London in the Time of the Stuarts

by Walter Besant

Judgment was therefore entered against the City. The King was now therefore absolutely master of the City. He allowed Pritchard to continue as Mayor and the two Sheriffs to remain; eight Aldermen were dismissed; sixteen were made Justices of the Peace; the Recorder was dismissed and another appointed, and Sir Henry Tulse was nominated Mayor to succeed Pritchard.

Now had Charles the First been clever enough at the outset to secure and use for his own interest the Court party in the City, all his troubles might have been avoided. On the other hand, had Charles the Second begun his reign instead of ending it with the enslaving of the City, he might have died the same death as his father, with the certainty that there would have been none to lament him. The City was not yet, however, made safe; there remained the companies. These also, being served with a Quo Warranto, had to surrender their charters and receive new ones with certain trifling conditions.

I have said nothing of the national aspect of this struggle. Let us remind ourselves that the conquest of London was only part of the conquest of the kingdom; that the triumph of despotism in London was accompanied by the triumph of despotism in the country. The country party was broken up. Shaftesbury had fled; with him many of the London merchants; Essex had committed suicide; Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney had been executed; Monmouth had fled. The towns attacked, like London, with Quo Warranto, surrendered their charters and received them back, with conditions. Oxford had declared for passive obedience. All but the most thorough loyalists were excluded from the franchise; Charles had the representation of every borough in his own hands. More than this, he had an army of 10,000 men.

The wonderful ability with which this Revolution was effected may be credited to Charles’s ministers; one seems, however, to perceive the King’s brain devising and the King’s hand executing the whole. And the master-stroke of all was that by which he acquired the whole power; he violated no law and executed no overt acts of tyranny. He was using the forms and institutions of liberty for the purpose of crushing liberty. He did not even restore old abuses; the Star Chamber and the Court of High Commission did not reappear. Freedom of the press was granted. The Habeas Corpus Act was passed. And the City of London, stripped of all real power, retained the form of it, and on the strength of the form seemed to preserve the old loyalty and the old personal affection for the King who had taken away its powers and its privileges. And this was even a more wonderful achievement for Charles than his triumph. Yet the loyalty and the affection were but forms and shadows like the ghostly form of its liberties left to the City.

What the King would have done with his absolute authority one knows not, because in the very hour of his success he was stricken down by death. I have refrained from speaking much of Charles’s Court, because by this time the Court and the City were entirely separate, and were drifting apart more and more. Yet one cannot avoid asking what the better class of people, what the baser sort, knew of the Court and the life led by King Charles and his courtiers. Something of the King’s mistresses they knew; witness the well-known story of Nell Gwynne and the mob; witness also that other story of the riot in 1668 when the ’prentices pulled down and wrecked certain disorderly houses in Moorfields, saying that they did “ill in contenting themselves with pulling down the little brothels and did not go to pull down the big one at Whitehall.” Eight of the rioters were hanged for this offence, which did not stop the appearance of the Remonstrance pretending to be a petition from the women whose houses had been destroyed to the King’s mistresses at Whitehall. But they could not have known the corruption, the venality, and the profligacy of Whitehall; that could only be learned by the habitués; there were no papers to spread the infamy abroad; there was no fierce light of journalism thrown upon the King’s private life.

The general belief concerning the Court of Charles II. is that it presented to the world nothing but a long-continued pageant of profligacy, extravagance, luxury, waste, and open contempt of morals. We remember Evelyn’s often-quoted account of the last Sunday evening before the fatal seizure; Pepys tell us what he saw and heard; De Grammont’s book is well known to all; the name and the fame and the shame of the King’s mistresses are notorious; the men seem devoid of honour, and the women match the men. It appears, to one who would restore the palace in the days of the Merry Monarch, that all day long the courts of Whitehall echo with the tinkling guitar; at every window is a light o’ love; below one of these the King converses gaily and carelessly; we hear the laughter, loud and coarse, of the titled harlots; with painted faces and languishing eyes they roll by in their coaches; the singing boys practise the latest part song by Tom D’Urfey; the courtiers are loud with ribald jest. I suppose that these things cannot be denied. It is, however, a great mistake to suppose that there was no serious side to the Court. In the first place, it is impossible to conduct the business of the kingdom without an immense amount of ceremony and state. Charles was not an Edward the Second; there is nothing to show that he did not do what was expected of a king with as much dignity as his father, even though he did not take himself so seriously. There were grave and weighty troubles and difficulties in his reign; domestic troubles such as the Fire of London; foreign troubles such as the war with the Dutch; the King’s counsellors were for the most part grave and serious men. Add to this that every officer in the numerous household and following of the King desired and expected his rank and dignity to be respected.

NELL GWYNNE (1650–1687)

From the painting by Sir Peter Lely in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

There were daily duties to be performed. The King held a levée every morning; he went in state to prayers; he received his ministers and sat at the Council; he dined in public; the Court was open to any one who might venture to claim the rank and consideration of a gentleman; the King was accessible to all. The quiet, dull Court of the Georges was a new thing altogether in the land. Charles kept open house, like the kings of France. He walked fearlessly and almost unattended in the Park and in his gardens; one cannot, I repeat, deny the gambling, singing, and love-making which the King permitted and encouraged; but I plead for Charles that amount of serious attention to his state and dignity of his position, no small amount, which was necessary for the mere maintenance of kingship. In other things the laxness of his morals did not prevent the assertion of his prerogative, especially in his dealings with the City of London. No king before him, for instance, had dared to inflict upon the City so enormous a fine as that when Charles shut up the Exchequer and robbed the merchants of a million and a half of money. This one action, so bold, so calculated both as to the occasion and the probable impotence of the City to resist it, ought to be alone sufficient to set aside completely the old theory of the jaded voluptuary. It was not, again, the jaded voluptuary who plotted, planned, and carried out the destruction of the City liberties; it was a Stuart, with all the cleverness of his race, with all the tenacity of his father and his brother, and with all the inability to discern the forces that were arrayed against him and to comprehend the certainty of their success. He died in the moment of his success, leaving to his brother the fruits of his despotic measures in ruin and deposition (see [Appendix I].).