At the time of Peter's visit, London and Paris were the two most populous cities in Europe. In commercial wealth, London ranked second to Amsterdam, which it was soon to succeed. What made London unique, however, was the degree to which it dominated the nation in which it lay. Like Paris, London was the national capital and seat of government, and, like Amsterdam, it was the country's greatest port, the center of its commerce, art and culture. In England, however, the size of the city dwarfed all else. London, counting its immediate environs, had 750,000 inhabitants; the next largest city in England, Bristol, had a mere 30,000. Or, to put it differently, one Englishman in ten was a Londoner; only one Frenchman in forty lived in Paris.
London in 1698 lay mainly on the north bank of the Thames, stretching from Tower Hill to the Houses of Parliament. The great boulevard of the city, spanned by a single bridge, London Bridge, was the Thames. The river, 750 feet across, flowed between marshy banks thick with reeds, interspersed with trim gardens and green meadows—its stone embankments came later. The Thames played a key role in the city's life. Always crowded with ships, it was used as a thoroughfare for getting from one part of the city to another. Hundreds of watermen rowing little boats provided a quicker, cleaner and safer service than could be had by traveling through the crowded streets. In autumn and winter, great mists and fogs swirled up from the Thames to roll through the streets, shrouding everything in a thick, brown, poisonous vapor created by the fog mixing with the smoke pouring from thousands of chimneys.
The London that Peter visited and explored on foot was rich, vital, dirty and dangerous. The narrow streets were piled with garbage and filth which could be dropped freely from any overhanging window. Even the main avenues were dark and airless because greedy builders, anxious to gain more space, had projected upper stories out over the street. Through these Stygian alleys, crowds of Londoners jostled and pushed one another. Traffic congestion was monumental. Lines of carriages and hackney cabs cut deep ruts into the streets, so that passengers inside were tossed about, arriving breathless, nauseated and sometimes bruised. When two coaches met in a narrow street, fearful arguments ensued, with the two coachmen "saluting each other with such diabolical titles and bitter execrations as if every one was striving which should go to the Devil first'." For short distances, to avoid the mud and pushing of the crowds, sedan chairs carried by two strong men were popular. Biggest of all were the overland coaches which rolled into London from the highroads, carrying commercial travelers and visitors from the country. Their destinations were the inns, where weary passengers could dine on cabbage and a pudding. Westphalian ham, chicken, beef, wine, mutton steaks and pigeons, and rise the next morning to a breakfast of ale and toast.
London was a violent city with coarse, cruel pleasures which quickly crushed the unprotected innocent. For women, the age of consent was twelve (it remained twelve in England until 1885).
Crimes were common, and in some parts of the city people could not sleep for the cries of "Murder!" rising from the streets. Public floggings were a popular sight, and executions drew vast crowds. On "Hanging Day," workmen, shop-keepers and apprentices left their jobs to jam the streets; joking and laughing, and hoping to catch a glimpse of the condemned's face. Wealthy ladies and gentlemen paid for places in windows and balconies overlooking the route from Newgate Prison to Tyburn, where executions took place, or, best of all, in wooden stands especially erected to provide an unobstructed view. The most ghastly execution was the penalty for treason: hanging, drawing and quartering. The condemned man was strung up until he was almost dead from strangulation, then cut down, disemboweled while still alive, beheaded, and his trunk was then chopped into quarters.
Sports were heavily stained with blood. Crowds paid to see bulls and bears set upon by enraged mastiffs; often, the teeth of the bear had been filed down and the cornered beast could only swat with his great paws at the mastiffs that leaped and tore at him. Cockfights attracted gamblers, and large purses were wagered on the specially trained fowl.
But, for all its violence, London was also a city where grace, beauty and civilized life were important. It was during this age that Sir Christopher Wren, the greatest of English architects, erected fifty-two new parish churches in London on sites wiped clean by the Great Fire. Their thin, glittering steeples gave London a breathtakingly distinctive skyline, dominated by Wren's masterpiece, the gigantic domed structure of St. Paul's Cathedral. The church was forty-one years in building; on the eve of Peter's arrival, the choir had just been opened for public worship.
For intelligent men, life in London centered on hundreds of coffee houses where the conversation could center on anything under the sun. Gradually, the different houses began to specialize in talk about politics, religion, literature, scientific ideas, business, shipping or agriculture. Choosing the house by the talk he wished to hear, a visitor could step in, sit by the fire, sip coffee and listen to every shade of opinion expressed in brilliant, learned and passionate terms. Good conversationalists could sharpen their wits, writers could share their dilemmas, politicians could arrange compromises, the lonely could find simple warmth. In Lloyd's coffee house, marine insurance had its beginnings. At Will's, Addison was to have his chair by the fire in winter and by the window in summer.
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This was London in 1698. As for the larger polity, England itself, the seventeenth century was a time of transition from the small, relatively insignificant sixteenth-century island kingdom of Queen Elizabeth I to the great European power and world empire of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Elizabeth died in 1603, and with her the Tudor Dynasty, England was free of the ambitions of Spain, having beaten off Philip II and his armada. But England remained a peripheral factor in the affairs of Europe. The dynastic question was settled when King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots, came down from Edinburgh to take the English throne as James I and begin a century of Stuart rule. During the first half of this century, England was absorbed in its own problems, trying to sort out the tangled strands of religious conscience and the relative power of crown and Parliament. When the debate burst into civil war, the second Stuart, Charles I, lost his head, and for eleven years England was ruled under the stern eye of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. Even when Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, religious tension remained acute. The nation was divided between Catholic and Protestant, and, among the Protestants, between Church of England and Nonconformists.
Yet, England's power and ambitions were growing. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Dutch dominated the world's trade routes, but English seamen and merchants were eager to compete, and three naval wars with Holland jarred this Dutch supremacy. Later, during the War of the Spanish Succession, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, won four major victories over the French armies in the field, besieged and captured supposedly invincible fortresses and was on the verge of driving the Sun King out of Versailles itself when victory was snatched from him by a government decision to end the war. England triumphed, nevertheless, not only over France but also over its own ally, Holland. The long war had overstrained even the superbly organized resources of the wealthy Dutch. The Dutch position on the continent was far more vulnerable than that of England, and during the struggle Holland's vast ocean trade was heavily restricted while that of England flourished and grew. The status of the two powers, nearly equal in the seventeenth century, changed rapidly in the eighteenth. Dutch power waned quickly and Holland slipped to the rank of a lesser state. England emerged from Marlborough's wars supreme on the oceans, and its maritime power ledj to world empire with colonies in every corner of the globe.