Westminster 1640–60: A royal city in a time of revolution

By J. F. Merritt

This book examines the varied and fascinating ways that Westminster – traditionally home to the royal court, the fashionable West End and parliament – became the seat of the successive, non-monarchical regimes of the 1640s and 1650s. It first explores the town as the venue that helped to shape the breakdown of relations between the king and parliament in 1640–42. Subsequent chapters explore the role Westminster performed as both the ceremonial and administrative heart of shifting regimes, the hitherto unnoticed militarisation of local society through the 1640s and 1650s, and the fluctuating fortunes of the fashionable society of the West End in this revolutionary context. Analyses of religious life and patterns of local political allegiance and government unveil a complex and dynamic picture, in which the area not only witnessed major political and cultural change in these turbulent decades, but also the persistence of conservatism on the very doorstep of government.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781526112347

J. F. Merritt

J. F. Merritt is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nottingham

Book preview

Introduction

The years between 1640 and 1660 were witness to a revolution: from the political breakdown amid popular tumults in 1640–42, civil war, the emergence of parliamentarian regimes, the second civil war and the execution of the monarch, to the republic, the protectorate, the restoration of the republic, struggles between a restored parliament and the army, and the ultimate restoration of the monarchy. Yet almost all the defining events of this dramatic period took place in just a single portion of the capital, defined by the boundaries of the town of Westminster. It was here that the royal and protectoral courts were located, that the Long Parliament and its successors met, that the king was tried and executed, and it was in its streets that rival military factions squared up to each other in the final chaotic months of 1659.

While these events are famous and much-visited episodes of national history, the venue in which they took place has been curiously invisible to historians’ gaze. Yet Westminster is a very large place to have become invisible; it was by 1640 one of the most populous and influential towns in England. Part of the problem has been that, as one of Westminster’s inhabitants Thomas Fuller wrote in 1662, its proximity to London has meant that Westminster has been obscured, ‘as a proper man seemeth a Dwarfe, when placed next to a Giant’.¹ But Westminster has its own history. My earlier monograph The Social World of Early Modern Westminster (2005) sought to demonstrate the importance of Westminster as an area of study in its own right. This uniquely important urban centre was one of the largest towns in early modern England, encompassing a complex local society and culture where artisans, the royal court, seasonal gentry residents, victuallers, servants and desperately poor rural immigrants lived in close proximity.

The years 1640–60 span a remarkable period when national and local history became uniquely intertwined in Westminster. Never before had the country’s executive and legislative authority been so continuously resident there, and accordingly, never before had the work of government been quite so highly centralized and intensive. The state in all its changing permutations had a profound impact on all aspects of the locality, as the great spaces and buildings of Westminster came more directly under its sway, sometimes brushing aside the local community in a way that had not happened earlier, when parliaments had been intermittent events and even the royal court sometimes decamped from Whitehall. In addition, the public life of successive regimes was now played out in the town, and changes in national government policy (which may sometimes have had limited impact in the rest of the country) were often manifested dramatically in the streets of Westminster.

Figure 1  Map of Westminster and its environs c. 1660

If the presence of national government had a transformative effect on the town, Westminster itself sometimes shaped the nature of the political crises that happened in its midst. Westminster’s distinctiveness as a locality could potentially have significant implications for the political events that unfolded in its streets. To begin with, there was the geographical vulnerability of the area, which made it difficult to defend in times of crisis. As we will see, this could crucially affect how the crown, parliament and the protectoral regimes sought to manage their own defences, how far they were vulnerable to popular demonstrations and disorders, and how necessary it was for them to rely on the potentially inflammatory presence of garrisoned troops. This exposure to popular tumults could be exacerbated further by the weakness of local government in Westminster: its lack of a lord mayor or town council meant that decisive action could not easily be taken without explicit direction by the crown or (increasingly) by parliament, and where these two could not agree on a course of action, then it would be difficult to suppress popular demonstrations. More generally, as the various regimes chose to occupy the buildings and spaces of Westminster, so they inevitably had to adapt to the distinctive topography and institutions of the area. There was a distinctive cultural geography to contend with as well. Westminster was a centre of fashionable gentry society and elite consumerism, as well as having long been a haunt of socially elevated Roman Catholics. These forces could provide both a challenge and a spur to action and national policy formulation for incumbent regimes.

Investigating the topographical and cultural context in which national government operated is also of potential value in enabling us to gain a properly integrated sense of the cultural and social politics of this period. Historical debates on the nature of military rule, parliamentary politics, the political character or culture of the interregnum regimes, or the development of fashionable society all share a principal focus on events in Westminster. The failure to establish their common topographical context, however, has led to atomized, separate historiographies, and the interplay of these different forces has therefore not been analysed. Westminster in this period was the location not only of the organs and personnel of government, but also of the military forces required to defend it, of the buildings and spaces in which its power and legitimacy were displayed, and also of the nation’s fashionable elite society. A unified, integrated study of Westminster itself can enable us to study for the first time the relationship between these different elements.

To study the town of Westminster’s own experience of national government in these years it will be necessary to address the fundamental question of how this centre of monarchical government accommodated itself to the parliamentarian, republican and protectoral regimes. After all, to pre-civil war commentators, Westminster was, in contradistinction to London, the royal city, the site of Whitehall Palace and the royal courts of justice, its Abbey was the ‘house of kings’, its inhabitants were the instinctive followers of king and court. Westminster was also a locality which, contemporaries assumed, had a basic loyalty to the Stuart sovereign, and yet after January 1642 the monarch no longer resided there, and after 1649 there was no monarchy. Instead the town hosted regicidal regimes whose most prominent members occupied highly visible roles in local society and controlled its iconic buildings. How easily, then, did Westminster adapt to its new masters? Did the locality still remain wedded to the royalist cause, as contemporaries often suggested, or did local inhabitants adjust seamlessly to serving the new regimes? Westminster’s unique situation consistently raises the question of how, and how far, political or religious conservatism could exist near the physical heart of the interregnum regimes.

The governments of this period were new and of doubtful legitimacy, and did not rest on the consent of the populace. For this reason it is particularly valuable to explore what was happening on their doorstep in religious and political terms. The control of the central spaces and organs of power was critical. The practicalities of how that space was controlled, the extent of military defence deemed necessary and how it was managed, the scale of local opposition, the degree to which conservative political and religious forces were active in the area – all can provide a sense both of how deep were the roots that interregnum regimes were able to establish and also of how far dissent could be tolerated and negotiated. This was also a time of major religious change, with the creation of an ambiguous, tolerationist Cromwellian settlement, yet we still lack any study of religious life in the area immediately around Whitehall and parliament. As we will see, conservative religious behaviour and ideas can be uncovered even in the central spaces and buildings of the interregnum government.

One other distinctive feature of these years that has cried out for attention is the military occupation of Westminster, something that has been dealt with in only a fragmented way in studies of the metropolis and of national government in these years. Despite the absence of military conflict on its streets, there was a significant military presence in Westminster throughout the period. This in turn had consequences for internal Westminster politics, spilling over into the national history of the later 1640s. It also affected how regimes defended by this military presence chose to employ martial resources and symbols in their self-representation. This book will seek for the first time to assess the nature and impact of this unparalleled military presence at the heart of government.

To ensure a fully integrated analysis of Westminster in these years, the ensuing book follows a largely thematic structure. After a chapter examining the complex events in the period 1640–42, when Westminster was the unwilling but crucially influential venue for the breakdown of relations between king and parliament, the following chapter traces the tensions produced by the militarization of local society through the 1640s and 1650s. This was one of the most tangible manifestations in Westminster of the revolutionary changes of these years, and it establishes the vital background for the political and cultural developments discussed in the rest of the book. Chapter 3 investigates the role that Westminster performed as both the administrative and ceremonial heart of the series of parliamentary and protectoral regimes that occupied it. Chapter 4 uncovers how a town whose local government had been so closely bound up with the crown, the privy council and deans of Westminster operated in the absence of those authorities. The chapter also examines the enduring nature and prevalence of royalism within the ‘royal city’ and among local officials, including those at the heart of its powerful parishes. Chapter 5 explores one of the most distinctive aspects of Westminster’s cultural geography, the fashionable society of the West End. It reveals the tensions and contradictions involved in its perpetuation at the geographical centre of a regime bent on moral regulation and reform which actively persecuted many of elite society’s royalist denizens. The important topic of religious life in Westminster provides the focus for the final chapter and further develops the themes of cultural change and the persistence of conservatism on the doorstep of parliament in these decades.

This book therefore seeks to explore how this major urban centre, the political capital of the English monarchy and site of parliaments, became the political, administrative and cultural centre of the parliamentary, republican and protectoral regimes that replaced monarchy, and how Westminster’s particular spaces and structures helped to shape political events and institutions, while also analysing the ways in which Westminster itself responded to and was changed by these events. It is intended to offer a history that draws out the dialectic between national and local history, in a place and at a time when the two were necessarily tightly interwoven, and to provide an integrated account of the problematic nature of cultural change in a time of political conflict.

UNDERSTANDING WESTMINSTER IN THE MID-SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

To understand much of what took place in the years 1640 to 1660, it will be important to have a sense of Westminster’s distinctive urban landscape, the character of its different neighbourhoods and the nature of government and jurisdiction in the area. In 1657 the royalist James Howell sought to do precisely this in the latter sections of his study of the capital, Londinopolis. For all of his desire to magnify the importance of London in comparison with other European cities, Howell was adamant that Westminster was not only a place of major significance in its own right, but was also one that in some senses was superior to London. While Howell compared London’s Guildhall with Westminster Hall, and St Paul’s cathedral with Westminster Abbey, he confessed that London had to defer to Westminster ‘for the quality of inhabitants ... most of the Nobility and Gentry residing in, or about’ it. Most of all, though, Westminster was superior to London because it was the site of the royal court, or, as Howell was obliged to add in 1657, ‘the residence of the Sovereign Magistrate’. Westminster’s glory was thus ‘that she hath the chiefest Courts of Justice, the chiefest Court of the Prince, and the chiefest Court of the King of Heaven’ (Westminster Abbey, which ‘hath bin always held the greatest Sanctuary, and rendevouze of devotion of the whole Iland’).²

After some initial comments on the Duchy of Lancaster, Howell began his account of Westminster – as seventeenth-century writers usually did – at Temple Bar. This marked the boundary between the City of London and the town of early modern Westminster. It was here that James I had been welcomed into his ‘royal city’ at the end of his coronation procession through London in 1603. The king had been greeted at Temple Bar by a triumphal arch in the form of a rainbow supported on two 70-foot-high pyramids. A speech composed by the dramatist, and native of Westminster, Ben Jonson, explained that the king, having passed through ‘thy Chamber’ [i.e. London], had now arrived at ‘this place, which claimes to be the seate/ Of all thy kingly race: the cabinet/ To all thy counsels; and the iudging chayre/ To this thy speciall kingdome’.³ It was at Temple Bar, too, that great chains and posts were set across the road during the Civil War to protect the City of London. In the medieval period, the highway leading from the City of London to Westminster was already one of the most important in the capital. The road from Temple Bar, down the Strand to Charing Cross, and subsequently along King Street to Whitehall Palace, Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, was both celebrated and satirized in the early modern period. In a time when few maps of the capital were available, most people navigated the capital’s crowded streets in terms of its notable buildings and landmarks. Yet our period saw the destruction of one of the most famous points of navigation in the capital – Charing Cross, pulled down around 1647 as a monument of superstition. A contemporary poem mischievously envisaged confused lawyers hopelessly losing their way when trying to travel from the City to the law courts at Westminster Hall.⁴

It is helpful to reconstruct that oft-trodden walk from Temple Bar to the heart of Westminster in order to identify the social and political spaces of the town of Westminster, some of which would undergo considerable change during our period.⁵ Walking from Temple Bar, a visitor would have come almost immediately to the church of St Clement Danes and, virtually adjacent to it, to Butchers Row. The latter was the legacy of a medieval policy of expelling noxious trades to places just outside the City, but in the 1650s the long-term presence of butchers in the parish of St Clement’s also provided a rationale for the new development of Clare Market. Perhaps more famously, St Clement’s formed part of the legal quarter of the capital, which spilled over the boundary of the City, and its parishioners would have included men from St Clement’s Inn, Lyon’s Inn, New Inn and possibly Lincoln’s Inn, part of whose premises fell within the parish. These prosperous residents and passing trade along the highway doubtless accounted for the presence of a large contingent of tailors and shoemakers within St Clement Danes. Moving further west along the Strand, the main thoroughfare here, one soon came to Arundel House, the first of a string of aristocratic mansions lining the Strand, including Somerset House, all of which fronted the river Thames. Somerset House had been a royal property and in the early Stuart period had been refurbished for Queen Anne and then subsequently modified to include a sumptuous Catholic chapel for Henrietta Maria. In the aftermath of the king’s execution in 1649, however, like other royal properties it came into the hands of the state and its chapel, suitably altered, now provided a pulpit for radical preachers, including soldiers and women.⁶ Nearby, the impressive bulk of the Savoy housed a chapel that served as the parish church to the inhabitants of St Mary le Strand, whose own church had been demolished under Edward VI.

Most of these mansions that lined the Strand had been the town-houses of the country’s bishops, but these had largely fallen into the hands of the aristocracy after the Reformation. Many had medieval cores and their frontage on the Strand was defensive in appearance, with gatehouses restricting access, although those along the riverside also boasted attractive, fashionable gardens running down to the Thames.

One of these houses, Salisbury House, marked the boundary between St Clement Danes and the fashionable parish of St Martin in the Fields. There were further town-houses along this part of the Strand leading up to Charing Cross. By the Caroline period, these included Durham House, Suffolk House (later Northumberland House) and York House. These were prestigious, if unwieldy, properties, but their initial rationale – to accommodate the retinues of medieval bishops and magnates – meant that they contrasted markedly with the planned urban development of Covent Garden, which was built in the 1630s. This was also located in the parish of St Martin in the Fields, just to the north of the Strand, behind the earl of Bedford’s older town-house, although in the 1640s Covent Garden would finally be established as a separate parish. Here in Covent Garden the arcaded portico houses of the ‘Piazza’ called to mind the modes of comfortable and sophisticated urban living found in Italian cities, while more generally the houses of its wealthy residents gave directly onto spacious streets, letting in plenty of light and with little thought of defence. This development is often associated with the emergence of a gentrified West End, and its residents were doubtless customers of the New Exchange (popularly known as ‘Britain’s Burse’), the luxury shopping development by Salisbury House, which had opened in 1609, partly competing for trade with the City’s Royal Exchange.

Another fashionable area in St Martin’s parish was St Martin’s Lane, a turning to the north of the Strand just before Charing Cross. It included the church of St Martin’s, which had been partly rebuilt in the Jacobean period to accommodate a burgeoning population, especially its increasing numbers of gentry and aristocratic residents. The huge parish of St Martin’s was unusual in that it comprised not only heavily built-up areas along the Strand and Charing Cross, but also the royal hunting ground of Hyde Park and large tracts of open fields, extending west as far as Knightsbridge. Hyde Park was already becoming famous as a place of fashionable entertainment and display in the pre-war period; by the Restoration its pre-eminence would be unrivalled. Much of the land in St Martin’s parish was only beginning to undergo development in the early seventeenth century, but this new building included substantial mansions erected in their own grounds for members of the nobility, such as Leicester House and Newport House, whose rural setting was reflected in the fact that their owners were required to recompense the parish for violating what had traditionally been common land used by local people for grazing cattle. The same area also provided an exercise ground for the Westminster Military Company, a voluntary organization of would-be civic soldiery established in the early Stuart period, whose military training would be all too pertinent by 1642.

Finally, our tour needs to return to Charing Cross, which marks a great turning in the river Thames. This was the site of the royal Mews, which became a substantial garrison for much of the 1640s and 1650s. From here the traveller passed along King Street, which led down to a great complex of nationally important buildings – Whitehall Palace, Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey. This area all fell within the parish of St Margaret’s, a church virtually adjacent to the Abbey, whose more prosperous residents (including brewers, butchers, bakers and minor civil servants) were associated with the Westminster Court of Burgesses, one of the few administrative bodies that regulated the town of Westminster as a whole. The residents of this parish often had close economic and other ties to the Abbey, which continued to be the principal owner of land in the parish in the years between the Reformation and the Civil War. The abolition of deans and chapters in 1645 would thus have potentially momentous consequences for the locality and its inhabitants. Like St Martin’s, St Margaret’s also included large rural areas to the west, including the unenclosed expanse of Tothill Fields and the more refined St James’s Park, adjacent to St James’s Palace, a venue often occupied by soldiers or political prisoners during our period.

Despite its concentration of nationally prominent buildings, Westminster constituted a curiously disorganized and vulnerable location for national government. The main thoroughfare of King Street was a busy commercial street, crammed with medieval inns and taverns to serve passing trade, which nevertheless passed through the precincts of the palace of Whitehall, a maze of rambling buildings which sprawled in an ungainly fashion over the area. Because the palace had been built on an already cramped and heavily developed site, the security of the palace (and later of parliament itself) was always a problem, and the question of the safety of whichever government was resident in Westminster was to prove a constant source of anxiety throughout the 1640s and 1650s. This geographical vulnerability was exacerbated by the fact that there were no gates or defences to protect Westminster from the west. The City of London, by contrast, was relatively easily secured – with its series of defensible gates, chains across the streets and secure stronghold of the Tower. The rebels of 1381 had only managed to gain entry to the City, where they wrought destruction, because they were allowed in, but they had been able to burn down the Temple and the Savoy with little trouble. When Wyatt’s rebels came up from Kent in 1554 they were unable to cross over the river Thames to the City, but they were easily able to cross the river by travelling further west, crossing at Kingston, at which point they moved through Knightsbridge into Westminster and to Charing Cross virtually unopposed.⁷

After completing his account of Westminster’s streets, and after some observations concerning the courts of justice, Howell concluded with a brief account of Westminster’s ‘modern Civil Government’.⁸ He sought, as usual, to draw comparisons with London, comparing Westminster’s division into twelve wards with London’s partition into twenty-six. But he did not attempt to compare Westminster’s local government – the Court of Burgesses – with the City of London’s Court of Aldermen, and with good reason. Although Westminster had been granted the courtesy title of ‘City’ and a coat of arms in 1601,⁹ it is misleading to think of it in these terms, given its crucial lack of a single corporate body to govern the town, and that is why in both this and my earlier monograph I refer throughout to Westminster as a town rather than a ‘City’. There was nothing truly analogous to London’s lord mayor and Court of Aldermen. The nearest that Westminster had to a government was the Court of Burgesses, established by Act of parliament in 1585, but this was essentially a revamped leet court. The relic of a half-achieved Elizabethan incorporation of the town, the Court had potentially wide powers to regulate local markets and to control and punish various forms of disorder, including problems of immigration and ‘inmates’ (which were controlled through a systematic testimonial system), illegal building, scolding and a range of moral offences.¹⁰ But it had no power to make laws or raise taxes, and no income to pay an independent bureaucracy. These shortcomings were readily evident to local inhabitants, who had made several unsuccessful attempts to secure the full incorporation of the town by converting the Court of Burgesses into a formal civic governing body, most recently in 1633.¹¹ The 1650s saw further efforts to secure Westminster’s full incorporation (one of which had been made just three years before Howell’s book was published). These were not successful, however, and in practice the town was effectively governed via its large parishes, each one with its own powerful vestry.

The quasi-corporate status of the town perpetuated a range of ambiguities in Westminster’s government, and in jurisdiction over it. The limitation on the powers of the Court of Burgesses had helped to perpetuate the authority of the Abbey and its dean in the area, as well as that of the high steward (a post that was effectively in the crown’s gift and was used to reward royal favourites). The town elected its own MPs to parliament, separately from those elected for Middlesex, and yet it fell within the jurisdiction of Middlesex in other ways. While Westminster’s own separate sessions had been established in 1619, it still formed a sub-set of the Middlesex sessions, and local cases were heard at both types of session meetings. In religious matters, while St Martin’s and St Clement’s fell under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London, St Margaret’s parish came under the direct government of the dean and chapter. Many of these jurisdictional distinctions were not observed as precisely during the civil war and interregnum periods, when the exigencies of war and the generation of new forms of government and revenue raising often involved the transgression of earlier jurisdictions, and for administrative purposes all of Westminster could sometimes find itself absorbed within Middlesex, or combined with other suburban jurisdictions, or even brought under the authority of the City of London.

Given the weaknesses of the Court of Burgesses, it was often incumbent on other authorities to step in when decisive executive action was needed in the locality. In the years before 1640 the privy council often intervened decisively in matters of public order and plague regulation. The prerogative courts could also provide important summary justice for local people. For day-to-day government, however, a vital role was performed by Westminster’s parishes: not only were these remarkably populous, but parish officials also commanded large budgets and undertook many major responsibilities.

Howell’s Westminster occupies an anomalous position: located in Howell’s volume as a mere appendix to the City of London, yet it is acknowledged to have its own distinctive and in some ways superior identity. It is this distinctive character of Westminster that will provide the focus for the following chapters.

1  Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (1662), pt ii, 235.

2  James Howell, Londinopolis (1657), p. 346.

3  The Works of Ben Jonson, ed. C.H.H. Percy, P. Simpson and E.M.S. Simpson (11 vols, Oxford, 1925–32), VII, 106–8.

4  John Phillips, Sportive wit (1656), p. 63.

5  For information in the paragraphs that follow, see J.F. Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster: abbey, court and community, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), especially, ch. 5. See also Figure 1, p. 2.

6  See Chapter 6.

7  Froissart’s chronicles, ed. J. Jolliffe (2001), pp. 243–4; D. Loades, The Wyatt rebellion (2000), pp. 21–3; Merritt, Social world, p. 56.

8  Howell, Londinopolis, p. 379.

9  Merritt, Social world, pp. 27, 91

10  Ibid., ch. 7.

11  Ibid., pp. 87–99, 225–56.

Chapter 1

The eye of the storm?

Westminster, 1640–42

BEFORE AND AFTER THE SHORT PARLIAMENT

On 13 April 1640 Westminster played host to a piece of political pageantry that had not taken place for some years, as the king proceeded to Westminster Abbey for the opening of parliament. The streets were thronged, and good vantage points for the procession were both hard and expensive to come by. John Castle, a Westminster resident, had been charged by the earl of Bridge-water to find a window from which the earl’s wife could watch the procession, but he had to report to the earl several days beforehand that he could find only two rooms still available in all of Westminster’s main thoroughfare of King Street, one of which had a fair window ‘that will take 5 or 6 at it’, but would not be let for under £5. Closer to the time, he warned that it was vital that the earl’s wife and her company should occupy the room by 6 a.m. at the latest, as after that ‘there will be too much difficultie to passe into the house; for the streets will be full before 5 a clocke, and the space within the Rayles quickly after, choaked up with the presse of the multitude’.¹

People were understandably excited to witness the spectacle surrounding the opening of parliament, as there had been no session called for eleven years, but over the next two and a half years Westminster would also play host to the disintegration of Charles’s regime, sustained political deadlock and the descent into civil war. The eyes of the political nation would often be focused on events in the buildings and spaces of Westminster over these months. Yet Westminster was not a mere empty stage upon which these events would be enacted, nor were its inhabitants mere spectators watching from their windows in King Street. As we will see, Westminster’s own characteristic features – its distinctive streetscape, its anomalous structures of local authority, its population of politically inflammatory Roman Catholics – would help to shape the course of the events that followed, and its inhabitants would play their own, sometimes unwilling, roles in the drama that unfolded.

Figure 2  Portion of Newcourt and Faithorne’s 1658 map, showing the area around New Palace Yard and Westminster Abbey, with Tothill Fields chapel on far left

When Charles proceeded through Westminster in April 1640 he may have considered himself to be among friends. This was, after all, a ‘royal city’ – the centre of royal government, populated by many courtiers, officials and minor royal servants, as well as a large service sector that partly depended on the economic boost that the royal court provided to the area. The window renters of King Street were not the only local people who profited from the opportunities and consumption associated with the royal presence. Westminster might therefore seem to be an unlikely venue for major and dramatic opposition to royal policies. The town’s ties to the court and government administration meant that traditionally it was regarded as politically ‘safe’. Indeed, in the 1620s the town had been specifically selected for the introduction of what became the forced loan because it was seen as politically quiescent. Nevertheless, even then, although the parishes of St Martin’s and St Margaret’s generally lent to the king at the required level, it was reported that St Clement’s, the Strand, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Savoy had all refused to contribute. The 1628 parliamentary election should have provided a rude awakening in this regard, as the preferred candidate of the duke of Buckingham (the king’s favourite) was decisively rejected, as was another former local MP, ‘because, as is said, they had discontented their neighbours in urging the payment of the loan’.²

In fact, as well as the expected compliance, the 1630s had seen opposition to Charles’s rule in the heart of Westminster. This had been most notable in the shape of the dean of Westminster, John Williams, bishop of Lincoln and ex-Lord Keeper. In the 1630s Williams was playing a major role in pamphlet opposition to Laudian policies, engaged in venomous exchanges in print with the Westminster prebendary Peter Heylyn. He swiftly became a focus for opposition to Personal Rule policies, and this seems to have been a conscious move on Williams’s part: as early as 1632 he was reported as saying that he had made a strong position for himself, even if the king was against him, and that he would be back in power with the next parliament.³ The prosecution of Williams was also a significant moment in Westminster’s history. Deans of Westminster had tended to play a prominent role in local administration, but the 1630s saw the dean’s rule suspended for the first time since 1558. Williams had tried in vain to keep his toe-hold at Westminster, trying to use his oath of residence as dean to avoid the king’s directions to all bishops to attend their dioceses, and had strenuously resisted the king’s attempts to force him to resign the deanery.⁴ Williams himself was imprisoned, and the Abbey – a major political institution in the town – was run instead by a royal commission. Charles showed little hesitation in subduing the Abbey as he thought fit, peremptorily claiming the power to appoint all Abbey officers and to dispose of all the Abbey’s fines and leases ‘according to our royal will and pleasure’.⁵

Williams’s fall from grace amid the contested politics of the 1630s was manifested in very tangible fashion before Westminster’s inhabitants. Not only was he tried a stone’s throw from the Abbey, in the Star Chamber, but his sentence was directed to be announced publicly in the Abbey in the time of divine service, when the greater part of the congregation had assembled. The master of Westminster School – Lambert Osbaldeston – was denounced at the same trial, and while Osbaldeston made good his escape by fleeing into hiding in the City of London, he was nevertheless sentenced to have each ear nailed to the pillory in the presence of his pupils.⁶ Flight meant that the sentence was not carried out, but three other famous figures who were not so lucky were Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne, who were pilloried in the same year in New Palace Yard, a short distance from the Abbey. But the sympathetic response of the crowd to their suffering signalled a potential sea-change in popular responses to the regime.⁷

There may not necessarily have been many local people in the crowds who supported the puritan ‘martyrs’ in 1637,⁸ but Westminster supplied a ‘martyr’ of its own in 1638 in the shape of the baronet Sir Richard Wiseman. Wiseman, who seems to have been resident in St Martin’s parish, was prosecuted in Star Chamber for having accused Lord Keeper Coventry of receiving bribes, and his punishment was severe. Not only was he fined £18,000 and imprisoned indefinitely, but he was also sentenced to lose his baronetcy and to undergo the public punishment of having his ears cut off, and to stand in the pillory with papers describing his offence, to be disabled from giving testimony and to have a ‘whetstone around his neck’.⁹ The impecunious Wiseman suffered in the Fleet prison, where he was reported as ‘being in great Misery and Want, having neither Cloaths nor Money to buy him Bread, nor any Bed to lie on but Straw’, and where (he later claimed) he ‘suffered more then the Torments of a Spanish Inquisition’. Small wonder that the House of Lords was shocked and considered him ‘an Object of great Pity’ when he was brought before it in January 1641.¹⁰

No other Westminster inhabitant suffered in the same way as Wiseman, but heavy-handed intervention by the government in a number of areas may nevertheless have bred some local resentment. This was especially true of the behaviour of William Laud. The archbishop had suspended one puritan lecturer in St Martin’s parish, and had then summoned his replacement for examination when the parish chose someone equally inflammatory. The parish had been brought to heel with the appointment of Laud’s chaplain, William Bray, as its vicar, but while St Martin’s did not manifest any direct hostility to the Laudian reforms it cannot be assumed that the parishioners were all willing participants in them. Laud and Bray had also intervened to curb the independence of the new chapelry of Covent Garden.¹¹

Other government policies in the area may also have caused resentment among some local residents. The New Incorporation of the Suburbs had superseded local bids for a separate incorporation of the town of Westminster and few locals benefited from the intensified economic regulation that it brought with it. The reinvigorated regulations on new building in the area and the proclamations against gentry residence in the capital – both more systematically enforced than in the past – undoubtedly caused inconvenience to some local people, and the drive to prevent brewing with sea coal in the area led to at least two prosperous and influential local brewers being forcibly relocated. More generally, the crown and privy council seem to have been intervening more consistently and directly in local affairs than they had previously, with the crown often seeming to prefer to revive old royal powers and courts rather than to strengthen the powers of local institutions and organizations.¹² Undoubtedly, minor resentments and frustrations were generated among many local inhabitants, but there was no coordinated opposition, and many of those who were inconvenienced were themselves courtiers or royal officials.¹³

Overall, objections to government policy were muted and indirect. On the vital issue of ship money, Westminster complained over its rating, and St Margaret’s employed the services of John Glynne – soon to become a famous parliamentarian lawyer – in advising ‘the town’ on the matter. Glynne may have helped to prompt eight letters from the parish to the privy council asking for the abatement of their ship money assessments.¹⁴ But the parish’s objections were concentrated more on the timing of the levy for the locality, troubled as it was with the escalating costs of plague and poor relief, rather than on challenging the legitimacy of ship money itself.¹⁵ The locality became more sluggardly in its payment – in September 1639 it was still owing nearly a quarter of its 1637 assessment – but this was not exceptionally slow, compared with other parts of the country, and local complaints of indebtedness due to heavy local rates were based on a genuine and documentable financial crisis (even if in some places the concentration on rating disagreements rather than on challenging the constitutional propriety of the levy was a pragmatic response).¹⁶ The legal challenge to ship money was, however, well known in Westminster, and many of those involved in the challenge to the legality of ship money had links to the town. Not only did the court that decided the case meet in Westminster, but John Hampden’s mother, Elizabeth, owned a town-house in Whitehall and was a prominent member of St Margaret’s parish (where Sir Robert Pye, the father-in-law of Hampden’s daughter, sat on the vestry), and his defence counsels were Oliver St John (a client and legal advisor of the earl of Bedford, who was busy with his new Covent Garden development) and Robert Holborne (who would contest Westminster’s own parliamentary seat in 1640). It may also be significant that one of the earl of Bedford’s principal clients in Covent Garden, Anthony Wither, was found in possession of a copy of Prynne’s ‘Remonstrance against ship money’ tract in 1637.¹⁷

The calling of the Short Parliament in the spring of 1640 prompted local parliamentary elections, which offer an interesting barometer of the political mood in the town of Westminster at this time. The elections proved to be sharply contested, with no fewer than six different candidates competing for the two seats. The earl of Leicester’s agent, William Hawkins, reported that in the election proceedings at Westminster there ‘is the greatest noyse about the businesse that ever there was in the place’. The six candidates were Sir Robert Pye (a previous MP, and prominent exchequer official), Sir Edward Wardour (Clerk of the Pells and a prominent St Martin’s parishioner), ‘Mr Porter’ (probably George, son of the courtier Endymion Porter), John Glynne (‘our Recorder’), ‘Mr Holbourne the lawyer’ (who had been involved in the Hampden defence, as we have noted) and the St Margaret’s apothecary William Bell. Hawkins opined that Holborne and Bell would win the selection ‘because they have least relation to the Court, for the streame runnes that way’.¹⁸

On the day of the election large numbers of townspeople attended – indeed, there were far too many. One observer reported that ‘they had been all this morning and some part of yesterday numbering by Powle [poll] but finding that way to be so verie difficult and tedious that they must of necessity have spent 4 or 5 dayes about it, they thought it best to cause al the Candidates to drawe their severall numbers into Tuthill [Fields] where the choice was pronounced by the viewe’. Mass assembly in Tothill Fields would continue to be the preferred method of trying to determine the excessively populous and discordant election meetings in Westminster over the next twenty years.¹⁹ In the event, Hawkins was half right: the relatively obscure local apothecary Bell was elected, but the other