No More Learning

Even the first
magistrates of that city were not ashamed to enrich themselves by so
odious a commerce. The number of houses appears, from the returns of the
hearth money, to have been in the year 1685, just five thousand three
hundred. We can hardly suppose the number of persons in a house to have
been greater than in the city of London; and in the city of London we
learn from the best authority that there were then fifty-five persons
to ten houses. The population of Bristol must therefore have been about
twenty-nine thousand souls. [90]

Norwich was the capital of a large and fruitful province. It was the
residence of a Bishop and of a Chapter. It was the chief seat of the
chief manufacture of the realm. Some men distinguished by learning and
science had recently dwelt there and no place in the kingdom, except the
capital and the Universities, had more attractions for the curious. The
library, the museum, the aviary, and the botanical garden of Sir Thomas
Browne, were thought by Fellows of the Royal Society well worthy of a
long pilgrimage. Norwich had also a court in miniature. In the heart
of the city stood an old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, said to be the
largest town house in the kingdom out of London. In this mansion, to
which were annexed a tennis court, a bowling green, and a wilderness
stretching along the banks of the Wansum, the noble family of
Howard frequently resided, and kept a state resembling that of petty
sovereigns. Drink was served to guests in goblets of pure gold. The very
tongs and shovels were of silver. Pictures by Italian masters adorned
the walls. The cabinets were filled with a fine collection of gems
purchased by that Earl of Arundel whose marbles are now among the
ornaments of Oxford. Here, in the year 1671, Charles and his court were
sumptuously entertained. Here, too, all comers were annually welcomed,
from Christmas to Twelfth Night. Ale flowed in oceans for the populace.
Three coaches, one of which had been built at a cost of five hundred
pounds to contain fourteen persons, were sent every afternoon round
the city to bring ladies to the festivities; and the dances were always
followed by a luxurious banquet. When the Duke of Norfolk came to
Norwich, he was greeted like a King returning to his capital. The bells
of the Cathedral and of St. Peter Mancroft were rung: the guns of
the castle were fired; and the Mayor and Aldermen waited on their
illustrious fellow citizen with complimentary addresses. In the year
1693 the population of Norwich was found by actual enumeration, to be
between twenty-eight and twenty-nine thousand souls. [91]

Far below Norwich, but still high in dignity and importance, were some
other ancient capitals of shires. In that age it was seldom that a
country gentleman went up with his family to London. The county town was
his metropolis. He sometimes made it his residence during part of the
year. At all events, he was often attracted thither by business and
pleasure, by assizes, quarter sessions, elections, musters of militia,
festivals, and races. There were the halls where the judges, robed
in scarlet and escorted by javelins and trumpets, opened the King's
commission twice a year. There were the markets at which the corn, the
cattle, the wool, and the hops of the surrounding country were exposed
to sale. There were the great fairs to which merchants came clown from
London, and where the rural dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar,
stationery, cutlery, and muslin. There were the shops at which the best
families of the neighbourhood bought grocery and millinery. Some of
these places derived dignity from interesting historical recollections,
from cathedrals decorated by all the art and magnificence of the middle
ages, from palaces where a long succession of prelates had dwelt, from
closes surrounded by the venerable abodes of deans and canons, and from
castles which had in the old time repelled the Nevilles or de Veres, and
which bore more recent traces of the vengeance of Rupert or of Cromwell.

Conspicuous amongst these interesting cities were York, the capital
of the north, and Exeter, the capital of the west. Neither can have
contained much more than ten thousand inhabitants. Worcester, the queen
of the cider land had but eight thousand; Nottingham probably as many.
Gloucester, renowned for that resolute defence which had been fatal to
Charles the First, had certainly between four and five thousand; Derby
not quite four thousand. Shrewsbury was the chief place of an extensive
and fertile district. The Court of the Marches of Wales was held there.
In the language of the gentry many miles round the Wrekin, to go to
Shrewsbury was to go to town. The provincial wits and beauties imitated,
as well as they could, the fashions of Saint James's Park, in the walks
along the side of the Severn. The inhabitants were about seven thousand.
[92]

The population of every one of these places has, since the Revolution,
much more than doubled. The population of some has multiplied sevenfold.
The streets have been almost entirely rebuilt. Slate has succeeded to
thatch, and brick to timber. The pavements and the lamps, the display
of wealth in the principal shops, and the luxurious neatness of the
dwellings occupied by the gentry would, in the seventeenth century, have
seemed miraculous. Yet is the relative importance of the old capitals of
counties by no means what it was. Younger towns, towns which are
rarely or never mentioned in our early history and which sent no
representatives to our early Parliaments, have, within the memory
of persons still living, grown to a greatness which this generation
contemplates with wonder and pride, not unaccompanied by awe and
anxiety.

The most eminent of these towns were indeed known in the seventeenth
century as respectable seats of industry. Nay, their rapid progress
and their vast opulence were then sometimes described in language which
seems ludicrous to a man who has seen their present grandeur. One of the
most populous and prosperous among them was Manchester. Manchester
had been required by the Protector to send one representative to his
Parliament, and was mentioned by writers of the time of Charles the
Second as a busy and opulent place. Cotton had, during half a century,
been brought thither from Cyprus and Smyrna; but the manufacture was in
its infancy. Whitney had not yet taught how the raw material might be
furnished in quantities almost fabulous. Arkwright had not yet taught
how it might be worked up with a speed and precision which seem magical.
The whole annual import did not, at the end of the seventeenth century,
amount to two millions of pounds, a quantity which would now hardly
supply the demand of forty-eight hours. That wonderful emporium, which
in population and wealth far surpassed capitals so much renowned as
Berlin, Madrid, and Lisbon, was then a mean and ill built market town
containing under six thousand people. It then had not a single press. It
now supports a hundred printing establishments. It then had not a single
coach. It now Supports twenty coach makers. [93]

Leeds was already the chief seat of the woollen manufactures of
Yorkshire; but the elderly inhabitants could still remember the time
when the first brick house, then and long after called the Red House,
was built. They boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the
immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the bridge.
Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds, had been paid down in the course of
one busy market day. The rising importance of Leeds had attracted
the notice of successive governments. Charles the First had granted
municipal privileges to the town. Oliver had invited it to send one
member to the House of Commons. But from the returns of the hearth money
it seems certain that the whole population of the borough, an extensive
district which contains many hamlets, did not, in the reign of Charles
the Second, exceed seven thousand souls. In 1841 there were more than a
hundred and fifty thousand. [94]

About a day's journey south of Leeds, on the verge of a wild moorland
tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with cultivation, then barren and
unenclosed, which was known by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded
there; and, from a very early period, the rude whittles fabricated there
had been sold all over the kingdom. They had indeed been mentioned by
Geoffrey Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture
appears to have made little progress during the three centuries which
followed his time. This languor may perhaps be explained by the fact
that the trade was, during almost the whole of this long period, subject
to such regulations as the lord and his court feet thought fit to
impose. The more delicate kinds of cutlery were either made in the
capital or brought from the Continent. Indeed it was not till the reign
of George the First that the English surgeons ceased to import from
France those exquisitely fine blades which are required for operations
on the human frame. Most of the Hallamshire forges were collected in a
market town which had sprung up near the castle of the proprietor, and
which, in the reign of James the First, had been a singularly miserable
place, containing about two thousand inhabitants, of whom a third were
half starved and half naked beggars. It seems certain from the parochial
registers that the population did not amount to four thousand at the
end of the reign of Charles the Second. The effects of a species of toil
singularly unfavourable to the health and vigour of the human frame were
at once discerned by every traveller. A large proportion of the
people had distorted limbs. This is that Sheffield which now, with its
dependencies, contains a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and which
sends forth its admirable knives, razors, and lancets to the farthest
ends of the world. [95]

Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance to return a
member to Oliver's Parliament. Yet the manufacturers of Birmingham were
already a busy and thriving race. They boasted that their hardware was
highly esteemed, not indeed as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and
Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had
acquired a less honourable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion
to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues,
who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of
Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the population, which is now little less
than two hundred thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham
buttons were just beginning to be known: of Birmingham guns nobody had
yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the magnificent
editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all the librarians
of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop where a Bible or an
almanack could be bought. On Market days a bookseller named Michael
Johnson, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, came over from
Lichfield, and opened stall during a few hours. This supply of
literature was long found equal to the demand. [96]

These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial
mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent
hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets
without parish churches, or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and
wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which
the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over
the whole world. At present Liverpool contains more than three hundred
thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to
between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom house has
been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as
the whole income of the English crown in 1685. The receipts of her post
office, even since the great reduction of the duty, exceed the sum
which the postage of the whole kingdom yielded to the Duke of York. Her
endless docks, quays, and warehouses are among the wonders of the world.
Yet even those docks and quays and warehouses seem hardly to suffice for
the gigantic trade of the Mersey; and already a rival city is growing
fast on the opposite shore. In the days of Charles the Second Liverpool
was described as a rising town which had recently made great advances,
and which maintained a profitable intercourse with Ireland and with the
sugar colonies. The customs had multiplied eight-fold within sixteen
years, and amounted to what was then considered as the immense sum of
fifteen thousand pounds annually. But the population can hardly have
exceeded four thousand: the shipping was about fourteen hundred tons,
less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class,
and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be estimated
at more than two hundred. [97]

Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and
accumulated. Not less rapid has been the progress of towns of a
very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and accumulated
elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of
the most remarkable of these gay places have sprung into existence since
the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any which
the kingdom contained in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted.
But in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth,
Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish
lying under the Cotswold Hills, and affording good ground both for
tillage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed over the space now
covered by that long succession of streets and villas. [98] Brighton was
described as a place which had once been thriving, which had possessed
many small fishing barks, and which had, when at the height of
prosperity, contained above two thousand inhabitants, but which was
sinking fast into decay. The sea was gradually gaining on the buildings,
which at length almost entirely disappeared. Ninety years ago the ruins
of an old fort were to be seen lying among the pebbles and seaweed
on the beach; and ancient men could still point out the traces of
foundations on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts had
been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place after this
calamity, that the vicarage was thought scarcely worth having. A few
poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry their nets on those
cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice as large and populous
as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents, mile after mile, its gay and
fantastic front to the sea. [99]

England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, destitute of
watering places. The gentry of Derbyshire and of the neighbouring
counties repaired to Buxton, where they were lodged in low rooms under
bare rafters, and regaled with oatcake, and with a viand which the hosts
called mutton, but which the guests suspected to be dog. A single good
house stood near the spring. [100] Tunbridge Wells, lying within a
day's journey of the capital, and in one of the richest and most highly
civilised parts of the kingdom, had much greater attractions. At present
we see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have
ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of England. The
brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the private dwellings far
surpasses anything that England could then show. When the court, soon
after the Restoration, visited Tunbridge Wells, there was no town:
but, within a mile of the spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner and
neater than the ordinary cottages of that time, were scattered over the
heath. Some of these cabins were movable and were carried on sledges
from one part of the common to another. To these huts men of fashion,
wearied with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came in the summer
to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of rural life. During the
season a kind of fair was daily held near the fountain. The wives and
daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighbouring villages
with cream, cherries, wheatears, and quails. To chaffer with them,
to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a
refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and
maids of honour. Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came down from London,
and opened a bazaar under the trees. In one booth the politician might
find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another were gamblers playing
deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the fiddles were in attendance
and there were morris dances on the elastic turf of the bowling green.
In 1685 a subscription had just been raised among those who frequented
the wells for building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered
everywhere, insisted on dedicating to Saint Charles the Martyr. [101]

But at the head of the English watering places, without a rival. was
Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the days of the
Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat of a Bishop. The
sick repaired thither from every part of the realm. The King sometimes
held his court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only four or
five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in the vicinity of the
Avon. Pictures of what were considered as the finest of those houses are
still extant, and greatly resemble the lowest rag shops and pothouses of
Ratcliffe Highway. Travellers indeed complained loudly of the narrowness
and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which charms even eyes
familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the
genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen,
has made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself
was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and hedgerows intersected
the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor
patients to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place
which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a covert
rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be
found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors
who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess
information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained
on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about
sixty years after the Revolution has accurately described the changes
which had taken place within his own recollection. He assures us that,
in his younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in
rooms hardly as good as the garrets which he lived to see occupied
by footmen. The floors of the dining rooms were uncarpeted, and were
coloured brown with a wash made of soot and small beer, in order to hide
the dirt. Not a wainscot was painted. Not a hearth or a chimneypiece
was of marble. A slab of common free-stone and fire irons which had cost
from three to four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace.
The best-apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and were
furnished with rushbottomed chairs. Readers who take an interest in the
progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be grateful to the
humble topographer who has recorded these facts, and will perhaps wish
that historians of far higher pretensions had sometimes spared a few
pages from military evolutions and political intrigues, for the purpose
of letting us know how the parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors
looked. [102]

The position of London, relatively to the other towns of the empire,
was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher than at present. For
at present the population of London is little more than six times the
population of Manchester or of Liverpool. In the days of Charles the
Second the population of London was more than seventeen times the
population of Bristol or of Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other
instance can be mentioned of a great kingdom in which the first city
was more than seventeen times as large as the second. There is reason to
believe that, in 1685, London had been, during about half a century, the
most populous capital in Europe. The inhabitants, who are now at least
nineteen hundred thousand, were then probably little more shall half a
million. [103] London had in the world only one commercial rival, now
long ago outstripped, the mighty and opulent Amsterdam. English writers
boasted of the forest of masts and yardarms which covered the river from
the Bridge to the Tower, and of the stupendous sums which were collected
at the Custom House in Thames Street. There is, indeed, no doubt that
the trade of the metropolis then bore a far greater proportion than at
present to the whole trade of the country; yet to our generation the
honest vaunting of our ancestors must appear almost ludicrous. The
shipping which they thought incredibly great appears not to have
exceeded seventy thousand tons. This was, indeed, then more than a third
of the whole tonnage of the kingdom, but is now less than a fourth of
the tonnage of Newcastle, and is nearly equalled by the tonnage of the
steam vessels of the Thames.

The customs of London amounted, in 1685, to about three hundred and
thirty thousand pounds a year. In our time the net duty paid annually,
at the same place, exceeds ten millions. [104]

Whoever examines the maps of London which were published towards the
close of the reign of Charles the Second will see that only the nucleus
of the present capital then existed. The town did not, as now, fade
by imperceptible degrees into the country. No long avenues of villas,
embowered in lilacs and laburnums, extended from the great centre of
wealth and civilisation almost to the boundaries of Middlesex and far
into the heart of Kent and Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense
line of warehouses and artificial lakes which now stretches from the
Tower to Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one
of those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble and
wealthy was in existence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled by more than
forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country village with about
a thousand inhabitants. [105] On the north, cattle fed, and sportsmen
wandered with dogs and guns, over the site of the borough of Marylebone,
and over far the greater part of the space now covered by the boroughs
of Finsbury and of the Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude;
and poets loved to contrast its silence and repose with the din and
turmoil of the monster London. [106] On the south the capital is
now connected with its suburb by several bridges, not inferior in
magnificence and solidity to the noblest works of the Caesars. In 1685,
a single line of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and crazy
houses, and garnished, after a fashion worthy of the naked barbarians of
Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, impeded the navigation of the
river.

Of the metropolis, the City, properly so called, was the most important
division. At the time of the Restoration it had been built, for the most
part, of wood and plaster; the few bricks that were used were ill baked;
the booths where goods were exposed to sale projected far into the
streets, and were overhung by the upper stories. A few specimens of this
architecture may still be seen in those districts which were not reached
by the great fire. That fire had, in a few days, covered a space of
little less shall a square mile with the ruins of eighty-nine churches
and of thirteen thousand houses. But the City had risen again with a
celerity which had excited the admiration of neighbouring countries.
Unfortunately, the old lines of the streets had been to a great extent
preserved; and those lines, originally traced in an age when even
princesses performed their journeys on horseback, were often too narrow
to allow wheeled carriages to pass each other with ease, and were
therefore ill adapted for the residence of wealthy persons in an age
when a coach and six was a fashionable luxury. The style of building
was, however, far superior to that of the City which had perished. The
ordinary material was brick, of much better quality than had formerly
been used. On the sites of the ancient parish churches had arisen a
multitude of new domes, towers, and spires which bore the mark of the
fertile genius of Wren. In every place save one the traces of the great
devastation had been completely effaced. But the crowds of workmen, the
scaffolds, and the masses of hewn stone were still to be seen where the
noblest of Protestant temples was slowly rising on the ruins of the Old
Cathedral of Saint Paul. [107]

The whole character of the City has, since that time, undergone a
complete change. At present the bankers, the merchants, and the chief
shopkeepers repair thither on six mornings of every week for the
transaction of business; but they reside in other quarters of the
metropolis, or at suburban country seats surrounded by shrubberies
and flower gardens. This revolution in private habits has produced
a political revolution of no small importance. The City is no longer
regarded by the wealthiest traders with that attachment which every man
naturally feels for his home. It is no longer associated in their minds
with domestic affections and endearments. The fireside, the nursery,
the social table, the quiet bed are not there. Lombard Street and
Threadneedle Street are merely places where men toil and accumulate.
They go elsewhere to enjoy and to expend. On a Sunday, or in an evening
after the hours of business, some courts and alleys, which a few hours
before had been alive with hurrying feet and anxious faces, are as
silent as the glades of a forest. The chiefs of the mercantile interest
are no longer citizens. They avoid, they almost contemn, municipal
honours and duties. Those honours and duties are abandoned to men who,
though useful and highly respectable, seldom belong to the princely
commercial houses of which the names are renowned throughout the world.

In the seventeenth century the City was the merchant's residence. Those
mansions of the great old burghers which still exist have been turned
into counting houses and warehouses: but it is evident that they were
originally not inferior in magnificence to the dwellings which were then
inhabited by the nobility. They sometimes stand in retired and gloomy
courts, and are accessible only by inconvenient passages: but their
dimensions are ample, and their aspect stately. The entrances are
decorated with richly carved pillars and canopies.
The staircases and
landing places are not wanting in grandeur. The floors are sometimes of
wood tessellated after the fashion of France. The palace of Sir Robert
Clayton, in the Old Jewry, contained a superb banqueting room wainscoted
with cedar, and adorned with battles of gods and giants in fresco. [108]
Sir Dudley North expended four thousand pounds, a sum which would then
have been important to a Duke, on the rich furniture of his reception
rooms in Basinghall Street. [109] In such abodes, under the last
Stuarts, the heads of the great firms lived splendidly and hospitably.
To their dwelling place they were bound by the strongest ties of
interest and affection. There they had passed their youth, had made
their friendships, had courted their wives had seen their children grow
up, had laid the remains of their parents in the earth, and expected
that their own remains would be laid. That intense patriotism which is
peculiar to the members of societies congregated within a narrow space
was, in such circumstances, strongly developed. London was, to the
Londoner, what Athens was to the Athenian of the age of Pericles, what
Florence was to the Florentine of the fifteenth century. The citizen
was proud of the grandeur of his city, punctilious about her claims to
respect, ambitious of her offices, and zealous for her franchises.

At the close of the reign of Charles the Second the pride of the
Londoners was smarting from a cruel mortification. The old charter had
been taken away; and the magistracy had been remodelled. All the civic
functionaries were Tories: and the Whigs, though in numbers and in
wealth superior to their opponents, found themselves excluded from every
local dignity. Nevertheless, the external splendour of the municipal
government was not diminished, nay, was rather increased by this change.
For, under the administration of some Puritans who had lately borne
rule, the ancient fame of the City for good cheer had declined: but
under the new magistrates, who belonged to a more festive party, and
at whose boards guests of rank and fashion from beyond Temple Bar were
often seen, the Guildhall and the halls of the great companies were
enlivened by many sumptuous banquets. During these repasts, odes
composed by the poet laureate of the corporation, in praise of the King,
the Duke, and the Mayor, were sung to music. The drinking was deep and
the shouting loud. An observant Tory, who had often shared in these
revels, has remarked that the practice of huzzaing after drinking
healths dates from this joyous period. [110]

The magnificence displayed by the first civic magistrate was almost
regal. The gilded coach, indeed, which is now annually admired by the
crowd, was not yet a part of his state. On great occasions he appeared
on horseback, attended by a long cavalcade inferior in magnificence
only to that which, before a coronation, escorted the sovereign from the
Tower to Westminster. The Lord Mayor was never seen in public without
his rich robe, his hood of black velvet, his gold chain, his jewel, and
a great attendance of harbingers and guards. [111] Nor did the world
find anything ludicrous in the pomp which constantly surrounded him. For
it was not more than became the place which, as wielding the strength
and representing the dignity of the City of London, he was entitled to
occupy in the State. That City, being then not only without equal in the
country, but without second, had, during five and forty years, exercised
almost as great an influence on the politics of England as Paris has,
in our own time, exercised on the politics of France. In intelligence
London was greatly in advance of every other part of the kingdom. A
government, supported and trusted by London, could in a day obtain such
pecuniary means as it would have taken months to collect from the rest
of the island. Nor were the military resources of the capital to be
despised. The power which the Lord Lieutenants exercised in other
parts of the kingdom was in London entrusted to a Commission of eminent
citizens. Under the order of this Commission were twelve regiments of
foot and two regiments of horse. An army of drapers' apprentices and
journeymen tailors, with common councilmen for captains and aldermen for
colonels, might not indeed have been able to stand its ground against
regular troops; but there were then very few regular troops in the
kingdom. A town, therefore, which could send forth, at an hour's notice,
thousands of men, abounding in natural courage, provided with tolerable
weapons, and not altogether untinctured with martial discipline, could
not but be a valuable ally and a formidable enemy. It was not forgotten
that Hampden and Pym had been protected from lawless tyranny by the
London trainbands; that, in the great crisis of the civil war, the
London trainbands had marched to raise the siege of Gloucester; or that,
in the movement against the military tyrants which followed the downfall
of Richard Cromwell, the London trainbands had borne a signal part. In
truth, it is no exaggeration to say that, but for the hostility of the
City, Charles the First would never have been vanquished, and that,
without the help of the City, Charles the Second could scarcely have
been restored.

These considerations may serve to explain why, in spite of that
attraction which had, during a long course of years, gradually drawn the
aristocracy westward, a few men of high rank had continued, till a
very recent period, to dwell in the vicinity of the Exchange and of
the Guildhall. Shaftesbury and Buckingham, while engaged in bitter and
unscrupulous opposition to the government, had thought that they could
nowhere carry on their intrigues so conveniently or so securely as under
the protection of the City magistrates and the City militia. Shaftesbury
had therefore lived in Aldersgate Street, at a house which may still
be easily known by pilasters and wreaths, the graceful work of Inigo.
Buckingham had ordered his mansion near Charing Cross, once the abode
of the Archbishops of York, to be pulled down; and, while streets and
alleys which are still named after him were rising on that site, chose
to reside in Dowgate. [112]

These, however, were rare exceptions. Almost all the noble families of
England had long migrated beyond the walls. The district where most of
their town houses stood lies between the city and the regions which
are now considered as fashionable. A few great men still retained their
hereditary hotels in the Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and
west of Lincoln's Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton
Square, which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho
Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite spots.
Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as one of the
wonders of England. [113] Soho Square, which had just been built, was to
our ancestors a subject of pride with which their posterity will hardly
sympathise. Monmouth Square had been the name while the fortunes of
the Duke of Monmouth flourished; and on the southern side towered his
mansion. The front, though ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned.
The walls of the principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit,
foliage, and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin.
[114] Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no
aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical
quarter. A little way north from Holborn, and on the verge of the
pastures and corn-fields, rose two celebrated palaces, each with
an ample garden. One of them, then called Southampton House, and
subsequently Bedford House, was removed about fifty years ago to make
room for a new city, which now covers with its squares, streets, and
churches, a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth century for peaches
and snipes. The other, Montague House, celebrated for its frescoes and
furniture, was, a few months after the death of Charles the Second,
burned to the ground, and was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent
Montague House, which, having been long the repository of such various
and precious treasures of art, science, and learning as were scarcely
ever before assembled under a single roof, has now given place to an
edifice more magnificent still. [115]

Nearer to the Court, on a space called St. James's Fields, had just
been built St. James's Square and Jermyn Street. St. James's Church had
recently been opened for the accommodation of the inhabitants of this
new quarter. [116] Golden Square, which was in the next generation
inhabited by lords and ministers of state, had not yet been begun.
Indeed the only dwellings to be seen on the north of Piccadilly were
three or four isolated and almost rural mansions, of which the most
celebrated was the costly pile erected by CIarendon, and nicknamed
Dunkirk House. It had been purchased after its founder's downfall by
the Duke of Albemarle. The Clarendon Hotel and Albemarle Street still
preserve the memory of the site.

He who then rambled to what is now the gayest and most crowded part
of Regent Street found himself in a solitude, and, was sometimes so
fortunate as to have a shot at a woodcock. [117] On the north the Oxford
road ran between hedges. Three or four hundred yards to the south were
the garden walls of a few great houses which were considered as quite
out of town. On the west was a meadow renowned for a spring from which,
long afterwards, Conduit Street was named. On the east was a field not
to be passed without a shudder by any Londoner of that age. There, as in
a place far from the haunts of men, had been dug, twenty years before,
when the great plague was raging, a pit into which the dead carts had
nightly shot corpses by scores. It was popularly believed that the earth
was deeply tainted with infection, and could not be disturbed without
imminent risk to human life. No foundations were laid there till two
generations had passed without any return of the pestilence, and till
the ghastly spot had long been surrounded by buildings. [118]

We should greatly err if we were to suppose that any of the streets and
squares then bore the same aspect as at present. The great majority of
the houses, indeed have, since that time, been wholly, or in great part,
rebuilt. If the most fashionable parts of the capital could be placed
before us such as they then were, we should be disgusted by their
squalid appearance, and poisoned by their noisome atmosphere.

In Covent Garden a filthy and noisy market was held close to the
dwellings of the great. Fruit women screamed, carters fought, cabbage
stalks and rotten apples accumulated in heaps at the thresholds of the
Countess of Berkshire and of the Bishop of Durham. [119]

The centre of Lincoln's Inn Fields was an open space where the rabble
congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and
Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and
to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses
were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and importunate as in
the worst governed cities of the Continent. A Lincoln's Inn mumper was
a proverb. The whole fraternity knew the arms and liveries of every
charitably disposed grandee in the neighbourhood, and as soon as his
lordship's coach and six appeared, came hopping and crawling in crowds
to persecute him. These disorders lasted, in spite of many accidents,
and of some legal proceedings, till, in the reign of George the Second,
Sir Joseph Jekyll, Master of the Rolls, was knocked down and nearly
killed in the middle of the Square. Then at length palisades were set
up, and a pleasant garden laid out. [120]

Saint James's Square was a receptacle for all the offal and cinders,
for all the dead cats and dead dogs of Westminster. At one time a cudgel
player kept the ring there. At another time an impudent squatter settled
himself there, and built a shed for rubbish under the windows of the
gilded saloons in which the first magnates of the realm, Norfolk,
Ormond, Kent, and Pembroke, gave banquets and balls. It was not till
these nuisances had lasted through a whole generation, and till much had
been written about them, that the inhabitants applied to Parliament for
permission to put up rails, and to plant trees. [121]

When such was the state of the region inhabited by the most luxurious
portion of society, we may easily believe that the great body of the
population suffered what would now be considered as insupportable
grievances. The pavement was detestable: all foreigners cried shame
upon it. The drainage was so bad that in rainy weather the gutters soon
became torrents. Several facetious poets have commemorated the fury
with which these black rivulets roared down Snow Hill and Ludgate Hill,
bearing to Fleet Ditch a vast tribute of animal and vegetable filth from
the stalls of butchers and greengrocers. This flood was profusely thrown
to right and left by coaches and carts. To keep as far from the carriage
road as possible was therefore the wish of every pedestrian. The
mild and timid gave the wall. The bold and athletic took it. If two
roisterers met they cocked their hats in each other's faces, and pushed
each other about till the weaker was shoved towards the kennel. If he
was a mere bully he sneaked off, mattering that he should find a time.
If he was pugnacious, the encounter probably ended in a duel behind
Montague House. [122]

The houses were not numbered. There would indeed have been little
advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen, porters,
and errand boys of London, a very small proportion could read. It was
necessary to use marks which the most ignorant could understand. The
shops were therefore distinguished by painted or sculptured signs, which
gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the streets. The walk from Charing
Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens'
Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when
they were no longer required for the direction of the common people.

When the evening closed in, the difficulty and danger of walking about
London became serious indeed. The garret windows were opened, and pails
were emptied, with little regard to those who were passing below. Falls,
bruises and broken bones were of constant occurrence. For, till the last
year of the reign of Charles the Second, most of the streets were
left in profound darkness. Thieves and robbers plied their trade with
impunity: yet they were hardly so terrible to peaceable citizens as
another class of ruffians. It was a favourite amusement of dissolute
young gentlemen to swagger by night about the town, breaking windows,
upsetting sedans, beating quiet men, and offering rude caresses
to pretty women. Several dynasties of these tyrants had, since the
Restoration, domineered over the streets. The Muns and Tityre Tus had
given place to the Hectors, and the Hectors had been recently succeeded
by the Scourers. At a later period arose the Nicker, the Hawcubite, and
the yet more dreaded name of Mohawk. [123] The machinery for keeping the
peace was utterly contemptible. There was an Act of Common Council which
provided that more than a thousand watchmen should be constantly on the
alert in the city, from sunset to sunrise, and that every inhabitant
should take his turn of duty. But this Act was negligently executed.
Few of those who were summoned left their homes; and those few generally
found it more agreeable to tipple in alehouses than to pace the streets.
[124]

It ought to be noticed that, in the last year of the reign of Charles
the Second, began a great change in the police of London, a change which
has perhaps added as much to the happiness of the body of the people as
revolutions of much greater fame. An ingenious projector, named Edward
Heming, obtained letters patent conveying to him, for a term of years,
the exclusive right of lighting up London. He undertook, for a moderate
consideration, to place a light before every tenth door, on moonless
nights, from Michaelmas to Lady Day, and from six to twelve of the
clock. Those who now see the capital all the year round, from dusk to
dawn, blazing with a splendour beside which the illuminations for La
Hogue and Blenheim would have looked pale, may perhaps smile to think of
Heming's lanterns, which glimmered feebly before one house in ten during
a small part of one night in three. But such was not the feeling of his
contemporaries. His scheme was enthusiastically applauded, and furiously
attacked. The friends of improvement extolled him as the greatest of
all the benefactors of his city. What, they asked, were the boasted
inventions of Archimedes, when compared with the achievement of the man
who had turned the nocturnal shades into noon-day? In spite of these
eloquent eulogies the cause of darkness was not left undefended. There
were fools in that age who opposed the introduction of what was called
the new light as strenuously as fools in our age have opposed the
introduction of vaccination and railroads, as strenuously as the
fools of an age anterior to the dawn of history doubtless opposed the
introduction of the plough and of alphabetical writing. Many years after
the date of Heming's patent there were extensive districts in which no
lamp was seen. [125]

We may easily imagine what, in such times, must have been the state of
the quarters of London which were peopled by the outcasts of society.
Among those quarters one had attained a scandalous preeminence. On the
confines of the City and the Temple had been founded, in the thirteenth
century, a House of Carmelite Friars, distinguished by their white
hoods. The precinct of this house had, before the Reformation, been a
sanctuary for criminals, and still retained the privilege of protecting
debtors from arrest. Insolvents consequently were to be found in every
dwelling, from cellar to garret. Of these a large proportion were
knaves and libertines, and were followed to their asylum by women more
abandoned than themselves. The civil power was unable to keep order in a
district swarming with such inhabitants; and thus Whitefriars became the
favourite resort of all who wished to be emancipated from the restraints
of the law. Though the immunities legally belonging to the place
extended only to cases of debt, cheats, false witnesses, forgers, and
highwaymen found refuge there. For amidst a rabble so desperate no
peace officer's life was in safety. At the cry of "Rescue," bullies
with swords and cudgels, and termagant hags with spits and broomsticks,
poured forth by hundreds; and the intruder was fortunate if he escaped
back into Fleet Street, hustled, stripped, and pumped upon. Even the
warrant of the Chief Justice of England could not be executed without
the help of a company of musketeers. Such relics of the barbarism of the
darkest ages were to be found within a short walk of the chambers where
Somers was studying history and law, of the chapel where Tillotson was
preaching, of the coffee house where Dryden was passing judgment on
poems and plays, and of the hall where the Royal Society was examining
the astronomical system of Isaac Newton. [126]

Each of the two cities which made up the capital of England had its
own centre of attraction. In the metropolis of commerce the point of
convergence was the Exchange; in the metropolis of fashion the Palace.
But the Palace did not retain influence so long as the Exchange. The
Revolution completely altered the relations between the Court and the
higher classes of society. It was by degrees discovered that the King,
in his individual capacity, had very little to give; that coronets
and garters, bishoprics and embassies, lordships of the Treasury and
tellerships of the Exchequer, nay, even charges in the royal stud and
bedchamber, were really bestowed, not by him, but by his advisers.
Every ambitious and covetous man perceived that he would consult his own
interest far better by acquiring the dominion of a Cornish borough, and
by rendering good service to the ministry during a critical session,
than by becoming the companion, or even the minion, of his prince. It
was therefore in the antechambers, not of George the First and of
George the Second, but of Walpole and of Pelham, that the daily crowd
of courtiers was to be found. It is also to be remarked that the same
Revolution, which made it impossible that our Kings should use the
patronage of the state merely for the purpose of gratifying their
personal predilections, gave us several Kings unfitted by their
education and habits to be gracious and affable hosts. They had been
born and bred on the Continent. They never felt themselves at home in
our island. If they spoke our language, they spoke it inelegantly and
with effort. Our national character they never fully understood. Our
national manners they hardly attempted to acquire. The most important
part of their duty they performed better than any ruler who preceded
them: for they governed strictly according to law: but they could not be
the first gentlemen of the realm, the heads of polite society. If ever
they unbent, it was in a very small circle where hardly an English face
was to be seen; and they were never so happy as when they could escape
for a summer to their native land. They had indeed their days of
reception for our nobility and gentry; but the reception was a mere
matter of form, and became at last as solemn a ceremony as a funeral.

Not such was the court of Charles the Second. Whitehall, when he dwelt
there, was the focus of political intrigue and of fashionable gaiety.
Half the jobbing and half the flirting of the metropolis went on under
his roof. Whoever could make himself agreeable to the prince, or could
secure the good offices of the mistress, might hope to rise in the world
without rendering any service to the government, without being even
known by sight to any minister of state. This courtier got a frigate,
and that a company; a third, the pardon of a rich offender; a fourth,
a lease of crown land on easy terms. If the King notified his pleasure
that a briefless lawyer should be made a judge, or that a libertine
baronet should be made a peer, the gravest counsellors, after a little
murmuring, submitted. [127] Interest, therefore, drew a constant press
of suitors to the gates of the palace; and those gates always stood
wide. The King kept open house every day, and all day long, for the good
society of London, the extreme Whigs only excepted. Hardly any gentleman
had any difficulty in making his way to the royal presence. The levee
was exactly what the word imports. Some men of quality came every
morning to stand round their master, to chat with him while his wig
was combed and his cravat tied, and to accompany him in his early walk
through the Park. All persons who had been properly introduced might,
without any special invitation, go to see him dine, sup, dance, and
play at hazard, and might have the pleasure of hearing him tell stories,
which indeed he told remarkably well, about his flight from Worcester,
and about the misery which he had endured when he was a state prisoner
in the hands of the canting meddling preachers of Scotland. Bystanders
whom His Majesty recognised often came in for a courteous word. This
proved a far more successful kingcraft than any that his father
or grandfather had practiced. It was not easy for the most austere
republican of the school of Marvel to resist the fascination of so much
good humour and affability; and many a veteran Cavalier, in whose heart
the remembrance of unrequited sacrifices and services had been festering
during twenty years, was compensated in one moment for wounds and
sequestrations by his sovereign's kind nod, and "God bless you, my old
friend! "

Whitehall naturally became the chief staple of news. Whenever there was
a rumour that anything important had happened or was about to happen,
people hastened thither to obtain intelligence from the fountain head.
The galleries presented the appearance of a modern club room at an
anxious time. They were full of people enquiring whether the Dutch mail
was in, what tidings the express from France had brought, whether John
Sobiesky had beaten the Turks, whether the Doge of Genoa was really
at Paris These were matters about which it was safe to talk aloud. But
there were subjects concerning which information was asked and given
in whispers. Had Halifax got the better of Rochester? Was there to be a
Parliament? Was the Duke of York really going to Scotland? Had Monmouth
really been summoned from the Hague? Men tried to read the countenance
of every minister as he went through the throng to and from the royal
closet. All sorts of auguries were drawn from the tone in which His
Majesty spoke to the Lord President, or from the laugh with which His
Majesty honoured a jest of the Lord Privy Seal; and in a few hours the
hopes and fears inspired by such slight indications had spread to all
the coffee houses from Saint James's to the Tower. [128]

The coffee house must not be dismissed with a cursory mention. It might
indeed at that time have been not improperly called a most important
political institution. No Parliament had sat for years The municipal
council of the City had ceased to speak the sense of the citizens.
Public meetings, harangues, resolutions, and the rest of the modern
machinery of agitation had not yet come into fashion. Nothing resembling
the modern newspaper existed. In such circumstances the coffee houses
were the chief organs through which the public opinion of the metropolis
vented itself.

The first of these establishments had been set up by a Turkey merchant,
who had acquired among the Mahometans a taste for their favourite
beverage. The convenience of being able to make appointments in any part
of the town, and of being able to pass evenings socially at a very small
charge, was so great that the fashion spread fast. Every man of the
upper or middle class went daily to his coffee house to learn the news
and to discuss it. Every coffee house had one or more orators to whose
eloquence the crowd listened with admiration, and who soon became, what
the journalists of our time have been called, a fourth Estate of the
realm. The Court had long seen with uneasiness the growth of this
new power in the state. An attempt had been made, during Danby's
administration, to close the coffee houses. But men of all parties
missed their usual places of resort so much that there was an universal
outcry. The government did not venture, in opposition to a feeling so
strong and general, to enforce a regulation of which the legality might
well be questioned. Since that time ten years had elapsed, and during
those years the number and influence of the coffee houses had been
constantly increasing. Foreigners remarked that the coffee house was
that which especially distinguished London from all other cities; that
the coffee house was the Londoner's home, and that those who wished to
find a gentleman commonly asked, not whether he lived in Fleet Street
or Chancery Lane, but whether he frequented the Grecian or the Rainbow.
Nobody was excluded from these places who laid down his penny at the
bar. Yet every rank and profession, and every shade of religious and
political opinion, had its own headquarters. There were houses near
Saint James's Park where fops congregated, their heads and shoulders
covered with black or flaxen wigs, not less ample than those which are
now worn by the Chancellor and by the Speaker of the House of Commons.
The wig came from Paris and so did the rest of the fine gentleman's
ornaments, his embroidered coat, his fringed gloves, and the tassel
which upheld his pantaloons. The conversation was in that dialect which,
long after it had ceased to be spoken in fashionable circles, continued,
in the mouth of Lord Foppington, to excite the mirth of theatres.