London (127 page)
“To Holland,” the older man replied. “I’m going to see William of Orange.”
The events of the summer of 1688 marked a watershed in English history, but to refer to them as the Glorious Revolution is rather misleading. There was no revolution; nor was there anything glorious about the business at all.
When, on Sunday 10 June, King James II of England announced to an astonished world that his wife had at last given birth to a son and heir, loyal Englishmen were put into a quandary. If the child lived – and all reports said it was healthy – this baby would inherit the throne. He would also, undoubtedly, be Catholic.
“But we only put up with James,” good Protestants pointed out, “because we knew we were getting William and Mary next.” Indeed, long before this, some of the more concerned Protestants had discreetly approached William of Orange to suggest that he should at least urge his father-in-law to moderate his papist ways – though the cautious Dutchman had preferred not to interfere. This baby boy, however, changed everything.
For Lord St James, already appalled by the revelation from O Be Joyful, and wrestling with his conscience about what to do, the news had been a blow. To others, less loyal than he, it was a call to arms. The Whigs were disgusted; the Tories – who had just seen seven of their Anglican bishops put in the Tower – were thoroughly alarmed. Others too, besides St James, set out for Holland. By the end of the month, an invitation had been sent to William from some of the greatest men in the land: “If you want your kingdom of England,” they told him, “you’d better come and get it now.”
How could Julius, whatever the circumstances, desert the path of loyalty which was his birthright, and break his oath to the king who had even made him an earl? Wasn’t it against all he stood for? Rooted equally deep in his character however was that other, binding injunction received eighty years ago from his father. The rule which, in the end, proved stronger than all the others: “No popery.”
For what really astonished the people of England, what caused Lord St James and Meredith to look at each other so sceptically, was the fact that this baby – Catholic and royal – had been born at all. A healthy boy after nothing but miscarriages? More than a month premature?
“I’ll tell you exactly what I think,” Lord St James told the still dazed O Be Joyful, as their vessel made its way down the long Thames Estuary. “I think the queen had a miscarriage and that they substituted another baby. Meredith thinks so too.” So did most of England. Medical history has since conceded that the baby was probably legitimate, but as Protestant England turned to William of Orange in 1688, it was widely claimed that the Catholic baby had no right to inherit at all. He had been smuggled in, so the story would finally go, in a warming pan.
Cautious William took his time. On 5 November he landed in the West Country. James went to Salisbury. Parts of the north declared for William; James hesitated. Then James’s best general, gallant John Churchill, went across to William, who marched slowly up to London, and James fled. By January, Parliament had gathered, decided that James, since he had gone, must have abdicated and, after some haggling over terms, offered the Crown to William and Mary jointly. This sequence of quite unheroic events was called the Glorious Revolution.
It was, nonetheless, a great watershed. For with the new settlement, the religious and political disputes which had troubled England for more than a century reached a lasting resolution. The great and final loser was the Catholic Church. William and Mary, if they had no children, were to be succeeded by Mary’s Protestant sister Anne. The Catholic descendants of James were omitted entirely from the succession. Most significant of all, no person in the future who was, or even married, a Catholic could ever sit upon England’s throne. As for ordinary Catholics, they were liable to extra taxes and debarred from any public position whatsoever.
The Puritans too were debarred from most public offices, but were free to worship as they pleased. Mary still hoped they might be included in a somewhat broader Anglican Church.
More subtle, but deeply significant, was the political aspect of the settlement. Though Parliament claimed it was only restating old rights, this was not so. Parliament was to be called at regular intervals – this was made statutory. No army could be raised without its agreement. Free speech was guaranteed. And, as it soon made clear, Parliament would always henceforth ensure the king was short of money, and ultimately subject, therefore, to Parliament’s will. The attempt of the Stuarts to edge England towards an absolute monarchy like the French had failed. Parliament, having won the Civil War, had finally won the peace.
One small political change that a few at Westminster noticed was that from this time the old Earl of St James, who God knows had always been a Tory, started voting with the Whigs. He said to their surprise that he now thought kings should be subject to Parliament. But he never said why.
It was best in Julius’s judgement that the secret of Charles II’s treachery should be quietly buried. “It can do no good to stir that up,” he told Meredith. Nor was O Be Joyful so eager to pursue the matter now that James and his Catholic heirs were gone. The extraordinary and treacherous agreement which had, indeed, been made between the Stuart King of England and his kinsman the King of France, was to remain secret for another hundred years.
One thing was very clear: there was no longer the faintest chance of the English monarch forming any threatening alliances with Europe’s Catholic powers. The English and the Dutch now shared a Calvinist Protestant king whose greatest enemy was Louis XIV of France. The Huguenots like Penny could be certain that the island kingdom was a safe refuge. As for the English, they might still be trading rivals, but the Dutch were now their allies. The two countries had much in common. Their languages were similar and God knew how many Englishmen were descended from the Hollanders’ Flemish neighbours. Catholic Spain, all through the Reformation, had been their common enemy. Englishmen admired Dutch craftsmen and artists, taking from them words like “easel”, “landscape” and “still life”. English sailors served in Dutch ships and cheerfully employed the Dutch terms “skipper”, “yacht” and “smuggler”. If King William told his English subjects that their Dutch cousins were in danger from the papist French, they were ready to help them defend the Protestant cause.
The Earl of St James lived to a very great age. In 1693 he passed his ninetieth year, and though he walked with difficulty, his mind remained keen. Nor was he ever lonely; for apart from his children and grandchildren, a stream of visitors came to talk to the man who had been born on the last day good Queen Bess was still the queen of England. From the Gunpowder Plot to the Glorious Revolution: “He’s seen it all,” they said. And in 1694, the last year of his life, he was allowed to see one thing more.
In that year, after much discussion, the city of London gained a new institution. Financed by a number of prominent London merchants, it was a joint stock bank. Its function was to finance long-term government debt by issuing bonds on which interest was payable. They called it the Bank of London.
“I told the first King Charles it could be done,” the earl explained to his visitors, with perfect truth. “But he wouldn’t listen. Perhaps,” he would nowadays concede with a smile, “it was just as well.” It also pleased him greatly that for its first premises the new bank should have taken offices in the rebuilt Mercers’ Hall in Cheapside. “Our family’s livery company,” he remarked proudly. And indeed he might have added that by choosing this location, the new institution, which before long was being called not just the Bank of London but the Bank of England, was beginning its life on the very site where once had stood the family house of Thomas Becket, London’s martyred saint.
Two months after the Bank of England’s founding, Julius died, one peaceful dawn. He therefore missed by a year a small event that would have given him pleasure. Richard Meredith, like his own father, had married late; but he had married well, and in 1695 he was blessed with a son.
A month afterwards, one rainy morning, Meredith received a visit from Eugene Penny.
The Huguenot had come with a present contained in a little box, which he opened with evident pride. Inside, Meredith saw, was a handsome silver watch. But as Penny drew this out, the clergyman also noticed that there was something unusual about it.
Taking his spectacles off to give them a careful wipe, Penny smiled. “Look,” he said, and opening the back of the watch he pointed with his little finger to explain its workings.
It was twenty years since Tompion of London had started making watches with a hair spring, but now the great clockmaker had devised a new refinement that was to carry London watchmaking to a position of prominence in all Europe. The tiny mechanism to which Penny pointed, and which was termed a cylinder escapement, made possible one great improvement in the portable watch. It allowed all the cog wheels within to be arranged horizontally, making the watch flat, so that it could be slipped into a pocket.
“It’s the neatest thing I ever saw in my life,” Meredith exclaimed.
It was to celebrate the birth of his son, and to say thank you for the kindly clergyman’s help in getting the Huguenot his job back with Tompion the master clockmaker.
Soon after the new century dawned, there was one other addition to Meredith’s life. In the year 1701 his friend Wren designed a splendid steeple for his church of St Bride’s. It was a remarkable affair. Set over a fine square tower, like that of St Mary-le-Bow, it consisted of a series of eight-sided hollow drums, with open arches and pillars, arranged in tiers, each smaller than the one below, like an inverted telescope, and completed by an obelisk on top. Taller even than the Monument, the new steeple of St Bride’s could be seen the whole length of Fleet Street, and made the church one of the landmarks of the city.
1708
They were still in good time. He had not told them where he was taking them, but he had obtained special permission and he wanted it to be a surprise. Though O Be Joyful had passed his three score years and ten, he felt fit enough for the task he had set himself as hurrying cheerfully along he led his two favourite grandchildren up Ludgate Hill. It was a sparkling late October day and the people thronging the streets were in festive mood. It was the day of the Lord Mayor’s procession.
Except for the Commonwealth period when such festivities were banned, the ancient annual ceremony had been growing more elaborate with every decade. Earlier on, in his official residence behind St Mary-le-Bow – Sir Julius Ducket’s place, as O Be Joyful still thought of it – the mayor had put on his robes before emerging and riding down to the river. Then, in his magnificent barge, escorted by the barges of all the livery companies, he had been rowed to Westminster where like a feudal baron of olden times he performed his oath of fealty to the monarch. After this, the barges would turn, disembark their passengers by Blackfriars, and then the mayor, aldermen and all the liveries of the city would ride, in a magnificent and brightly coloured pageant, up to Cheapside and thence to the Guildhall. And what better place for the two children to see the whole affair, Carpenter had thought, than from the great outside gallery of the dome of St Paul’s?
There it was, looming in the sky ahead of them, the monarch of the city’s western hill, the mighty dome. Even now, the last finishing touches were still being made to the great stone lantern tower that rose over fifty feet above the apex of the dome to conclude in a golden cross, a dizzying three hundred and sixty-three feet above the cathedral’s floor. The dome: just as it had been in the great wooden model he had made almost thirty-five years ago, just as he had always known it would be. Yet with this one difference: Wren’s final dome was taller, even more august, than the original model.
Carpenter had watched it go up with fascination. Wren himself was often there, an old man now, but still gamely letting the workmen pull him up into the dome in a basket so that he could inspect the work. Carpenter had been especially intrigued to see that the great structure was not in fact one dome at all, but three. Between the domed ceiling seen from the interior, and the metalled exterior roof which actually rose fifty feet higher, there was, not exactly a dome, but a massive brick cone, almost like a kiln.
“And that,” Wren told him one day, “is what will support the lantern on top, and hold everything else in place as well.” A week later, taking the terrified woodcarver up in the basket with him, he conducted him into the scaffolding of the roof and showed him some of its secrets.
“Around the base of the dome,” the architect explained, “lies a great double chain. This is an extra protection to stop the weight above pushing the walls outwards. Then, all the way up the inner cone, I have placed bands of stone and iron chains which hold everything tight, like the metal hoops round a barrel. And everything needs to be very firm,” he added a little sadly. “For the outer roof was to have been made of copper. But they made me use lead. It saved them a thousand pounds, but it added six hundred tons to the load the building has to bear.”
Around the inside and the outside of the lower parts of the dome there were galleries; and, now that the huge building was completed, stairs even took the bravest up to the very pinnacle of the lantern tower itself. The view from the gallery was splendid, and thanks to Grinling Gibbons and Wren, O Be Joyful had been granted permission to go up there today. Feeling rather proud of himself, he reached the top of Ludgate Hill and led the way towards the great western portico with its huge pillars.
It amused him to notice that as the two children came to the door they hesitated for a moment before going in, but it did not surprise him. Indeed, in a way, he was rather pleased.
Gideon and Martha: his two favourites of the seven grandchildren. How proud, he used to think, their namesakes would have been if they could have seen them with their quiet but determined characters, their serious faces and rather solemn eyes. They had been strictly brought up in the Puritan manner too. For since the toleration granted after 1688, the Dissenters, as all Protestants outside the Church of England were now called, had flourished. Over two thousand meeting-houses were now operating in England, with London of course the most vital centre. True Puritans seldom dressed in black or wore high hats, these days, but you could see hundreds of good folk, in plain brown or grey, flocking to hear the pastors preach on any Sunday. The harsh moral laws of the Commonwealth might have gone, but every child of one of these congregations knew that ornament in dress was sinful, that worldly pleasures were corrupting, and that, if they committed fornication, or got drunk, or gambled, the quiet, disapproving eyes of the whole community would be on them. The Puritans might be out of power, but their conscience was still a mighty force in England, and those Dissenters who felt they had a part to play in public life would take communion in an Anglican church, for form’s sake, perhaps as Church of England men. “I give the sacrament to five good Dissenters,” Meredith once told Carpenter. “I know what they’re doing and they know I know. Nor does it worry me. We are just getting round some legislation that shouldn’t be there.”