17th century London — humanity amid the insanity

Look at any period in past history, and it’s easy to come up with features of staggering unfamiliarity (the past is another country, after all) and heartwarming sameness (human nature doesn’t change, does it ?). Despite all the efforts of postmodernist historians to make the past strange, and to deconstruct the very notion of human nature (with the factually unreliable Michel Foucault leading the charge), we can still look at the past and recognise ourselves in our ancestors. Love of children, love of partners, love of friends, may all look very different under the varying material constraints of distant cultures; but there’s a kernel of humanity which surely survives the assaults of infant mortality, death in childbirth or raging pandemic.

London in the 17th century looks very samey and very different from a 21st century perspective. Financial speculation, the rage of fashion, and a seething property market vie with civil war, deadly plague and a magical worldview to unsettle our notions of what it was to be a 17th-century Londoner.

The great virtue of Margarette Lincoln’s new book, London and the 17th Century, is to show us a world in flux, and what we recognise as a sort of modernity coming into being. As the century commenced, Elizabeth I was still on the throne — not the Queen Bess of lore and legend, but rather an ageing and unpopular queen presiding over a kingdom, and a capital city, troubled by endless war with Spain, dearth, poverty and religious faction. Her death was a moment both of release — she had after all been on the throne for the past four decades — and of anxiety. The smoothness of the royal succession was by no means a foregone conclusion. London’s place in welcoming her successor — the Scottish king, James Stuart — was exercised through City institutions which exist to this day: the Corporation of London, the Court of Aldermen, the Court of Common Council and the Livery Companies.

The century was dominated by the experience of civil war and its aftermath, and London was inevitably the linchpin of the struggles between king and parliament. Charles I’s abandonment of the ancient capital in 1642 was both a sure sign that armed conflict was coming and, arguably, a guarantee that the royalists, starved of London’s unparalleled financial resources, would lose. The king was executed in London, on a scaffold erected in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall; and London and its environs remained the focus of constitutional discussion and constitutional experiments, as the army reduced parliament to a compliant “Rump”, democratic reform was debated in a church in Putney, and Oliver Cromwell moved to dismiss successive parliaments and concentrate power in his own hands. Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 only initiated three decades in which London was the cockpit of political to-ing and fro-ing, a breeding ground of anti-Catholic paranoia, and a site of resistance to nascent absolutism.

What is extraordinary is that, despite the chaos and catastrophe that dominated 17th-century London — civil war, devastating plague and fire, all in the matter of a few decades — it was precisely then that the city rose to a European, even global eminence, which it has retained to this day. London in 1600 was a nervous backwater. By 1700, fortified by a political settlement in 1689, which proved lasting, it was creating networks of trade and exchange that were to make it what it is today. Too big; too dominant; too expensive. A capital city which distorts the priorities of the polity it is licensed to govern.

Lincoln, a former deputy director of the National Maritime Museum, brings much engaging detail about London life — the gardens, the coffee houses, the shopping. An age of burgeoning bourgeois comfort for many, this was also an age of intense and bitter cold, the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames froze over and Mary Evelyn, wife of the diarist John, complained of the “Crackling of the Ice, and whistling winds [which] are our Musick, which if continued long in the same quarter may possibly freese our wits as well as our penns”.

If one wanted to find a pre-echo of our own times, it might be in the significant presence of French (Protestant) émigrés: 5 per cent of London’s population by 1700, contributing 10 per cent of the founding capital of the Bank of England.

But what I took away from the book above all was the importance of the river that flows through the metropolis and is the fons et origo of its importance, its wealth and its power. Ships, warehouses, merchants, shipyards. While the Thames itself may no longer be the guarantor of London’s prosperity, a very different sort of flow, that of the invisible stuff we call money, liquid desire, has taken its place. If that flow freezes up, or is diverted into other channels, London may be all washed up.

Wealth is the subject of Inheritance: the Lost History of Mary Davies. Leo Hollis tells the story of an heiress whose patrimony lies at the root of a modern accumulation of a vast landed fortune, the Grosvenor Estate of the Dukes of Westminster, an inheritance that has flowed down the generations for more than three centuries.

Mary Davies’s father, Alexander, was confidential clerk to Hugh Audley: lawyer, moneylender, landed proprietor and subject of an instructive 32-page broadside recommended by none other than Samuel Pepys: “The Way to be Rich, according to the practice of the great Audley, who begun with two hundred Pound, in the year 1605, and dyed worth four hundred thousand Pound this instant November 1662, etc.” At his death he left valuable lands to the west of London, in the Manor of Ebury, to his scrivener Alexander, and they passed on his death, in turn, to his daughter Mary.

Mary’s marriage to Sir Thomas Grosvenor was a union of landed possibility and established eminence which his death and her subsequent mental instability threatened and which the Grosvenor family protected with dogged legal manoeuvres. Hollis, author of previous books on London, is brilliant at conveying the ambiguous story of Mary’s second, spurious marriage to the scapegrace bounder Edward Fenwick. Was this barely avoided diversion of the Grosvenor inheritance from its proper course the result of a regretted love match or of a drug-assisted plot? Did she consent? The ultimate legal answer was no, but not before a jury had vouched for the marriage’s validity.

In the course of the book, Hollis demonstrates the significance of 17th century legal developments for creating our modern notions of private property. He ends by questioning where we have ended up, with the city as “an investment rather than a place to live or work . . . a financial instrument”. It’s fascinating, and perhaps hopeful, that the descendants of Mary Davies and Sir Thomas Grosvenor, through the Grosvenor Estate, are working against this grain, with a commitment to long-term stewardship, which is ultimately a better protection of value than short term speculation.

London and the 17th century: The Making of the World’s Greatest City, by Margarette Lincoln, Yale, RRP£25, 384 pages

Inheritance: The Lost History of Mary Davies — A Story of Property, Marriage and Madness, by Leo Hollis, Oneworld, RRP£20, 304 pages

Ian Bostridge is a tenor and author of ‘Witchcraft and its Transformations 1650-1750’

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