Somewhere, Pym and the other members hid while Charles and his men burst into the Commons. Rumour said that they took refuge in the Puritan stronghold of St Stephen’s Coleman Street, very near the Guildhall. It was ominous that the new state wrapped itself protectively in the folds of the church, ominous and predictive of what would become a Parliamentarian theocracy of sorts. They were able to enter the Guildhall the next day, to cheers.
These events left Charles and Henrietta thoroughly scared, and after a failed bid to persuade the London aldermen to give up the errant members, on 10 January 1642 they packed their bags and abandoned Whitehall for Hampton Court. It was Charles’s second disastrous mistake in under a week. The king and queen knew that when the House reconvened it might go on to impeach the queen as the one who had invited the ‘Jesuited papists’ who threatened the nation into the country in the first place. They had sensed the mood of London when Charles rode to the Tower the day after his disastrous invasion of the Commons. ‘Sir, let us have our liberties,’ cried someone in the crowd, ‘we desire no more.’ The Christmas holidays meant that London’s apprentices, always volatile, were available to demonstrate. On 6 January there was a panic in the City as vast crowds thronged public spaces; a fight broke out between the king’s supporters and demonstrators at Westminster Abbey, and Sir Richard Wiseman was killed. The demonstrators took up a collection to pay for Wiseman’s funeral, though, and the French ambassador commented on how calm the crowds were in comparison with crowds in Paris.
In the Guildhall it was the same. ‘Parliament, Privileges of Parliament’, shouted some. Others shouted back ‘God bless the king’. But there were not enough of them, and – with no military effort at all, without even a show of real opposition – Charles’s opponents achieved the tremendous victory of persuading him to vacate London.
In doing so, Charles lost prestige. He lost credibility as the inevitable, the unconsidered government. And he lost the Tower, with its mint and its armoury, and the London militia. Perhaps the capital had become peripheral to him. He had had dreams of a new London that would reflect the order and ceremonial he loved, but it had failed to materialize from the mongrel old city, crowded with unregulated houses of worryingly diverse and muddled shapes. Early in his reign, Charles had grandiose schemes for London; he issued proclamations to regulate new building, enforce the use of better materials, and impose some semblance of town planning. He wanted to rebuild and beautify Whitehall itself, but also the great cathedral of St Paul’s, so tumbledown and so given up to profane activities that Charles felt it was unworthy of his capital. He wanted to demolish the existing jerry-built medieval housing to forward these schemes. He wanted London to reflect his own ordered family, his well-regulated court. He disliked the continued residence in London of those who, he felt, should be in the provinces looking after their tenants; the gentry were strictly prohibited from neglecting their estates in the country and the duties they should be performing there by residing in London all year round.
The problem with all this was that the London corporation was unenthusiastic. And as often, when Charles couldn’t realize his fantasies, he turned his back. During the period of his personal rule, Whitehall had become just another palace, like Hampton and Oakley and Greenwich. He knew nothing first-hand of the vast activity that surrounded his court – the trade, law, business, finance, the sheer human pressure of what was in a few short years to become the greatest city in Europe. He had always avoided it. He hated the London crowds that reached out to him, hoping his touch would heal their sores. He had not visited the great shipyards at Poplar that had loomed over Anna Trapnel’s childhood, nor seen the first ships of the East India Company dropping anchor in Poplar docks laden with luxuries. He had seen only the luxuries. Now this city, invisible to Charles, was to be his downfall. He had refused to see it, and London, not the city to take a slight lightly, never forgave him.
Like all wars, the Civil War was expensive, and the money to pay Parliament’s army came from the public. London alone provided between a quarter and a third of all the money spent by Parliament. And yet at the same time business was down; with the court gone the trade in luxuries, which had been booming, collapsed. And with the king away, Parliament at once acted to alter the social fabric of the city. The theatres were closed, the traditional holidays abolished: this threw still more people out of work.
Not everyone was miserable as the conflict deepened. Woodturner Nehemiah Wallington was happy, because his London was a godly city once more. For him, all events were a rich source of moral lessons. This was a man who, when his house was burgled in August 1641, tried to see in it the correcting hand of God’s providence: ‘because the Lord doth see the world is ready to steal away my heart, therefore, he doth it in love to wean me from the world’. But Wallington, like other godly folk in London, lived in terror that his bounty of spiritual surroundings might be taken from him. He was also a workaholic who adjured himself to wake at 1 a.m. to write, and who decided to miss a spring expedition across the fields to Peckham with his wife and daughter in order to stay at home and worry about ‘the sadness of the times’.
Even before the war, London had outgrown law and order – the king’s palace at Whitehall, like some manor surrounded by new estates, was now at the heart of a troublespot. The Middlesex suburbs contained a high proportion of the disorderly poor – to the north and west, as well as to the east. The large number of apprentices and other migrants – young, poor, male and single – meant that turbulence within the city was endemic; the rallying cry ‘prentices and clubs’ symbolizes that threat. London was huge. It was constantly growing. And it was noisy: its streets resounded with pealing bells, the cries of street traders, the songs of buskers, the news cries of ballad-singers. Some traders made sure they were noticed with bells, horns and clappers. Every time you sat down in a tavern a fiddler and a flautist or two would appear, and expect to be given a fee for cacophonous playing. Alehouses were noisy. But almost all houses in London except the very grandest were right on the street. The clatter of carts, and of water-carriers on cobbles was almost constant. Dogs barked and howled. There were more and noisier birds: rooks and jackdaws were once common in the city. And London talked; from the upper storeys Londoners could eavesdrop on neighbours or shout abuse at them.
It wasn’t just the noise of London that a countryman might have found surprising. London was also smelly. If we could travel back in time and sniff the London air, we would be suffocated not by the smell of sewage, but the pervasive acrid reek of coal fires. As the seventeenth century progressed, industry moved into the East End and Southwark, and the smells it produced lessened. When slaughterhouses were moved out in the 1620s and 1630s, the city lost the noise and mess of pigs, cows and sheep driven through the centre. There was also less noise from smithies, tanneries and the like, but the shouts of those advertising bear-baiting and prize-fights went on. So did town-criers, shouting the time, the news, the dead, the ‘For Sale’ notices. The noise did have a term: there was a curfew, and the nights were much quieter.
In the period of personal rule, Charles had relied on the London money market as well as on his subjects for forced loans, and in the crisis of 1640, when the royal forces’ defeat in war coincided with a widespread refusal to pay outstanding taxation, the City’s financiers declined to continue to support the regime. Some rich men were ruined in Charles’s fall, which may have made the others less keen to bail him out. Once the Scots were seen successfully to resist the king, some of the discontent that had been bubbling beneath the surface in London, repressed by Laud, became visible. After all, in 1637 John Lilburne had been whipped at the cart’s tail for publishing an attack on the bishops, and in the ‘liberties’ outside the jurisdiction of the City, there were separated congregations, church groups that had declared their independence of bishops and priests. Cheaper, open-air theatres staged plays openly critical of the court.
The intermittent swirls of London’s rage finally eddied into a new whirlwind of riot over the appointment of a Lieutenant of the Tower. On Monday 27 December 1641, Londoners marched to Westminster, demanding to know what had happened about their Commons petition. Were they to be landed with Charles’s