The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  Atheists. Atheism is not a sect as such, as it lacks organisation and leadership. Otherwise it would displace Quakerism as the most hated religious group. To quote Magalotti, it is

  the very abyss of blindness and the uttermost limit of the pestilential heresy of Calvin. The professors of it say there is no God; they do not believe in a Resurrection to come; they deny the immortality of the soul; and teach that everything happens by chance; and as a natural consequence, they follow their own perverse inclinations, without having any regard to futurity but thinking only of the present time.30

  And that is about as polite an appreciation as you will hear. Most people regard atheism as repugnant and any discussion of it as taboo. In 1698 Parliament passes a law making it illegal to deny the divinity of Christ, which effectively criminalises both atheism and deism (which is the belief that God exists as a Creator, but that he does not intervene in the workings of the world). Obviously, if you fall into either of these camps, you won’t be able to swear the Oath of Supremacy required by the Test Act of 1673. However, if you swear an oath in bad faith in order to acquire public office, you will be guilty of perjury. You can’t win. Even being a genius won’t help you. The scientist Edmond Halley is rejected for the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford in 1691 due to a rumour that he does not believe in God. The only way to be an atheist and flourish is to be very wealthy and/or enormously charismatic. It is permissible for the flamboyant earl of Rochester to profess his atheism openly, but not for a humble tradesman or a farmer, who will simply be shunned by his neighbours.

  Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Independents, Unitarians and Baptists. Things are somewhat easier if you are a follower of one of these groups – but not that much easier. There remains a basic assumption that all nonconformists are republicans at heart. Many moderate Presbyterian clergy who are ejected from their churches in 1662 keep a low profile for the next ten years; they then are among the 1,500 nonconformists who obtain licences to preach in 1672. Those who are more radical face further intolerance and persecution. The father of the Unitarians, John Biddle, spends much of his life in chains and is still incarcerated when he dies in 1662. The entire Seventh Day Baptist congregation of Bulstake Alley, Whitechapel, is imprisoned in Newgate Gaol in 1661; their preacher, John James, is found guilty of high treason and hanged, disembowelled and quartered at Tyburn. As an Independent Congregationalist strongly influenced by the Fifth Monarchists, John Bunyan spends the first twelve years of the Restoration period in prison. He could obtain his freedom if he wanted – by undertaking not to preach – but he refuses. Such is the fire within him that he writes a total of forty-two religious books and holds illegal conventicles – for which he is locked up again in 1676.

  Suffice to say, unless you really know what you are doing, it is best not to try to join any nonconformist groups before the Toleration Act of 1689. They are all dangerous. However, if you do find yourself moved to join them, or see your children falling in with them, you can take solace from this fact.

  At least they are not Roman Catholics.

  ROMAN CATHOLICISM

  If you are a Roman Catholic in Restoration Britain, you’d better have your wits about you. You are in a distinct minority – less than 0.5 per cent of the country is Catholic – and there is a long history of popular intimidation as well as official persecution. You are not allowed to travel more than five miles from your home. You may not go to school. You cannot attend a university. You pay taxes at double the rate. There is a fine of £100 for marrying in a Catholic ceremony. Catholic physicians and surgeons cannot obtain licences to practise. Catholic lawyers likewise cannot represent their clients in court, and the aforementioned Corporation Act (1661) and Test Act (1673) prohibit Catholics from holding official posts. And if you think things cannot get worse, think again.

  In 1678 an anti-Catholic panic attack called the ‘Popish Plot’ breaks out. A ne’er-do-well Catholic convert called Titus Oates reveals to the authorities that the English Catholics are conspiring to kill Charles II so that his convert brother, James, can take the throne. The king himself interrogates Oates and finds he is a duplicitous, self-interested schemer and has him arrested, but Parliament is scared enough to overrule the king. Oates is given his own band of armed constables and is ordered to discover all the supposed Catholic conspirators. When Sir Edmund Godfrey, the magistrate to whom Oates has revealed the names of dozens of plotters, is found strangled and run through with his own sword, popular feeling against the Catholics runs even higher. The Trained Bands are put in readiness. Hundreds of ‘Godfrey daggers’ are sold so that Anglicans can protect themselves against the murderous Catholics. The gates of London are guarded around the clock. Houses of leading Catholics are searched. Anyone found to have been in contact with the Jesuits is arrested and sent to the Tower. An MP is hounded out of town simply for denying that there is any plot. Oates then implicates five Catholic lords, who are arrested, tried and found guilty. One of them, Lord Stafford, is executed. A second Test Act banning Catholic noblemen from sitting in the House of Lords is immediately passed. Then Oates and his accomplices implicate the Catholic queen in the plot, stating that she is trying to poison her Protestant husband. Rumours spread that the Great Fire of London was started by the Catholics and that they plan to burn down the city again. By the time the extent of Oates’s fantasies becomes clear, in 1681, thirty-five men have been executed as a result of his false evidence.

  Hardly has the fear died down when two new crises hit English Catholics. The first is the death of Charles II on 6 February 1685, which brings his politically inflexible Catholic brother to the throne. The second is the French king’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which has hitherto guaranteed Huguenots (French Protestants) the freedom to live and practise their religion in France. Suddenly they are faced with a choice: convert to Catholicism, die or escape. Thousands are executed and murdered. All their churches are demolished and the schools closed. Hundreds of thousands of Huguenots flee, and many of them come to England, telling stories of terrible suffering at the hands of Catholics. With such stories circulating, it is extremely unwise of James II to choose this moment to promote tolerance of Catholicism, and to allow Catholics to join his government. He appoints a Catholic to be a privy councillor, and encourages members of the court to attend Mass: John Dryden the poet and Nell Gwyn both do so. He allows Catholic books and pictures to be sold openly. Friars are seen walking along the streets, laughing. It is only a matter of time before the mob takes things into their own hands. When the news breaks that the Protestant William of Orange is coming to rescue England from the Catholic king, every Catholic chapel in London is demolished or burnt. The embassies of the Catholic states of Venice, Spain, Tuscany and the Palatinate of the Rhine are also attacked and looted.31

  Wise Catholics keep their heads down through all of this. In fact, if you are Catholic, it is best to keep your head down until the next century. Catholics are still excluded from William III’s Toleration Act of 1689, which only allows freedom of worship to Protestant nonconformists. But even more importantly, the ousted James II repeatedly threatens to return to England with the help of the French in order to seize back the throne. In 1690 he invades Ireland. William III defeats him at the Battle of the Boyne, but James does not give up. There are further Jacobite plots in 1692, 1694 and 1696. The last of these sees a failed attempt to assassinate the new king, William III. After this, Catholics are not allowed to come within ten miles of London.

  JEWS

  Before we leave the subject of religion, you might like to know that one previously persecuted minority group does see a slight upturn in its fortunes. The Jews were expelled from England in the thirteenth century and subsequently could not live openly in the kingdom. A few Jewish families settled in London in the 1580s and 1590s, but to all intents and purposes it was not possible to be a Jew in England before 1656. In that year Oliver Cromwell relaxed this prohibition and invited Jews to settle here. In 1660
, there are about thirty-five Jewish families in London and by the end of the century that number has doubled. They are mostly Sephardic Jews and Ashkenazim from Poland and Germany, living around Whitechapel and Petticoat Lane. Don’t imagine, though, that this is a sign of general rapprochement. Soon after the Restoration, the lord mayor and the Corporation of London petition Charles II to expel the Jews once more.32 However, on this occasion the king refuses the petition and permits the Jews to stay.

  Immorality

  I mentioned in the introduction to this book that there is widespread relief when, in 1660, the Adultery Act is repealed by the English Parliament. Most people are indeed happy to wave goodbye to the bulk of such legislation. However, a significant minority do not see things this way, preferring the moral austerity of Cromwell’s time. The overthrow of James II in 1688 and the accession of the much more strait-laced William and Mary give Puritans a new lease of life, which in turn leads to calls for a stronger moral law. In 1690 a group of bishops and judges draft a bill to put the Adultery Act back on the statute books. In order to make convictions easier, they propose that there should be an assumption of guilt if two people are found in bed together or naked in the same room. Fortunately the Bill fails. A further attempt to punish adultery with hanging – or at least branding and transportation – is narrowly defeated in 1698.33 Frustrated by these setbacks, the morally upstanding people of London take matters into their own hands and establish societies for the reformation of morals, in order to prosecute individuals for any offence they can pin on them. The return of the king in 1660 might herald a restoration of libertinism for some but don’t presume the result is a free-for-all thereafter.

  In Scotland, moral austerity remains the norm. Although the Scottish Parliament in 1649 refrained from passing an Act punishing adultery with death, there is a tottering pile of other moral legislation in force, including an ‘Act against the horrible crime of blasphemy’, an ‘Act against swearing, drunkenness, scolding and other profanities’, an ‘Act against fornication’ and an ‘Act for punishing the horrible crime of incest with death’. This last one makes it a capital offence not just to lie with your own relations, but with any of your in-laws – be it your stepfather or stepmother, your spouse’s nephews, nieces, aunts or uncles, or anybody who is married to one of your relations. It is not unknown for a man in Scotland to be burnt at the stake for having sex with his sister-in-law.34 These laws continue to be enforced throughout the period. And as the case of Thomas Aikenhead shows, when it comes to blasphemy, the Scottish authorities see no reason to show clemency on the grounds of youth.

  Such attitudes might make you wonder what you can and can’t get away with. Just how naughty can you be?

  Immorality lies in the mind of the perpetrator as well as in the eye of the legislator, so let’s begin with your conscience. Some people feel guilty about the slightest things. Edward Barlow thinks his greatest vice is that, every time he falls in love with a girl, he promises to return to her after his next voyage – but then he meets another girl on the said voyage and says the same to her.35 Pepys is racked with guilt just for playing music on a Sunday. He is not alone. Monsieur Misson observes that ‘those to be hanged for murdering their parents will first confess that they broke the Sabbath’, and when Ralph Thoresby visits Rotterdam he is appalled to see people ‘singing, playing, walking and sewing’ on the Lord’s day.36 Apart from clergymen, the only people allowed to work on Sundays are miners – because the mines will flood if they don’t. But while Sabbath-breaking is reprehensible in some people’s minds, there are worse crimes. It hardly matters that it is upon a Sunday in 1660 that Mr Pepys meets up with Mistress Lane of Westminster Hall and takes her to Lord Sandwich’s house, where he shares a bottle of wine with her in the garden, before having sex with her in his old house in Axe Yard. The following month he puts his empty house to the same use with another woman.37 Over the ten years of his diary he has affairs with about ten women and sexual frolics with about forty others, most of which involve him fondling their private parts and them his. He knows it is wrong – worse even than playing his lute on a Sunday – but he just can’t stop himself. In June 1663, after spending an afternoon groping Mistress Lane in a wine tavern, and having a stone thrown at him by someone who sees him at it through a window, he reflects, ‘I have used of late, since my wife went [away from London], to make a bad use of my fancy with whatever woman I have a mind to – which I am ashamed of and shall endeavour to do so no more.’

  When an immoral act becomes publicly known, it assumes a whole new dimension, and certain deeds can still prove fatal. If Pepys were homosexual, for example, he would suffer more than stone-flinging. Male–male desire is viewed not as a matter of natural affection, but only in terms of its physical manifestation – sodomy – and, as such, it is deemed entirely unnatural. Like bestiality, it is a capital offence under the terms of the Buggery Act of 1533. Several notable executions have taken place over the years, including those of the earl of Castlehaven in 1631 and of John Atherton, bishop of Waterford, in 1640. Few cases come to light for the obvious reason that it is not normally something done in the presence of witnesses. Moreover, those giving evidence who have been party to the act will also be hanged: a servant who testifies that his master sodomised him is signing his own death warrant. For this reason, homosexual men are not normally accused of sodomy itself, but of ‘assault with intent to commit sodomy’, so that the witness does not suffer too.

  All this gives you some idea of the moral tempest through which you will have to navigate. The legal framework within which people live does not correspond with their natural urges, whether those be sexual or more to do with a spot of embroidery on a Sunday afternoon. Ultimately everyone has to find their own way of dealing with the problem. Robert Hooke’s method is to sleep with his housekeeper, Nell Young, and after she leaves his employment, to have a passionate affair with his niece, Grace. Their love being against the law, she also lives with him as his ‘housekeeper’. Pepys’s way of coping with the mismatch of desire and morality is, broadly speaking, subterfuge – until he gets caught. Others resort to prostitution. For the wealthy, this often takes the form of maintaining a mistress. Lord Sandwich has a house in Chelsea where he keeps his girlfriend – or his ‘slut’ as Pepys refers to her (look who’s talking!). Men who are unwilling or unable to maintain a mistress may find temporary relief in London’s Fleet Alley, and you will find similar streets in most major towns. Unsurprisingly, as London grows in size, so does the sex industry; by the 1690s prostitutes are to be found all over the city, not just in one street. In 1691 a correspondent to a journal suggests that an area be set aside where all the London street walkers can ply their trade legally every evening, as they do in Amsterdam.38

  Above all else, however, it is the immorality of the court that is the talk of the town. People fear that the king’s outrageous behaviour will bring harm upon them all. The royal chaplain is bold enough to preach in a sermon before the king in July 1667 that, on account of King David’s sin of adultery, ‘the whole nation was undone’.39 Before 1660 the punishment of libertines had the royal seal of approval – but Charles II encourages them to be more immoral. You can see the clergy’s problem: how can they possibly hope to maintain strict discipline among their flocks if the fount of all power in the land, and the head of their Church, is so openly leading them astray?

  It is well over a hundred years since there was last a royal mistress in England – people don’t know quite what to expect. Charles doesn’t worry about that: in fact, he seems determined to make up for the whole century’s worth of missed opportunities. In all, he has about fourteen illegitimate children by seven women, and numerous other affairs. But it is the sheer ostentation of his liaisons that leaves people dumbfounded. In January 1663 he spends four or five nights a week at Lady Castlemaine’s apartments, and each morning he is seen walking back to the palace by all those who live close by. Their servants talk about it. The palace sentries do
too. Everyone does. Pepys opines that ‘there is nothing but bawdry at court’. A few days later he himself sees the king leave his mistress’s rooms and declares that it is ‘a poor thing for a prince to do’.40 The following week he hears from Captain Fenner that Lady Castlemaine recently invited the beautiful Frances Stuart to an entertainment and the two women performed a marriage ceremony together for the king’s amusement. They exchanged rings and even went so far as to perform the flinging of the stocking – whereby the naked bride throws her stocking to the womenfolk who are there to witness her nuptials. Captain Fenner adds that Lady Castlemaine then made room in the bed for the king, who took her place in acting the part of the bridegroom. Such are the stories circulating about the king and, whether they are true or not, the king’s public behaviour encourages people to believe them.

  Charles’s use of the peerage system to reward his libido is just as outrageous. He creates Lady Castlemaine, who is his first mistress after becoming king, duchess of Cleveland. A duchess! You might just accept that giving a mistress a title helps her get around at court, as it allows her to join the ranks of ‘the great’ so that people have to look up to her, but still, does he have to elevate her above upstanding earls’ wives? Not only that, he ennobles her illegitimate sons: the dukes of Southampton, Grafton and Northumberland are all his offspring by her. He also creates James Scott, his son by an earlier mistress, duke of Monmouth. In 1670 Louise de Kéroualle, a famous French beauty, comes to England: she is meant to tempt Charles into making a treaty between England and France. She succeeds magnificently. In 1673 she is created duchess of Portsmouth and, in due course, the king’s son by her becomes duke of Richmond. Although Nell Gwyn remains a commoner, she does not do badly by her royal bedfellow, either. She is given a freehold house in Pall Mall, and her royal bastard is eventually created duke of St Albans. That’s six illegitimate dukes. Add the earl of Plymouth (the king’s son by Catherine Pegg) and you can see that a large proportion of the front rank of the English aristocracy is privileged purely on the grounds that it is the result of Charles’s unashamed lust.