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

luxury. The style of building

was, however, far superior to that of the City which had

perished. The ordinary material was brick, of much better quality

than had formerly been used. On the sites of the ancient parish

churches had arisen a multitude of new domes, towers, and spires

which bore the mark of the fertile genius of Wren. In every place

save one the traces of the great devastation had been completely

effaced. But the crowds of workmen, the scaffolds, and the masses

of hewn stone were still to be seen where the noblest of

Protestant temples was slowly rising on the ruins of the Old

Cathedral of Saint Paul.107


The whole character of the City has, since that time, undergone a

complete change. At present the bankers, the merchants, and the

chief shopkeepers repair thither on six mornings of every week

for the transaction of business; but they reside in other

quarters of the metropolis, or at suburban country seats

surrounded by shrubberies and flower gardens. This revolution in

private habits has produced a political revolution of no small

importance. The City is no longer regarded by the wealthiest

traders with that attachment which every man naturally feels for

his home. It is no longer associated in their minds with domestic

affections and endearments. The fireside, the nursery, the social

table, the quiet bed are not there. Lombard Street and

Threadneedle Street are merely places where men toil and

accumulate. They go elsewhere to enjoy and to expend. On a

Sunday, or in an evening after the hours of business, some courts

and alleys, which a few hours before had been alive with hurrying

feet and anxious faces, are as silent as the glades of a forest.

The chiefs of the mercantile interest are no longer citizens.

They avoid, they almost contemn, municipal honours and duties.

Those honours and duties are abandoned to men who, though useful

and highly respectable, seldom belong to the princely commercial

houses of which the names are renowned throughout the world.


In the seventeenth century the City was the merchant's residence.

Those mansions of the great old burghers which still exist have

been turned into counting houses and warehouses: but it is

evident that they were originally not inferior in magnificence to

the dwellings which were then inhabited by the nobility. They

sometimes stand in retired and gloomy courts, and are accessible

only by inconvenient passages: but their dimensions are ample,

and their aspect stately. The entrances are decorated with richly

carved pillars and canopies. The staircases and landing places

are not wanting in grandeur. The floors are sometimes of wood

tessellated after the fashion of France. The palace of Sir Robert

Clayton, in the Old Jewry, contained a superb banqueting room

wainscoted with cedar, and adorned with battles of gods and

giants in fresco.108 Sir Dudley North expended four thousand

pounds, a sum which would then have been important to a Duke, on

the rich furniture of his reception rooms in Basinghall

Street.109 In such abodes, under the last Stuarts, the heads of

the great firms lived splendidly and hospitably. To their

dwelling place they were bound by the strongest ties of interest

and affection. There they had passed their youth, had made their

friendships, had courted their wives had seen their children grow

up, had laid the remains of their parents in the earth, and

expected that their own remains would be laid. That intense

patriotism which is peculiar to the members of societies

congregated within a narrow space was, in such circumstances,

strongly developed. London was, to the Londoner, what Athens was

to the Athenian of the age of Pericles, what Florence was to the

Florentine of the fifteenth century. The citizen was proud of the

grandeur of his city, punctilious about her claims to respect,

ambitious of her offices, and zealous for her franchises.


At the close of the reign of Charles the Second the pride of the

Londoners was smarting from a cruel mortification. The old

charter had been taken away; and the magistracy had been

remodelled. All the civic functionaries were Tories: and the

Whigs, though in numbers and in wealth superior to their

opponents, found themselves excluded from every local dignity.

Nevertheless, the external splendour of the municipal government

was not diminished, nay, was rather increased by this change.

For, under the administration of some Puritans who had lately

borne rule, the ancient fame of the City for good cheer had

declined: but under the new magistrates, who belonged to a more

festive party, and at whose boards guests of rank and fashion

from beyond Temple Bar were often seen, the Guildhall and the

halls of the great companies were enlivened by many sumptuous

banquets. During these repasts, odes composed by the poet

laureate of the corporation, in praise of the King, the Duke, and

the Mayor, were sung to music. The drinking was deep and the

shouting loud. An observant Tory, who had often shared in these

revels, has remarked that the practice of huzzaing after drinking

healths dates from this joyous period.110


The magnificence displayed by the first civic magistrate was

almost regal. The gilded coach, indeed, which is now annually

admired by the crowd, was not yet a part of his state. On great

occasions he appeared on horseback, attended by a long cavalcade

inferior in magnificence only to that which, before a coronation,

escorted the sovereign from the Tower to Westminster. The Lord

Mayor was never seen in public without his rich robe, his hood of

black velvet, his gold chain, his jewel, and a great attendance

of harbingers and guards.111 Nor did the world find anything

ludicrous in the pomp which constantly surrounded him. For it was

not more than became the place which, as wielding the strength

and representing the dignity of the City of London, he was

entitled to occupy in the State. That City, being then not only

without equal in the country, but without second, had, during

five and forty years, exercised almost as great an influence on

the politics of England as Paris has, in our own time, exercised

on the politics of France. In intelligence London was greatly in

advance of every other part of the kingdom. A government,

supported and trusted by London, could in a day obtain such

pecuniary means as it would have taken months to collect from the

rest of the island. Nor were the military resources of the

capital to be despised. The power which the Lord Lieutenants

exercised in other parts of the kingdom was in London entrusted

to a Commission of eminent citizens. Under the order of this

Commission were twelve regiments of foot and two regiments of

horse. An army of drapers' apprentices and journeymen tailors,

with common councilmen for captains and aldermen for colonels,

might not indeed have been able to stand its ground against

regular troops; but there were then very few regular troops in

the kingdom. A town, therefore, which could send forth, at an

hour's notice, thousands of men, abounding in natural courage,

provided with tolerable weapons, and not altogether untinctured

with martial discipline, could not but be a valuable ally and a

formidable enemy. It was not forgotten that Hampden and Pym had

been protected from lawless tyranny by the London trainbands;

that, in the great crisis of the civil war, the London trainbands

had marched to raise the siege of Gloucester; or that, in the

movement against the military tyrants which followed the downfall

of Richard Cromwell, the London trainbands had borne a signal

part. In truth, it is no exaggeration to say that, but for the

hostility of the City, Charles the First would never have been

vanquished, and that, without the help of the City, Charles the

Second could scarcely have been restored.


These considerations may serve to explain why, in spite of that

attraction which had, during a long course of years, gradually

drawn the aristocracy westward, a few men of high rank had

continued, till a very recent period, to dwell in the vicinity of

the Exchange and of the Guildhall. Shaftesbury and Buckingham,

while engaged in bitter and unscrupulous opposition to the

government, had thought that they could nowhere carry on their

intrigues so conveniently or so securely as under the protection

of the City magistrates and the City militia. Shaftesbury had

therefore lived in Aldersgate Street, at a house which may still

be easily known by pilasters and wreaths, the graceful work of

Inigo. Buckingham had ordered his mansion near Charing Cross,

once the abode of the Archbishops of York, to be pulled down;

and, while streets and alleys which are still named after him

were rising on that site, chose to reside in Dowgate.112


These, however, were rare exceptions. Almost all the noble

families of England had long migrated beyond the walls. The

district where most of their town houses stood lies between the

city and the regions which are now considered as fashionable. A

few great men still retained their hereditary hotels in the

Strand. The stately dwellings on the south and west of Lincoln's

Inn Fields, the Piazza of Covent Garden, Southampton Square,

which is now called Bloomsbury Square, and King's Square in Soho

Fields, which is now called Soho Square, were among the favourite

spots. Foreign princes were carried to see Bloomsbury Square, as

one of the wonders of England.113 Soho Square, which had just

been built, was to our ancestors a subject of pride with which

their posterity will hardly sympathise. Monmouth Square had been

the name while the fortunes of the Duke of Monmouth flourished;

and on the southern side towered his mansion. The front, though

ungraceful, was lofty and richly adorned. The walls of the

principal apartments were finely sculptured with fruit, foliage,

and armorial bearings, and were hung with embroidered satin.114

Every trace of this magnificence has long disappeared; and no

aristocratical mansion is to be found in that once aristocratical

quarter. A little way north from Holborn, and on the verge of the

pastures and corn-fields, rose two celebrated palaces, each with

an ample garden. One of them, then called Southampton House, and

subsequently Bedford House, was removed about fifty years ago to

make room for a new city, which now covers with its squares,

streets, and churches, a vast area, renowned in the seventeenth

century for peaches and snipes. The other, Montague House,

celebrated for its frescoes and furniture, was, a few months

after the death of Charles the Second, burned to the ground, and

was speedily succeeded by a more magnificent Montague House,

which, having been long the repository of such various and

precious treasures of art, science, and learning as were scarcely

ever before assembled under a single roof, has now given place to

an edifice more magnificent still.115


Nearer to the Court, on a space called St. James's Fields, had