London (125 page)

1688

How massively, how graciously it rose upon its western hill. Already the walls were up and the roofing had begun. The huge Roman temple of St Paul’s stared down upon Ludgate as if it had been there first. And though over the cathedral’s central crossing there was as yet nothing but a great, gaping cavity, open to the sky, it was entirely clear from the arrangement of the supporting pillars what was to come. King James had thrown his full weight behind the project. Extra taxes for the building had been raised, and even if nobody had seen any drawings yet, everyone knew that Wren’s great cathedral would soon be surmounted by a mighty, popish dome. Though it was somewhat modified, O Be Joyful had no doubt that he was looking, essentially, at the great wooden model he had helped to make a dozen years ago. And with a Catholic king now on the throne, he knew that the conspiracy was complete.

Although, to his shame, he had continued to follow Grinling Gibbons’s orders, O Be Joyful had always tried when he could to avoid projects that seemed too papist. His work some years before in the rebuilt Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside had given him special pleasure, while two years ago he had managed to escape working on the frieze for a statue of the new Catholic king. At present he was working in the little palace of St James, and this too his conscience could allow him to enjoy.

But now on this bright morning of 9 June 1688, O Be Joyful Carpenter paused by St Paul’s and wondered if he had been right in the advice he had given last night to his friend Penny, recently arrived from Bristol. Certainly the Huguenot had seemed astonished.

“You, O Be Joyful, now support a papist king?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.” He supported King James. After what had happened recently, it had seemed to O Be Joyful that he must. But as he thought of the Huguenot’s urgent voice and his worried face he wondered: was this all a trap?

It was twelve o’clock that morning when Eugene Penny caught up with Meredith. He had gone first to St Bride’s where the clergyman’s housekeeper had told him he was out, but suggested one or two places where he might have gone. Since then he had tried Child’s in St Paul’s, the Grecian near the Temple, Will’s by Covent Garden, Man’s at Charing Cross, three others in Pall Mall and St James’s, but at last it was in Lloyd’s, that the Huguenot found the clergyman sitting comfortably at a corner table and smoking a pipe. Surprised but delighted to see him after all these years, Meredith motioned him to sit down.

“My dear Mr Penny! Will you take coffee?” Of all the many conveniences of the new city since the fire, none had pleased Meredith more than the institution of the coffee house. There seemed to be a new one every month. Open all day, serving hot chocolate and coffee – which was always drunk black, though usually with sugar – the coffee houses of the city and the West End were more gentlemanly places than the old taverns and were rapidly developing strong characters of their own. Wits went to one, military men to another, lawyers to a third. Meredith, who enjoyed good conversation, liked to visit a different one every day, though he tended to avoid Child’s because it was full of clergymen. The clientele of the newly opened coffee house of Lloyd’s tended to be merchants and insurance men. It was a good clientele to have. There had long been rudimentary schemes for insuring ships and their cargoes amongst merchants, though house insurance, before the Great Fire, had been unknown. But that huge disaster, together with the fact that the new brick and stone London houses were far less likely to burn down, had given a huge impetus to the whole insurance business. Many of the better houses, and almost all ships, were now comprehensively insured. The assessment of risk and the provision of cover was becoming an informal science. Meredith himself had investigated the mathematics of it and delighted to discuss such arcane subjects as the proper premium to be paid on a vessel bound for the East Indies, with the men who gathered at Lloyd’s, where business was booming.

Having accepted a coffee and polished his spectacles, Eugene Penny diffidently enquired: “I was wondering – can you help me get my job back? I’d like to return to London.”

Until recently, it had seemed to Penny, providence had been on his side. Certainly three years ago, when the captain of the English sailing ship had cracked open the top of his barrel, told him that they were now safely at sea, and cheerfully informed him that an officer had stuck his sword right through the barrel next to him – which fortunately had been full of wine – he had reasonably assumed that God meant him to survive. Their reception in Bristol had also been encouraging. There was already a Huguenot community in the western port, and in the months that followed it greatly swelled. Nor were the English unwelcoming. Even in London where, especially in Spitalfields, there was now a flood of immigrants, many of whom had suffered great danger and hardship in leaving France, there was remarkably little resentment against the hard-working foreigners. The tale of their persecution shocked the Protestant English. When they heard, as they soon did, of Huguenot pastors in France being broken on the wheel, they were outraged. Scores of thousands of Huguenots like the Penny family came into England in these years, bringing the total French population in England to some two hundred thousand – a number large enough to ensure that, in due course, three out of every four Englishmen would have a Huguenot somewhere in their ancestry. With so many of his countrymen in London, Penny had decided to remain in Bristol, had found work and modestly prospered.

But he missed working for Tompion. There were some fine clockmakers in Bristol, but nobody like him. And so, two days ago, he had journeyed up to the capital, found his old friend Carpenter, and set out to plead with his former employer for a position.

But the great clockmaker had been annoyed when Penny had suddenly left before and he was not minded to forgive him now.

Penny had not been surprised, but it had been a bitter blow, especially when he had seen in the workshop the wonderful watches the great craftsman was making. So this morning he had sought out Meredith to ask him if he would intercede on his behalf.

“I do know Tompion,” Meredith agreed, but it seemed to the clergyman that there was still something more on Penny’s mind. After an awkward pause, an offer of more coffee, and a gentle enquiry as to whether there was anything else he could do to help, Meredith saw the Huguenot take a deep breath.

Penny had been in Bristol nearly a year before any suggestion of trouble had reached him, and even then he was not sure what to make of it. The king, wanting more tolerance for his Catholic co-religionists, had started appointing a number of Catholic officers to the army and some Catholics to his Privy Council. The courts had agreed, albeit reluctantly, that he was within his rights; but many people were outraged. “What about the Test Act?” the Puritans cried. The Bishop of London refused to stop his clergy preaching publicly against it, and was suspended. Penny was not sure what all this meant, but in the months of peace that followed he had put it out of his mind until, the following spring, a new development left all England stunned.

“It’s a Declaration of Indulgence,” Penny told his astonished family one April day. “Everyone is free to worship as they please.” Catholic King James, it seemed, irritated by opposition from the Church, had called in no less a Protestant than William Penn, the patron of the Quakers, and with his help had designed this remarkable edict. “It means that the Catholics are free to worship and to hold public positions,” he explained. “But it also means that all the other faiths may do so too – Calvinists, Baptists, even Quakers.” Such religious tolerance was not unknown in northern Europe. In Protestant Holland, for instance, Dutch Catholics and Jews worshipped freely and were never troubled by William of Orange. The Declaration would override the Test Act until Parliament repealed it.

In Bristol, Penny noticed, most of the nonconformist Protestants welcomed the news. The number of Catholics who would benefit was small, the number of Protestants far larger. “It benefits us,” a Baptist remarked to him, “so we welcome it.” They even sent the king a vote of thanks. But Penny himself was more cautious. He began to pay close attention to the news that came from London. He read broadsheets; asked questions. He learned that the papal nuncio had gone to Windsor in state; all over the country, he discovered, the king was replacing the lord-lieutenant and the justices of the peace who ran the counties with Catholics. News came from Oxford that King James was trying to turn one of the colleges into a Catholic seminary. At the end of the year there was even news that the queen was pregnant again – though since, in fifteen years of marriage, she had never done anything but miscarry, nobody was much concerned by that. But taken together these things disturbed Penny profoundly. The phlegmatic English might accept them, but the Huguenots he knew, who had experienced the French king’s persecution, found them ominous. That spring, when King James announced that a Parliament would be called to turn this tolerance into law, and ordered his Declaration read in churches, Penny remained sceptical. “We were protected once, by the Treaty of Nantes,” he remarked. “And look what happened to that.”

Since there was little he could do about these fears, he had come to London to see Tompion anyway, and found his old friend Carpenter as well. But it was O Be Joyful who had provided the greatest surprise of all. Although the woodcarver hated popery, it seemed he was ready to support the king.

“So are the aldermen of London and the guilds,” he explained and then added, almost apologetically: “Things have changed.”

As he discovered what had passed in London, Penny saw how clever King James II had been. Since he wanted his Declaration passed into law, he needed a Parliament to vote for it. As the Tories, his natural supporters, were mostly Church of England men, they could not be relied on. But the opposition Whigs, inheriting some of the old Roundhead character from Cromwell, favoured toleration. King James II had therefore been securing Whig dominance in boroughs all over the country, so that they would send Whigs to Parliament. And nowhere had he been more thorough than in the city of London.

“By royal dispensation,” O Be Joyful explained, “you no longer have to be Church of England to join the livery companies or become an alderman. The Dissenters have been flooding in. The Weavers, the Goldsmiths, even the grand old Mercers company have sent addresses thanking the king. The very things my father fought for are being granted. Most of the city officers are Puritans and Dissenters now. Why, even the mayor’s a Baptist, I believe!”

But the woodcarver’s greatest excitement had come the previous afternoon. No less than seven Church of England bishops had signed a petition protesting against the toleration. Yesterday they had been brought before the king’s council charged with sedition.

“They’ve been sent to await trial in the Tower. Taken there by boat. I saw it myself,” Carpenter said. Good Anglicans were shocked, but the craftsman could not conceal his glee. The king against the bishops – who would ever have thought it?

Penny, however, was unable to share this optimism. That same afternoon, curious to see how the West End had developed in the dozen years he had been away, he had strolled down towards Whitehall. With the royal family spending more time at St James’s, the old Whitehall palace had become more of a series of royal offices than a residence. The old tiltyard where courtiers had once practised jousting was now a parade ground known as Horse Guards. As he walked down beside it he had to confess that the soldiers exercising in their red coats looked rather cheerful in the afternoon sun.

The colourful troops of soldiers had become a feature of the London scene during the last two decades. Originating from forces raised on both sides of the Civil War, they were all the king’s loyal regiments now. The infantry troops on the parade ground Penny recognized as the smart Coldstream Guards. And a few moments later, a squadron of the Household Cavalry, the splendid Life Guards, came jingling into view. He was watching with some admiration when an elderly gentleman standing nearby addressed him.

“A fine sight, sir, are they not? Yet I wish,” the older man continued, “there was not a huge camp of soldiers only ten miles outside London, under Catholic officers. The king has other camps like that all over the country. What does he mean by all these Catholic troops? That’s what I’d like to know.”

The squadron had reached them. How large the dragoons seemed on their magnificent mounts; how brightly their breastplates and helmets flashed; how proudly they rode. And how clearly, with a sudden, sickening resignation, it came to Eugene Penny that he did understand, very well, what the troops meant. He had seen dragoons like this before and he knew what they could do.

These English, he thought. They fought a civil war against an obstinate tyrant; but his son is more cunning. He will trick them into servitude. He may take his time, just as the French king did, but he will do it; and with terrible anguish he wondered whether he had fled the persecution in France, only to find the same thing in England, too. He had argued unsuccessfully with Carpenter the night before, and now addressed Meredith sternly: “It’s a trap.”

The Reverend Richard Meredith only sighed as he sipped his coffee. The publication of Newton’s great work, he had to admit to himself, was far more important to him than twenty books of sermons. He had read the Declaration of Indulgence from his pulpit without a qualm and, though he felt duty bound to support his bishop and the others who had protested, he did so with no personal conviction. On the Catholic question he was cynical. For though King James himself undoubtedly believed that huge numbers of his subjects would flock to the Catholic Church if given the chance, Meredith was quite sure in his own mind that this was just another example of the Stuart’s family’s inability ever to understand their Protestant English subjects. As a former physician, he was also privy to two pieces of information unknown to Penny. James II of England was far from well; and he had also, more than a year ago, contracted venereal disease. The Catholic monarch would probably not live long, and the chances of his producing a healthy male heir were remote.