A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (41 page)

Meanwhile the navy was on the verge of disintegrating. When some sailors were sent to Newgate for ‘discontented words’, several hundred armed seamen gathered in the city to break into the prison to release them, and Albemarle was forced to march his troops to Wapping. At the end of 1666 Pepys wrote disconsolately, ‘Public matters in a most sad condition. Seamen discouraged for want of pay, and are become not to be governed. Nor, as matters are now, can any fleet go out next year. Our enemies, French and Dutch great, and grow more, by our poverty.’
¹¹

The winter frost was violent and intense. In January a sudden thaw filled London streets with mud and slush, and then two more months of freezing weather followed, bringing the coldest days in living memory. The people shivered, complaining loudly of the scarcity of coal and the extortionate prices. The need for money was so urgent that Charles took Arlington’s advice, against that of the Duke of York, Clarendon and Sheldon, and told the Lords to accept the Irish Cattle Bill, including the nuisance clause, and the Poll Tax Bill. But instead of immediately discussing the grant, the Commons returned to Mordaunt’s impeachment, which he answered in the Lords this month. Charles would pardon him the following July, but a year or so later, Mordaunt resigned his offices and retired. For stalwarts like Clarendon and Ormond the precedent was ominous. It was the first time in Charles’s reign, discounting Bristol’s wild attempt, that a serious move was made to impeach a peer.

The session of parliament left Charles bruised. He had surrendered over the Cattle Bill but had still not obtained his money. In mid-January he addressed both houses in angry tones:

My Lords and Gentlemen: I have now passed your Bills; and I was in good Hope to have had other Bills ready to pass too. I cannot forget that within a few days after your coming together in September both Houses presented me with their vote and declaration, that they would give me a Supply proportionable to my occasions; and the confidence of this made me anticipate that small part of my Revenue which was unanticipated for the payment of the same. And my Credit hath gone farther than I had reason to think it would; but it is now at an end.

This is the first day I have heard of any Money towards a Supply, being the 18th of January, and what this will amount to, God knows. And what Time I have to make such preparations as are necessary to meet Three such Enemies as I have, you can well enough judge…
¹²

He blamed the delay partly on Buckingham, with whom he had finally completely lost patience. On 25 February, almost as soon as the parliamentary session ended, Charles ordered a warrant to be put out for his arrest. The charge, manufactured by Arlington, was that he had arranged to have the king’s horoscope drawn up by an astrologer.
¹³
Since a horoscope implied the old offence of ‘imagining the king’s death’ it could be categorised as treason. Faced with the prospect of such an accusation, Buckingham went into hiding. His post as Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire was taken over by Lord Burlington, his protégé George Savile was dismissed, and he was stripped of the lucrative patents for his glassworks.

But if Charles could not control his nobles, his subjects, his sailors or his parliament, he could at least try to make a deal with his enemies. Early in 1667 he began to sue for peace.

King of Spades from
The English Counties
, by Robert Morden, 1676. The medallion for the King of each suit showed Charles II, while the Queen was depicted by Catherine of Braganza. Clubs showed the Northern counties, Hearts the Eastern, Diamonds the Southern and Spades the Welsh.

IN DEFERENCE
to the sombre mood after the Fire, there were no great Christmas festivities in Whitehall. But as the New Year came, with its fierce frost and snow, new singers arrived to entertain the court. ‘This evening I heard rare
Italian
voices’, wrote Evelyn, ‘2
Eunuchs
& one Woman, in his Majesties greene Chamber next his Cabinet.’
¹
The singers also appeared at the Theatre Royal, including a beautiful soprano, who, Killigrew warned all admirers, adamantly refused to be kissed. This year too, young Pelham Humfrey, later Purcell’s mentor, returned from France to inject some Gallic brio into the King’s music.
²
A new card game, too, had arrived from France in the middle of the war. This was basset, or
bassette
, which became an obsessive court pastime, considered only fit for those of high rank since the gains and losses could be so huge. It was a game of pure chance, where the banker, the
talliere
, assisted by the
croupiere
, sat with his bank of gold on the table before him and the rest of the players put forward their cards one by one, with their stakes upon them, hoping to multiply this through a mass of complex rules, but almost bound to lose, since all the advantage was with the bank. (Louis XIV decreed that the banker must be the son of a nobleman of the first rank, and eventually banned the game altogether, fearing court bankruptcies.)

While fortunes were being lost at court, more serious things were happening outside. Soon work began on rebuilding London. Immediately after the Fire, Charles had ordered that no rebuilding should start until the damage was properly estimated. He warmed to the plans of Evelyn and Wren, with their new quays along the Thames and geometric grid of avenues, vistas and squares, bringing memories of the Paris of Mansart and Le Vau that he had admired in his exile. But to implement these he would have to raze the old network of city streets, and such high-handed grandeur would smack of absolutism, an affront to the rule of the City fathers. Much as he liked the plans, they had to be laid aside. On the other hand, he could lay down basic rules for rebuilding without a political storm. A swift royal proclamation declared that new houses should be of brick or stone; the old overhanging storeys must go; roads should be widened to get rid of the web of alleys and lanes, and paved to allow easier traffic, ‘convenient and noble for the advancement of trade of any city in Europe…both for use and beauty’.
³
Even this early statement made it clear that every stage of planning and building was to be a collaboration between the crown and the Lord Mayor and aldermen. It was vital for Charles to work with the City, to capitalise on the goodwill he had won during the Fire, and to squash the gossip that some courtiers – notably the ever tactless Bab May, his current Keeper of the Privy Purse – had actually rejoiced that the ‘rebellious city’ had been brought to its knees.
⁴

At booths around the City, landlords and tenants registered their legal claims, and a commission was set up to survey the burnt areas. The court appointments included Christopher Wren and the royal architects Roger Pratt and Hugh May, while the City put forward their surveyor, Peter Mills, and builder, Edward Jerman, and also Robert Hooke, who had delivered his proposed plan not to Charles, but directly to the City Corporation at Gresham House.
⁵
In the bitter, stormy winter the commission drew up their plans and costings. In February 1667 parliament passed two acts. One set up Fire Courts, dealing with wrangles between landlords and tenants who were ruined, or reluctant to rebuild. (Business was so heavy that there was still a waiting list after a year, and the courts sat all day.) The other was the first Rebuilding Act, which laid down the provisions for standardising houses, widening streets, arranging compensation and relaxing guild rules to allow immigrants to swell the army of labourers. The work was to be paid for by a ten-year tax of a shilling on each chaldron of coal (just over a ton) brought into the Port of London. Soon the City passed its own Act of Common Council, laying down rules for establishing disputed boundaries.

Work could now begin. At the end of February, Sir Robert Vyner and the Lord Mayor came to ask directions from Charles about measuring out the streets. Everyone had a view. The best way, according to Pepys’s friend Captain Cocke, would be to sell the whole area to a commission, then let them sell it again, giving preference to the old owners, so that it could be built as the trustees desired, ‘whereas now, great differences will be and the streets built by fits’.
⁶
The commission, however, could not do anything so bold and the streets, as Cocke prophesied, were indeed built in bursts as money and men became available. First, though, they had to be surveyed. In March and April, when the weather was still so icy that no leaf appeared on the trees, Hooke and Mills began the Herculean task of staking out the line of the new streets. With a small team of workmen they covered the entire area in nine weeks. In late March, Pepys wrote, he went out with Sir William Penn ‘to my shoe-maker’s, cutler’s, tailor’s…and in my going do observe the great streets in the City are marked out with piles drove into the ground; and if ever it be built in that form, with so fair streets, it will be a noble sight’.
⁷
(At the end of the year, Pepys heard that William Penn junior, who would warn people so passionately against this greedily material world, had lately returned from Ireland, as ‘a Quaker again, or some very melancholy thing’.
⁸
)

Hooke was appointed surveyor for the City, and became a local hero, greeted warmly wherever he went. For years the streets would be a mess of scaffolding, ropes and piles of bricks and timber. Roads were widened and the gradients were lowered on the steepest hills, making them easier for carriages and carts. Entrepreneurs made fortunes out of new brickworks, and the price of land rocketed. By the end of 1667, in the centre of the City, where a new road was planned from the Guildhall to Cheapside, ground worth fourpence a foot before the fire was now valued at fifteen shillings.
⁹
Speculators flourished, like Nicholas Barbon, who first set up a fire insurance business and then began buying back leases from landlords who did not wish to redevelop their land themselves. With astonishing speed, Barbon built up a property empire, building terraces of houses from St Paul’s to St James’s. His new wealth seemed remote from his family’s old faith: he was the son of the preacher Praise-God Barebones, who had christened him not Nicholas, but ‘If-Jesus-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damn’d’.
¹⁰

For many people, as for Barbon, money came before religion. The Exchange was rebuilt before the churches. In October crowds watched as Charles rode in procession to the sound of kettledrums and trumpets to lay the first stone of the new building.
¹¹
It was reopened two years later, with all its shops and wonderful arcades. But the churches came next. In May 1667 a second Rebuilding Act listed fifty-one parish churches to replace the eighty-seven churches and six chapels lost in the fire. These would slowly rise over the coming decades, their spires inscribing the vision of Wren, Hooke and Hawksmoor on the skyline.

The argument over the design of St Paul’s took longer. The remains of the charred tower and crossing were pulled down stone by stone in the late summer and autumn of 1668. Crowds gathered to see the walls tumble, and gaze into the great vaults of St Faith’s, where the booksellers’ stock had burnt. But it was not until a year later, when Charles appointed Wren as surveyor general, that any real plans were made. Even then it took another three years for the walls to be demolished, and Wren’s design for a cruciform neoclassical building with a cupola, displayed as a model to the King, was compromised by the demands of the Church for something more traditional. The foundation stone was eventually laid in June 1675. The work was finished stage by stage under Charles, James and William and Mary, until it was finally completed in 1711, in the reign of Queen Anne, with the aged Wren the only survivor of those who had begun this great project.

London came to life again fast, with all the ‘noise, hurry, bustle and confusion’ that the young Quaker Penn so disliked. The theatres reopened, and the booths and freak-shows, the dancing horses and ‘Pulchinello’ were back at Bartholomew Fair in Smithfield in late August. The Post Office was up and running and stage-coaches clattered into the great galleried inns in the suburbs. Messengers and porters were back at their posts on street corners, with the great white scarves that they used to carry parcels tied across their chests, ready to run errands through the half-built streets. The number of hackney carriages was much lower than the four hundred authorised by law that had crammed the streets before the Fire, but the river was crowded with skiffs carrying people from bank to bank. The taverns and coffee-houses and brothels were packed. As if the conflagration had never happened, Londoners walked in the parks, played on the bowling greens and laid bets on bull- and bear-baiting and cock-fights. If anything, the mood was even wilder. Pepys was horrified by the young gallants in Spring Gardens, forcing themselves on any woman who walked by.

In this time of reconstruction the city moved westward. The ecclesiastical courts moved to Essex House in the Strand, and the Excise Office to Bloomsbury Square, built by the Earl of Manchester on land granted at the Restoration, its fine houses now nearly complete. While the old Exchange was out of action, the New Exchange in the Strand became the great shopping centre, an alternative to the theatre as a place of entertainment. It had two long double galleries of drapers’ and mercers’ shops, where customers were served by well-dressed women or smart apprentices selling silks and gloves, walnut cabinets and gilded mirrors, everything the heart could desire. Nearby, a ‘great new ordinary’ was built by Adam Lockett at Charing Cross, much admired by Pepys when he ate his grilled pigeons there, and immortalised as ‘Lockett’s’ in the plays of the next generation.
¹²

The Royal Society, still exiled from Gresham House, also moved west. Henry Howard, Duke of Norfolk, invited the Fellows to move into Arundel House in the Strand, and prompted by Evelyn, he also donated the great library collected by his grandfather, the famous virtuoso, whose collecting trips on the continent were an early forerunner of the Grand Tour. Soon all was as before. ‘We had divers Experiments for improving Pendule Watches,’ wrote Evelyn on 8 January, ‘& for winding up huge Springs by force of powder; with an invention for the letting down, & taking up any earth, Corall, or what ever it met with at the bottome of the sea.’
¹³
The noisy, dangerous gunpowder trials continued, to the Fellows’ evident enjoyment, and so did the gruesome medical experiments, transfusing blood from a sheep into a dog ‘till the sheep died, the dog well, & was ordered to be carefully looked to’.
¹⁴
In a lighter mood, there was a demonstration of a newly invented calash, a light, four-wheeled carriage with a folding hood, with which Charles was particularly pleased.

His Majesty was also pleased this spring by a striking visitor with strong views on experimental philosophy. The Duke of Newcastle had finally raised enough funds to buy back the house that he had built in Clerkenwell in the 1630s, and he and his duchess drove down in state from the country in April 1667. Although Newcastle’s relationship with Charles had been awkward ever since he requested permission to leave court and live in the country, Charles was among their first visitors. A host of nobles and old friends from the days of exile followed, crowding into Newcastle House over the next month. Margaret Cavendish, now in her forties, fascinated all those who came. ‘The whole story of this lady is a romance, and all she doth is romantic,’ wrote Pepys, who pursued her coach all over town to get a glimpse of her.
¹⁵
She talked volubly to cover her shyness, about her books, her ideas on religion, her poetry, her views on science. ‘My tongue runs fast and foolish,’ she had once confessed, uttering ‘so much, and fast, as none can understand’.
¹⁶

The Duchess was a poet, a writer of successful plays and the author of provocative essays. In
Observations upon Experimental Philosophy
, in 1666, she had attacked Boyle and Hooke and the high value that the Royal Society put upon experiment. Like Hobbes and other critics she objected that their experiments revealed only superficial wonders, and their observations were often distorted. She was now extremely keen to visit the society, so they made a great exception to their rule against women and invited her to a meeting, displaying the air-pump and other wonders. At the time she seemed overcome, and could say nothing except that she was ‘full of admiration, full of admiration’.
¹⁷
But with her usual energy Margaret thought over everything she had seen and diligently reworked her ideas in
The Grounds of Natural Philosophy
, published the following year. In all her work she sought a way of using reason that acknowledged the limitations of human intellect, and remained humble before the mysteries of nature. Since order was clearly visible in the natural world she concluded that a vacuum could not exist in nature, as it would ‘destroy nature’s unity and create disorder’. The cosmos worked, she decided, not by one body forcing another into motion, but by free will, ‘general agreement’, the ‘consent of associating parts’. In the climate of the late 1660s, amid musing about the power of king and people, and debates about the place of men and women, this argument from ‘consent’, even in cosmic terms, seemed to shimmer with a political and personal resonance.