The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  All these reasons to travel have been established for centuries. What is novel is the desire to travel for the sake of travelling – to see new sights, learn new things and maintain or improve one’s health. Celia Fiennes expresses the reasons why ladies and gentlemen should travel around Britain:

  If all persons, both ladies [and] much more gentlemen, would spend some of their time in journeys to visit their native land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place … [it] would be a sovereign remedy to cure or preserve [them] from these epidemic diseases of vapours, [to which] should I add laziness? It would also form such an idea of England, add much to its glory and esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts, [and] at least furnish them with an equivalent to entertain strangers when among us, or inform them when abroad of their native country, which has often been a reproach to the English: ignorance, and being strangers to themselves. Nay the ladies might have matter not unworthy their observation, so subject for conversation … which would spare them the uneasy thoughts [of] how to pass away tedious days, and time would not be a burden when not at a card or dice table … But [it is] much more requisite for gentlemen in the general service of their country at home or abroad, in town or country, especially those that serve in Parliament, to know and inform themselves [of] the nature of [the] land, the genius of the inhabitants, so as to promote and improve manufacture and trade.80

  Many of the virtues that Celia Fiennes associates with domestic travel can be applied to foreign trips too. The term ‘Grand Tour’ is first coined in 1670 by Richard Lassels in his book An Italian Voyage to describe the Continental journeys undertaken by hundreds of young English gentlemen each year. They make their way to Dover, cross the Channel to Calais and aim straight for Paris. From there they journey down to Italy. Rome is always the most popular destination, followed closely by Venice. Other must-see places for Englishmen are Parma, Piacenza, Bologna, Genoa, Lucca, Florence, Siena, Viterbo, Arezzo, Perugia, Terni and Naples. The southernmost destination for most gentlemen is Paestum, at which point they will turn back and visit all the places they missed on the way south, delaying their return to England for as long as possible. Most young men spend between eighteen months and two years on such a journey. Some Grand Tours last even longer. Thomas Herbert, the brother of the earl of Pembroke, spends three years travelling around France and Italy in 1676–9. Robert Spencer, earl of Sunderland, spends four years in France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy in 1661–5. Parents hope that their sons will learn something along the way, so they send them in the company of tutors, whose duty it is to keep their charges’ attention focused on the artworks and architecture of the Italian Renaissance, and to steer them away from all the pretty Italian women. This is quite a tall order – especially when the tutor is effectively a servant and not in a position to tell his young lord what not to do. Many Grand Tours descend into debauchery and whoring as soon as the newly liberated young buck reaches Paris. To be fair, however, many are genuinely educational. The naturalist John Ray sails to Calais in 1663 specifically to record all the birds, beasts, fish and insects that are not to be found in England: over the next three years he travels through Flanders, the Low Countries, southern Germany, Austria, Italy, Sicily, Switzerland and France. Robert Boyle’s five years abroad are spent studying subjects as diverse as ethics, history, natural philosophy and fortification. Edmond Halley’s Grand Tour in 1680–82 sees him monitoring the progress of comets with Giovanni Cassini at the Paris Observatory.

  English gentlemen and ladies are also able to learn from those foreign travellers who come to these shores. We have already encountered some of them – Willem Schellinks from Holland, Lorenzo Magalotti from Italy and Monsieur Misson from France. Thousands of others arrive from almost every corner of the world. Ambassadors from the king of Siam (Thailand) come to London in 1682. John Evelyn entertains the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Chardin in 1680, hearing of his travels to the East Indies, Persia, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, Baghdad, Nineveh and Persepolis. One of the most remarkable of all visitors is the Latin-speaking Chinese intellectual Shen Fuzong. When he comes to England with the Flemish Jesuit Philippe Couplet, in 1687, James II orders Godfrey Kneller to paint a portrait of him in his Chinese robes. Shen spends some time at Oxford helping to catalogue the Chinese books in the Bodleian Library and providing information on everything from Chinese maps and calendars to mathematics and games. The same year, Couplet produces Confucius Sinarum philosophus, which introduces three of the four canonical works of Confucianism to Western scholars. Items brought to these shores by traders hint at some of the cultural differences to be encountered on the other side of the world – Chinese porcelain and furniture, for example, or Indian cotton, chintzes, rugs and tea. In these respects, the English are the very opposite of ‘unfriendly’ to foreigners: exotic goods from the Middle East and Far East are welcomed as never before.

  On top of all these different ways of learning about the rest of the world, you must bear in mind the growing diplomatic reach of the king of England. There are English ambassadors resident at the courts of Denmark, Flanders, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Imperial Diet, the Hanseatic League, Tuscany, Venice, Poland, Portugal, Prussia, Russia, Savoy, Spain, Sweden and Turkey.81 Additionally in 1676 there are consuls stationed in Aleppo, Smyrna, Zante, Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Messina, Naples, Leghorn, Genoa, Marseilles, Alicante, Malaga, Cadiz, Seville and the Canary Islands. Not only do diplomats in these places despatch information about their host countries back to Britain, but they also dine out themselves on their experiences when they return. Then there are the overseas possessions of the English Crown. Governors or deputy governors exercise British rule over New England, Virginia, Carolina, New York, Newfoundland, Jamaica, Barbados, Bermuda, the Leeward Islands, St Christopher Island (St Kitts), Nevis, Jersey, Guernsey, Bombay (India), Fort St George (India), Bantam (Indonesia), Tangiers (North Africa) and Guinea (West Africa), as well as other territories that are dependent on these states.82 Further settlements, such as Willoughbyland (now Suriname) and British Honduras (Belize), have only recently been settled. The East India Company, the Royal Africa Company, the Levant Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company all trade with their respective parts of the world, bringing back information and local products. Although the British do not have a settlement in Australasia, the land is known about: Australia was discovered in 1607 and New Zealand in 1642. Thus atlases and globes produced in this period will look familiar to you: they just lack a few details here and there.83

  The enormous reach of Britain means that it is not just gentlemen who bring back knowledge of the rest of the world. Most of the 50,000 seamen employed by the Royal Navy and English merchant ships travel far from home and see things they could never have anticipated in their home parishes. Edward Barlow’s long career endows him with anecdotes that would make any barnacled midshipman proud – except that he does not simply tell tall stories: he really has seen the world. William Dampier, who also goes to sea as a boy, becomes the third Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth in the years 1679–91 (after Sir Francis Drake in 1577–80 and Thomas Cavendish in 1586–8). He first leaves for the Mosquito Coast, but soon finds himself in the company of buccaneers in the West Indies and Virginia; he then sails around Cape Horn and across the Pacific in search of the Manila treasure galleon and lands on the coast of New Holland (Australia), which he explores for two months in early 1688. Returning home via Vietnam, Sumatra and India, he finally comes ashore in England on 16 September 1691. His memoir of the trip, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), is an instant bestseller, full of information about the flora and fauna of the places he has visited, as well as the people, the islands and the buccaneers. Everyone wants to meet him. Pepys and Evelyn both invite him to dinner. He goes on to sail around the world twice more, becoming the first man ever to circumnavigate the world three times.

  J
oseph Pitts is another accidental explorer: a seaman remarkable for being the first Englishman to travel to Mecca and write an appraisal of the holy place, which is forbidden to non-Muslims. He is born in Exeter and in 1678, at the age of fourteen, joins a fishing boat bound for Newfoundland. On the ship’s return, off the coast of Spain, the crew is captured by Algerian slavers; Pitts and his shipmates are all cast into the hold in chains. In Algiers he is sold in the slave market and is beaten by his master for being Christian. Having been sold a second time, his new owner decides he must convert Pitts to Islam. So he has him strung up by his feet and beaten on his soles until the blood runs down his legs. After several days of this, having his bloody feet thrust into salt water and being beaten on the belly while still suspended, Pitts agrees to convert. One positive result of his conversion is that, after he is sold a third time to a kindly old man, he is able to accompany his master on the pilgrimage to Mecca. He travels throughout North Africa, visiting the ruins of Alexandria on the way. At the port there he notices an English ship from Lympstone in Devon and meets a sailor whom he knows from home (now that’s a ‘small-world story’ if ever there was one). After returning from the pilgrimage he is set free and sails to Smyrna, where a Cornishman pays for his voyage to Leghorn in Italy. From there he walks home, arriving back in England after being away for sixteen years. Pitts writes and publishes a book called A faithful account of the Religion and the Manners of Mahometans in which he explains, in an extraordinarily fair and level-headed way, what Islam is like and how people in Algiers really live. As an objective and dispassionate account of a foreign people and their religion and customs, it is worthy of the pen of a Fellow of the Royal Society.

  The result of all these much-publicised travels is that, wherever you go, people talk about the world. The poor are amazed by the stories brought back by sailors. The rich discuss the further-flung reaches of the globe with the sure knowledge relayed to them by their peers and what they have read in books by men such as Dampier and Pitts. The wider world becomes a great topic of debate to which everyone can add their own opinion. Pepys sits down one afternoon in the Fleece Tavern and argues with two escaped white slaves that Algiers is more lenient to Christian slaves than the Plantations are to black ones: they soon put him right on the subject, telling him about the constant beatings on the feet and the belly. Evelyn has dinner-table conversations about events in China and Japan. Merchants from Königsberg tell their hosts in London how people in their country live in winter, fishing with nets half a mile long through holes in the ice and taking the fish to market in sledges, packed with snow.84 One day you may be discussing the Turkish military advance into Germany and how the German emperor drinks too much, and another day you might be talking about the unscrupulousness of Moroccan warlords, or chatting about the Hottentots’ practice of semi-castration, or gazing in astonishment at a book in Chinese or Russian.85 The newspapers help circulate the knowledge of foreign events, so that you may find yourself in a London coffee shop reading about the defeat of Don John of Austria at Ameixial at the end of June 1663, or the destruction of Lima in a major earthquake at the end of May 1688.86 In fact, literate Londoners are just as much aware of recent events elsewhere in the known world as most modern people – with the principal difference that there is a time delay proportionate to the distance that the news has to travel. The Battle of Ameixial in Portugal, for example, takes place on 8 June 1663, three weeks before it appears in a London newspaper. The earthquake that destroys Lima actually happens on 20 October 1687, seven months before the London newspapers report it.

  Scientific Knowledge

  On 28 November 1660, a committee of learned gentlemen meets in London to discuss the formation of a new college or philosophical society for the exploration of scientific matters. Two years later their organisation receives a royal charter and becomes the Royal Society. Three years after that it starts publishing its Philosophical Transactions. As you are no doubt aware, this is a supremely important development in the history of science. It provides the institutional focus for international excellence in natural philosophy (as science is called at this time), which is just emerging as the prime discipline for understanding the depth and breadth of Creation.

  This emphasis on Creation, with its religious connotations, is important. In the modern world we are prone to see religion and science as operating antagonistically, but in the seventeenth century they are one and the same thing. Previously unknown plants and animals discovered in the New World are immediately understood to have been created by God. People want to know their properties, to see whether they were put on Earth to be useful to mankind in some way – as medicines or dyes, for instance. Scientists are thus driven on by both their thirst for knowledge and by their quest for spiritual enlightenment. Robert Boyle is particularly interested in the nature and extent of Creation: not only does this intensify his interest in the natural world but it leads him to pay for the translation of the Bible into foreign languages and to send out missionaries to convert indigenous peoples of other continents. Isaac Newton knows the Bible better than anyone, and writes several theological treatises alongside his scientific works. The astronomer John Flamsteed is an ordained clergyman. Robert Hooke’s depictions of the minutiae of life are part of his attempt to show the machinery of Creation in greater detail. It is hardly surprising that so many scientific breakthroughs are made in this period. As history has shown repeatedly over the centuries, if you really want to make something happen, make it a spiritual quest.

  The religious aspect of scientific discovery is, however, only half the story. The other half is collaboration – and that is where the Royal Society proves to be so important. All these men could have pursued their research independently, treading their separate paths as pilgrims of truth. But the Royal Society brings them together in a great scientific crusade, and the publication of the Philosophical Transactions embodies and invigorates this collective enterprise. Ideas don’t just filter down into society, they positively cascade. Robert Hooke is engaged by the Royal Society to undertake new experiments every week – thereby becoming the world’s first paid professional research scientist. He demonstrates that he can keep a dog alive by blowing air into its motionless lungs, facilitates a blood transfusion and gives a report of skin grafting on a dog. Hundreds of discoveries are reported, not only in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions but also in the scientists’ own books. The leading figures become internationally famous. John Evelyn remarks that a traveller in England who has not visited Robert Boyle at work in his laboratory is ‘missing one of the most valuable objects of our nation’.87 Hooke is no less renowned after his Micrographia is published in 1665, largely on account of its incredibly detailed illustrations of familiar objects observed through a microscope. You are probably familiar with the massive, 18-inch image of a flea, as well as his fine engravings of a gnat, a fly’s eye and a louse. Astronomers like John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley reveal that there are thousands of stars that the naked eye cannot perceive. Isaac Newton’s fame spreads abroad with his papers on optics and, later, his Principia Mathematica. All these men become household names – to the extent that playwrights lampoon them on the London stage. Even if you are not a natural philosopher, you can hardly be unaware of what is happening around you.

  The Scientific Revolution (as it will become known to future historians) is heavily centred on London. Of course other countries contribute ideas and discoveries – some of the most important thinkers of the age are based on the Continent, including Gottfried Leibniz, Christiaan Huygens and Jakob Bernoulli – but London is the epicentre. The Royal Society is one reason. Another is the number of instrument makers based in the capital. If you want to buy a microscope, telescope, thermometer, barometer or clock, London is the place to visit. If you are a maker of such objects, again London is the place to be, for this is where people will pay for precision devices.

  There is no better example of a craftsman who takes advantage of the deman
d for scientific instruments than Thomas Tompion, the father of English watchmaking. A blacksmith’s son from Bedfordshire, he moves to London in about 1660 to learn the trade of a clockmaker. It is perfect timing, if you will pardon the pun. In 1657 the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens builds the first pendulum clock and, almost immediately, it is copied everywhere. Soon Tompion is making better pendulum clocks than everyone else. When Huygens writes to the Royal Society in 1675 announcing his invention of a watch with a balance-spring, Robert Hooke complains to Charles II that he had the same idea fifteen years earlier; so the king asks Tompion to make just such a watch to Hooke’s design. The following year Tompion becomes the obvious choice to make a pair of highly accurate clocks for the newly built Royal Observatory. The resulting machines, with 13ft-long pendulums, are so sophisticated that they run for a whole year on a single wind and have mechanisms to facilitate their continued action even while being wound. Their accuracy (within two seconds a day) is a phenomenal achievement, coming less than twenty years after the invention of the pendulum. Tompion’s business grows rapidly after that. He employs dozens of apprentices and skilled workers on his production line of precision timepieces. In his highly regulated factory, six sequences of manufacturer’s reference numbers are developed, for watches (from 1681), spring-driven clocks (from 1682), weight-driven clocks (from 1682), repeating watches (from 1688), alarm watches (from 1692) and watches with a special virgule escapement (from 1695). He also continues to make highly specialised instruments for astronomers, and barometers and clocks of exceptional craftsmanship for the royal families of Europe.88