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  Although it has been altered again and again over the years, the house nevertheless is basically sixteenth century. It stands almost next door to the re-created Globe Theatre and running down one side – sadly now closed to the public – is one of London’s narrowest thoroughfares – Cardinal Cap Alley.

  For the first few centuries after the house was built this was a poor and dangerous area – apart from the theatres (banished to the south side of the river by the more religious-minded members of the government who thought plays immoral) the area was also famous for its bear-baiting and cock-fighting pits, as well as for the sheer number of its brothels. The murder rate here was probably twice that of the city across the water and there are vague references to respectable citizens simply disappearing in the vicinity of Cardinals Wharf – at least one twentieth-century owner of the house said he would never excavate below the house for fear of what he might find!

  ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL

  1540

  Few people today realise that Westminster Abbey is not the name of the great abbey church that stands at Westminster. The official name of the abbey is the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster and it is from this name that the phrase robbing Peter to pay Paul comes. Today the phrase simply means taking money from, as it were, the left hand and giving it to the right or to pay one person at the pointless expense of another person.

  The origins of the phrase lie in those decades after the Reformation of the mid-1500s that ended Britain’s thousand-year monastic tradition. After Henry VIII’s death his son Edward VI (1537–53) continued the work of giving monastic lands and money to his favourites. The new parish churches also competed for endowments and Westminster Abbey (St Peter’s) petitioned the king endlessly for funding. So much so that he decided to punish the abbey by taking away the revenues St Peter’s had long enjoyed from the Manor of Paddington and giving them to St Paul’s, which had always been known as London’s cathedral. Thus the Royal church lost out to the London cathedral – and the phrase robbing Peter to pay Paul came into the language.

  BURNING HERETICS

  1555

  The area around London’s Smithfield is one of the most remarkable parts of London – Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, was stabbed to death here; the king’s jester Rahere bizarrely founded the church of St Bartholomew, which is one of London’s most ancient and least altered churches; and just across the square is the Charterhouse, the only medieval monastery that survives in London.

  At the Reformation the Chaterhouse buildings were not, to general astonishment, demolished. Instead the Duke of Norfolk came to live here and later, in 1613, the Charterhouse became a home for elderly gentlemen – the Charterhouse Brothers – a role it fulfils to this day.

  Most bizarrely, any work carried out in the centre of the square in front of St Bartholomew’s Hospital that involves digging down a metre or more invariably cuts through a layer of ash – this is not ash from the Great Fire but rather from the hundreds of burnings of heretics that took place here from 1555 through the reign of Queen Mary. She was hated not so much because she insisted that heretics should be burned but because she would not spare those who were prepared to recant. The tradition Mary overturned was that heretics were spared if they changed their minds – and that applied even if the change of heart occurred at the very last minute.

  VANISHED DUNGEONS REAPPEAR

  1555

  Many villages and country towns in England still have their ancient lock-ups – these are small, usually single-roomed buildings, often near the market square or by the side of a back street, that were once used to house those arrested before they could be taken to court and dealt with by local magistrates. They were also used simply to get someone unruly off the streets for the night – a drunk perhaps – and having sobered up the miscreant would then be released the next day.

  The City of London had similar though usually larger lock-ups until fairly recent times – but in the City they were and are called compters. The original compter buildings have, like so much of London’s history, been swept away but here and there the underground cells of former compters do survive.

  Casual passers-by would be astonished to discover that what may well have once been the dungeons of the formerly infamous Wood Street Compter – situated in Mitre Court in the City – can still be seen complete with their chains and fetters. Mitre Court gets its name from the celebrated Mitre Tavern that once stood here – it is mentioned by countless writers and features in Ben Jonson’s (1572–1637) play Bartholomew Fair.

  The compter once housed some seventy prisoners. It was built in 1555 and was under the control of the sheriffs of London. It seems to have been used as a lock-up but also, curiously, as a debtor’s prison and even to house the overflow of prisoners when nearby Newgate was full. For centuries all trace of it was assumed to have vanished but early in the twentieth century the former dungeons were rediscovered. One wonders how many other parts of ancient London buildings remain underground and awaiting rediscovery.

  The compter was unusual in reflecting precisely the social conditions outside the prison: it had three sections – the best section, the master’s side as it was known, was for the wealthy and aristocratic; the knight’s side was for those of some means, however small; and the hole was for the common people. The surviving cellars – now part of a nearby wine merchant – may well have been part of the hole, the most feared part of the prison and in which incarceration meant you were very likely to die from typhoid, cholera or some other waterborne disease.

  CASH FOR WATERBORNE BODIES

  1556

  Almost everything about London’s watermen is unique to that vanished trade. Until the end of the eighteenth century London’s watermen were the equivalent of the modern underground, buses, cabs and overground trains all rolled into one. They wielded enormous power, particularly after the Company of Watermen was created by Parliament in 1556 followed by the grant of a royal patent in 1585. In fact one of the main reasons why London had only one bridge until the end of the eighteenth century was that the watermen were against it – they knew that any new bridge would seriously threaten their livelihoods.

  Watermen, like cab drivers today, were carefully licensed. They had to ply their trade from a recognised spot – Whitehall Steps, Bridewell Steps or wherever – and they had to wear a red frock coat while at work.

  The tradition was that anyone who wanted to hire a boat would shout ‘Oars, oars’ from the bottom of one of the many streets and lanes that led down to the river before the Embankment was built.

  The boatmen would shout ‘Oars! Oars!’ in a bid to drum up extra trade but this was eventually forbidden, according to a number of early commentators, when it was realised that those unfamiliar with the watermen’s role – particularly visitors to London – thought they were shouting ‘Whores! Whores!’

  When the watermen were not transporting people across the river or up and down it they would salvage anything found in the river and theirs was a brisk trade in finding bodies – either suicides or those who’d accidentally drowned or been murdered.

  By a curious quirk of history, the origins of which are now entirely obscure, bodies were almost always landed on the south side of the river because the authorities would pay a shilling for a body landed in Southwark whereas only sixpence would be paid for the same body landed on the north bank.

  From the City proper down to Vauxhall Gardens the fare would be sixpence but the watermen must have been powerful men – they would regularly row their passengers as far up river as Hampton Court and beyond, but Londoners in a hurry would always choose to travel when the tide was in their favour. Rowing with the tide would speed things up considerably.

  By 1700 there were more than ten thousand licensed watermen and such was the nature of their work that if you wanted to travel downstream of London Bridge you had to employ a waterman who was almost prepared to risk his life for the journey.

  The rea
son it was so dangerous was that Old London Bridge had so many stone supports that they created a bottleneck in the river which would rush through the arches at a terrific and highly dangerous pace. Shooting the bridge was so dangerous in fact that passengers never stayed in the boat for that part of the journey. The waterman intending to row people downstream to Greenwich or wherever would approach London Bridge and then land his passengers at the Three Cranes Tavern just upstream of the bridge. The passengers would walk downstream of the bridge while the boatman shot the rapids. If he missed his moment, hesitated for a second too long or simply mistimed his journey under the bridge in any way his boat would be smashed and he would almost certainly drown. But an experienced waterman took pride in the danger and in the fact that he could shoot the bridge without mishap. And having done so he would pick up his passengers again and set off down river.

  THE QUEEN’S BOSOM ON SHOW

  1597

  Detailed descriptions of the London scene before 1600 are relatively rare. Those that exist only occasionally satisfy the modern desire for detail – published descriptions mention noble buildings, grand thoroughfares and monumental edifices, but they rarely describe what it was actually like to walk along the Strand, through the mud and the puddles, when the City wall still existed and the Strand was effectively a suburb where the rich had their riverside palaces.

  But if physical, detailed descriptions are lacking we are lucky enough to have a number of wonderful descriptions of meetings with the great and the good.

  When the French ambassador Andre Hurhault-Sieur de Maisse met Queen Elizabeth I for the first time in 1597 she had been on the throne for almost forty years, a remarkably long reign in an age of regular outbreaks of the plague and general medical ignorance.

  It had taken more than a year for the French ambassador to finally fix a date for the meeting and his sense that this was a momentous and long-awaited event comes through in the detailed report he wrote afterwards.

  De Maisse was led along a dark corridor to the audience chamber where the Queen sat alone on a low chair. Others in the room gathered in small groups at some distance from her. The ambassador made a low bow at the door and the Queen rose and came over to him. De Maisse takes up the story:

  I kissed the fringe of her robe and she embraced me with both arms. She smiled at me, and began to apologise for not receiving me sooner. She said that the day before she had been very ill.

  She was dressed in silver cloth, her dress with slashed sleeves lined with red taffeta. On her head she wore a garland and beneath it a great reddish-coloured wig, with a great number of spangles of gold and silver, and hanging down over her forehead some pearls, but of no great worth.

  By this time the Queen was in her sixties. Her cheeks were sunken and her teeth were yellow and broken with many missing from her habit of continually eating sweets – in fact so many teeth were missing that it was difficult at times for De Maisse to understand what she was saying.

  De Maisse noticed all this and was therefore doubly astonished to discover that she was actually half naked! He explains with evident astonishment that the Queen’s dress was completely open down the front and that her breasts – which she continually handled and moved about – were completely open to view.

  He says: ‘Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled as well as one can see for the collar that she wears round her neck, but lower down her flesh is exceeding white and delicate, so far as one could see.’

  The only explanation one can find at this distance in time is that the Queen, who could never be criticised or contradicted, really believed the stories her poets and painters told her – that she was the eternally youthful Virgin Queen. The creature she read about in the verses presented to her was daily confirmed by her courtiers’ behaviour and she clearly believed it all – either that or by this time she was simply losing her marbles!

  JOHN STOW’S QUILL PEN

  1605

  It is hard to believe now but right up till the 1950s and early 1960s the City of London – the famous square mile – still had a substantial residential population. Greed and an obsession with redevelopment has reduced the number of those who actually live in the City to a point at which all the City’s remaining churches are effectively redundant. Those that survive are kept for the tourists. They date mostly from the period after the Great Fire when Sir Christopher Wren and others – most notably Nicholas Hawksmoor – rebuilt the city.

  Churches that predate the Great Fire in the London area were not that rare until German bombs destroyed them or damaged them so badly that what we see today is largely a pastiche of genuine seventeenth-century or earlier work. There are exceptions, however. The delightfully named St Andrew in the Wardrobe on Ludgate Hill was not bombed and looks today much as it would have looked centuries ago. Likewise St Bartholomew at Smithfield. St Andrew Undershaft in Leadenhall Street – undershaft refers to the shaft or maypole that once stood outside the church – is another church that retains much of its original fabric and among its most interesting features is the monument to the great historian of sixteenth-century London, John Stow. Stow was a tailor and antiquarian who spent years crossing and re-crossing the city in order to complete his monumental Survey of London, published, as we have seen, in 1598.

  When Stow died in 1605 he was buried at St Andrew Undershaft and, despite the many years since his death, a curious tradition has grown up and survives to this day – Stow’s monument shows him sitting with his books and in the act of writing. The monument of marble does not, however, include a stone or marble pen. Instead Stow holds in his hand a real quill pen and every year the Lord Mayor of London replaces the pen with a new quill. It is a ceremony that has taken place for centuries with hardly a break.

  LONDON’S ONLY MAN-MADE RIVER

  1606

  With the growth of international trade, the founding of the South Sea Company and other trading groups, seventeenth-century London had a huge and ever increasing problem: how to get enough clean water for the population; and not just the human population – thousands of horses on which the city relied for transport had also to be watered regularly. The Thames was dirty and the water polluted, which caused regular epidemics.

  One of the very earliest attempts to find a solution to the water problems can still be seen in north London.

  Along the backs of the houses in one or two streets in Canonbury, the most prestigious and expensive part of Islington, runs a narrow watercourse. To the casual observer it looks like an old canal, but a closer inspection reveals something rather odd – this river is far too narrow to be a canal, but it isn’t a river or a stream either. It is in fact one of the last remnants of one of the earliest attempts to bring fresh water to London.

  The New River Company started life in 1606 when Acts of Parliament were passed to enable a channel to be dug to bring fresh water to central London from Amwell in Hertfordshire. Londoners were aware that it was unhealthy to throw all their rubbish and sewage into the same river from which they obtained their drinking water (i.e. the Thames) but the practical difficulties of finding a supply other than the Thames had always seemed insurmountable. The New River Company refused to accept defeat. The head of the company – Hugh Myddleton (1560–1631) – began the enormous task of digging the channel which was to become the New River. It was to be ten feet wide by four feet deep. Total length was a little less than forty miles. All the work had to be done by hand and much of it was carried out in the face of fierce opposition from landowners along the route. Halfway through the work Myddleton ran out of money and had to be rescued by King James, who offered financial assistance in return for a share of future profits.

  By 1613 the route had been completed and water ran into four newly built reservoirs at Clerkenwell. From here it ran to the city through wooden pipes – pipes which are still occasionally uncovered today during roadworks and re-building. Though the system leaked badly it was to provide water for many in the city for more than two hundred years.

>   The New River was adapted over the centuries and its flow was increased by additions from various newly dug wells and from the River Lea, but in essence it remained unchanged until 1904 when the New River Company was amalgamated with the Metropolitan Water Board. When the Second World War ended a decision was made to stop using water from the remaining reservoirs at Clerkenwell and though the flow continues to this day it now ends at Stoke Newington. However, a few stretches of the channel much closer to central London have survived, including those quiet backwaters running through Canonbury.

  DERRICK’S DEATH CRANE

  1610

  All over the world wherever ships are unloaded the word derrick simply means a special type of crane that allows objects to be lifted and lowered but also swung horizontally. Few realise that the word and the design of the crane have their origins in one of London’s most feared historical figures – a man whose name became a byword for death.

  From 1388 until 1783 Londoners who were condemned to death were taken from Newgate Prison in the city in a tumbril – a primitive cart – that rolled through Holborn and on to the old Oxford Road (now Oxford Street) until it reached the western end of that road where today Oxford Street meets the Edgware Road. This place was then known as Tyburn. Throughout this long period Tyburn was chosen as the place of public execution precisely because it was open country. The authorities believed that public hangings acted as a deterrent to the rest of the population so when the hanging days came they wanted the crowds of spectators to be easily accommodated. Tyburn was perfect in this respect and ‘Tyburn tree’ became a euphemism for the gallows. Until the early seventeenth century the condemned stood in the back of the cart that had brought them to Tyburn until the hangman had the noose round their necks. The cart was then driven away and the victim was left dangling in midair. Death at this time was caused by slow strangulation – it wasn’t until the nineteenth century and the introduction of the long drop that death by hanging became more or less instantaneous. The long drop meant that the neck was broken by the force of the victim’s own weight rather than the slowly tightening effects of the noose as at Tyburn.