848 LONDON [HISTORY.
Protestants and Roman Catholics had gathered together one Sunday evening at the house of Count de Tillier, the French ambassador, to hear Father Drury (a converted Protestant) preach. As many as were able crowded into the room on the upper floor for that purpose, but those who could not get in were fain to remain on the floor below and listen to a preacher on the sacrament of penance. The floors both gave way, and a large number of persons were precipitated to a great depth and killed, both preachers being among the dead. With the death of James I. in 1625 the older history of London may be said to have closed. During the reign of his successor the great change in the relative positions of London within and without the walls had commenced. Before going on to consider the chief incidents of this change it will be well to refer to some features of the social life of James's reign. Ben Jonson places one of the scenes of Every Man in his Humour in Moorfields, which at the time he wrote the play had lately been drained and laid out in walks. Beggars frequented the place, and travellers from the village of Hoxton, who crossed it in order to get into London, did so with as much expedition as possible. Adjoining Moorfields were Finsbury Fields, a favourite practising ground for the archers. Mile End, a common on the Great Eastern Road, was long famous as a rendezvous for the troops. These places are frequently referred to by the old dramatists; Justice Shallow boasts of his doings at Mile End Green when he was Dagonet in Arthur's Show. Fleet Street was the show-place of London, in which were exhibited a constant succession of puppets, naked Indians, and strange fishes. The great meeting-place of Londoners in the day-time was the nave of old St Paul's. Crowds of merchants with their hats on transacted business in the aisles, and used the font as a counter upon which to make their payments; lawyers received clients at their several pillars; and masterless serving-men waited to be engaged upon their own particular bench. Besides those who came on business there were gallants dressed in fashionable finery, so that it was worth the tailor's while to stand behind a pillar and fill his table-books with notes. The middle or Mediterranean aisle was the Paul's Walk, also called the Duke's Gallery from the erroneous supposition that the tomb of Sir Guy Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, was that of the "good" Humphrey, duke of Gloucester. After the Restoration a fence was erected on the inside of the great north door to hinder a concourse of rude people, and when the cathedral was being rebuilt Sir Christopher Wren made a strict order against any profanation of the sacred building. Another of the favourite haunts of the people was the garden of Gray's Inn, where the choicest society was to be met. There, under the shadow of the elm trees which Bacon had planted, Pepys and his wife constantly walked. Mrs Pepys went on one occasion specially to observe the fashions of the ladies because she was then "making some clothes."
In those days of public conviviality, and for many years after wards, the taverns of London held a very important place. The Boar's Head in Great Eastcheap was an inn of Shakespeare's own day, and the characters he introduces into his plays are really his own contemporaries. The "Mermaid" is sometimes described as in Bread Street, and at other times in Friday Street and also in Cheapside. We are thus able to fix its exact position; for a little to the west of Bow church is Bread Street, then came a block of houses, then Friday Street. It was in this block that the "Mermaid" was situated, and there appear to have been entrances from each street. What makes this fact still more certain is the circumstance that a haberdasher in Cheapside living "twixt Wood Street and Milk Street," two streets on the north side opposite Bread and Friday Streets, described himself as "over against the Mermaid tavern in Cheapside." The Windmill tavern occupies a prominent position in the action of Every Man in his Humour.[1] The Windmill stood at the corner of the old Jewry towards Lothbury, and the Mitre close by the Mermaid in Bread Street. The Mitre in Fleet Street, so intimately associated with Dr Johnson, also existed at this time. It is mentioned in a comedy entitled Ram Alley (1611), and Lilly the astrologer frequented it in 1640. At the Mermaid Ben Jonson may be supposed to have had such rivals as Shakespeare, Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Carew, Donne, Cotton, and Selden, but at the Devil in Fleet Street, where he started the Apollo Club, he was omnipotent. Herrick, in his well-known Ode to Ben, mentions several of the inns of the day.
Under James I. the theatre, which established itself so firmly in the latter years of Elizabeth, had still further increased its influence, and to the entertainments given at the many playhouses may be added the masques so expensively produced at court and at the inns of law. In 1613 "The Masque of Flowers" was presented by the members of Gray's Inn in the Old Banqueting House in honour of the marriage of the infamous Carr, earl of Somerset, and the equally infamous Lady Frances, daughter of the earl of Suffolk. The entertainment was prepared by Sir Francis Bacon at a cost of about £2000.
Charles I. and his councillors were filled with the same fear of the increasing growth of London which showed itself in the prohibitory proclamations of his two predecessors. In 1630 a proclamation was issued in which "the erection of any building upon a new foundation, within the limits of 3 miles from any of the gates of the City of London, or palace of Westminster," was forbidden. The privy council in the following year put this question to the lord mayor – "What number of mouths are esteemed to be in the City of London and the liberty?" – the answer to which was 130,268. These prohibitions were not allowed to remain a dead letter, and in 1632 Mr Palmer, a large landholder in Sussex, was fined by the Star Chamber in the sum of £1000 for living in London beyond the period prescribed in the proclamation of June 20th of that year. In April 1635 information was filed against Sir John Suckling the poet and others in the Court of Star Chamber for continuing to reside in London and Westminster. It was during this reign that the first great exodus of the wealthy and fashionable was made to the West End. The great square or piazza of Covent Garden was formed from the designs of Inigo Jones about 1632. The neighbouring streets were shortly afterwards built, and the names of Henrietta, Charles, James, King, and York Streets were given after members of the royal family. Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, was built about 1629, and named in honour of Henrietta Maria. Lincoln's Inn Fields had been planned some years before.
When the civil war broke out London took the side of the parliament, and an extensive system of fortification was at once projected to protect the town against the threatened attack of the royal army. A strong earthen rampart, flanked with bastions and redoubts, surrounded the City, its liberties, Westminster and Southwark, making an immense enclosure. Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, marks the spot of one of these fortifications called Oliver's Mount. In 1650 Cromwell allowed the Jews to return to England after a banishment of centuries, and those who settled in London mostly chose the neighbourhood of Aldgate as a place of residence. With the Restoration the separation of fashionable from city life became complete, and the West End grew into a formidable rival of the older London. In 1635 the game of pall mall was played in St James's Fields, on the site of St James's Square and Pall Mall, but during the Commonwealth this was discontinued, and some houses were built round about. The square was planned out in 1663, and it soon became the most fashionable place in London. A mall was then prepared in St James's Park which still retains its name. About the same time the great houses in Piccadilly were built. Clarendon, Berkeley, and Burlington Houses all appeared on the north side of that street about 1665.
London had been ravaged by plague on many former occasions, but the pestilence that commenced in December 1664 will ever live in history as "the Plague of London." On the 7th of June 1665 Samuel Pepys for the first time saw two or three houses marked with the red cross and the words "Lord, have mercy upon us," on the doors. The deaths daily increased, and business was stopped. Grass grew in the area of the Royal Exchange at Whitehall, and in the principal streets of the city. On the 4th of September, 1665, Pepys writes an interesting letter to Lady Carteret from Woolwich: – "I have stayed in the city till above 7400 died in one week, and of them about 6000 of the plague, and little noise heard day or night but tolling of bells." ... The plague was scarcely stayed before the whole city was in flames, a calamity of the first magnitude, but one which in the end caused much good, as the seeds of disease were destroyed, and London has never since been visited by such an epidemic. On the 2d of September 1666 the fire broke out at one o'clock in the morning at a house in Pudding Lane. A violent east wind fomented the flames, which raged with fury during the whole of Monday and great part of Tuesday. On Tuesday night the wind fell somewhat, and on Wednesday the fire slackened. On Thursday it was extinguished, but on the evening of that day the flames again burst forth at the Temple. Some houses were at once blown up by gunpowder, and thus the fire was finally mastered. Many interesting details of the fire are given in Pepys's Diary. The distress of those who were made houseless by this calamity was great. The river swarmed with vessels filled with persons carrying away such of their goods as they were able to save. Some fled to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate, but Moorfields was the chief resort of the houseless Londoner. Soon paved streets and two-story houses were seen in that swampy place. The people bore their troubles heroically, and Henry Oldenburg, writing to the Hon. Robert Boyle on September 10, says, "the citizens, instead of complaining, discoursed almost of nothing but of a survey for rebuilding the city with bricks and large streets." Within a few days of the fire three several plans were presented to the king for the rebuilding of the city, by Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and Robert Hooke. Wren proposed to build main thoroughfares north and south, and east and west, to insulate all the churches in conspicuous positions, to form the most public places into large piazzas, to unite the halls of the twelve chief companies into one regular square annexed to Guildhall, and to make a fine quay on the bank of the river from Blackfriars to the
- ↑ Various changes in the names of the taverns are made in the folio edition of this play (1616) from the quarto (1601); thus the Mermaid of the quarto becomes the Windmill in the folio, and the Mitre of the quarto is the Star of the folio.
