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  RESTORATION

  The Year of the Great Fire

  Alexander Larman

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  About Restoration

  ENGLAND, 1666

  The king, Charles II, has beenon the throne for six years. Thecountry is at war with the Dutch.Isaac Newton sits in his mother’sgarden and watches an apple fall. Samuel Pepys falls in love with anactress. The subversive preacherJohn Bunyan radicalises the inmatesof Bedford jail. Lord Rochesterbegins a scandalous poetic career.And a fiery reckoning threatensto destroy everything.

  In Restoration, Alexander Larman portrays acountry in the throes of social, political and cultural change following the convulsions of Civil War, the rule of Cromwell’s Protectorate and the Restorationof the monarchy. From bishopsto brothel-keepers, from courtiersto coachmakers, from hawkers tohaberdashers, and from poets toprostitutes, he investigates how thepeople of the time thought, ate, drank, loved and died, bringing alive in vivid detail the England of three hundred and fifty years ago.

  For Nancy and Rose

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  1. The State of England

  2. King and Court

  3. Anglicans and Dissenters

  4. Science and Superstition

  5. The Great Plague

  6. Going Out

  7. Dressing up and Staying In

  8. Crime and Punishment

  9. Foreign Affairs

  10. The Great Fire of London

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

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  About Alexander Larman

  Also by Alexander Larman

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Introduction

  When the diarist and naval clerk Samuel Pepys wrote his first entry of the year on 1 January 1666, the day had offered little in the way of any particular interest. He was awoken at five in the morning by a colleague, worked solidly ‘without eating or drinking’ until three in the afternoon, and then, after a dinner mainly spent discussing business with another clerk in the Naval Office, went ‘late to bed’. He was not at all vexed by the industry of the day. A summing-up of 1665 in his previous day’s journal recorded him as having more than trebled his capital, from £1,300 to £4,100, and even the ‘great melancholy’ of the plague did not affect him; he boasted, ‘I have never lived so merrily’, thanks to the company of his friends and the presence in his life of Elizabeth Knepp, an attractive actress with whom he enjoyed a flirtation. He had hopes that the next year would bring more of the same merriment.

  At the end of 1666, the tone of his diary struck a different note. Although he was worth a good deal more money – £6,200, according to his careful accounting – Pepys was irritated to find that he had spent considerably more than the previous year through his ‘negligence and prodigality’. He knew that in this he was representative of what he castigated as the ‘sad, vicious, negligent’ court, which had been responsible for ‘this year of public wonder and mischief… [one] generally wished by all people to have an end’. Public affairs were in ‘a sad condition’, with the country’s enemies ‘great, and grow[ing] more by our poverty’. Those ‘sober men’ like himself had become ‘fearful of the ruin of the whole kingdom this next year’. It was a far cry from his optimism of twelve months earlier.

  If the Restoration itself can be compared to the supposedly blissful early days of a marriage between king and country in their respective roles of husband and bride, then by the end of 1666 the honeymoon was over. The relationship had become one bedevilled by mistrust and suspicion. The euphoria that had greeted the return of the monarch had been based less on rational expectation of what his reign would bring, and more on a mixture of hope and a misguided belief that he would prove a more able ruler than his father, uniting Parliamentarians and Royalists in an England keen to put the schisms of the civil war behind it. The literate middle classes, represented by Pepys, who wrote about the year with both wit and an insider’s view of court, observed those above and below them initially with optimism but also with a growing sense of disquiet. Death stalked the age, whether through ill-advised foreign adventures, poverty and plague – or simply brutal capital punishment.

  The year itself began with the concluding months of the Great Plague, which killed more than 200,000 people across England, and climaxed with the destruction and chaos of the Great Fire in September, which meant that London had to shake off centuries of history and rebuild itself as a modern and outward-facing world city. Yet this was also a year when many English people believed that the end of the world was nigh, because of the devil’s number – 666 – that it contained. A solar eclipse in July struck panic into the hearts of many, who muttered darkly about this new, licentious age, in which those at court adopted foreign customs and the king was married to a Catholic. England’s relations with her European neighbours continued to be troubled. The disastrous Second Anglo-Dutch War was fought in vain pursuit of mercantile advantage; it saw one of the longest naval skirmishes ever fought, the Four Days’ Battle of early June 1666.

  Still, if the end of the world really was coming, people were determined to enjoy themselves first. Pleasure, despite (or because of) the constant sense of mortality, dominated the age. Freed from the repressive shackles of the Commonwealth, those who could afford such luxuries wore gaudy, figure-enhancing and expensive new clothes and drank rich imported wine. New theatres were built for Londoners of all classes to go to see the suggestive new comedies whose authors often seemed to enjoy the same hard-living, hard-loving lives of their rake-hero protagonists. At home, people pursued illicit love affairs, safe in the knowledge that they would escape legal retribution; some even enjoyed carnal relations with members of their own sex, a risky move that nonetheless seemed tacitly sanctioned by the permissiveness of the time.

  This was not, however, an age purely of indulgence and excess. Literature flourished, helped by the rise in mass printing and affordable books and pamphlets. People could buy witty and sometimes obscene poems written by a louche group of young aristocrats, many of whom had royal favour. They could also appreciate the emergence of politically and religiously engaged writers, from John Milton to John Bunyan, who eschewed the court (often by dint of being in prison) and wrote more weighty and ambitious works such as Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The foundation of the Royal Society a few years earlier meant that serious matters of science and philosophy were central to the national conversation. Charles himself was a keen student and had his own private laboratory at Whitehall. Scientific innovators such as Robert Hooke formulated laws that would shape humanity’s view of the physical universe for centuries thereafter; an apple fell from a tree in front of a twenty-three-year-old Isaac Newton. Even medicine evolved, albeit in a more limited fashion.

  The poet John Dryden called 1666 an annus mirabilis, with the agenda of promoting himself to royal favour. The more sanguine John Evelyn described it as ‘a year of nothing but prodigies in this nation: plague, war, fire, rains, tempest: comets’. Beyond the clichés of orange-selling wenches and bewigged dandies lay a changing world that was as frightening and uncertain as it was seductive. The year 1666 stands at the dawn of a new age in which the Restoration reveals itself in all its tantalizing, contradictory aspects.

  My first concerted experience of writing about the Restoration period came when I was researching Blazing Star, a biography of John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester. Rochester’s life – to understate, a tumultuous affair – was gripping material for any biographer
, but the strange, beautiful and damaged time that he inhabited was every bit as compelling. Over and over again I was frustrated at having to jettison a fascinating story, or at not being able to follow an intriguing character in order to prevent the book becoming a slippery morass of sub-plots and background detail. When I finished writing Blazing Star it was with a sense of unfinished business. I had more stories left to tell, and wanted to carry on exploring them. I wanted to create a combination of social and narrative history, offering both an overview of an age and a more detailed glimpse into the lives of those who inhabited it.

  Restoration is the result of my attempt to finish what I had begun. After a research and writing process that has been at once tortuous, fascinating and liberating, I feel like a time traveller from an antique land, ready to tell tales from the past that are, by turns, amusing, horrifying and utterly unexpected. There were many other years in the Restoration period that could have made – and no doubt will make – fascinating books, but it seems appropriate, on the 350th anniversary of one of the most turbulent years in English history, to have visited 1666 and to have tried, through the stories of the people involved in it, to make sense of what happened there.

  We will meet a cross-section of individuals from royalty to labourers, prostitutes to poets (with scant difference between them in some cases) and will tarry awhile with the outwardly respectable and the flamboyantly wicked. We will visit the decadent court, and peep inside the humblest houses, to say nothing of the fearsomely filthy prisons in which some of our main protagonists dwelled, deservedly or otherwise. We will patronize the theatres and the fairs, but also spend time at home admiring the fashions of the day. We will sail with the English fleet to do battle with the Dutch, and we will take care to avoid the ravages of the plague. And, finally, we will stand and watch the awesome spectacle of the Great Fire, the moment at which it seemed London might be destroyed forever. I hope that 1666 will prove to be as exciting a world to explore as a reader as it has been to research and write about.

  A Note on the Text

  I have attempted as far as possible to keep intact the archaic grammar and syntax of the writing of the period when referring to quoted material – save where comprehension would be adversely affected. Spelling has been modernized for ease of reading.

  All currency values should be multiplied by approximately eighty to get a sense of what the cost would be in present-day terms. Modern values have been estimated using the excellent website measuringworth.com.

  Any errors of fact are my own.

  — 1 —

  The State of England

  ‘Is this the seat our conqueror is given?’

  – John Dryden, The State of Innocence

  By 1666, London was unquestionably the greatest city in England. Its population at the time of the Great Fire was around 400,000, which made it fifteen times bigger than any other English city and second only to Paris in Europe. By comparison, Oxford had a population of around 10,000, including 3,000 students. Cambridge had slightly fewer. The city closest in size to the capital was Norwich, with 30,000 inhabitants, which had risen to prominence in the Restoration on account of its thriving cloth industry. Half of royal revenue came from London, and virtually everything that was manufactured was made in the capital. The population of England itself was around five million, meaning that almost one in ten inhabitants had either been born in or had headed to London in order to live and work there. It was glamorous, dangerous and home to the king and his court – and a magnet for the ambitious and the curious. One such figure was the French physician, philosopher and man of letters Samuel de Sorbière.

  Sorbière might have expected, at the age of nearly fifty, to be enjoying the life of a respected academic, lauded by his Parisian peers for his work in the spheres of medicine and literature. Instead, his visit to England had ended with him being exiled to Brittany and censured by the crème de la crème of French society, including the king, Louis XIV. He had provoked a diplomatic storm that led to the Conseil d’État, the supreme court of justice, taking dramatic action against him. His considerable public career, which had included friendships with Thomas Hobbes and the French philosopher Pierre Gassendi and the achievement of being the first French translator of Thomas More’s Utopia, seemed to have come to an ignominious end. Biding his time in penury and solitude, he had plenty of opportunities to think about what he had done that had led to this state of disgrace. The answer was both banal and tragic: he had visited Restoration England and told the truth about what he had seen there, in his book A Voyage to England, which caused a diplomatic storm upon its publication in Paris in 1664.

  Sorbière had form in upsetting the inhabitants of the countries he visited. His translator, François Graverol, laconically noted in his memoir of Sorbière that an earlier visit to Italy ‘had not the success he imagined’ as his curiosity and limited grasp of the language often manifested itself in a bluntness that verged on rudeness. Nonetheless, when Sorbière arrived in England in 1663, his first impressions were positive. He was intrigued by what awaited him, saying of his destination ‘there is no country in the world so well known’. After a seven-hour journey across the Channel, he arrived at Dover and was picked up by a stagecoach driven by a man ‘clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George’; impressed, Sorbière described the coachman as ‘a merry fellow’, who ‘fancied he made a figure and seemed pleased with himself’.

  When Sorbière arrived in London a few weeks later, he lodged in Covent Garden, an area frequented by French visitors. He pronounced it ‘certainly the finest place in the city’. Wandering further afield, he was surprised at the ‘vastness’ of London. He noted that it had more houses but fewer people than Paris, ‘and that in many other things it’s not to be compared to it’. He spent a crown a week on his rooms, which he considered reasonable for accommodation near to Whitehall and Westminster, and felt himself fortunate that he was centrally situated; as he said, ‘it takes a year’s time to live in it before you can have a very exact idea of the place’. He praised the shops, which he described as the finest and the most varied in the world, but criticized the public buildings as unremarkable, belittling the two major churches, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, by remarking ‘we have not much to say of them neither’.

  Sorbière encountered some of England’s most notable figures during his visit. He said of the king’s cousin Prince Rupert that he was ‘kind, modest [and] very curious’, although he also believed that Rupert should have been ‘more haughty’ and kept ‘himself at a greater distance’. Sorbière became aware of Charles’s interest in science and navigation, but hinted that the king’s interests seldom lasted long and that when he became bored, he swiftly moved on to something more diverting. As with his mistresses, Charles was fickle in his attentions.

  It is a mark of the ruler’s accessibility that, when introduced to Sorbière by the diplomat Sir Robert Murray, Charles addressed him in French and spent an hour with him in his private rooms. Sorbière was later to say of Charles: ‘this prince made great improvement of his long adversity, from which he has drawn all the conclusions which he seems to have taken for settling the peace, tranquillity and embellishment of his country upon a solid foundation’.

  The Frenchman enjoyed a privileged experience at court, visiting Westminster, the Courts of Justice and some of the country’s most impressive estates; he ‘forgot nothing that was feasible’. Even as he noted that ‘the court of England is not so great as ours’, he praised the nobility and gentry, reserving his disdain for the ordinary people who, in his eyes, ‘are naturally lazy, and spend half their time taking tobacco’. His account seemed to suggest that the country would have been a better and happier one if the aristocracy had disposed of the common man altogether and created a prelapsarian state where wealth and taste were the only credentials worth bearing. The reality could not live up to his hopes.

  *

  For rich and poor alike, life in London in 16
66 was noisy and dirty; the sounds of animals, cart drivers, children, street sellers and craftsmen melded together in an urban cacophony, and waste from the furnaces used by tradesmen hung heavy over the city. The diarist John Evelyn bemoaned the ‘clouds of smoke and sulphur’ that polluted the centre. The black, foul-smelling expanse of the Thames – a filthy, polluted waterway where corpses of animals and even humans were deposited – bisected the city. Seventeenth-century winters were more severe than those of twenty-first-century Britain,* and the river was liable to freeze over, as it did in the winter of 1665–6. Despite its squalor, the Thames had an important symbolic place in London’s heart. It provided a backdrop for some of the city’s most notable civic events, including the annual Lord Mayor’s parade, which took place every 29 October and was intended to display the autonomy and wealth of the City of London. During the pageant, a flotilla of boats,† each representing one of the City’s guilds, made its way from the City to Westminster, watched by crowds of thousands along the way.

  If the annual parade (which continues to this day) showed London at its most glittering, everyday reality was less glamorous. Both the streets and the river were full of human and animal excrement, and they were crowded and took time to traverse. If you wished to cross the Thames on foot or on horseback, your only option was London Bridge, the king having refused earlier petitions to allow the building of another bridge downriver between Lambeth and Westminster. Thronged with livestock, carts and workers, it could take anything up to an hour to cross on a busy day. Some people even lived on the bridge, in houses with shops on the ground floor. Many preferred to take one of the hundreds of boats that sailed up and down the Thames, touting for business every day except Sunday. These looked either like Venetian gondolas, or ‘skiffs’, or larger barges. Travel on these was precarious and frightening, with the ever-present danger of capsizing into the fast currents of the murky depths.