Restoration, p.3
Restoration, page 3
Outside London, towns tended to be self-sufficient when it came to their government, trading and customs. In fact, few people travelled beyond their locality unless they were heading for the capital or another large city in search of new opportunities. This was partly due to the dangers and uncertainties of the roads, where highwaymen and filthy conditions alike made long journeys difficult, and partly because of a sense of local identity that dominated each town and village. Strong regional accents were prevalent and each area had its own customs, superstitions and beliefs.
While we know much less – Sorbière’s brief accounts excepted – about the state of other English towns and cities in 1666 than we do about London, it is still possible to gain some sense of what everyday life was like in such places as Bristol, York and Newcastle. These were important trading (and, in the case of York, ecclesiastical) centres, whose inhabitants lived, bred, quarrelled, ate, drank and worked as any other assembly of human beings in a sizeable town did. Bristol had a particular importance in that it was the major western seaport, consolidating its earlier reputation as a point of embarkation for voyages of exploration by becoming a major trading port. It was a place where appearances mattered enormously, even in death; both Evelyn and Pepys recorded the elaborate nature of christening and burial services there, and the biographer and lawyer Roger North said of a Bristolian that ‘a man who dies worth three hundred pounds will order two hundred of it to be laid out in his funeral procession’. Similar wealth was to be found in the ports of Exeter and Plymouth.
Nearby Bath was fashionable and frequented by men of quality, albeit not on the same scale that would develop in the eighteenth century, as was its southeastern cousin Tunbridge Wells, a popular resort for the fashionable to escape the hubbub of London life. The poet and libertine John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester, wrote a satire about it, lampooning the ‘new scene of foppery’ that saw the wealthy and gullible take the waters in the belief that they would cure the infertile and restore lost youth; as he acidly noted, ‘ourselves with noise of reason we do please in vain: humanity’s our worst disease’.
Other cities that would grow in size and importance during the Industrial Revolution were at this time little more than small towns. Liverpool, for instance, had a population of around 4,000, and was not seen as a port worthy of the name until the early eighteenth century, when the world’s first enclosed commercial dock was built there. Manchester accommodated slightly more people – around 6,000 – and was known for the manufacture of such small luxury items as leather laces and shoe ties. Both paled in comparison as commercial centres next to their northeastern neighbour Kingston upon Hull,* which, although it did not yet have a dock, was a valuable port that imported iron, copper, corn and linen. All of these were much prized in London, bringing lucrative commercial rewards to the city.
Sorbière noted that he had talked ‘with some of the genteelest and most polite people in the kingdom’ and that ‘my short stay in England, and ignorance of the language, perhaps have been a bar to making a right judgement of things’, but his comments on the national character are revealing nonetheless. He saw the English as being ‘of a very irregular and fantastic temper’. The common people, he wrote, exhibited ‘a haughtiness and indifference towards strangers’. Warming to his theme, he criticized them as being ‘very suspicious, and full of hollow-heartedness’. He noted also their ‘capricious and melancholy temper, which is so peculiar to them’, and he remarked that ‘the English may be easily brought to anything, provided you fill their bellies, let them have freedom of speech and do not bear too hard upon their lazy temper’.
In the course of his travels, Sorbière observed that the English might have been poor, but lacked little when it came to good cheer: ‘you will meet with no faces there that move pity, nor no habit that denotes misery… they scarce want any necessaries of life [and] their pride keeps them back from pushing after superfluities, which others take so much pains to pursue’. He was struck by the ‘excellent qualities’ of Englishmen, their keen interest in blood sports such as ‘bear-baiting and bull and dog-fighting’, and praised their coolness and seriousness in comparison to the ‘forwardness, which they call indiscretion’ of the French.
Despite these laudatory words, Sorbière was scathing about English xenophobia. He recorded that when he tried to find accommodation for the night in a country inn on his journey to London, he was treated with contempt, and ‘as little regarded as if [I] had been a bale of goods’. Such behaviour doubtless stemmed in part from ignorant suspicion of outsiders, but it may also have been characteristic of a people who had been cowed into obedience through fear during the years of the Protectorate. Taking a Frenchman as an interpreter, Sorbière discovered on his journey to Oxford that, only a few years after the Restoration, ‘there are no people in the world so easily frightened into subjection as the English… as soon as ever you repress their insolence, you take away their courage’.
Strong words; strong enough, in fact, for one English divine, Thomas Sprat, to write a satirical response to Sorbière. In his Observations Upon Monsieur de Sorbière’s Voyage into England, he praised the temper of the English as ‘free, modest, sincere, kind [and] hard to be provoked’. Sprat, who had achieved preferment under Charles II as a prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral,* was naturally keen to defend the status quo as far as he could. He implicitly compared England with absolutist France under Louis XIV:
The government which we enjoy is justly composed of a sufficient liberty and restraint. And though it may be suspected in a querulous and discontented age, a little to incline the people to disobedience, yet in a calm and a secure time (such as this at present) it serves admirably well to breed a generous, an honourable and invincible spirit.
Sprat was, despite his unprepossessing name, a significant figure in the new order in which he found himself, but when he said ‘a universal zeal towards the advancement of such designs has not only overspread our court and universities, but the shops of our mechanics, the fields of our gentlemen, the cottages of our farmers, and the ships of our merchants’, it is tempting to wonder whether his desire to act as a propagandist for the new regime had clouded his judgement. Many would desperately have wished that Sprat’s ‘calm and secure time’ was an accurate reflection of the state of things, but in what would become the most turbulent year of Charles’s entire reign, the ‘honourable and invincible spirit’ of England would be tested to its limits.
For the country to maintain its facade, criticism of its aristocrats had to be limited. Referring to the tensions between Clarendon and the Earl of Bristol, which were clearly a matter of public record, Sorbière presciently noted, ‘it looks as if the least spark of fire, when they meet with combustible matter, should make great conflagrations’. Sorbière was unimpressed by Clarendon, saying of him that he ‘[understood] the formalities of the legal system, but [had] little understanding of other things, and no knowledge of literature’. This insult caused diplomatic outrage, especially coupled with his other unflattering comments about the English. Sorbière was particularly unfortunate in his timing; tense diplomatic relations between England and France over the latter’s support for the Dutch meant that it was inevitable that he should be made a scapegoat to demonstrate that the entente cordiale remained.
Sprat’s attack on Sorbière seemed almost an official response from the court; the former defended Clarendon in the most generous of terms, saying, ‘I will declare, that of all the men of great worth, who have possessed the office, since learning and the civil arms came amongst us, there was never any man that had so much resembled Sir Thomas More, and the Lord Bacon, in their several excellencies, as the Earl of Clarendon.’ Sprat’s fulsome praise concealed a more venal purpose – the Royal Society, which he belonged to, wished to have the all-powerful Clarendon as its patron – but the implication was clear; Sorbière was persona non grata and deserved all the scorn and ridicule that greater minds could cast upon him.
Ironically, Sorbière’s eventual salvation, such as it was, came from two sources. The first was Charles, who had enjoyed his encounter with the Frenchman and felt that his treatment was unnecessarily harsh; he intervened on Sorbière’s behalf with Louis and saw to it that he was recalled from his banishment after a few months. While Sorbière’s reputation never fully recovered – he was not made a member of the Académie des sciences (the French equivalent of the Royal Society) – he continued to write and travel until his death in 1670. He never returned to England, but, had he paid another visit after 1666, he would have found an altogether different place from the one he had earlier described.
* The so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ lasted across Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and was characterized by heavy snowstorms and freezing temperatures.
† The boats used in this voyage were known as ‘floats’, in due course giving their name to land-borne transports.
* They took their name from the town of Sedan, in northeastern France, where they originated.
* The term ‘hackney carriage’ may be a derivation of the French ‘haquenée’, meaning a small horse, or a reference to Hackney, then a small village outside London.
* See Chapter 6, ‘Going Out’.
* The implication being that his produce was as the fruits or vegetables found in the Garden of Eden.
† No system of street numbering was introduced in England until the 1770s.
* Although in 1669 the so-called ‘flying coaches’ would reduce the London-to-Oxford journey to a single day.
* The poet and politician Andrew Marvell, who was born and brought up in the city, served as its member of Parliament for most of the period from 1659 until 1678.
* He would eventually become bishop of Rochester.
— 2 —
King and Court
‘Who never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one’ –
John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, ‘Epitaph on Charles II’
On 24 December 1666, James Barnes, a weaver who lived in Stepney, was prosecuted at the assize courts. His crime was to have said, ‘Here is a health to George Monck, and the devil take the king’. The court arraignment described his words as ‘malicious and devilish’, stating that they were said ‘in the presence and hearing of divers persons’. Whether or not Barnes’s statement was intentionally libellous, or a remark made in a moment of drunken bravado, the details are telling. General Monck, 1st duke of Albemarle, Knight of the Garter and officer in charge of the navy, was one of the great figures of the Restoration, though a series of mistakes in the Second Anglo-Dutch War had seen him become a diminished figure by the end of the year. However, he still held some loyalty from those who believed he had acted as an important check on the sins of the court, a moral man in a sea of immorality. Barnes was eventually acquitted, perhaps because the evidence against him was weak. He was fortunate. Had he been found guilty, he probably would have been hanged.
It is also possible that the magistrates had some sympathy with his sentiments. Barnes’s comments about his monarch, once a figure beyond reproach, chimed with an increasingly disillusioned public attitude towards Charles. In the space of a few years he had gone from being a popular, even loved, king to one regarded with hostility and contempt by his people, who saw him as blithely inconsiderate. As one disaster after another threatened to destroy the country, and with it the entire basis on which the Restoration was founded, it is astonishing to consider how swiftly the English monarchy once again nearly collapsed.
Things had been very different half a decade before. In a triumph for diplomacy and negotiation, rather than the divine right of kings, Charles Stuart was crowned Charles II on 23 April 1661. It was an event that many had thought impossible after his father’s execution on 30 January 1649: a restored monarch once again resuming his place as head of church and state alike. The day itself, St George’s Day, had been picked because of its patriotic associations. Those around Charles believed that the public wanted a grand spectacle, and this is what they were given, beginning with the king’s eve-of-coronation journey from the Tower of London to Whitehall. This was not only ‘a spectacle so grateful to the people’, as the official description had it, but a self-conscious attempt to place Charles in the tradition of his forebears; medieval kings such as Edward III and Richard II had all trodden the same route before their coronations. Continuity with previous traditions was key, even if Charles became the last king to date to follow the time-honoured path. He rode through the streets to great acclaim; Pepys, who watched some of the journey from the upholsterer John Young’s house at Cornhill, said, ‘So glorious was the show with gold and silver, that we were not able to look at it, our eyes at last being so much overcome with it.’
The next day, the pageantry began early. After several days of rain, the morning was dry and bright, an auspicious omen. Royal advisers felt that the theatricality of having the streets run with wine had been successful on the day of Charles’s Restoration, 29 May 1660, and so taverns and vintners were encouraged to pour wine through the conduits in the street, creating a suitably jovial, alcohol-soaked atmosphere. The regal procession headed to Westminster Abbey, where some spectators, including Pepys, had been waiting since just after four o’clock that morning, anxious to be present at the moment of history. They had to wait until 11 a.m., so that Charles could proceed in his newly accustomed pomp from Whitehall to Westminster to the acclamation of the crowd.
When he reached the Abbey, mounted on a horse with a saddle embroidered with pearls and gold, Charles was met with the lavishness that a king deserved, or expected. One nobleman’s robes had cost more than £30,000, and the entire event was rumoured to have cost £200,000, voted for by a committee determined to retain ‘the old names, and fashion’ befitting a coronation. Scarlet and blue lent a regal flavour to the day. Charles was dressed in a hugely elaborate outfit that encompassed mantles of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine, satin undergarments and golden sandals with high heels designed to make him look suitably imposing. Sartorial splendour was a requirement for everyone attending. Pepys himself wore an expensive velvet costume made by the French tailor Claude Sourceau in collaboration with his English tailors, John Allen and William Watts, and costing the enormous sum of £2,271 19s 10d. The bill was not settled until the following year, and then only after repeated requests.
The ceremony itself was modelled closely on Charles I’s investiture in 1626, although many of the jewels used, such as the Black Prince’s ruby and St Edward’s sapphire, had had to be repurchased by Royalist sympathizers after their disposal following the king’s execution. Others had either been broken up, their precious metals melted down and the stones dispersed, or disappeared into European collections. Few had believed that a king would need such finery again. Yet a new crown was now placed on the royal head by the Archbishop of Canterbury, leading to ‘a great shout’, as Pepys put it, before the nobles and bishops present took an oath of loyalty. As they swore that they would be ever ready to support the crown, with all their power, foreign dignitaries looked on, interested to see how things would be in this new England. This accomplished, Sir Edward Walker, the king’s loyal supporter and holder of the office of Garter King-at-Arms, asked three times whether anyone knew any reason why Charles should not be crowned. The Lord Chancellor then announced a general pardon for those who had fought against him in the civil war and Lord Cornwallis distributed silver medals to attendants; to his chagrin, Pepys did not manage to obtain one. The diarist left the event early because, as he wrote, ‘I had so great a lust to piss’.
An event of this nature merited an extravagant feast, and a banquet of a sort unseen in England for years was subsequently held in Westminster Hall. Pepys, as a naval administrator and Justice of the Peace, was sufficiently high profile to be invited to attend, and described it as ‘a rare sight’, full of ritual and spectacle. The Lord High Stewart, Lord High Constable and the Earl Marshal appeared on horseback, and the king’s champion, Sir Edward Dymoke, issued a challenge to any ‘false traitor’, ‘[who] shall deny or gainsay our sovereign Lord King Charles the Second’, and promised to fight him. The food was of secondary importance to the show, although Pepys managed to get his hands on ‘four rabbits and a pullet’, along with some bread. There was ‘music of all sorts’ played by twenty-four violinists, and much good-natured commotion, which lasted until 6 p.m., when Charles ceremonially washed his hands in water brought to him by attendants and left Westminster by barge. As he departed, the weather broke, and Pepys noted that ‘it fell a-raining and thundering and lightning as I have not seen it do some years’.
Whether Charles believed that the suddenly inclement weather was a symbolic judgement on his resumption of the throne, or if he was simply too exhausted by the activity of the day to consider such superstitions, he could be forgiven for not taking the event as seriously as those around him. After all, it was not the first time that he had been crowned king. Following his father’s execution, the Scots had pronounced Charles the rightful heir, and crowned him King at Scone – the traditional place of coronation for kings of Scotland – on 1 January 1651. It did Charles little good in terms of helping him to reclaim the English throne. Later that year, he found himself fleeing across the country after defeat at the Battle of Worcester, pursued by Cromwell’s soldiers and with a bounty of a thousand pounds upon his head. So, for all the cheering and hand-kissing, a sense of déjà vu settled over the new king, relieved only by the attentions of his mistress Barbara Villiers, as he considered what had happened since he had returned to the country nearly a year earlier.
