The Piccadilly Plot (55 page)

When the Portuguese Infanta Katherine de Braganza married Charles II in 1662, she brought with her a dowry that included
the ports of Bombay and Tangier. Tangier was thought at the time to have the greater significance, and the Navy Board intended
to develop it as a base from which to fight the pirates that infested the north African coast. In the event, it was Bombay
that transpired to be the real catch – it was developed into a major commercial centre, and played a pivotal role in the later
British Empire.

Tangier, on the other hand, proved to be expensive. A fortune was poured into making it a viable port, mostly by constructing
a mole. This was the biggest marine engineering project attempted by the British to date, and comprised a sea wall that was
a quarter of a mile long. Contemporary engravings show houses and other buildings on it, as well as guns and their embrasures.

Twenty years later, the government decided to cut its losses and abandon the port. The diarist Samuel Pepys was there to supervise
its evacuation; his ‘Tangier Diary’ recalls his horror at a town that was dirty, corrupt and
full of vice. The mole was blown up, although parts of it can still be seen at low tide today.

Tangier had a number of governors. One of the last Portuguese colonial heads was Fernando de Meneses, Conde de Ericeira (he
left in 1661, by which time discussions to pass it to the British were well underway). Lord Teviot was governor in 1664. He
was not an effective leader, and was probably corrupt. On 3 May 1664, he went out to inspect his defences and cut wood, having
been assured by his scouts that the area was free of Barbary corsairs. But either the scouts lied or were inept, because a
much larger enemy force (some accounts say it was ten thousand strong) was lying in wait, and Teviot and all but thirty of
his five hundred men were massacred.

His post was taken by Tobias Bridge, notable for being one of Cromwell’s major generals. Colonel John Fitzgerald was appointed
to succeed Bridge, although he held power only until April 1665. As a rule, good people did not want to go to Tangier: it
was a long way away from any political power, and its climate was considered unhealthy.

The Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa was founded in 1660, and its charter granted it a complete monopoly of
any goods coming out of Africa, including precious metals, ivory and slaves. The vast amount of money poured into Tangier
would have suited the Adventurers, who would have benefited from a British-controlled harbour near the Mediterranean – and
what they wanted went, as its members included the King, his Queen, his mother, his sister, his brother, the Duke of Buckingham,
several earls, Peter Proby, Sir Edward Turner, Lord Lucas, James Congett and Thomas Grey. Its secretary was Ellis (or Elisha)
Leighton, a
brazenly villainous character who was known to be devious and dishonest.

The Adventurers’ corporation did not survive long. It suffered during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and was deeply in debt by
1667. Its successor, the Royal African Company, was founded in 1674 with a new charter – and fewer courtiers and more merchants
as investors – and by the eighteenth century it was making a fortune in the slave trade.

Most of the people in
The Piccadilly Plot
were real. Reverend John Addison was chaplain to Tangier in the 1660s. John Dugdale, William Edgeman and Thomas Kipps were
the Earl of Clarendon’s Chief Usher, secretary and Seal Bearer, respectively. The Earl’s (second) wife was called Frances,
and she was the mother of Henry. Henry Hyde, Viscount Cornbury, became the Queen’s private secretary in 1662, a post he held
until he was appointed her chamberlain in 1665.

John Oliver, first mentioned in documents of 1667–8, was Master Mason to the King. John Vere was a woodmonger in the 1670s,
and was convicted of theft. William Prynne was a pamphleteer in Lincoln’s Inn, who hated virtually everything about the world
in which he lived, and Robert Lydcott was John Thurloe’s brother-in-law, and did indeed take advantage of his kinsman’s influence
during the Commonwealth, when Thurloe was Secretary of State and Spymaster General. Thurloe often used cipher to communicate
with his spies, and hired John Wallis, a famous mathematician, to decode documents for him.

Early in 1664, John Cave, a gentleman of His Majesty’s Chapel Royal, was killed outside the New Exchange by one James Elliot.
The argument was said to be about who was to take the wall.

The Collection of Curiosities, on display at the Mitre near St Paul’s Cathedral throughout 1664, really did contain a mummy,
a moon fish, a torpedo, a remora and other objects and animals that were virtually unknown to London at the time.

Records show that at the Restoration, Piccadilly was a hamlet set in open countryside. It comprised a few cottages, a windmill
and the famous Gaming House. A survey of 1651 shows local residents to include William Reyner and Robert Newell. John Marshall
owned a tenement called the Crown, which boasted ‘drinking rooms’ on the ground floor. Brilliana Stanley and her brother Colonel
Edward Harley had moved to Piccadilly by 1658.

Joseph Williamson, one of those who stepped into Thurloe’s shoes as Spymaster, really did marry Catherine O’Brien (here called
Kitty to avoid confusion with Queen Katherine), who was the wife of a friend from his Oxford days. The speed of their marriage
after Henry O’Brien’s death has led to the speculation that they had been lovers beforehand. Documents in Williamson’s handwriting
dating to the 1660s show he made payment to spies called Captain Lester, William Doines and Josiah Brinkes.

Royal Katherine
was launched on 26 October 1664 in Woolwich, an occasion that was attended by the King, the Queen and Samuel Pepys, who records
the bad weather and the King’s teasing of the Queen’s ladies over their seasickness. I have taken the liberty of moving it
forward a few months for
The Piccadilly Plot
.
Henrietta Maria
was a slaving ship, and
Eagle
was a merchantman trading to and from Tangier in the 1660s; one of her captains was Anthony Young. Captain Pepperell was
the master of an Adventurer-owned ship; he fought and seized a privateer vessel called
Jane
.

Clarendon House was designed by Roger Pratt in 1664. It was a massive H-plan structure costing some £40,000 to build, plus
the cost of interior furnishings. This was wildly extravagant, even by Restoration standards, and Londoners resented it. It
stood roughly where Albemarle Street is today, and faced down St James’s Street. It was said to have led the way in English
domestic architecture, and stood in an eight-acre site amid open countryside.

The house contributed to the Earl’s downfall, and was demolished less than twenty years after its completion. Pratt retired
to his country estate in Norfolk, where he built himself Ryston Hall. He was awarded a knighthood, and lived in quiet obscurity
for the rest of his life, playing the role of a country squire. Only two of the five houses he designed still survive – Ryston
Hall and Kingston Lacy – although both were extensively remodelled in the nineteenth century.