by Ian Mortimer
The king is not the only immoralist in town. In 1663 Sir Charles Sedley, baronet and rake, strips off and parades naked on the balcony of the Cock, a cookshop in Bow Street. He plays out ‘all the postures of lust and buggery that can be imagined’ and preaches a highly blasphemous sermon. In the course of this he declares to the crowd of about a thousand people gathered below that he has a powder such as will make all the women of the town run after him – except that he does not use the word ‘women’ but calls them by their sexual organs. Next he takes a glass of wine, washes his private parts in it and then drinks it. After that he drinks the king’s health. In all this he is supported by his friend Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, an aristocrat and suspected highwayman. In 1668 these two men run through the streets of London by night ‘with their arses bare’, staging a fight until they are arrested by the city watch.41 It is Buckhurst who lures Nell Gwyn away from the stage and beds her before he hands her over to be the king’s mistress.
A more famous and shocking libertine than either Sedley or Buckhurst is the arch-rake John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Talk about immorality! Wine, women and syphilis are just the starter. The main course of his life includes the abduction of his chosen bride, serial adultery, self-confessed claims of sodomy, blasphemy, insults directed at anyone and everyone (even the king), extreme lewdness, rudeness, atheism, reckless courage in warfare, fighting duels, punching royal servants in the king’s presence, selling fake medicines, writing poetry, unlawful appearances on the London stage, imprisonment in the Tower and banishment from court. He is also suspected of being the author of Sodom, almost certainly the rudest play ever written, about a debauched king who encourages his sex-crazed subjects to indulge themselves in as much sodomy as they like. Just to give you a flavour of its lewdness, the dramatis personae includes: King Bolloximian and Queen Cuntigratia; Prince Prickett, Princess Swivia and General Buggeranthus; Pockenello (a pimp, catamite and the king’s favourite), Borastus (the buggermaster-general), Pene, Tooly and Lady Officina (pimps and she-pimp of honour); Fuckadilla, Cunticula and Clitoris (maids of honour); Flux (physician-in-ordinary to the king) and Virtuoso (dildo-maker to the court).
Enough. There have always been transgressors of social norms – so what makes this different? Is this just not sordid? Many people think so. But there is more going on here than will ever meet a moralist’s eye.
You can call Samuel Pepys a hypocrite for his immorality. His outrageousness lies in that very hypocrisy: saying one thing and doing another. But the king, Rochester, Buckhurst and Sedley are not hypocrites; their outrageousness is that they do not pretend to subscribe to normal standards of morality. They are asking a wider question: how should men fight against a system of Puritanical repression that is so sanctimonious that it borders on inhumanity? It hangs women for adultery and witchcraft, and men for homosexuality and blasphemy; it prohibits free speech, restricts free thinking and imposes a religious structure on almost everything that is said and done. Ordinary people can do next to nothing to kick against the control of the Church, but these rich and privileged young men can do something – even if it is only a matter of breaking all the rules. There is a reason why they strip off and simulate acts of buggery on a balcony, and it is not because they are buffoons or idiots. They are all educated men of the stage and they know exactly what they are doing in invoking such taboos. What’s more, they can write too. They can add a literary flourish to Charles II’s two-fingered gesture towards the Puritanism that killed his father and forced him into exile. At its best, their contribution amounts to brilliant poetry. Yes, it incorporates language so vulgar that even in the modern world it is shocking, but men who can write as well as Rochester do not choose such words gratuitously. They choose them because the Puritans banned them. Thus their immorality is more than just profane: it is revolutionary, deliberately offensive, public and proud – and a world apart from Pepys’s furtive fumbling with maidservants’ petticoats in attic rooms.
Attitudes to Foreigners
None of the people of Britain are famed for their welcoming smiles to strangers. Ask almost any foreigner who visits and you will hear the same old story: the English are unfriendly, proud and treacherous, and the Scots and Welsh are cruel and barbarous. Their redeeming features are a sense of fair play (in the case of the English) and an indomitable courage (in both the Scots and the Welsh). If you come across a variation on these themes, it will be to differentiate between the attitudes of the wealthy and the common rabble. In describing the Scots, Monsieur Misson distinguishes between ‘those who have civilised themselves by their travels and by their commerce with France and England’ and the common folk who are ‘half-barbarous’. He goes on to explain that the well travelled are ‘courteous, good-natured … men of wit, more subtle and cunning than their neighbours and very capable in the sciences’. The poorer sort, however, ‘are mere savages’.42 In describing Londoners, Magalotti makes a similar distinction, only he puts it more elegantly:
The common people of London, giving way to their natural inclination, are proud, arrogant and uncivil to foreigners, especially the French, against whom, they entertain a great prejudice and cherish a profound hatred, treating such as come among them with contempt and insult. The nobility, though also proud, have not so usually the defects of the lower orders, displaying a certain degree of politeness and courtesy towards strangers; and this is still more the case with those gentlemen who have been out of the kingdom, and travelled, they having taken a lesson in politeness from the manners of other nations.43
These views are not surprising. A Continental traveller in Britain has, by definition, broader horizons than the majority of those he meets here, as few ordinary Englishmen have journeyed abroad. Moreover, in order to have come here in the first place, the said traveller must be reasonably well off. And if he writes down his views, he also needs to have been educated. Therefore a great many contemporary comments on the people of Britain are blunt opinions held by educated gentlemen about the illiterate lower orders. British travellers say similar things about the unfriendliness of the common people when they go abroad. Nevertheless, such opinions are a good indicator as to how a stranger like you will be received in Restoration Britain. The educated and wealthy will do their best to welcome those of a similar rank; the middle sort will be suspicious of you, and the poor will not go out of their way for you at all – unless you pay them enough to make it worth their while.
This, by and large, is true whichever country you are from and however exotic your appearance. When the Russian ambassador arrives in London in November 1662 and makes his procession through the streets of the city in his native garb, the ordinary citizens’ reaction is not exactly respectful. ‘But Lord, to see the absurd nature of Englishmen, who cannot forbear laughing and jeering at everything that looks strange,’ writes Pepys.44 At the end of our period, when Tsar Peter I visits England to view the shipyards, he stays at Sayes Court, which is owned by John Evelyn. One of Evelyn’s servants writes to his master and describes the Russian people staying in the house as ‘right nasty’.45 Yet both embassies are most cordially received at a higher social level, as indeed are most diplomatic missions to England. Evelyn makes a special point of going to see that Russian procession in 1662 and describes the visitors ‘on horseback clad in their vests after the Eastern manner, rich furs and caps, and carrying the presents, some carrying hawks, furs, teeth [ivory], bows etcetera’. He concludes, ‘it was a very magnificent show’.46
So much for Continental travellers; what about strangers from other parts of Britain?
It perhaps goes without saying that relations between the English, Welsh and Scots have always been awkward. An English traveller describes the Scots as ‘proud, arrogant, vainglorious boasters, bloody, barbarous and inhuman butchers’.47 As for the Welsh, if you are in London on 1 March 1662, which is St David’s Day, you will see all the Welshmen in town wearing a leek in their hats. This is widely believed to commemorate an ancient battle in w
hich the Welsh beat the English. The English custom is to mock the Welsh by putting up dolls and scarecrows with leeks in their hats. Both sides drink heavily and soon get rowdy. On this occasion an English cook puts a leek in his own hat and drunkenly addresses a Welsh lord as ‘fellow countryman’. The Welsh lord is not amused and replies sharply in Welsh, prompting the cook to sneer back at him in English. The lord draws his rapier and goes for him. The cook runs into his shop and grabs a hot spit from the fire to defend himself. The lord’s retainers draw their swords to defend their master, but the crowd now joins in, throwing mud and stones and whatever else is to hand, eventually driving the Welshmen to the river to flee by boat.48
These infelicitous moments are not just confined to rivalries between the separate countries within Britain. Similar tensions can erupt into violence between groups of Yorkshiremen and Londoners, or even between people from separate villages within the same county. Indeed, the word ‘foreigner’ is used in rural parishes to denote anyone not normally resident in the community, and that can even include the lord of the manor.49 This universal ‘foreignness’ presents impecunious travellers with the danger of being seen as a vagrant. You may be a gambler, a beggar or a servant looking for work; perhaps you are a seaman sleeping rough as you return to your ship, or a decommissioned soldier on his way home; or a pedlar, a released prisoner, a labourer, a musician or an actor travelling from town to town – strangers who are poorly dressed and who have no money are seen as a threat and if the local constable decides you are indeed a vagrant, he will be after you. The punishment is simple: you will be stripped from the waist up and ‘whipped till your back be bloody’.50 Then you will be driven out of the parish. And remember this is not a punishment for any particular crime, only for being an unwelcome visitor – a ‘foreigner’ without any money.
That sounds a pretty grim prospect, so consider something much more positive. When the French king starts murdering his own people on account of their Protestantism, the English set aside their prejudices and provide a safe haven. Scottish towns too play their part in welcoming French refugees in the 1680s. Perhaps more than 70,000 Huguenots settle in Britain. In 1697 there are twenty-two French churches in London (nine of them in Spitalfields) and a hundred Huguenot clergymen administering to them.51 Other nations have established colonies in London too. There are Dutch, Italian and Danish churches and, by 1700, a second synagogue.52 There are also French and Dutch churches in other towns. Given all this, it is misleading to say that the people of Britain are unfriendly towards foreigners. There is just a greater antipathy to strangers in general – which, in an age of plague, religious war and daily violence, is unsurprising.
BLACK PEOPLE
There are relatively few black people in Britain during this period – probably 2,000–3,000 in 1660 and about 5,000 in 1700.53 The great majority of them are the servants of the rich. Almost everyone with pretensions to fashionable living wants to have a black pageboy in his or her household, dressed in the finest livery. Wealthy ladies keep their black boys practically as pets. Charles II’s mistress, the new duchess of Portsmouth, has herself painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller with her black pageboy in a fine coat. Plantation owners want to be waited on by black servants in their English homes in the same way as they are in the West Indies. Slavers whose ships take blacks from Africa to the West Indies like to be followed by teenage black servants as they stroll around Bristol or Liverpool. So if you find the name of a ‘negro’ or a ‘blackamoor’ in a country parish register, it is invariably because the local lord of the manor or his wife likes to have exotic servants about the house.
How are black people treated? It is difficult to generalise on this point. The concept of racism, as it exists in the modern world, has yet to develop, but there is certainly a sense of ‘otherness’ about those with a dark skin colour. That implies a number of preconceptions, some of which are deeply unpleasant. People associate blacks with godlessness, on account of their pagan origins in sub-Saharan Africa. On the whole the slave trade is approved of by society, for otherwise how else would the plantation owners obtain the labour necessary to produce the sugar that everyone craves these days? If people hear the word ‘slave’, they don’t necessarily think of the transatlantic slave trade, let alone the working conditions in far-flung parts of the world; they think of the plight of enslaved white Christians in North Africa. Many maritime families have lost kinsmen to Barbary pirates, who raid villages and take ships at sea and sell those they capture in the slave markets of Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers. Some individuals do point out the inhumanity of the slave trade – the writer Aphra Behn is one, in her novel Oroonoko (1688) – but most people either don’t think about the black slave trade or regard it as a necessary evil.
The association of blacks with godlessness and slavery leads to some searching questions about the nature of liberty. If a plantation owner brings a slave to England, is he still a slave on these shores? English law does not recognise a state of slavery, so the answer is a clear-cut ‘no’ in many people’s eyes. Edward Chamberlayne, writing in 1676, declares that ‘a foreign slave brought into England is, ipso facto, free from slavery but not from ordinary service’.54 This view is upheld by the Lord Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, whose opinion is that ‘as soon as a Negro comes into England he becomes free; one may be a villein in England but not a slave’.55 On top of this, many people hold that, since it would be wrong to enslave another Christian, the act of baptism liberates a slave. In 1667 a baptised black woman, Dinah Black, who has been a servant to a rich woman in Bristol for the last five years, is sold by her employer to a slave trader. The purchaser intends to take her back to the West Indies, but Dinah refuses to go. The aldermen of Bristol decide she cannot be compelled and order her to be taken off the boat. Since her former employer does not wish to take her back, she is free to work for someone else. Not all courts see things this way, though. So strong is the law of property that many decide that, if individuals have been bought in the past, then their purchasers have the right to sell them again. In two legal cases in 1677 royal judges declare that, as non-Christians, blacks are not entitled to the rights of ordinary men and thus, being merely property, their legal owners have a right to compensation for losing them if they come to Britain. The bishop of London worsens their plight still further in 1680 when he states categorically that baptism does not mean the emancipation of a slave.56
Regardless of the legal position, the plain fact is that black people are bought and sold in Britain as if they were slaves. When William Hoyle is baptised in Bishopsteignton in Devon, he is described in the parish register as ‘a Negro belonging to the above Mr Cove, aged about 17 or 18, his grandfathers were his Master and Mr William Cumes’.57 Note the language used here: William ‘belongs’ to his ‘master’, even though that man is his grandfather. Note also that he is described as a ‘negro’ even though he is half white. The treatment of black servants in England can be harsh too, reminiscent of slavery conditions in the Plantations. Katherine Auker, a black woman, is brought to London in 1684 by Robert Rich, a planter in Barbados. She is tortured by her master and mistress and turned out, without a discharge, so that no one else can employ her. Instead Mr Rich arranges that she be arrested and locked up. He and his wife then return to Barbados, leaving her in prison. Katherine applies to a court in 1690 to be discharged from her employer’s service so that she can work for her living; the court releases her and allows her to work for whosoever will employ her – but only ‘until such time as the said Rich shall return from Barbados’.58 Clearly she will never be entirely free of this man. He owns her.
Although black servants in Britain are not called slaves, that is effectively what they are. Charles II buys a black pageboy from the marquess of Antrim for £50: that is not a contract with the servant, but with his vendor. Lord Sandwich similarly obtains ‘a little Turk and a negro’, as ‘presents’ for his daughters in 1662.59 Blacks are generally made to wear collars of silver, copper or brass engrave
d with the name and coat of arms of their master or mistress. Even William III’s favourite black servant wears one. If they run away, the advertisements in the press refer to their ages, the scars they bear, how well they speak English and the inscriptions on their collars. A few black men and women do manage to live independently, working as paid employees in other people’s houses, but returning at night to their own homes. However, the vast majority are live-in servants. Pepys is pleased with his black kitchen maid’s culinary skills in 1669, and his neighbour Sir William Batten has great respect for his own black manservant, Mingo, who accompanies his master to the tavern and turns out to be a surprisingly good dancer. However, you only have to go to the house of Sir Robert Vyner to see how some people view someone with black skin. After Sir Robert’s black pageboy dies of consumption, he does not give him a Christian burial. Instead he has his body dried in an oven and keeps it as a curio in his house, on display in a box.60
