Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (58 page)

The formal declaration of war came, in February 1665, after months of preparation. The cause seems to have been largely popular, as far as such matters can be ascertained, particular among those merchants and speculators who would benefit from the embarrassment of Dutch trade; one of these was the king’s brother, James, duke of York. He led the Royal Africa Company that specialized in the business of slavery, and he invested in other commercial ventures. The conflict has therefore been described as the first purely commercial war in English history. As one hemp merchant, Captain Cocke, put it, ‘the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must go down’.

A great victory was won at Lowestoft in the beginning of June under the leadership of the duke of York, when twenty-six Dutch vessels were seized or sunk. Each fleet would sail past the other firing its guns into the enemy’s hull and rigging until one or more ships ‘broke the line’, in which case the disabled vessels would be boarded or sunk with fire-ships. The two sides ‘knocked it out’, in the phrase of the time, for several hours.

The sound of the guns was heard even in London, and in an essay John Dryden recalled that ‘the noise of the cannon from both navies reached our ears about the city, so that all men being alarmed with it, and in a dreadful suspense about the event which we knew was then deciding, everyone went following the sound as his fancy led him…’ The success would have been even greater if a courtier, while the duke of York was asleep in his cabin, had not called off the pursuit of the remaining ships, whether for fear of waking him, or of engaging once more with the enemy, is not known. In any case the momentum of the victory was not maintained in the wider war.

In August a squadron of English ships attacked a merchant convoy, but was beaten back. In the same month the fleet under the command of the earl of Sandwich was held off the Suffolk coast as a result of poor victualling, and then spent the next few weeks chasing Dutch ships through storm and rain. Some were captured but, when the prizes were dispersed among the flag officers, charges of fraud and theft were made against Sandwich; he never really managed to refute them, and the navy itself seemed complicit in corruption. The earl was deprived of his command and sent as an ambassador to Spain. Later in the year, when the English ships were laid up for repair, some Dutch vessels appeared at the mouth of the Thames and commenced a blockade; it was dispersed only when disease, and lack of supplies, forced them to return home. The blockade, however, had compounded the problems of high taxes and uncertain business that already beset the merchants. Overseas trade had been seriously set back by the war on the high seas, and the Baltic trade shrank away almost to nothing; woollen manufacture, the staple of England’s exports, was similarly depressed. A war fought for trade had become a war fatal to trade.

Yet already a greater threat had emerged in the streets of London. In his diary entry for 7 June 1665, ‘the hottest day that ever I felt in my life’, Samuel Pepys noted that

This day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there – which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw. It put me into an ill conception of myself and my smell, so that I was forced to buy some roll tobacco to smell to and chew – which took away the apprehension.

The plague had come back to London; houses infected with the distemper were shut up, the victims still often within, and a red cross 1 foot in height was painted on the doors. Pepys had purchased tobacco as a medical precaution.

So began a time of peril and great fear. The first signs of the disease were ‘tokens’ of discoloured skin; after three or four days ‘buboes’ or carbuncles erupted over the body and, if they did not suppurate, death was certain. Many victims were tied to the bed in the event of frenzy.

The ‘dead carts’ or ‘pest carts’ trundled through the lanes and alleys with their burden of corpses to be discharged in one of the many pits dug for the purpose; it is reported that in their misery some of the living flung themselves among the piles of the dead. Some lay dead, or dying, in the streets. Others fled wailing to the fields around London. Some people locked themselves away, and those that ventured outside looked on one another fearfully. ‘And not dead yet?’ ‘And still alive?’ Some, desperate beyond fear, sang and danced and drank in promiscuous gatherings. Others fell into a stupor of despair. It was whispered that demons in human shape wandered abroad; they were known as ‘hollow men’, and those that they struck soon died.

Prophets and fanatics roamed the streets bawling out threats and warnings. One of them, walking naked with a pan of burning coals on his head, invoked the judgement of God on the sinful city. Through the searingly hot months of July and August the fury of the plague rose ever higher. The principal thoroughfares were all but overgrown with grass. In September fires of sea-coal, one fire for every twelve houses, were kept burning in the streets for three days and nights. Yet they had no effect. As many as 10,000 fatalities were listed each week in the bills of mortality. It seemed that soon enough the city would be empty. But by the beginning of December the sickness abated, and the new year witnessed a return of many London families who had fled in panic. It was estimated that 100,000 had died.

The new year, 1666, was one of ill omen. The number had long been considered significant, heralding perhaps the coming of the Antichrist; for some it signified fire and apocalypse. In its Latin form, ‘MDCLXVI’, it is unique for including every Roman numeral once and in reverse sequence. The solar eclipse at the beginning of July, in this year, convinced many that the end of days was coming.

The prognostications elsewhere were not good. The king of France had signed a defensive treaty with the Dutch and, at the beginning of the year, he declared war upon England. In truth he did not do much for the benefit of his new ally, but his intervention increased public anxiety about the conduct of hostilities. There was no money and the lord high treasurer, the 4th earl of Southampton, asked Samuel Pepys, clerk of the naval board, ‘What would you have me do? I have given all I can for my life. Why will people not lend their money? Why will they not trust the king as well as Oliver?’ The reference to Cromwell’s success is interesting. The nation had received no benefit, and acquired no material gains, from these inconclusive and inglorious battles against the Dutch.

They were in any case still a formidable enemy. A battle at the beginning of June off the Flemish and English coasts lasted for four days, and at the end of it the English had lost twice as many ships and men as their rivals; the two sides had fought each other to exhaustion and, as one English commander put it, ‘they were as glad to be quit of us as we of them’. It was a desperate and bloody fight, leaving 6,000 Englishmen dead. Many of them were found floating in the seas wearing their dark ‘Sunday clothes’; they had previously been taken by the press-gangs on leaving church.

News then came, a week later, that the French had taken over the colonial possession of St Kitts. Louis XIV had decided to take a more active part in the maritime struggle and ordered his fleet to sea. The melancholy aspect of affairs convinced many that the government and the king were about to fall. A battle in late July was the occasion for some celebration, however, after the English fleet had pursued the fleeing Dutch over the North Sea for some thirty-six hours. The cry that had gone up before the engagement was: ‘If we do not beat them now, we shall never do it!’ But all of the participants were growing weary of a war that would last for another year.

London was not spared further horror. After the disaster of the plague, a small chimney fire at a bakery in Pudding Lane began a conflagration that would envelop most of the city. It was the very beginning of September 1666, after an unusually hot August had left the thatch and timber of the city bone dry; the fire was carried by strong south-east winds towards London Bridge and Fish Street.

It burned steadily towards the west, and John Evelyn noted that ‘the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it’. The molten lead from the roof of St Paul’s ran through the streets, according to John Evelyn, ‘glowing with fiery redness’. The Guildhall stood immured in flame like a burning coal. The people took to the water or fled to the fields in the north of the city, seeking safety from the burning drops that rained down upon them. The smoke now stretched for 50 miles. Yet not everyone ran in terror. The royal brothers, Charles and James, took an active part in exhorting, and even joining, those who were trying to contain the engulfing fires.

The fire abated after three days, having consumed five-sixths of the city and leaving a trail of destruction and desolation a mile and a half in length and half a mile in breadth. When John Evelyn clambered among the ruins, the ground still hot beneath his feet, he often did not know where he was. Yet the vitality of the city was not seriously harmed. The usual round of trade and commerce was established again within a year, and the work of rebuilding in brick and stone began; within two years of the Great Fire 1,200 houses had been constructed, and in the following year another 1,600. By 1677 most of the city was once again in place. It was said that it rose almost as quickly as it fell.

The year of ill omen, however, seemed to have fulfilled its destiny. In the month after the fire parliament reassembled in a state of gloom and anxiety. Rumours of conspiracy, by the French and Dutch, were everywhere. The Catholics, and the Quakers, were also blamed. One of those returned to parliament, Roger Pepys, cousin to Samuel, predicted that ‘we shall all be ruined very speedily’. A general fast was imposed upon the nation as a penance for what John Evelyn described as ‘our prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’. In the same period the king ordained that all French fashions should be banished from the court and that in their place a simple ‘Persian’ coat and tunic were to be worn; it was supposed to be a gesture towards thrift but it was essentially a token of his flippancy. The style was in any case soon abandoned.

After much debate, and intense scrutiny of the accounts provided by the Navy Board, the king was voted sufficient funds to fight another year of war; yet there was intense wrangling about the means of furnishing them. Should it be a hearth tax or a poll tax? Nobody seemed to know. As they talked and debated it was rumoured that the French were preparing an invasion, but this was discounted as a government ploy to hasten a decision.

The assessment was finally passed in the middle of January 1667, but of course the revenues were not collected. In the following month the Navy Board declared to the duke of York that ‘we are conscious of an utter incapacity to perform what his majesty and your royal highness seem to look for from us’. The shipyards were laid up without supplies or repairs. The seamen, deprived of pay and even of the necessities of life, were provoked to riot on several occasions. The City refused to lend money, and the treasury was exhausted.

It was time for peace. The king and his council had tentatively begun the process of negotiation with the Dutch, and Charles himself was at the same time engaged in private negotiations with the French king; they had no reason to fight against each other, and it was eventually agreed that they should abstain from mutual hostilities. Charles also trusted that his fellow sovereign would be able to persuade or bully his Dutch allies into signing a similar agreement. Charles and Louis had sent their letters through Henrietta Maria, respectively mother and paternal aunt of the two men; the English king kept the matter secret from even his most intimate councillors, thus emphasizing his propensity for clandestine dealings.

In the meantime, to save expenditure, the privy council had no choice but to reduce the scale of naval operations; only a ‘summer guard’ of ships would be sent to sea in order to protect the merchant vessels. It was also believed that, given the increasingly futile nature of the war, hostilities were about to be suspended. This incapacity led directly to one of the most humiliating episodes in English naval history.

At the beginning of May 1667, a great conference between the warring parties was called at Breda; it soon became clear to the Dutch, however, that the English were not prepared to be over-generous in the negotiations. So they decided to try force for the final time to extort concessions and to hasten the progress of the discussions. In the following month, therefore, they launched a raid into the Thames estuary; they broke the defences of the harbour at Chatham and proceeded to burn four ships before towing away the largest ship of the fleet, the
Royal Charles
, and returning with it undamaged.

Panic ran through the streets of London. It was said that the Dutch were coming, and the trained bands were called out for the city’s defence. In truth the enemy fleet could have found its way to London Bridge without much difficulty. It was reported that Harwich, Colchester and Dover were already burned. The reports were false but the events at Chatham were a symbolic, as well as a naval, disaster. One parliamentarian, John Rushworth, wrote that ‘the people are ready to tear their hairs off their heads’. Sir William Batten, surveyor of the navy, exclaimed, ‘By God! I think the devil shits Dutchmen!’

The Dutch now pressed their advantage and the king, humiliated at home and abroad, conceded some of their demands. The principle of negotiation was that of ‘
uti possidetis’
, by means of which the parties retained possession of that which they had taken by force in the course of conflict. As a result, England lost much of the West Indies to France and the invaluable island of nutmeg, Run, part of Indonesia, to the Dutch. In return, however, it retained New Netherland; this was the colonial province of the Netherlands that included the future states of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and Connecticut. Yet at the time the gains did not match the loss of national prestige.