Love of show was so marked a characteristic of Henry VIII. that we are not surprised to find him encouraging the citizens in the same expensive taste. On the occasion of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon the city was gorgeously ornamented with rich silks and tapestry, and Goldsmiths’ Row (Cheapside) and part of Cornhill were hung with golden brocades. When on the eve of St John’s Day, 1510, the king in the habit of a yeoman of his own guard saw the famous march of the city watch, he was so delighted that on the following St Peter’s Eve he again attended in Cheapside to see the march, but this time he was accompanied by the queen and the principal nobility. The cost of these two marches in the year was very considerable, and, having been suspended in 1528 on account of the prevalence of the sweating sickness, they were soon afterwards forbidden by the king, and discontinued during the remainder of his reign. Sir John Gresham, mayor in 1548, revived the march of the city watch, which was made more splendid by the addition of three hundred light horsemen raised by the citizens for the king’s service.
The best mode of utilizing the buildings of the suppressed religious houses was a difficult question left unsolved by Henry VIII. That king, shortly before his death, refounded Rahere’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital, “for the continual relief and help of an hundred sore and diseased,” but most of the large buildings were left unoccupied to be filled by his successor. The first parliament of Edward’s reign gave all the lands and possessions of colleges, chantries, &c., to the king, when the different companies of London redeemed those which they had held for the payment of priests’ wages, obits and lights at the price of £20,000, and applied the rents arising from them to charitable purposes. In 1550 the citizens purchased the manor of Southwark, and with it they became possessed of the monastery of St Thomas, which was enlarged and prepared for the reception of “poor, sick and helpless objects.” Thus was refounded St Thomas’s Hospital, which was moved to Lambeth in 1870-1871. Shortly before his death Edward founded Christ’s Hospital in the Grey Friars, and gave the old palace of Bridewell to the city “for the lodging of poor wayfaring people, the correction of vagabonds and disorderly persons, and for finding them work.” On the death of Edward VI. Lady Jane Grey was received at the Tower as queen, she having gone there by water from Durham House in the Strand. The citizens, however, soon found out their mistake, and the lord mayor, aldermen and recorder proclaimed Queen Mary at Cheapside. London was then gay with pageants, but when the queen made known her intention of marrying Philip of Spain the discontent of the country found vent in the rising of Sir Thomas Wyat, and the city had to prepare itself against attack. Wyat took possession of Southwark, and expected to have been admitted into London; but finding the gates shut against him and the drawbridge cut down he marched to Kingston, the bridge at which place had been destroyed. This he restored, and then proceeded towards London. In consequence of the breakdown of some of his guns he imprudently halted at Turnham Green. Had he not done so it is probable that he might have obtained possession of the city. He planted his ordnance on Hay Hill, and then marched by St James’s Palace to Charing Cross. Here he was attacked by Sir John Gage with a thousand men, but he repulsed them and reached Ludgate without further opposition. He was disappointed at the resistance which was made, and after musing a while “upon a stall over against the Bell Savadge Gate” he turned back. His retreat was cut off, and he surrendered to Sir Maurice Berkeley, we have somewhat fully described this historical incident here because it has an important bearing on the history of London, and shows also the small importance of the districts outside the walls at that period.
We now come to consider the appearance of London during the reign of the last of the Tudors. At no other period were so many great men associated with its history; the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign are specially interesting Tudor London. to us because it was then that Shakespeare lived in London, and introduced its streets and people into his plays. In those days the frequent visitation of plagues made men fear the gathering together of multitudes. This dread of pestilence, united with a puritanic hatred of plays, made the citizens do all they could to discountenance theatrical entertainments. The queen acknowledged the validity of the first reason, but she repudiated the religious objection provided ordinary care was taken to allow “such plays only as were fitted to yield honest recreation and no example of evil.” On April 11, 1582, the lords of the council wrote to the lord mayor to the effect that, as “her Majesty sometimes took delight in those pastimes, it had been thought not unfit, having regard to the season of the year and the clearance of the city from infection, to allow of certain companies of players in London, partly that they might thereby attain more dexterity and perfection the better to content her Majesty” (Analytical Index to the Remembrancia). When theatres were established the lord mayor took care that they should not be built within the city. The “Theatre” and the “Curtain” were situated at Shoreditch; the “Globe,” the “Swan,” the “Rose” and the “Hope” on the Bankside; and the Blackfriars theatre, although within the walls, was without the city jurisdiction.
In 1561 St Paul’s steeple and roof were destroyed by lightning, and the spire was never replaced. This circumstance allows us to test the date of certain views; thus Wyngaerde’s map has the spire, but Agas’s map is without it. In 1566 the first stone was laid of the “Burse,” which owed its origin to Sir Thomas Gresham. In 1571 Queen Elizabeth changed its name to the Royal Exchange. The Strand was filled with noble mansions washed by the waters of the Thames, but the street, if street it could be called, was little used by pedestrians. Londoners frequented the river, which was their great highway. The banks were crowded with stairs for boats, and the watermen of that day answered to the chairmen of a later date and the cabmen of to-day. The Bankside was of old a favourite place for entertainments, but two only—the bull-baiting and the bear-baiting—were in existence when Agas’s map was first planned. On Norden’s map,[8] however, we find the gardens of Paris Garden, the bearhouse and the playhouse.
The settled character of the later years of Elizabeth’s reign appears to have caused a considerable change in the habits of the people. Many of the chief citizens followed the example of the courtiers, and built for themselves country residences in Middlesex, Essex and Surrey; thus we learn from Norden that Alderman Roe lived at Muswell Hill, and we know that Sir Thomas Gresham built a fine house and planned a beautiful park at Osterley. The maps show us much that remains somewhat the same as it was, but also much that has greatly altered. St Giles’s was literally a village in the fields; Piccadilly was “the waye to Redinge,” Oxford Street “the way to Uxbridge,” Covent Garden an open field or garden, and Leicester Fields lammas land. Moorfields was drained and laid out in walks in Elizabeth’s reign. At Spitalfields crowds used to congregate on Easter Monday and Tuesday to hear the Spital sermons preached from the pulpit cross. The ground was originally a Roman Cemetery, and about the year 1576 bricks were largely made from the clayey earth, the recollection of which is kept alive in the name of Brick Lane. Citizens went to Holborn and Bloomsbury for change of air, and houses were there prepared for the reception of children, invalids and convalescents. In the north were sprinkled the outlying villages of Islington, Hoxton and Clerkenwell.
6. Stuart (1603-1714).—The Stuart period, from the accession of James I. to the death of Queen Anne, extends over little more than a century, and yet greater changes occurred during those years than at any previous period. The early years of Stuart London may be said to be closely linked with the last years of Elizabethan London, for the greatest men, such as Raleigh, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, lived on into James’s reign. Much of the life of the time was then in the City, but the last years of Stuart London take us to the 18th century, when social life had permanently shifted to the west end. In the middle of the period occurred the civil wars, and then the fire which changed the whole aspect of London. When James came to the throne the term suburbs had a bad name, as all those disreputable persons who could find no shelter in the city itself settled in these outlying districts. Stubbs denounced suburban gardens and garden houses in his Anatomy of Abuses, and another writer observed “how happy were cities if they had no suburbs.”
The preparations for the coronation of King James were interrupted by a severe visitation of the plague, which killed off as many as 30,578 persons, and it was not till March 15, 1604, that the king, the queen and Prince Henry passed triumphantly from the Tower to Westminster. The lord mayor’s shows, which had been discontinued for some years, were revived by order of the king in 1609. The dissolved monastery of the Charterhouse, which had been bought and sold by the courtiers several times, was obtained from Thomas, earl of Suffolk, by Thomas Sutton for £13,000. The new hospital chapel and schoolhouse were begun in 1611, and in the same year Sutton died.
With the death of James I. in 1625 the older history of London may be said to have closed. During the reign of his successor the great change in the relative positions of London within and without the walls had set in. Before Social life. going on to consider the chief incidents of this change it will be well to refer to some features of the social life of James’s reign. Ben Jonson places one of the scenes of Every Man in his Humour in Moorfields, which at the time he wrote the play had, as stated above, lately been drained and laid out in walks. Beggars frequented the place, and travellers from the village of Hoxton, who crossed it in order to get into London, did so with as much expedition as possible. Adjoining Moorfields were Finsbury Fields, a favourite practising ground for the archers. Mile End, a common on the Great Eastern Road, was long famous as a rendezvous for the troops. These places are frequently referred to by the old dramatists; Justice Shallow boasts of his doings at Mile End Green when he was Dagonet in Arthur’s Show. Fleet Street was the show-place of London, in which were exhibited a constant succession of puppets, naked Indians and strange fishes. The great meeting-place of Londoners in the day-time was the nave of old St Paul’s. Crowds of merchants with their hats on transacted business in the aisles, and used the font as a counter upon which to make their payments; lawyers received clients at their several pillars; and masterless serving-men waited to be engaged upon their own particular bench. Besides those who came on business there were gallants dressed in fashionable finery, so that it was worth the tailor’s while to stand behind a pillar and fill his table-books with notes. The middle or Mediterranean aisle was the Paul’s walk, also called the Duke’s Gallery from the erroneous supposition that the tomb of Sir Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was that of the “good” Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. After the Restoration a fence was erected on the inside of the great north door to hinder a concourse of rude people, and when the cathedral was being rebuilt Sir Christopher Wren made a strict order against any profanation of the sacred building. St Paul’s churchyard was from the earliest days of printing until the end of the 18th century the headquarters of the book trade, when it shifted to Paternoster Row. Another of the favourite haunts of the people was the garden of Gray’s Inn, where the choicest society was to be met. There, under the shadow of the elm trees which Bacon had planted, Pepys and his wife constantly walked. Mrs Pepys went on one occasion specially to observe the fashions of the ladies because she was then “making some clothes.”
In those days of public conviviality, and for many years afterwards, the taverns of London held a very important place. The Boar’s Head in Great Eastcheap was an inn of Shakespeare’s own day, and the characters he introduces Taverns. into his plays are really his own contemporaries. The “Mermaid” is sometimes described as in Bread Street, and at other times in Friday Street and also in Cheapside. We are thus able to fix its exact position; for a little to the west of Bow church is Bread Street, then came a block of houses, and the next thoroughfare was Friday Street. It was in this block that the “Mermaid” was situated, and there appear to have been entrances from each street. What makes this fact still more certain is the circumstance that a haberdasher in Cheapside living “’twixt Wood Street and Milk Street,” two streets on the north side opposite Bread and Friday Streets, described himself as “over against the Mermaid tavern in Cheapside.” The Windmill tavern occupies a prominent position in the action of Every Man in his Humour.[9] The Windmill stood at the corner of the Old Jewry towards Lothbury, and the Mitre close by the Mermaid in Bread Street. The Mitre in Fleet Street, so intimately associated with Dr Johnson, also existed at this time. It is mentioned in a comedy entitled Ram Alley (1611) and Lilly the astrologer frequented it in 1640. At the Mermaid Ben Jonson had such companions as Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Carew, Donne, Cotton and Selden, but at the Devil in Fleet Street, where he started the Apollo Club, he was omnipotent. Herrick, in his well-known Ode to Ben, mentions several of the inns of the day.
Under James I. the theatre, which established itself so firmly in the latter years of Elizabeth, had still further increased its influence, and to the entertainments given at the many playhouses may be added the masques so Theatres. expensively produced at court and by the lawyers at the inns of court. In 1613 The Masque of Flowers was presented by the members of Gray’s Inn in the Old Banqueting House in honour of the marriage of the infamous Carr, earl of Somerset, and the equally infamous Lady Frances, daughter of the earl of Suffolk. The entertainment was prepared by Sir Francis Bacon at a cost of about £2000.