Yes, Nell Gwynn had a good time, but life with Charles II was mostly savage — and short
HISTORY THE TIME TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO RESTORATION BRITAIN by Ian Mortimer (Bodley Head £20)
According to ian Mortimer in this enthralling and detailed book, once oliver cromwell was out of the way and cavalier King charles ii with his spaniels, foppish chestnut wig and an eye for the curvaceous nell gwynn had been rapturously ushered back on to the throne, life in 1660 Britain was back to beer and skittles.
it was the age of the arrival of tea, coffee and chocolate, exotic fruit and fine wine. colour flooded forth once more, the British isles having been cast into grim shadowy monochrome since the Puritans had beheaded charles i at Whitehall on January 30, 1649.
The theatres were back, after being closed by the Puritans in 1642, when Shakespeare’s globe was demolished to make way for affordable homes. From 1661, for the first time, women were permitted on stage.
cock-fighting was back, but as they’d run out of bears, bulls were tormented instead — ‘the bull bellows and bounds and knocks about to shake off the dog’, which would sink its teeth in its knackers.
in other words, after the roundheads fell from power, what was restored in the main during the restoration was medieval savagery, rather than ‘cherished traditions and pleasures’.
Horse races, puppet shows and fun fairs could again be held — but so could freak shows, the exhibition of animals and human beings with deformities. in 1682, a highlight was ‘ the two- headed child’, a set of conjoined twins.
People didn’t stop to question their own cruelty. Physical violence, for example, was a way of settling disputes — duels were widespread and husbands could beat their wives with impunity as wives were not people but property.
Furthermore, women couldn’t own anything, as they had no legal status. They were not allowed to attend university or obtain professional posts, so they were barred from the law, teaching or medicine. if they answered back, they’d be dunked in a stream as a witch.
in restoration Britain, spinsters and intelligent girls accused of witchcraft were still burned at the stake. Hysterical girls were accused of making cows barren of milk or causing shipwrecks.
The law wasn’t stern and impartial. it was gratuitously cruel, with a presumption of guilt and no access to legal counsel. JUDGES enjoyed ‘applying the most horrible punishments possible’ and prisoners died in agony at the stake in full public view, until they were ‘mere ashes and splintered bone’. Severed heads were placed on spikes on London bridges.
if the authorities didn’t arrest you — and the monarchy was quick to suspect treason and sedition — life expectancy in any event was only 33 years. child mortality was 21 per cent (today it is 0.4 per cent) and 37 per cent of the younger population never attained the age of 15.
Mothers died in their droves during childbirth — forceps hadn’t been invented, midwives used ropes and hooks.
of Britain’s population of 5.5 million, 3,500 were killed each year in war and 2,500 sailors drowned or died of malnutrition on ships, where ‘ butter goes rancid and biscuits are attacked by beetles’.
As always in British society, there was an unbreachable gulf between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots.
The King was given £1.2 million a year for the maintenance of the royal household and the government. Peers of the realm ran their estates on £ 2,800. Merchants made £400, lawyers £140, military officers £60 and there were more than 200,000 servants receiving an annual wage of £3. Vagrants, gipsies and freelance contributors to Ye dailie Mayle resided in workhouses and made £2 in a year if they were lucky.
At the beginning of the restoration period, London, with a population of 410,000, was still a higgledy-piggledy medieval city, ‘a decaying mass of antiquity, adaptation and dilapidation’.
There was no sanitation. ‘You will gag on the noxious fumes,’ Mortimer assures his timetravellers, particularly from the stench of the cesspits.
We can’t really regret that all this was swept away by the great Fire of 1666, when wooden warehouses full of oil, pitch, tar, resin and hemp caught alight.
The conflagration covered 436 acres. ‘The sky was a fiery aspect, like the top of a burning oven’, and as temperatures reached 1,700c, lead melted from church roofs.
in all, 87 churches were lost, along with 13,200 homes. More than 80,000 people found themselves on the streets. London became a dangerous place — Pepys took to walking with a drawn sword.
From the ashes, however, a beautiful new London arose. christopher Wren, who was instructed to create the domed cathedral of St Paul’s, also designed piazzas, wide boulevards and grand public buildings in Whitehall.
To this architectural period we owe covent garden, Leicester Square, St James’s Square, the Mall (which was flanked by a deer park) and many terraces of fine town houses — what wasn’t flat- tened by the Luftwaffe has fallen to ‘developers’ in recent times. if architecture made an advance, medicine generally didn’t — despite William Harvey working out that blood circulated round the body and wasn’t a secretion from the liver. Though gadgets such as thermometers, microscopes, telescopes, steam pumps, pocket watches and springaction clocks were becoming commonplace, physicians and apothecaries still belonged to the pagan era. When the Queen fell ill in 1663, doctors ‘applied live pigeons to her feet’. Women eradicated wrinkles using an ointment made from boiled puppies. The powder of mummified corpses from egypt was used as a laxative, nose bleeds were cured by blocking the nostril with pig dung, and smallpox treated with a drink of sheep droppings sprinkled in milk. There wasn’t much to be done to stop the plague, which in 1665 claimed 8,000 victims a week. Mortimer’s lurid description of the removal of a kidney stone in the pre- anaesthetic period positively makes the eyes water.
Beyond London, Britain was still a rural eden, despite the highways remaining ‘vulnerable to attack by brigands’. Kent was a vast orchard of cherries, pears and apples. The sheep population was 12 million. no provincial town had more than 2,000 inhabitants and most people worked for manorial estates.
roads were stony and narrow, bridges rickety and the stagecoach took two days to reach dover from London. At wayside inns, beds were shared with strangers.
gradually, what we might recognise as our world may be seen in the distance. Banks began issuing cheques in 1660. There was a postal service by 1683. The navigation of the rivers and the construction of canals began. Lighthouses were built.
But where we have global warming, they had global freezing. The year 1675 was known as the ‘year without a summer’, with harvest failures and food shortages. The country was gripped by a harsh frost from december 1683 until February 1684. The Thames, where 1,400 vessels were moored, was frozen solid, as was the seashore off Kent and Sussex.
Sulphurous smoke from coal fires hung in the air — and everyone smoked tobacco. As it was believed that smoking was beneficial to health, children were beaten for not smoking. Another thing we’d find odd, in our society of Pilates and sparkling water: they drank beer for breakfast.
nevertheless, and despite the chance to attend lectures by newton in person and concerts by Purcell, i’d not wish to accompany Mortimer in his time machine.
restoration Britain is about as appealing as north Korea.