Though theatres were closed, reputed as centres of delinquency, in 1656 the first English opera, ‘The Siege of Rhodes’, was performed and women sang on stage.60 There were many musical clubs and taverns in London, and Cromwell’s court promoted dancing and music. John Milton was Secretary of Foreign Tongues, assisted by Andrew Marvell as Latin Secretary, making Cromwell’s government the only one in British history to contain such unrivalled poets, though neither was known as such at the time.
Evelyn managed to banish the spectre of ‘mechanic’ preachers by attending coach races in Hyde Park. Spring Gardens near Charing Cross was a rendezvous for ‘the young company’ of ‘ladies and gallants’ who could be found there ‘till midnight’, enjoying the fact that ‘the thickets of the garden seemed to be contrived to all the advantages of gallantry’. In all these ways, says historian Stephen Inwood, ‘the puritan decade was a time of change, but change towards, rather than away from, greater individual freedom.’61
The Restoration of Charles II was a moment of political reaction, made possible by Cromwell’s inability to weld the forces that had made the revolution into a stable basis for post-revolutionary administration. Critically, stabilizing the new order meant crushing the Levellers and radical left of the revolution without being able to re-unite with monarchist conservatives. And despite a brief resurgence of the radical old cause when Cromwell died in 1659, the establishment preferred the return of a Stuart monarch – or at least they did at first. Politically, the Restoration meant reaction. Some regicides were executed, others fled to Europe and to America. John Milton escaped with his life, partly due to the pleading of Andrew Marvell. They were both lucky since, with John Dryden, they had marched in Cromwell’s funeral cortege.
There was political retreat, but the state machine was not restored to its condition under Charles I. The French ambassador to the court of Charles II observed, ‘It has a monarchical appearance, and there is a king, but it is very far from being a monarchy.’62 Socially and economically it was even harder to push the wheel of revolution back. On the land feudal tenures had been abolished in 1646, a mighty blow to medieval relations in the countryside, and as soon as Charles II was on the throne he confirmed that abolition.
The Royal Society and the Bank of England can stand as the two symbols of the longer-term deep impact of the revolution. The Royal Society, established in 1660, owed its origins to a group established at Gresham College in the heart of the City in 1645, dedicated to furthering scientific study for business purposes. Scientifically and philosophically cutting-edge ideas would never be subordinate to the Church again. The philosopher John Locke was not a Leveller, but without what they did and thought, his work was inconceivable. In the movement’s wake, work like that of Locke, across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy, could no longer be suppressed. The Bank of England was not established until six years after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had put an end to absolutist ambitions once and for all, and effectively subordinated the monarchy to the wider governing classes. It made loan capital available on a greater scale, an essential feature of a capitalist economy. Guilds and monopolies were gone and the merchants and money men were now free of the Crown, even if the Crown was not free of them.
The Great Fire of 1666 marked the physical extermination of the old City that had given birth to the revolution. And although it was not rebuilt on the grid-plan that Christopher Wren favoured, it was still a new city in many ways. The Restoration had meant a loss of power for democratic movements in the City as well as in national government. Small masters were driven to the margins in the City companies. But industrial struggles began to assume a more modern form. There were strikes, mutinies and combinations in pursuit of higher wages at the Royal Dockyards in the 1660s. And in the following decade, as London was rebuilt after the Great Fire, sawyers tried to form craft unions. Machine-breaking began: in 1675 a few hundred ribbon weavers, ‘good commonwealth’s men’, broke into houses and destroyed the machines that were putting them out of a job. Cloth workers refused to work for less than twelve shillings a week. ‘The trend of economic development’, says Christopher Hill, ‘was in the direction of sharper differentiation between classes; a landless working class dependent on wage labour increased, the yeomanry and the masters declined.’63
The apprentices, so central to the London crowd of the revolution, had been growing fewer even in the 1640s. The new bosses who emerged fortified by the revolution hastened that decline and a new class was formed, and formed itself, from the same human material. But it took a century in the making. And it formed itself out of long decades of struggle for the democracy that had seemed so tantalizingly close in the 1640s, but had been receding ever since.
The settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the political expression of this new social reality. Absolutism and the Stuarts were gone for good. Constitutional monarchy, albeit a constitution in which the monarch retained real power, was its replacement. But within this new framework, even at the beginning, the new money men were more powerful than they had ever been. In the decades that followed they were set to become more powerful still.
4
Old Corruption and the Mob That Can Read
And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
William Blake
OLIGOPOLIS
By the eighteenth century, the elite that ruled Britain and its pre-eminent city, London, was one of the most unaccountable, unrepresentative and inhumane ever known. The wealth generated through trade and a developing empire, the political success of the Act of Union with Scotland and the lack of any democratic control from below all helped to produce an oligarchy whose main aim was the creation of fabulous wealth, regardless of the human or social consequences. Politics was run by a small elite of Whigs and Tories who presided over the networks of a unified, London-based, political, business and office-holding class. Conversely, the vast majority of the population had no say in who was elected: ‘There were a few constituencies where perhaps 10 per cent of the male electorate could vote, but these were easily outnumbered by the “rotten boroughs”, where the Member was effectively nominated by his patron, a lord or a landowner or both.’1 The rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs ensured no wider democratic mandate, leading to a rampant corruption and of politics dominated by greed, self-interest, corruption and careerism.
London was the centre of this ‘Old Corruption’ and, housing more than a tenth of the whole population of England and Wales, dominated the rest of the country: ‘London was then far more important commercially, industrially, and socially, in relation to the rest of the country than it has ever been since. . . . The only place it could be compared with was Paris, and people were fond of discussing which was the larger and which the more wicked.’2
A city which grew at such speed exhibited many of the features we now associate with cities in the developing world: precarious living, slum dwelling, and no support mechanisms for the poor; unbounded and ostentatious wealth for the rich. As a result of the appalling death rate the city relied on a population born and brought up elsewhere to increase its size. That changed around the middle of the century, when mortality began to fall. ‘In towns deaths exceeded births, and yet the towns continued to grow. It was clear that they grew only at the expense of the healthier country districts; London, in particular, was regarded as a devouring monster.’3
The London of the eighteenth century was a city in transition. At its beginning, England had not long before reached the political settlement known as the Glorious Revolution which marked a compromise with its turbulent seventeenth-century past. The nation was establishing itself as the world’s number one trading