King Charles II (49 page)

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 banquet
²⁶
– 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 per 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

‘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.’

F
or 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.