The History of England, from the Accession of James the Second - Volume 1, Thomas Babington Macaulay [ebook pc reader txt] 📗

and pasture. Corn grew and cattle browsed over

the space now covered by that long succession of streets and

villas.98 Brighton was described as a place which had once been

thriving, which had possessed many small fishing barks, and which

had, when at the height of prosperity, contained above two

thousand inhabitants, but which was sinking fast into decay. The

sea was gradually gaining on the buildings, which at length

almost entirely disappeared. Ninety years ago the ruins of an old

fort were to be seen lying among the pebbles and seaweed on the

beach; and ancient men could still point out the traces of

foundations on a spot where a street of more than a hundred huts

had been swallowed up by the waves. So desolate was the place

after this calamity, that the vicarage was thought scarcely worth

having. A few poor fishermen, however, still continued to dry

their nets on those cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice

as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents,

mile after mile, its gay and fantastic front to the sea.99


England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, destitute

of watering places. The gentry of Derbyshire and of the

neighbouring counties repaired to Buxton, where they were lodged

in low rooms under bare rafters, and regaled with oatcake, and

with a viand which the hosts called mutton, but which the guests

suspected to be dog. A single good house stood near the

spring.100 Tunbridge Wells, lying within a day's journey of the

capital, and in one of the richest and most highly civilised

parts of the kingdom, had much greater attractions. At present we

see there a town which would, a hundred and sixty years ago, have

ranked, in population, fourth or fifth among the towns of

England. The brilliancy of the shops and the luxury of the

private dwellings far surpasses anything that England could then

show. When the court, soon after the Restoration, visited

Tunbridge Wells, there was no town: but, within a mile of the

spring, rustic cottages, somewhat cleaner and neater than the

ordinary cottages of that time, were scattered over the heath.

Some of these cabins were movable and were carried on sledges

from one part of the common to another. To these huts men of

fashion, wearied with the din and smoke of London, sometimes came

in the summer to breathe fresh air, and to catch a glimpse of

rural life. During the season a kind of fair was daily held near

the fountain. The wives and daughters of the Kentish farmers came

from the neighbouring villages with cream, cherries, wheatears,

and quails. To chaffer with them, to flirt with them, to praise

their straw hats and tight heels, was a refreshing pastime to

voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and maids of honour.

Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came down from London, and

opened a bazaar under the trees. In one booth the politician

might find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another were

gamblers playing deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the

fiddles were in attendance. and there were morris dances on the

elastic turf of the bowling green. In 1685 a subscription had

just been raised among those who frequented the wells for

building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered

everywhere, insisted on dedicating to Saint Charles the

Martyr.101


But at the head of the English watering places, without a rival.

was Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the

days of the Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat

of a Bishop. The sick repaired thither from every part of the

realm. The King sometimes held his court there. Nevertheless,

Bath was then a maze of only four or five hundred houses, crowded

within an old wall in the vicinity of the Avon. Pictures of what

were considered as the finest of those houses are still extant,

and greatly resemble the lowest rag shops and pothouses of

Ratcliffe Highway. Travellers indeed complained loudly of the

narrowness and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which

charms even eyes familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and

Palladio, and which the genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of

Frances Burney and of Jane Austen, has made classic ground, had

not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself was an open field lying

far beyond the walls; and hedgerows intersected the space which

is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor patients

to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place

which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a

covert rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries

which were to be found in the interior of the houses of Bath by

the fashionable visitors who resorted thither in search of health

or amusement, we possess information more complete and minute

than can generally be obtained on such subjects. A writer who

published an account of that city about sixty years after the

Revolution has accurately described the changes which had taken

place within his own recollection. He assures us that, in his

younger days, the gentlemen who visited the springs slept in

rooms hardly as good as the garrets which he lived to see

occupied by footmen. The floors of the dining rooms were

uncarpeted, and were coloured brown with a wash made of soot and

small beer, in order to hide the dirt. Not a wainscot was

painted. Not a hearth or a chimneypiece was of marble. A slab of

common free-stone and fire irons which had cost from three to

four shillings were thought sufficient for any fireplace. The

best-apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and were

furnished with rushbottomed chairs. Readers who take an interest

in the progress of civilisation and of the useful arts will be

grateful to the humble topographer who has recorded these facts,

and will perhaps wish that historians of far higher pretensions

had sometimes spared a few pages from military evolutions and

political intrigues, for the purpose of letting us know how the

parlours and bedchambers of our ancestors looked.102


The position of London, relatively to the other towns of the

empire, was, in the time of Charles the Second, far higher than

at present. For at present the population of London is little

more than six times the population of Manchester or of Liverpool.

In the days of Charles the Second the population of London was

more than seventeen times the population of Bristol or of

Norwich. It may be doubted whether any other instance can be

mentioned of a great kingdom in which the first city was more

than seventeen times as large as the second. There is reason to

believe that, in 1685, London had been, during about half a

century, the most populous capital in Europe. The inhabitants,

who are now at least nineteen hundred thousand, were then

probably little more shall half a million.103 London had in the

world only one commercial rival, now long ago outstripped, the

mighty and opulent Amsterdam. English writers boasted of the

forest of masts and yardarms which covered the river from the

Bridge to the Tower, and of the stupendous sums which were

collected at the Custom House in Thames Street. There is, indeed,

no doubt that the trade of the metropolis then bore a far greater

proportion than at present to the whole trade of the country; yet

to our generation the honest vaunting of our ancestors must

appear almost ludicrous. The shipping which they thought

incredibly great appears not to have exceeded seventy thousand

tons. This was, indeed, then more than a third of the whole

tonnage of the kingdom, but is now less than a fourth of the

tonnage of Newcastle, and is nearly equalled by the tonnage of

the steam vessels of the Thames.


The customs of London amounted, in 1685, to about three hundred

and thirty thousand pounds a year. In our time the net duty paid

annually, at the same place, exceeds ten millions.104


Whoever examines the maps of London which were published towards

the close of the reign of Charles the Second will see that only

the nucleus of the present capital then existed. The town did

not, as now, fade by imperceptible degrees into the country. No

long avenues of villas, embowered in lilacs and laburnums,

extended from the great centre of wealth and civilisation almost

to the boundaries of Middlesex and far into the heart of Kent and

Surrey. In the east, no part of the immense line of warehouses

and artificial lakes which now stretches from the Tower to

Blackwall had even been projected. On the west, scarcely one of

those stately piles of building which are inhabited by the noble

and wealthy was in existence; and Chelsea, which is now peopled

by more than forty thousand human beings, was a quiet country

village with about a thousand inhabitants.105 On the north,

cattle fed, and sportsmen wandered with dogs and guns, over the

site of the borough of Marylebone, and over far the greater part

of the space now covered by the boroughs of Finsbury and of the

Tower Hamlets. Islington was almost a solitude; and poets loved

to contrast its silence and repose with the din and turmoil of

the monster London.106 On the south the capital is now connected

with its suburb by several bridges, not inferior in magnificence

and solidity to the noblest works of the Caesars. In 1685, a

single line of irregular arches, overhung by piles of mean and

crazy houses, and garnished, after a fashion worthy of the naked

barbarians of Dahomy, with scores of mouldering heads, impeded

the navigation of the river.


Of the metropolis, the City, properly so called, was the most

important division. At the time of the Restoration it had been

built, for the most part, of wood and plaster; the few bricks

that were used were ill baked; the booths where goods were

exposed to sale projected far into the streets, and were overhung

by the upper stories. A few specimens of this architecture may

still be seen in those districts which were not reached by the

great fire. That fire had, in a few days, covered a space of

little less shall a square mile with the ruins of eighty-nine

churches and of thirteen thousand houses. But the City had risen

again with a celerity which had excited the admiration of

neighbouring countries. Unfortunately, the old lines of the

streets had been to a great extent preserved; and those lines,

originally traced in an age when even princesses performed their

journeys on horseback, were often too narrow to allow wheeled

carriages to pass each other with ease, and were therefore ill

adapted for the residence of wealthy persons in an age when a

coach and six was a fashionable