Aristocrats new and old were among the beneficiaries; the duke of Norfolk inherited a new mansion on the site of Holy Trinity Priory and called it, unimaginatively, Duke’s Place. Lord Lumley’s mansion was on the site of Crutched Friars. The lord treasurer, the soon-to-be marquess of Winchester, sold off the stones and lead that had once been Austin Friars and built himself a townhouse. The Charterhouse passed to three aristocratic owners before becoming, in 1614, a school and home for poor gentlemen. The ‘inns’ of abbots and priors that lined much of Holborn, the Strand and Fleet Street became hostels for travellers: those of the abbots of Glastonbury, Lewes, Malmesbury, Peterborough, and Cirencester were reborn as the Dolphin, Walnut Tree, Castle, Bell and Popinjay Inns. Others became residences for nobles and rich aldermen: the bishop of Worcester’s inn became Somerset House, the bishop of Bath’s inn became Arundel House, the bishop of Carlyles’s inn became Bedford House. Norwich Place passed through several hands before it came into those of the duke of Buckingham in the 1620s. Its river gate, York Watergate, still runs down the side of Charing Cross Station. The king’s new Palace of Whitehall, with its tiltyard for jousting, cockpit and tennis court, expanded on the archbishop of York’s confiscated palace. All of it, save James I’s Banqueting House, was destroyed by fire in 1698.
The emerging ‘middling sort’ also gained from the dissolution of monastery land. Housing for ‘Noble men and others’ was built on the land of Whitefriars, St Mary Spital and Holywell Priory. Tenements for ‘brokers, tiplers, and such like’ were built near St Bartholomew-the-Great. Two livery companies, the Mercers and the Leathersellers, gained new halls. St Mary Graces was demolished to make way for naval stores and a ships’ biscuit factory. Ploughs, no doubt, were beaten into swords at St Clare’s, conveniently near the Tower, when it became an armoury. A wine tavern opened at St Martin-le-Grand and there was glass-blowing (and a tennis court) at Crutched Friars. Belief in the Almighty was replaced by the willing suspension of disbelief as theatres rose on the sites of Blackfriars – soon home of the Queen’s Revels and Blackfriars Playhouse – and Holywell Priory, later to house the Curtain and the Theatre. Due to a legal loophole, the grounds of former monasteries were still beyond City regulation, making these sites ideal for industry, theatres and crime. Some monasteries did, however, retain a religious function, becoming Protestant churches. Others were converted into institutions of pastoral care as schools or hospitals.46 Broadly speaking, the anonymous poem ‘Skipjack England’ contained an estimate not too far from the truth:
The Abbeys went down because of their pride
And men the more covetous rich for a time;
Their livings dispersed on every side,
Where once was some prayer, now places for swine.47
THE BOUNDARIES OF LORDSHIP
Slowly, over the time in which the rebellions took place, feudal society faded and an incipiently modern world came into view. The revolts themselves, and the economic changes they reflected, were staging posts in the shift from a feudal economy – based on the militarily enforced labour service of the peasantry – to a commercial-capitalist economy, based on market-driven profits expropriated by a new trading class from labourers working for wages. The driving force of these changes was the people now becoming known as ‘the middling sort’ – yeomen farmers, traders, merchants and masters who could mobilize their apprentices. The power of the aristocratic nobility was being challenged, its old Church transformed. The new classes were reading their English Bibles, grabbing some monastery land and wondering aloud (at times) about the virtue of kings and the idleness of nobles.
Over many decades the boundaries of lordship were being driven back and the commercialization and monetization of all exchange and social relations proceeded to undermine the structure of feudal society. The challenge to the old Catholic Church, the shift to the individual’s own Bible-led relationship with God at the expense of the prelate-dominated, hierarchically mediated relationship with God, was one ideological reflection of this change. The growth of Universities and Inns of Court, and the invention of the printing press, meant that Church was no longer the sole repository of knowledge. Printing, for instance, meant that one of the Church’s key services to the monarchy, the handwritten reproduction of documents, was rendered an anachronism. The English state at first benefited from putting itself at the head of these changes, most obviously through the Reformation.
The Tudors, especially Elizabeth I, enjoyed the crystallization of these elements as a period of national, Protestant, reaffirmation. English nationalism, in the era of Drake and Raleigh, was reborn. The Stuarts faced the dissolution of this temporary stability. There was still another century before all these elements would fuse in the mighty Civil War against monarchy but by 1540 the seeds had been sown. And ideas that were first mummered by Lollards in the 1380s would be cried aloud by Levellers in the 1640s.48
3
‘The Head and Fountain of Rebellion’
The only and sole legislative law making power is originally inherent in the people.
John Lilburne
LONDON’S REVOLUTIONARY REPUTATION
If ‘posterity shall ask’, said one Royalist, ‘who would have pulled the crown from the king’s head, taken the government off the hinges, dissolved Monarchy, enslaved the laws, and ruined the country; say, “twas the proud, unthankful, schismatical, rebellious, bloody City of London”.’1 Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon and Charles I’s advisor, was inclined to the same view. He saw London as ‘the fomenter, supporter and indeed the life of the war’.2 For the philosopher Thomas Hobbes it was obvious that ‘but for the city the Parliament never could have made the war, nor the Rump ever have murdered the King’.3 Sir Edward Walker described London as ‘the head and fountain of this detested rebellion’.4
It is certainly true that King Charles I was driven from London at the start of the Civil War, eventually establishing his headquarters at Oxford. And it is also true that at the end of the civil wars London was the scene of his execution and the establishment of a Republic. But the radicalism of London was not inevitable nor was it uncontested. London was the site of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. At the outset of the conflict the City had to break its ties to the Crown, which were considerable. Later on, there were pro-peace demonstrations at various times during the war. In 1647 those moderates who wished to conclude a treaty which would ‘re-inthrone’ Charles organized an effective counterrevolutionary petitioning campaign.5 And if it is true that, in general, the forces of revolution were victorious, it is also true that they did not win alone. On two occasions, in 1647 and again in 1648, the New Model Army had to enter the capital in force to restore the fortunes of the revolution.
The London of the revolutionary 1640s was a fast-expanding city, but it was still composed of three distinct areas separated by open country. The old walled City remained the core of the metropolis, but it was spilling eastwards beyond its stone boundary in the Tower Hamlets and along the river, through the seafarers’ town of Wapping, to Limehouse. Ribbon development was spreading towards the new buildings of the Strand, that were themselves the outgrowth of the second governmental centre of the city at Westminster. But this development was limited, with Covent Garden, where Leveller John Wildman’s Nonsuch Tavern was located, as its newest centre completed in the 1630s. South of the river, Southwark stretched along the banks of the Thames and was expanding, but it was still only connected to the north bank of the river by London Bridge.6
In 1640 the population of the old City and its associated parishes was 135,000. But the population of the suburbs was already larger. The main trades were clothing, metal and leather working, and building. Manufacture engaged 40 per cent of the working population, retail another 36 per cent. In one parish, St Botolph