London before the Great Fire by Deborah Swift

Whilst researching A Divided Inheritance I had to find out what London was like before the Great Fire. My novel is set in 1609, and at that time London was mostly still Elizabethan, even medieval in character, just as Shakespeare would have known it. The closely packed houses would have been timber-framed and tiled with red tiles just as in this 1920's painting of Staples Inn, Holborn.

The City skyline was characterised by the spires of innumerable churches from all the different parishes : St Giles, Criplegate, St Mary le Bow, (of the famous Bow Bells) St Michael Paternoster. Most had been there since medieval times, and all had bells to summon parishioners to prayer, to ring out for births, marriages and deaths, and to tell the hour. More about these churches can be discovered in Reaching for the Heavens: the City Churches of Medieval London by Sarah Valente Kettler & Carole Trimble.

Just what this skyline looked like can be seen in Visscher's fabulous engraving, a map I consulted often whilst working out the layout of London for all three of my novels. Of course the landscape is dominated by the bridge (see my previous post) - still the only one across the Thames, and St Paul's Cathedral, which undfortunately had lost its spire during a storm when it was struck by lightning.

Southern Bridge Gate still held the spikes which displayed the heads of traitors. In my novel these traitors would likely have been the Gunpowder Plotters, to act as a warning to Catholics about their fate should they decide to try the same ploy to remove James I from the throne.

Living in the city was not as romantic as it looks from a distance as narrow alleyways led down to the river where the night-soil men dumped the city's waste. Within the actual city streets the houses were two to three storeys high, with overhangs that blocked the light. Apart from churches, the other large buildings were the Halls of the City Companies, such as Brewers, Bankers, Cloth Merchants. London trade through shipping made up a third of all England's trade. The Halls had often been acquired from the monasteries after the dissolution (in fact in The Gilded Lily, Whitgift's Pawnbrokers is on just such a site.)

Plan of Greyfriars Monastery before it was used as a hospital

Another example of a monastery being re-used is the old cloisters of Greyfriars Monastery in Newgate Street, which  became a hospital for poor children, known as Christ's Hospital. As well as housing the invalid poor, the former nave was used by a stationer to store books. You can imagine how the repressed Catholics felt, seeing their holy buildings now converted for trade - and not always ethical trade at that.

There was some new building going on at this time though, but upstream at Westminster, then unconnected to the city itself. Nearing completion was the new Banqueting Hall by Inigo Jones. It was built to replace a previous one lost by fire, and linked to the city via a highway running through the village of Charing. It was set amongst other noblemen's houses which enjoyed the setting of formal gardens. The purpose of this building in 1622 was to act as a symbol to glorify the house of Stuart, and provide the centrepiece of a proposed palace. The actual banqueting hall is just a fraction of the development below, shown just to the left of the main courtyard, so you can see how ambitious the plans were.

Outside the city gates though, the houses sprawled haphazardly beyond the walls. The population increased from 250,000 to 400,000 from the beginning of James's reign until the Great Fire. This is even despite the Plague which killed 100,000 people. Slum areas within the city and outside its walls became gradually known as 'rookeries'. One famous rookery is the St Giles area and it existed from the 17th century and into Victorian times. Another is Seven Dials - named for its innovative plan of seven streets radiating from a central 'sundial'. Unfortunately Seven Dials became overrun with cheap and shoddy housing and soon became a byword for the hangout of the criminal underclass. More about rookeries in The Beer Flood - the tale of the exploding brewery in St Giles.

The nickname 'rookery' came from the fact that there were similarities between a city slum and the nesting habits of the rook, a crow-like bird which nests in large, untidy colonies. The nests are all crammed together.  The word might also be linked 16th century underworld expression to 'rook'  - which means to steal. Rooks were notorious birds for thieving. Many of these urban slums remained similar for a few hundred years, with no great increase in sanitation or home comforts.

Rookery at St Giles about 1800

My protagonist Elspet Leviston was lucky, she lived in a better area close to Convent Garden (now Covent Garden). When researching her house I could find no manor house still surviving in London that I thought was suitable in terms of period, so I used the model of Bampfylde House in Exeter as my inspiration for West View House in the book.

Bampfylde House Exeter

You can find out more about Jacobean Houses and Bampfylde House in particular on another of my posts here. Scroll  down to find the post. Happy Reading!

My latest book - A Divided Inheritance - is the story of a lace-trader's daughter who must leave her London home to track down her cousin, a man who has stolen her inheritance.

Not only must she confront the cousin she loathes, but she must travel to Seville, a city in the grip of the Inquistion, and a place which in 1610 is about to undergo one of the biggest upheavals in its history.

More about my researches about Golden Age Seville and the book can be found on my website

www.deborahswift.com

Bibliography : Wren's London by Eric de Mare

The Illustrated Pepys by Robert Latham

Life in Stuart London by Peggy Miller

WILLIAM and MARY

This week we welcome Andrea Zuvich as our guest blogger. William and Mary are the forgotten Stuarts (except to the Irish!) and we are very excited to find out a little bit more about them!

The story of William & Mary is one of duty, love, war, heartbreak, betrayal, and revolution. It was a real game of thrones. This was a unique reign as there was a joint King and Queen upon the throne for the first time in English history.

Mary II, eldest daughter of James, Duke of York (later James II) and niece of the Merry Monarch, Charles II, was a romantic, naturally intelligent but poorly educated, beautiful, feminine girl when she married William III of Orange in 1677.  

William III, by contrast, had lived a solemn lifestyle – one of hard work and duty. He was Stadtholder, or Chief Magistrate, of the United Provinces/Dutch Republic (now the Netherlands) and the constant threat from and warfare with Louis XIV’s France always plagued his thoughts. His passions included hunting and collecting artwork.

William was struck by Mary’s sweet nature and stunned by her incredible beauty, and he immediately asked Charles for her hand in marriage. Mary, then fifteen years old, was devastated to learn that she would have to marry her first cousin William, who was at first sight unattractive, morose, old, and a good deal shorter (William and Mary’s height difference was almost the same as that between Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise). Remember, Charles II’s Restoration court was flamboyant and colourful, whereas the Dutch Republic was more sombre and calm. Fortunately, she soon fell completely in love with her husband, who was kind-hearted and even funny with his intimates, and also with her adoptive country.

Within a few months of their marriage, 1678, Mary became very happily pregnant. At around four months pregnant, she decided to visit him at his encampment at Breda. Unfortunately, the roads were rough and the coach jostled her about so violently, resulting in a miscarriage. As there was no doctor around with knowledge of gynaecology, she developed an infection. Eventually, in 1679, she became pregnant a second time, but the damage from the first miscarriage was too great and she lost the baby again. Call it wishful thinking, she had all the symptoms of pregnancy again in 1680, but no child came, the symptoms had been misdiagnosed and this was unbearable for the young couple. Mary’s childlessness was a source of deep heartache for her for the rest of her life.

William, in sadness or desperation, turned to another. Imagine how heartbreaking it must have been for Mary, who loved him passionately, to learn that he was carrying on with her lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Villiers, a woman she had grown up with. There is still debate as to whether William’s relationship with Elizabeth Villiers was sexual, as she never gave birth to any of his children, though the affair presumably lasted for 15 years, and when she did marry, she quickly had children. No letters between them, nothing at all, has survived. Elizabeth remains shrouded in mystery. Perhaps we will never know what their relationship was. One thing remains clear: William was not, unlike his uncles, a highly sexed man. This can be attributed to his ill health – he had severe asthma, suffered from headaches, haemorrhoids, and later, painfully swollen legs and feet.

Persistent rumours of William’s homosexuality, popularised in Jacobite propaganda, cannot be accepted due to lack of evidence. We even have William’s own writing against it. When told of scurrilous rumours surrounding his relationship with his young favourite, Arnold Joost von Keppel, he wrote, “I find it extraordinary that one cannot have esteem for a young man without it being criminal.” (Sodomy was illegal at this time).

Then, in 1688, the Glorious Revolution occurred, in which the Immortal Seven – seven of the most influential, powerful men in England – invited William to take the throne from James II, his uncle/father-in-law, who was unpopular and Catholic. For a brief summary, click here,

William and Mary were crowned in 1689 at Westminster Abbey – he crowned in St. Edward’s Chair, she in a copy of the chair which is on display at the Abbey museum today. Mary was Queen regnant, like Elizabeth I had been (Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge will become Queen consort when her husband William becomes King, not Queen regnant). Mary, though unfortunately not given the same excellent education as Elizabeth I had had, was nevertheless a very intelligent woman and there were pamphlets at the time which depicted her as the new Elizabeth.

Together they purchased the home that would become Kensington Palace and they hired Christopher Wren to remodel both it and Hampton Court Palace.

Their joint reign was short-lived. In late 1694, Mary contracted hemorrhagic smallpox – the most deadly strain of the disease. She considerately sent anyone who had not already had the disease away from Kensington House and put her affairs in order. She went through her journal and ripped out and burned pages that she did not wish anyone else to see.  Mary, aged only 32, died in the early hours of the 28^th December, 1694, leaving her husband (who fainted) and the entire nation broken-hearted. To William, whose father had died of smallpox a week before he was born, and who also lost his mother to the same disease when he was ten, it was an earth-shattering blow. Her body lay in state in the Banqueting House until the costly funeral at Westminster Abbey, where “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary” by Henry Purcell was played.

After Mary’s death, William ruled alone until his death in 1702, and in the intervening years he had become more unpopular, the target of several assassination attempts and he increasingly drank to excess. As he rode his favourite horse, Sorrel, out on Home Park, Hampton Court; the horse stumbled on a molehill, sending William flying off, breaking his collarbone in the fall. Within days pneumonia had set in and William III died at Kensington House. Loathed by his sister-in-law, Mary’s younger sister, now Queen Anne, he was interred with little fanfare. A sad end for someone once heralded as the Protestant Champion of Europe! 

Andrea (aka 17th Century Lady) is a 17th century historian specialising in the late Stuarts & the middle Baroque composers. She went to the University of Central Florida and Oxford University and is a Garden History tour guide at Kensington Palace.  She is currently writing a historical fiction book about William and Mary. You can find her at The Seventeenth Century Lady