The Cheapside Corpse (52 page)

As there were no banks as such in the 1660s, goldsmiths took it upon themselves to store and lend money, keeping it in their vaults, and loaning it to other customers at rates of between six and ten per cent. Some of their stockpile went towards paying for the war that had been officially declared on the Dutch on 22 February 1665 – a month later than portrayed in this novel.

Edward Backwell was one such goldsmith, a founder of our modern-day banking system. He was the government’s chief financial advisor during the Commonwealth, a role he continued after the Restoration. He arranged the money side of the sale of Dunkirk (an unpopular transaction that turned many people against the Earl of Clarendon), managed the payment of war subsidies, and lent the government money to pay the Tangier garrison. His ‘bank’ suffered a near-collapse in 1665, when he was out of the country on government business and the clerk he had left in charge (Robin Shaw) died of plague. He was finally ruined in 1672, when the King put a Stop on the Exchequer –
de facto
admission that the government was bankrupt. Shaw was probably in Spymaster Williamson’s pay. Other great goldsmith–banking dynasties of the 1660s include such names as Vyner, Angier, Hinton, Glosson, Johnson and Meynell.

James Baron was a linen-draper who married Frances Bott in 1650 and died in 1667. Francis Poachin was landlord of the Mitre on Cheapside in 1667, and lived on Cornhill; he suffered catastrophic losses to his business in the 1680s. Charles Doe lived on Cheapside between 1641 and 1671; his business failed shortly after the Great Fire. Nicholas Kelke was a pewterer who married a Southwark lass, while Mr Yaile paid twenty pounds’ rent for his house on Cheapside in 1638.

The Earl of Clarendon did build himself a princely home in Piccadilly, sneeringly called Dunkirk House. And the vintner Nicholas Colburn bought a country estate in Essex, where he was living in February 1665. Thomas Chaloner, father of the regicide, did discover alum on his estates at Guisborough in Yorkshire; they subsequently passed to the Crown, and an unfair takeover has been suggested as one reason why his heirs might have sided with Parliament.

The Intelligencer
for 24 April 1665 records the unfortunate lot of Dr Misick, who was severely burned while reaching for a glass of spirit and turpentine. His maid suffered the same fate trying to save him, and it was feared that both would die. Francis Neve was an upholder active in the Cornhill–Threadneedle Street area in the 1660s. Famous courtiers include Bab May, Will Chiffinch, Winifred Wells, Lady Carnegie (rumoured to have given the Duke of York a ‘shameful pox’) and the Duke of Buckingham, while Sir George Carteret was Treasurer to the Navy.

As in most conflicts, the propaganda machines were busy during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The rumour about the fifteen hundred drowned Britons was hawked around the city until it was discovered to be a lie and its originator punished. Similar rumours were propagated in Holland at the same time. Omens and portents were rife, and included comets, coffin-shaped clouds and other celestial phenomena, all reported with grave precision in the newsbooks. Pepys records being told about a sea-battle heard on 14 April, during which Captain Teddeman had his legs blown off, but there was no truth in it.

The parish registers of St Mary le Bow record several burials in the spring of 1665. They include Robert and Sarah Howard, George Bridges and Abner Coo, physician. Another early victim was Margaret Porteous, buried on 12 April 1665. Daniel Defoe’s
A Journal of the Plague Year
contains a tale of a Frenchman who caught the plague at his lodgings in Long Acre, and who then went to Bearbinder Lane off Cheapside, thus transporting the disease from one parish to another. However, Defoe was still a child when the Great Plague of London raged, and his account was written almost sixty years later, intended as fiction.

There was a riot in London over the double standards imposed by the authorities during the plague, although it happened in the area surrounding St Giles-in-the-Fields, not on Cheapside. It stemmed from the fact that the searchers could be bribed to record a death as something other than the pestilence, which would release the house from the forty-day quarantine.

Regardless of their efforts, London was essentially powerless to combat the disease, mostly because contemporary medics did not understand how it was transmitted or how to treat it. Various theories were put forward, including one that said it was caused by a deadly miasma, and another that blamed tiny worms invisible to the naked eye. Cures and preventatives were myriad, and many were advertised with great confidence in the newsbooks, although it was to no avail. The disease advanced relentlessly as the weather grew warmer, leaving thousands dead in its wake.