. He is as careful a witness as they come. Yet he does not doubt that, after his shipmates have left a number of debts unpaid in the Norwegian port of Bergen, the women whom they defrauded are responsible for the storm that drives their ship on to the Goodwin Sands.1 His superstition is a reminder of how everyone has their own belief system and, through it, makes sense of the world – especially when facing the unknown.

  Superstitions, large and small, are everywhere. Monsieur Misson notes that some Englishmen are intent on preserving the hairs that grow out of their warts, as tokens of good luck. Most tradespeople in London have a particular regard for the first coin that they receive in the morning: they kiss it, spit on it and then put it in a pocket by itself, in the expectation of good fortune.2 Magistrates and judges alike listen in sober consternation to stories of the Devil assuming the form of a cat or a magpie to visit a witch. Even though Ralph Josselin is a clergyman, he is quite capable of believing that the Devil takes the form of a bull to force one of his parishioners into a river.3 In some places it is still held that if a murdered person’s corpse is touched by the murderer, it will bleed. In Orkney in 1666 four men who have died in suspicious circumstances are exhumed so that all the suspects can be made to touch their putrefying corpses and the authorities can check for bleeding (strangely, no blood is to be seen).4 When it comes to ghosts, even sober, educated men are affected. John Aubrey, a Fellow of the Royal Society, publishes a book in 1696 in which he attests to the authenticity of portents, omens, dreams, apparitions, disembodied voices, knockings, invisible blows, prophecies, magic, transportation by invisible powers, visions in crystal balls, conversations with angels, oracles and instances of second sight.5 John Mompesson, a magistrate living in Tidworth, Wiltshire, has to put up with the haunting sound of a drum beating in his house night after night, from March 1662 to April 1663. It terrifies the life out of his children when its disembodied rhythm moves to their room.6

  One of the most common superstitions is that the future can be foretold from interpreting certain events. A violent storm might be taken as a portent of some dire calamity shortly to befall a community. So might the beaching of a whale or the birth of a calf with two heads. The news that earthquakes have destroyed ancient Smyrna and several other places in the Mediterranean causes the scientifically minded Evelyn to think they must be the forerunners of greater calamities: ‘God Almighty preserve His Church and all who put themselves under the shadow of His wings, till these things be over-past!’ he writes.7 Every autumn you can buy cheap almanacs that tell you what the following year might hold. All sorts of people believe that an accurately cast horoscope will reveal what is to befall them. Others anxious to know the future will seek out practitioners of palmistry or fortune-telling gypsies. In August 1663 a gypsy woman tells Pepys that he should watch out for two men called John and Tom, who will be with him within a week hoping to borrow money. Shortly afterwards he receives a letter by the hand of his brother, John Pepys, from their brother Tom, seeking £20. Pepys – a future president of the Royal Society – is impressed that this prognostication turns out ‘to be so true’.8

  When it comes to health, the highest people in the land are not above accepting the efficacy of superstitions. The queen falls desperately ill of a fever in October 1663 and is expected to die. In desperation, her physicians turn to the last resort of medicine: applying live pigeons to her feet.9 She recovers. How much the pigeons have to do with it, no one knows. The royal family’s own claim to have healing powers can’t be ignored either. Since medieval times, the king of England has been associated with the ability to cure scrofula, a form of tuberculosis (otherwise known as ‘the King’s Evil’). Charles II is rather keen to maintain this tradition – largely because the ceremony underlines the divine status of his kingship. Observers are invited to witness him touching for the disease. The sufferers pass in a line between two rails in front of the enthroned sovereign. One by one they go on their knees; the king touches both their cheeks as a clergyman exclaims, ‘The king touches thee, God heal thee.’ Then they are each given a gold medal on a ribbon. Whether all this does any good is a moot point. Mr Hollier, a surgeon of St Thomas’s Hospital, tells people that the king’s touch does no good whatsoever.10 On the other hand, large numbers of people want to be touched each year. In 1684 so many apply for tickets to be cured that half a dozen of them are crushed to death.11 You might well suspect the reason is the value of the gold medal, not the king’s magic properties – and you would probably be right. As Monsieur Misson notes, after the ceremony, ‘those that are really ill are put in the hands of physicians and those that have come only for the medal have no need of other remedies’.

  The king is not the only thaumaturgist in town. In fact, the Restoration period is when you can visit one of the most remarkable British faith healers of all time: Mr Valentine Greatrakes, also known as ‘The Stroker’. He comes from an English landowning family in Ireland, so he is not at all like your usual travelling confidence trickster. To begin with, he modestly tries to stop people talking about his strange power. But after he starts healing people through rubbing or stroking them, his fame spreads. People travel from England as well as Ireland to see him, including the scientist and future Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed. Clergymen try to stop him, partly on account of the miraculous character of his abilities and partly because he also can heal scrofula, which is supposed to be something only the king can do. But desperate people do not listen to doubters. The king, hearing of Greatrakes’s ability, invites him to perform a cure in front of the court. The invitation is, of course, a ruse, and on this occasion his stroking the proffered patient is unsuccessful. But in the eyes of his followers, one failure does not undermine his many other successes, and Greatrakes himself is the first to admit that his laying on of hands does not always work. Those attesting to his genuine skill in effecting miraculous cures include Thomas Sydenham, the leading physician of the age, and Robert Boyle, one of the greatest scientists, who attends more than sixty healing sessions.12 Greatrakes goes back to Ireland in 1666 but returns to England every few years, performing many more cures before his death in 1683. If you are looking for a simple explanation as to why superstition remains so strong in the British Isles, you need look no further than the widespread belief in the efficacy of Greatrakes’s touch.

  Witchcraft

  At the other end of the spectrum of supernatural benevolence lies witchcraft, the sin of the century. You’ve missed the real fireworks of occultism: most of the indictments and executions for witchcraft fall
between 1590 and 1660.13 Nevertheless, you need to remember that witchcraft remains a criminal act recognised in statute law throughout the Restoration period: it is not just a curious set of quaint and curious folk beliefs. In England and Wales the legal punishment is to be hanged. In Scotland, witches are strangled and burnt. And although in 1685 Alice Molland becomes the last witch to be sentenced to death in England, you are not safe even after this date: the Witchcraft Act will not be formally repealed until 1736. In Scotland, you’ll have to wait until 1727 for the sad sight of the last woman being covered in pitch and set alight on account of her fellow countrymen’s belief in sorcery.