It may seem strange to our ears that any other explanation was sought than the three (or even latter two) suggested by the Privy Council, in a rickety wooden city where fire was generally acknowledged to be a common hazard. On 6 September the King addressed all the homeless Londoners assembled at Moor-fields. It was a macabre scene. The grass was littered with rescued belongings, interspersed with ashes. The ruins of St Paul’s provided a sombre background. Wisps of smoke were rising from the stones of the once ‘proud and self-satisfied City’. The King came on horseback, attended by only a few gentlemen. As he addressed the people before him, his first care was to state with all the firmness at his command: there had been no plot. The Fire was due to the hand of God.
He spoke in vain, except to the rational. From the first, the Catholics were prime suspects for firing the City, with the Anabaptists second in line. The Catholics themselves were inclined to believe, like the Dutch, in the theory of God’s vengeance; the Quakers too worked it out that God was punishing the City of London for persecuting them. But in the minds of the populace, and of many who should have known better, purulent suspicious against the Catholics formed. The fact that the Post Office had burnt down early on meant that reliable news was hard to come by – and gave a field day to the rumour-mongers. As fear of revolution was to some (like King Charles), fear of the Catholics was to others: irrational, but a fact of the age. Hidden from outward eyes, the infection festered and waited for the next outbreak of strident anti-Popery.
In his Moorfields speech of 6 September the King had vowed, by the grace of God, to take particular care of all Londoners. The manner in which he intended to implement this promise was an exciting one. He intended to build on the ruins of London. Only ten days after the start of the fire he was prophesying a thrilling development for ‘this our native city’ – a judicious reminder that London was his birthplace. But it was to be a Phoenix of brick and stone, not inflammable wood, which was to rise from the ashes.
The replanning of London was of course a long-held aim. The King had a strong streak of the town-planner in his nature, be it palaces or parks, streets, squares or gardens. He had been disappointed at the Restoration that funds had not permitted him much expression of it. He had wished, for example, to sweep away the whole complicated, unaesthetic Whitehall complex (with the exception of the Banqueting Hall). Since this could not be afforded, he had turned his energies towards constructing a new palace at Greenwich, sending for designs and designers and taking much personal interest in progress. Building was begun there in 1661. To the extent that everyone was quoting the mysterious ways of God as an explanation of the fire, it must have seemed to Charles another – far pleasanter – example of the workings of Providence that he should now be compelled to rebuild London.
Providence might perhaps receive another credit: for having produced at this crucial moment in the history of London an architect of the genius of Christopher Wren. Nevertheless, King Charles II was not without credit himself for having perceived the quality of the man he was offered. From the first, King Charles had attempted to employ Wren’s manifold talents, vainly seeking to persuade him to supervise the fortification in Tangier in 1661; Wren was content with the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford. When Wren became the Deputy Surveyor of Works to John Denham, it was said by Denham to be ‘by the King’s desire’, and in the official terms of the appointment ‘according to our [that is, the King’s] particular direction and recommendation’. In 1669, when Wren became the actual Surveyor of the Works, it was to open the longest reign in the history of the office – lasting nearly fifty years. He would serve under six monarchs and twenty-four Lord Treasurers.23
At the vital moment of inception, the work most popularly associated with Wren’s name, the rebuilding of London, owed much to the energy of King Charles, and his proclamations. Without the King’s zestful patronage, Wren might have struggled in vain with London’s narrow, devastated streets, and with its scarred stones like Westmorland’s fells. As it was, the King was the prime motor, setting up a Committee of Lords in the Council, under the Lord Chancellor, to discuss rebuilding with the City’s representatives, as soon as the fires were properly extinguished.
By 10 September Wren, as Deputy Surveyor, had already submitted a plan to the King and Council. A few days later the King issued a royal proclamation, remitting for seven years the Hearth Tax of two shillings per annum on new buildings, by which it had been hoped to keep the spread of London under control. He went further in practical steps. After the Act of Parliament was passed for the rebuilding, he not only promised further help to the Lord Mayor and Alderman ‘to the beauty, ornament and convenience of the City’, but took an energetic interest in the details of the reconstruction.24
There should, for example, be sufficient open markets to make the clogging street markets unnecessary. The halls of the lesser companies might be erected along the Thames Quay, to add to the charm of the river frontage. Where the buildings of lesser streets abutted on the main thoroughfares, they should range with the high buildings in height, for the look of the thing. In the following February King Charles sent for the Acts of the Common Council and a map; then with his finger he proceeded to trace the vital proposals for straightening the chief streets, such as Fleet Street. Wren’s vision had included a straight view from Ludgate Circus to St Paul’s, then on to the Royal Exchange: alas, it was never carried through, any more than was the concept of one large thoroughfare from Smithfield to the river. The City rulers objected that the new Act gave them no powers for sufficiently compensating the owners of the required land. Had such a vision come to pass, the seventeenth-century London of King Charles and Wren would vie with the nineteenth-century Paris of the Emperor Napoleon and Haussmann.
As it was, the King’s patronage was freely acknowledged by the City, at least for the next fifteen years. On 23 October 1667 he travelled to the City in state, attended by kettle-drums and trumpets, and laid the first stone of the first pillar of the new Royal Exchange. Seven years later this patronage was acknowledged when he received the freedom of the City from the Lord Mayor, Sir Robert Viner – the only reigning Sovereign to have done so.fn4 The scroll was presented in a massive gold box, its seal enclosed in another one ‘beautifully enriched with diamonds’. At the same time the King also paid the City the ‘unparalleled favour and honour’ of dining at a Mayoral banquet26 – a favour, unlike the freedom itself, which has since been paralleled by many reigning monarchs.
‘Eheu fugaces’ … In 1681 the City authorities would put up, of their own accord, a Fire Monument attributing the great conflagration to ‘the treachery and malice of the popish faction’.27 And Marvell did not fail to satirize that golden casket, presented
Whilst their churches unbuilt, and their houses undwelt
And their orphans want bread to feed ’em.
Nevertheless, the King’s prompt and determined action with regard to the reconstruction of London immediately after the fire was laudable at the time, and remains something for which later generations should call him blessed.
It was good that he actively enjoyed the process. For there was little else for his comfort in that discontented autumn of 1666. When the year ended – one which had included the disappointments of the Dutch War as well as the biblical ordeals of fire and flood – Pepys described it as one of ‘public wonder and mischief to this nation – and therefore generally wished by all people to have an end’. Dryden in his poem Annus Mirabilis (Year of Wonders) used the same word. A correspondent wrote to Ralph Verney even more passionately: ‘Let not ’66 come these hundred years again.’28
As for the King himself, the insufficiency of his received income was beginning to bite and accumulate in a particularly horrid kind of compound interest. The House of Commons was at best unsympathetic. Andrew Marvell, MP for Hull, described the situation in November 1666 to a correspondent:
Foreign excise, home excise, a Poll Bill, subsidies at the improved value of at six pence pe
r pound, Privy Seals, Sealed Paper, a land tax have been all more or less disputed with different approbation but where we shall pitch I am not wise enough to tell you. For indeed as the urgency of His Majesty’s affairs exacts the money so the sense of the nation’s extreme necessity makes us exceedingly tender whereupon to fasten our resolutions….29
‘The urgency of His Majesty’s affairs’ was an apt phrase. For the previous few years, the annual deficit had been running at some £400,000. One effect of the fire was to cripple the yield of the taxes. Then there was the question of the King’s debts and those of his father, which Parliament had promised to redeem, though it had not done so. By July 1667 Clifford, who was one of the five Commissioners appointed to act as Lord Treasurer after the death of Southampton, estimated the general debts at £2,500,000 – with one million owing for the Navy. Retrenchment was the order of the day and a committee of the Privy Council was set up with that in mind.
But still the war, the greatest cause of poverty, dragged on. Dutch, French and English seemed unable to agree on terms. The resistance of both the English and the Dutch was being whittled away. It was against this seemingly dreary background of diplomatic negotiation and royal manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre that the Dutch carried out their daring raid on the Medway in June 1667. De Witt was determined to strengthen the Dutch hand materially in the peace proposals. An attack on ‘London’s river’, as De Witt termed it, had been planned as early as the Four Days’ Battle, but the Dutch had been too cautious to carry it out. This time they were given explicit instructions ‘to deliberate and to proceed with vigour and rather to take a risk than return without some notable accomplishment’. The playwright Aphra Behn, who played a resourceful role in English intelligence at the time, warned the government in advance of what was intended. As she wrote in her memoirs, her news might have ‘sav’d the nation of a great deal of money and disgrace had credit been given to it’. But her warning was disregarded.30
With the aid, it is distressing to relate, of two renegade English pilots, the fort of Sheerness was captured, the boom at Chatham broken and, worst of all, the English fleet – in Evelyn’s words – ‘A dreadful spectacle as ever Englishmen saw and a dishonour never to be wiped off!’31
The result exceeded De Witt’s wildest expectations. There was panic in the capital, ruled over by a shaky King and government. One rumour suggested that the King had abdicated and escaped. While there were those who suggested that Charles would now refuse to make peace until he had avenged this blow, the King was in fact in no position to meditate retribution. Clarendon referred to peace as an offer that the English would find it difficult to refuse. ‘Although peace can be bought at too high a price, it would suit us highly in the circumstances and we are not in a position to decline. Peace is needed to calm people’s minds, and would free the king from a burden which he is finding hard to bear.’ Thus the Peace of Breda between the two countries was officially brought about at the end of July. The Dutch were conceded their demands in West Africa, the island of Pulo Run and Surinam.
At the same time, England was confirmed in the tenure of the former Dutch possessions of New York, New Jersey and New Delaware, as well as sundry other benefits. It could not be said therefore that the country itself had bought peace at too high a price, since its need for rest and recovery was so manifest. Yet the humiliation symbolized by that ‘black day accurs’d’, as Marvell called it,
When aged Thames was bound with Fetters base,
And Medway chaste ravish’d before his Face
could not be easily expunged from the national consciousness.
The price had to be paid – by someone.
1 The villainess of W. Harrison Ainsworth’s memorable recreation of this grisly time, Old St Paul’s, is one such plague nurse, a horrific fictional character perhaps, but no worse than the real-life nurses of the time.
2 The gynaecological history of Queen Catharine will be considered in its proper place (see here).
3 It is sometimes described as having lasted five days; but see W. G. Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666, for the correction of this myth; he also corrects the legend that the fire ended at Pie Corner.
4 There are several instances of the Sovereign receiving the freedom before accession; but the Sovereign is normally considered to be the fount of all honours.25
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
This Revolution
‘Many particulars … have inclined me to this revolution, which already seems to be well liked in the world and to have given a real and visible amendment to may affairs.’
Charles II to Ormonde, on the fall of Clarendon
For a long time Charles II’s relationship with the Earl of Clarendon had been permeated by resentment. Some of this was personal. It was not pleasant to be treated as a lazy schoolboy, as the King approached his fortieth year. Whether King Charles was laggard in his transactions of business or not, Clarendon should perhaps have put his knowledge of history to work on the subject of monarchs and their former bear-leaders – the early intimacy generally making tact more important rather than less. The notes passed between Charles and Clarendon in the Privy Council, despite the humorous exchanges, illustrate how firmly the elder man considered himself in control.
But there was more to the fall of Clarendon from Charles’ favour than mere annoyance at an irksome manner: that, the King could have easily pretended to tolerate, if it had suited his book to do so. Had he not cultivated in exile an unusual ability to mask his feelings? The fact was that the King was by now evolving his own theories on how the country should be governed, along pragmatic lines. It has already been noted that he did not favour Clarendon’s emphasis on the Privy Council, whose domination seemed to him scarcely preferable to that of Parliament. He would have liked to free the Privy Purse, the source of his personal expenditure, from the overlordship of the Exchequer, and equally to place the Irish Seal above the Great Seal so that Irish affairs (and money) could be handled by him directly when necessary. He had also suffered acutely in recent years from Clarendon’s failure to control the House of Commons (he did not appreciate the real need for able speakers on the Court side), or for that matter the Lords.1 As a result, its ‘angry pettish’ members had in his opinion kept him woefully short of funds. Nor had Clarendon produced the French alliance of his dreams, which would have made the whole Dutch business so much easier to pursue.
Affluent, pompous, by his very virtues reminding everyone uncomfortably of an earlier age, Clarendon had no widespread popularity to counteract the loss of the royal favour. Two marriages were further held against him – the alien Portuguese match to Catharine was laid as his door; while the fact that his own daughter was likely to be Queen, if Charles died without issue, only increased Clarendon’s unpopularity, exacerbated by the failure of the Dutch War.
In the meantime, the King was discovering for himself the advantages of younger, more accommodating servants. Besides Arlington, now married to a rich Dutchwoman, and Thomas Clifford, there was Buckingham’s Yorkshire protégé Thomas Osborne, two years younger than the King. Osborne was a handsome fellow who probably joined the anti-Clarendon group when Clarendon slighted him over the profitable Yorkshire Excise. The King himself understood his worth: for example, Osborne’s name was inserted in the King’s own handwriting into the list of commissioners appointed to examine the Irish accounts.2
One mark of Buckingham’s Yorkshire-based group, in Clarendon’s prejudiced opinion, was exhibitionism. They were, he wrote, ‘all bold speakers, and meant to make themselves considerable by saying upon all occasions what wiser men would not, whatever they thought’.3 As a matter of fact, Osborne had diligence as well as boldness, as his subsequent career in the King’s service would demonstrate. Nevertheless, the sport of Chancellor-baiting was an easy one for these younger men to propose in the embittered atmosphere of that autumn of 1667.
There was a temporary reverse in Buckingham’s fortunes in the summer, a silly matter of the King?
??s horoscope being cast. By September however the ebullient Duke, his good looks becoming puffy with age, but his spirits in no way weighted down, was back in favour. Nor was Buckingham the only one to see in the fall of Clarendon a convenient solution to the expensive fiasco of the Dutch War. Arlington was joined with Buckingham in the cause. Barbara Castlemaine, who hated Clarendon – the feeling was mutual – joined with her cousin Buckingham and exerted what was literally petticoat influence: after Clarendon’s disgrace she was spotted in her aviary at Whitehall, wearing a smock and ‘joying herself at the old man’s going away’.4
Under different circumstances, Clarendon might have survived these animosities. In the spring of 1667 he wrote to his old friend Nicholas that he intended to lodge peaceably in his own (newly built and magnificent) house and enjoy his sustained good health, ‘which is worth a great deal of money’.5 But the violent Parliamentary attacks coincided with the King’s own feeling that the Chancellor had outlasted his usefulness, and that he needed to evolve a different method of handling the government, if the monarchical role was to be played as he wished. New advisers raised in him hopes of new and better parliamentary management.
The public move against Clarendon came from Arlington and Sir William Coventry combined. Coventry, another of the new men who was roughly the same age as the King, was an attractive character, possessing both wit and courage, as his career in the Civil War as a very young soldier had demonstrated; his work at the Admiralty, under the Duke of York, was devoted and intelligent, and in the summer of 1667 he was made a Joint Commissioner of the Treasury. Now Coventry turned to the attack on Clarendon with zest.