Punch (9 page)

There were those who frequented coffeehouses for that wit but who didn’t much care for the “soot-coloured ninny-broth” (as the Grub Street satirist Ned Ward called it) that went with it. Even hipsters like to get their drink on. Yet ale wasn’t quite the thing—not aspirational enough—although at first many coffeehouses served it anyway,
faute de mieux
, since the tavern licenses that would allow wine were scarce and expensive. But anyone with a coffeehouse license could sell spirits—then just at the beginning of their Recreational phase in England and hence largely unregulated—if he could persuade his patrons to drink them. John Dryden, the pugnacious poet laureate, signaled the eventual solution to that problem in a set of verses he wrote in 1691 on the legendary Will’s CoffeeHouse, where he had been the head-wit-in-charge (so to speak) since it opened in 1660. In them, he portrays William Urwin, the house’s proprietor, with “nutmeg, spoon and garter” [i.e., grater], all necessary accessories for Punch-making. And indeed by then Punch had become the standard coffeehouse antidote to all that caffeine. In fact, many a coffeehouse—such as the Little Devil in Goodman’s Fields, lauded by Ward for its Punch in his 1700 masterwork of literary lowlife,
The London Spy
—was one in name only.

Yet it’s unclear precisely how or when coffeehouses learned the utility of Punch; if history recorded which of them was the first to give the flowing bowl safe harbor and when that happened, I haven’t been able to find where. It seems to have taken a little while: the satirical 1673 pamphlet
A Character of a Coffee House
lists, for the “Hodge Podge of Drinks” typically served, the “hot Hell-Broth” coffee, tea and chocolate (all three recent imports), plus “Betony and Rosade [a sort of herbal tea] for the addle-headed Customer,” cider, mum and ale. If Punch had been in common use, the opportunity to hit at trumped-up would-be wits for fuddling themselves with a low sailor’s tipple would have been too tempting to pass up.

Or maybe not: one of the factors that must have hastened Punch’s adoption in England was the high standing in which the navy stood, and not just because the king’s brother was Lord High Admiral. Unlike the army, which was deeply implicated in the dark deeds of the Civil War, the navy was seen as England’s defender, pure and simple, and sailors themselves as stout, if rough, primitives with hearts of oak. (And besides, they were making England rich.) Well into the nineteenth century, a popular upper-class expression of patriotism was to gather a party to visit a navy ship at dock and drink Punch with the sailors. In 1732, even Alexander Pope, the great poet of the age, participated in the ritual, answering Lord Peterborough’s invitation with the stirring words, “I decline no Danger where the Glory of Great Britain is concern’d and will contribute to empty the largest Bowl of Punch that shall be rigg’d out on such an Occasion.” It’s a wonder it didn’t kill him, sickly as he was with the chronic tuberculosis that had so stunted and twisted his bones that he was barely four and a half feet tall. Such things had been known to happen: the Calendar of State Papers for November 8, 1692, records that “One Mr. Hele, a gentleman of Devonshire, went on board the Rupert at Plymouth, and drinking too freely of punch he fell asleep and never waked.”

The spread of Punch-drinking couldn’t have been hurt by Parliament’s 1678 ban on the importation of French wines. This regulation was as much an attempt to buck up the fledgling wine trade with Portugal as it was a hit at France and its troublesome monarch, Louis XIV, but since the Portuguese, the most temperate of people, barely drank wine themselves and when they did cared little about its quality (it would take generations to create the magnificence that is port), it resulted mostly in more smuggling and spirits-drinking in England. As in turn did the various measures passed under William III—the genever-drinking Dutchman who was given the English throne in 1688 after Charles’s brother James, who succeeded him in 1685, unacceptably produced a Catholic heir—to restrict the very large wine and brandy trade with France, now an open enemy, and bulk up English grain-distilling.

The moment of transition was captured perfectly by the spectacularly alluring figure of Mrs. Aphra Behn—author, spy, courtesan, wit and mixologist (we’ll get to that last part in Book III)—in her play
The Widow Ranter
, published posthumously in 1690. Set in Virginia, it features in the very first scene a country justice of the peace “sick” from having been drunk the night before on “high Burgundy Claret.” Hearing this, his tippling companion wonders aloud “how the gentlemen do drink” that “Paulter Liquor, your
English French
wine.” “Ay so do I,” replies our over-hung J.P.:

Although Mrs. Behn was barred by her sex from participating in the strictly stag coffeehouse culture, she nonetheless maintained a wide acquaintance among the wits (the prologue to
The Widow Ranter
was supplied by no less than Dryden himself). If drinking Punch was still low enough to satirize, it must have at least been common enough for the jab to tell.
^aa

By 1690, Punch-drinking had also followed the roads out of London and taken root deep in the countryside. In 1675, when Henry Teonge joined his ship fresh from rural Warwickshire, he had pronounced the Punch of which he shared three bowls on his first night afloat “a Liquor very strange to me.” Ten years later, they had even heard of it in farthest Yorkshire, judging by the fact that George Meriton included it in the locally printed booklet of verses he wrote in praise of Yorkshire ale. Not that rural Punch-tippling didn’t have its problems, as Thomas Brown, one of Dryden’s verbal sparring partners, who found himself marooned in Hertfordshire, complained in a characteristically amusing 1692 letter on the inconveniences of country life:

Reluctantly or not, the tavern class had learned to drink Punch, and it would take it another century and a half to relinquish the sport and the sin and the pain of it.

Thus arrived the Age of Punch. In 1700, Ned Ward could opine in prose that Punch “if composed of good ingredients, and prepared with true judgment, exceeds all the simple [i.e., straight, unmixed], potable products in the universe” and in verse that “Had our forefathers but thy virtues known, / Their foggy ale to lubbers they’d have thrown.” As long as there were lubbers—that is, bumpkins—to keep ale alive, its triumph was not complete, but Punch did cast many of the other traditional compound drinks of Olde Englande, those turbid, egg-rich brews based on ale and wine, into the outer darkness, where is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Over time, the informal associations that the coffeehouses encouraged hardened into formal clubs made up of like-minded men who agreed to meet at a fixed time and venue and follow certain loose rules. Not all clubs drank Punch, but most did, and since the majority of them favored the Whigs—the (semi) progressive element in English politics and the one that supported William III against his Tory and Jacobite (i.e., loyal to the deposed James II) opponents—Punch became something of a Whig drink. In 1695, when William III visited Warwick Castle, “a cistern containing a hundred and twenty gallons of punch was emptied to his Majesty’s health,” as one contemporary history recorded. Clearly, in a time when Whiggishness was triumphant that association did nothing to impair Punch’s popularity. If the Tories, not at all progressive, stuck for a time to the traditional French wines of the English gentry, paying exorbitantly for smuggled goods when necessary, eventually they, too, would yield to the attraction of the “flowing bowl” (a phrase that was already proverbial when Matthew Prior used it in one of his poems in 1718).

Ultimately, people will drink what they will drink, politics be damned. Ned Ward, for one, was a Tory, and when he tired of Grub Street, he opened a Punch house of his own. But even if you agreed with Bishop Hoadley’s then-notorious polemic on the theme “Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world” and eschewed the vulgar money-getting and party politics of the day in favor of laying up capital for the next world, you could still partake. Henry Fielding’s prison chaplain in
The Adventures of Jonathan Wild
supplies the justification: “If we must drink, let us have a Bowl of Punch—a Liquor I rather prefer, as it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture.”

Many Punch-drinkers absorbed their portions without incident. But as Fielding also observed, this time in
Tom Jones
, “There are indeed certain Liquors, which, being applied to our Passions, or to Fire, produce Effects the very Reverse of those produced by Water, as they serve to kindle and inflame, rather than to extinguish. Among these, the generous Liquor called Punch is one.” Just because clubmen were literate and of at least a middling social rank didn’t mean that they wouldn’t sluice themselves a little too liberally from the bowl and end the evening in a crashing, heaving general brawl. With Punch on the table, even someone as civilized as Samuel Taylor Coleridge can end up smashing glassware, windows and furnishings, as he and Theodore Hook and their fellow topers did on one late evening at “a gay young bachelor’s villa near Highgate” (Coleridge brewed the Punch, so Lord knows what was in it).

But that only fit in with the times. In the early eighteenth century, London was nothing like the trim, orderly place it (mostly) is today, with its neat ranks of just-so town houses, its quiet, leafy parks and its general air of peaceful bustle. The streets in the older parts of town were dark and narrow and choked with (as Jonathan Swift put it) “filths of all hues and odour,” while not even the most fashionable new neighborhoods were exempt from having herds of swine driven through them to market. Londoners were different, too. The lords and marquesses and other fine gentlemen didn’t carry umbrellas but carried swords, and not just for show, while the common people weren’t so much plucky and quaint as frankly terrifying—a xenophobic, violent lot who made a sport of pelting anyone who ventured into the street in fancy court-dress with some of those “filths” and could turn from curious crowd to murderous mob at the drop of a handkerchief.

They did not drink Punch. They drank gin, and far too much of it. As much as their putative betters deplored the gin habit, though, they weren’t all that much better when it came to resisting the power of aqua vitae. When, in the 1730s, Parliament began to consider various prohibition measures, there were always members who could be counted on to mount passionate arguments for the exemption of Punch and its component spirits (i.e., anything but gin) from the law. In 1737, when Parliament passed the infamous Gin Act, with no exceptions, one of the first acts of protest came from the Cherry Tree Tavern in Clerkenwell (by then, taverns had followed the coffeehouses’ lead in serving Punch), where “a Company of 100 Persons resolving to drink Punch . . . had a Bowl (or rather Trough) of that liquor . . . containing 80 Gallons, which was drunk out before the Company parted.”
^ab
Reading through the Old Bailey’s records of the rapes, robberies, assaults and outright murders committed under the influence of Punch, one may conclude that at times the main difference between the filth-pelter and the peltee was the price of their tipple (those sword-carrying gentlemen, for example, had a distressing habit of getting quarrelsome over Punch and sticking each other, all too often fatally).

Punch was not cheap. Once it became a status drink, the literate classes made it an object of connoisseurship, in particular the spirits that fueled it. By the late seventeenth century, the days of generic aqua vitae were over. Now drinkers had preferences. If it wasn’t arrack, imported at great expense from the East,
^ac
it was French brandy, by now (at its best, anyway) an exceedingly well-distilled, barrel-mellowed commodity, or fragrant rum from the Caribbean. For a bowl of Punch made with one of these, one might expect to pay six or eight shillings a three-quart bowl. Eight shillings doesn’t sound like much, but in an age when, as a friend of Samuel Johnson observed to him, “thirty pounds a year was enough to enable a man to live [in London] and not be contemptible,” it amounted to half a week’s living wage—say, some two hundred dollars today. The lemons alone cost the equivalent of eight dollars each. Sure, you would split this bowl between three or four people, but it still required a rather hefty capital investment. By the 1730s, the gin-drinkers had learned to make Punch with it, which could be sold for a shilling—say, twenty-five dollars a bowl. Entirely more like it. With the creation of Gin Punch, this simple sailor’s expedient completed its conquest: all levels of English—or rather British, as it had to be called since the 1707 union of England and Scotland—society were more or less comfortable with the idea that spirits could be drunk recreationally.