A History of Britain, Volume 2 (37 page)

A pathetic Fifth Monarchist riot in London in January 1661, which mobilized all of fifty supporters to its cause, gave the militant bishops and their allies in the subsequent Cavalier Parliament all the pretext they needed to reject the efforts of both Clarendon and the king to loosen the severity of the restored Church of England. For all the grandeur of his demeanour, Clarendon was a pragmatist and had no interest in provoking and perpetuating disaffection. Better the Puritans should scowl from within than from without the Church. So he had hoped that either the Church of England's dogma could be broadened enough to allow some of the Nonconformists to be reconciled, or else that the penalties for active conformity might be unenforced. The king wanted the same leniency for Catholics. But prelates like Wren and Gilbert Sheldon were having none of this. So notwithstanding the fact that it represented everything the Lord Chancellor opposed, parliament enacted a series of punitive acts known collectively as the ‘Clarendon Code' and expressly designed to strangle the life out of non-Anglican Christian worship. Knowing that the sects had drawn their strength from urban artisans and merchants, dissenting ministers were banished to a distance at least 5 miles outside town limits. Strict examination of the orthodoxy of professing clergy was to be enforced, and those tainted with the least signs of Nonconformity weeded out. And of course it was not just the wilder fringe cults – the Muggletonians and the Seekers – that were the target of all this draconian scrutiny. The acts were intended to marginalize, and then uproot, the entirety of English Presbyterian Calvinism. Presbyterian
opposition to the republic in the 1650s and support for the Restoration was as of no consequence now. The bishops were adamant in their belief (not unfounded) that Puritan heterodoxy had been the great engine of disaffection against Church and king. If those institutions were to be made secure against a repetition of rebellion, the opposite conclusion from Clarendon's middle way had to be embraced. English Calvinism needed to be wiped out.

So – astonishingly – a whole culture of teaching, preaching, praying and singing, a culture that had so deeply coloured faith and politics for at least two generations, was made to go away. If it survived at all it did so with permission, not as of right but furtively and apologetically. In 1662 on the anniversary of the St Bartholomew's Eve massacre, hundreds of Nonconformist (overwhelmingly Puritan-Presbyterian) ministers were evicted from their livings. In December of the same year the king issued a Declaration of Indulgence, expressing his intent to ask the Cavalier Parliament to grant him power to dispense with the Act of Uniformity, but he was defeated in March 1663 by his own, much more intransigent parliament! In November 1663, Pepys heard his clerk Will Hewer's ‘Uncle Blackborne' speak with quiet but deep resentment of the ‘many pious Ministers of God – some thousands of them [who] do now, beg their bread' and of ‘how highly the present Clergy carry themselfs everywhere, so as that they are hated and laughed at by everybody'.

This transformation of a highly visible and even more highly audible culture into a closeted, family Church was one of the great disappearing acts in English history. It was neither permanent nor universal. Dissenting Christianity would survive and revive (especially in the next century). And the enforced collapse of Calvinism encouraged recruits to Nonconforming Churches like the Quakers, which were free from political suspicion. But the future of British history was profoundly affected in ways as yet undiscernible to the confident bishops and the Cavaliers who made the Clarendon Code. What they did was not so much eliminate Puritanism as displace it, sending it into exile from where, in the future, it would cause at least as much trouble to the British monarchy as it had in the past: places like Belfast and Boston.

The shutting of mouths was completed by the closing of presses. The repeal of the act requiring triennial elections brutally pruned back the young growth of competitive politics. A licensing act now effectively gagged the free press of the Commonwealth by giving a publishing monopoly over works of history and politics to the orthodox university presses or the officially regulated Stationers Company. The unrepentant old Laudian journalist Roger l'Estrange was given effective censorship
authority over London's master-printers, whose numbers, he proposed, should be cut from sixty to twenty. Bad things could happen to those who flouted that authority, however idiosyncratic their publications. John Heydon, for example, was thrown into prison merely for casting the king's horoscope – deemed a seditious act – and publishers like Giles Calvert, who had specialized in treatises of political theory, ended up in Newgate. Clubs, such as the Rota, where competing arguments about the constitution and government had been freely debated in 1659, were shut down; coffee-houses, where the agitators had met, were patrolled and spied on.

For the prophets and preachers, the printers and journalists cast out into the wilderness, their dispersal handed the realm to Pharisees, harlots and parasitical courtiers. But it was not necessary to be a Puritan ‘fanatic' to be scandalized by the profligacy and promiscuousness of Charles II's court. Even to staunch Anglican Royalists like John Evelyn, the addiction of the king and his brother to debauchery was an affront to the Almighty by whose benevolent grace the king had been restored to his throne. But the king, now in the narcissistic prime of his mid-thirties, was impervious to criticism. He lolled on downy pillows of flattery, assiduously fluffed up by a succession of fawning poets (many of whom, like John Dryden and Edmund Waller, had once fawned on Cromwell), and would dandle his bastards on the royal couch along with his glossy spaniels and mistresses. There was an instinctive graciousness about the king (unlike his cynosure Louis XIV), which made it physically painful, if not outright impossible, for him to refuse favours to those women who had so unhesitatingly received him into their bed. The brightest and most ambitious of them made the most of the moment. Barbara Palmer, Lady Castlemaine, for example, insisted on being treated as a true consort, accumulating not just wealth but power, and at times dictating who might and who might not be received by the king. As a helpless bystander to Charles's captivity between the sheets, Clarendon was in a state of infuriated torment. Under Cromwell, the aggressive (if intermittent) pursuit of virtue had threatened to undo the stability of government. Now, the equally aggressive pursuit of vice promised to have the same effect. For if sophisticated Londoners were unshocked by the fashion parade of over-frizzed curls and overexposed bosoms, the same, so Clarendon feared, was not true of opinion in the shires. When the secret marriage of his own (pregnant) daughter, Anne Hyde, to Charles's brother, James, Duke of York, was announced, Clarendon was so aghast that he recommended the king behead her for her temerity. His horror was occasioned not just by James's reputation for lechery, which surpassed even that of the king, but by the inevitable whispering campaign that he had contrived the marriage to create a royal
dynasty of Stuart-Hydes (something that duly came to pass but not exactly in the way Clarendon imagined or feared).

He was not alone in these anxieties. When things went very badly wrong with the government of the realm a few years later, in 1667, Sir George Carteret, Pepys' colleague at the Navy Board, reminded him that the want of ‘at least a show of religion in the government, and sobriety' had been the cause which

That the affairs of the flesh and the affairs of state need not necessarily be mutually exclusive is documented – exhaustively – by the diaries of Samuel Pepys. His hands were seldom still, whether they were busily penning memoranda on the state of the timber supply, or travelling through the underthings of the latest woman to take his fancy. But for Pepys these dalliances were not distraction so much as invigoration: the grope that refreshes.

To say his days were full would be an understatement. Apart from his business at the offices of the Navy Board, Pepys managed to take in several plays a week, meetings of the Royal Society, bibulous assemblies in taverns and musical recitals. Hungry for news, gossip or flirtation, Pepys roamed the capital by boat, by carriage or on his own two feet, searching for
whatever he needed that particular hour, that particular day: information from the arsenal at Woolwich, or the dockyard managers at Deptford; girls who made themselves available in the alleys off Fleet Street; a shipyard carpenter's wife; the latest telescope from Richard Reeve's shop; the sleekest black-silk camelot suit coat from his tailor.

Pepys was one of the great inspectors, whether of the inviting curve of a woman's breast or the supplies of cordage available to the fleet. He was compulsive about tallies, not least of his own assets as well as the kingdom's, and was distressed whenever he detected shortfall. When he thought his long-suffering wife Elizabeth was frittering the substance of their fortune on dress he subjected her to bullying accusations, and when she presumed to argue back slapped her about the face (as he often did) for her temerity. This ugly side of his character, however, was seldom on show to his large circle of friends and colleagues, who took him to be the most companionable and learned of men. And Pepys was easiest amid like-minded fellows who shared his view that the accumulation of knowledge was the pillar, not just of understanding but of power. So he could be counted on as a booster of experimental and scientific projects designed for the benefit of the kingdom, like John Evelyn's proposals, set out in his
Fumifugium
, to make the verminous, insanitary, smoke-choked city safer and healthier, or William Petty's invention of the double-keeled boat – even when the king politely ignored the one and saw the other founder in its first sailing trial, drowning those on board.

It became apparent, in fact, that for Charles science was an amusement, an indulgence of toys like time-pieces and eye-pieces rather than a meticulously sustained inquiry. The king (like the rest of polite society) was charmed by Robert Hooke's engravings of the magnified louse in the
Micrographia,
and he was content to have his patronage attached to the deliberations of the Royal Society. But he also made sure to broadcast his bewilderment at the goings-on at Gresham College whereby grave men busied themselves ‘spending time in weighing of ayre'. But it never occurred to Charles to see the proceedings of the Royal Society as more than the eccentric diversions of a gentlemen's club, certainly not as a model of inquiry and debate settled by experimental observation, favoured by the likes of Petty and Boyle. When calamity struck the kingdom, as it did in a succession of stunning hammer-blows between 1665 and 1667, the instinctive response of the king, as well as of his subjects, was to invoke not the illuminations of science and the arguments of reason but divine intercession through penance, fasting and prayer.

So the appearance of a comet in the summer of 1664 struck observers, not with astronomical wonder (though those in possession of
Richard Reeve's telescope could observe its blazing tail with unparalleled clarity), but with the same dismay that this phenomenon had always inspired as a presage of disaster. Those like Clarendon who had bitterly opposed the war against the Dutch, into which the king had entered with such bellicose optimism, felt even queasier when they saw the dusty pallor trembling in the night sky, notwithstanding an early naval victory at Lowestoft. By the following summer, when the Dutch showed no sign of surrender and plague carts were carrying thousands to the burial pits every week, the Jeremiahs seemed vindicated in their prophecies that God's hand would be laid across the back of the sin-steeped kingdom. And there was not much that science could do about it, other than count London's dead with modern devotion to the seriousness of statistics and the mapping of the epidemic (8252 deaths in the first week of September, 6978 from the plague).

Understanding of the generation and transmission of the sickness was scarcely any more advanced than when it had first struck in 1348. Because it was thought that cats and dogs spread the plague, the Lord Mayor of London ordered a general slaughter: 40,000 dogs and perhaps (by Pepys's reckoning) 200,000 cats were duly massacred. That they were so swiftly rounded up and dispatched testified to the fact that what
had
modernized since the medieval epidemics was the policing of mortality. Daniel Defoe's heart-rending account of the harvest of bodies in 1665,
A Journal of the Plague Year,
was written more than half a century after the event, but was based on reliable memories of contemporaries, including one of Samuel Pepys's amanuenses, Paul Lorrain. What Defoe describes is a culture divided into the mad and the methodical. Unhinged prophets walked naked in the streets roaring for repentance before the race was consumed altogether, while platoons of watchmen patrolled the streets enforcing the requirement that households become hermetically sealed at the first sign of infection. While the court, the aristocracy and the professions (including, of course, physicians) fled London just as fast as they could, common citizens were locked up by the watch in their own houses, prisoners of the contagion, left to succumb, starve or survive. The regulations may have been designed to seal off the country from the plague, but inevitably the infection always outran the ability to contain it, and in the meantime they condemned Londoners to be deprived of any hope of work or sustenance except what came their way by charity. The desperate who attempted to escape the net risked arrest and prosecution. From Alderman Hooker, Pepys heard of a saddler ‘who had buried all the rest of his children of the plague; and himself and wife now being shut up, and in despair of escaping, did desire only to save the life of this [their
surviving] little child; and so prevailed to have it received stark-naked into the arms of a friend, who brought it (having put it into new fresh clothes) to Greenwich'. And for once Pepys and his colleagues were moved enough to allow the child to stay there in safety.