The World of Caffeine (28 page)

Watercolor drawing of a London coffeehouse by unknown artist who lived during the early eighteenth centuiy. W.H.Ukers, in
All about
Coffee,
describes it as follows: “This little body color drawing by an unknown English artist of the reign of Queen Ann was given by Mr. R.Y.Ames to the British Museum. It is a document of considerable interest for students of social history. It is a naive and obviously faithful representation of the interior of a London coffee house, with its clients seated at tables, smoking and drinking coffee, which is poured out from a black pot by a boy waiter, while other coffee pots are kept hot before a blazing fire. It is possible that these pots were also used for tea at this period. An elegant lady in a fontange head dress presides at a bar under a tester on the left, and is handing out a glass, the contents of which may be guessed from a framed notice on the wall: ‘Heare is right Irish Usquebae.’ Of the newspapers which lie on the tables no word but ‘April’ is legible. Pictures, perhaps for sale, adorn the wall: A connoisseur is examining one of them by the light of a candle. The prevailing colors are scarlet, pale blue, grey, and white, against a background of the various browns of wall, tables, and floor. The probable date, judging by the costume, is about 1705. The drawing resembles in several respects a small engraving of a coffee house which appeared in 1710, but is not the original of that engraving, and represents the fashions of a slightly earlier period. The date ‘A.S.’ (for Anno Salutis) 1668 which appears to the left is obviously a later and spurious addition.” (Photograph courtesy of British Museum)

In another passage they describe the plight of what we might call the “coffeehouse widow”: “on a domestic message [errand] a husband would stop by the way to drink a couple of cups of coffee” and be gone for hours. Echoes of their complaints are evident in King Charles II’s proclamation banning coffeehouses the following year.

Later the same year of the women’s petition, the husbands responded with
The Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition
Against Coffee, vindicating…their liquor, from the undeserved aspersion lately cast upon them, in their scandalous pamphlet,
in which they defended their conduct and the drink they had come to fancy. Another broadside in the same vein, also appearing that year, and the first to feature illustrations, was
A Brief Description of the Excellent Vertues of that Sober and
Wholesome Drink Called Coffee, and the Incomparable Effects in Preventing and Curing Most Diseases Incident To Humane
Bodies,
which sold “at the sign of the coffee mill and tobacco-roll in Cloath-fair near West-Smithfield, who selleth the best Arabian coffee powder and chocolate in cake or roll, after the Spanish fashion.”

Meanwhile, injured parties other than desolate wives were complaining against coffee’s increased popularity. One leaflet asserted that the coffeehouse seduced men into an idle life of dissipated conversation with people they hardly knew. Such promising, worthy gentlemen and merchants, once trustworthy, were lured by their coffeehouse friends into a habit that took
them away from their occupations “for six or even eight hours.”
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And, expressing even a greater alarm, a political economist, writing on behalf of established trade interests that were being injured by the popularity of coffee, asserted:

To read these bills of particulars, one might think that a general economic catastrophe had befallen the nation. All on account of the little bean and the houses in which it was brewed and served.

By 1700, there was an abundance of coffeehouses in London, many of which catered to a special professional, social, mercantile, or artistic clientele. Every writer on the subject entertains a different opinion as to how many there were, but no one seems to really know. The estimates have declined over the years. As a reference point, consider that, at the end of the seventeenth century, Gregory King (1648–1712), an English herald, genealogist, and engraver, calculated that the entire population of Britain was 5.5 million based on the hearth-tax returns between 1662 and 1682,
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a figure with which modern demographers concur.
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London, at the turn of the eighteenth century, had reached about 500,000 (almost twenty times the size of Bristol, the next-largest city of the day) and, even more rapidly than the other English seaport cities, was expanding as a center for business and politics. The rapid growth of the coffeehouse business is suggested by the French writer Sylvestre Dufour, who in 1683 relates claims by returning visitors that there were more than three thousand coffee-houses in London, a remarkable, even preposterous figure that has been widely repeated in such respected works as
The Story of Civilization,
by Will and Ariel Durant. Another testimonial comes from John Ray (1627–1705), a London botanist, who computed in 1688 that coffeehouses were nearly as general in London as in Cairo.
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Timbs, in his classic
Clubs and Club Life in London
(1872), quotes an early edition of the
National Review
to the effect that “Before 1715, the number of Coffee-houses in London was reckoned at two thousand. Every profession, trade, class, party, had its favorite Coffee-house.” However, Stella Margetson, in her incisive and entertaining book
Leisure and Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century
(1970), writing of the age of Addison, provides a considerably smaller estimate, stating that there were “more than 500 coffeehouses in London alone at this time.”

Extrapolating from Dufour’s figure for London coffeehouses, we should expect almost fifty thousand in New York City today; extrapolating even Margetson’s more modest estimate, we should expect seventy-five hundred. For comparison, consider that, by actual count in the spring of 1994, Phillips/Norwalk, a real estate consulting firm, found only fifty-five coffeehouses in New York City and estimated that this number had doubled to more than a hundred by the start of 1995. It has probably at least doubled again since. The Specialty Coffee Association reported that in 1989 there were about two hundred coffeehouses in the entire country, about five thousand by the start of 1995, and correctly predicted over ten thousand by the new millennium.

Thus, taking even the most conservative estimates, London around 1700 had one coffeehouse for every thousand people, or nearly forty times the proportion of coffee-houses than New York today, in what are the early stages of the contemporary coffee-house revival. These exotic flowers of the East were not to thrive for long, for by 1815, however many there may once have been, there were fewer than twelve coffeehouses left in the entire city. In only one hundred and fifty years, the coffeehouse had come and gone in London. But as consequence of its vogue, coffee, tea, and, to a lesser extent, chocolate had become commonplace dietary items that were welcomed as fortifying temperance drinks, even as far as the conservative English countryside.

Kings and sultans have a long history of involvement with caffeine. Many have made attempts to ban its use by their subjects, while some—often the same ones— have enjoyed preparing and serving it to their intimates or have made a considerable amount of money from taxing its sale. A good example of inconsistency in state policies with respect to coffee and tea is an English king’s disapproval of the tumultuous atmosphere of the early coffeehouses, while his queen played a starring role in introducing the fashion of tea to England.

The promiscuous mingling of political opinions, the trademark of the new coffeehouses, engendered fear and suspicion, bolstering opposition to coffee and the establishments in which it was served. This opposition culminated in a proclamation by Charles II, made on December 23, and issued on December 29, 1675, banning coffee-houses from London after January 10, 1676:

BY THE KING: A PROCLAMATION FOR THE SUPRESSION OF COFFEE HOUSES

Charles R.

Whereas, it is most apparent that the multitude of Coffee Houses of late years set up and kept within this kingdom,… the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons …, have produced very evil and dangerous effects; as well for that many tradesmen and others, do herein mispend much of their time, which might and probably would be employed in and about there Lawful Calling and Affairs; but also, for that in such houses…diverse false, malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad to the defamation of his Majesty’s Government and to the Disturbance of the Peace and Quiet of the Realm; his Majesty hath thought it fit and necessary, that the said Coffee Houses be (for the future) Put down, and supressed, and doth…strictly charge and command all manner of persons, That they or any of them do not presume from and after the Tenth Day of January next ensuing, to keep any Public Coffee House, or to utter or sell by retail, in his or her or their house or houses (to be spent or consumed within the same) any Coffee, Chocolate, Sherbett, or Tea, as they will answer the contrary at their utmost perils…(all licenses to be revoked).

Given at our Court at Whitehall, this third and twentieth day of December, 1675, in the seven-and-twentieth year of our reign.

GOD SAVE THE KING

Some of the reasons for the ban that are enunciated in the edict, such as their danger as fire hazards, may, because of the need to maintain a continuous open flame, have been genuine concerns less than ten years after the Great Fire of 1666. Other reasons, especially the apparent desire to protect adults from their own folly, sound strangely similar to the feigned aims of modern socialist politicians. But the king’s primary motivation was a fear that coffeehouses could act as breeding grounds for political and social unrest, and Charles II may well have been haunted by sentiments encapsulated in a couplet from a 1685 comedy:

Moseley, who recounted the stories of coffeehouse persecutions in the Islamic world, saw this concern as the king’s primary motive. “However strange it may appear at this time, Coffee had similar difficulties to encounter soon after its introduction into England;…it having been found an encourager of social meetings, Coffee-houses were shut up by proclamation, as seminaries of sedition.”
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Charles II was no stranger to proclamations designed to promote the welfare of his subjects. In Isaac Disraeli’s
Curiosities
of Literature
(London, 1848), is described how, in 1660, the king promulgated a lengthy proclamation for the strict observance of Lent “for the good it produces in the employment of
fishermen.
”
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In other proclamations he inveighed against “the excess of gilding of coaches and chariots,” and, to help avert the increasing congestion of the city, against new construction, which posed, he thought, many of the same threats to fire safety, health, and public order as coffeehouses. But the king’s true motive may have been his own protection, a point stridently voiced by those who thought the coffeehouse ban had been designed to restrain the “licentious talking of state and government” and according to which “speakers and hearers were made alike punishable.”
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,
31

Charles II’s ruling was even shorter-lived than had been the edict of Kha’ir Beg more than 150 years before, if it can be said to have had a life at all. A loud protest arose from coffeehouse owners and coffee drinkers, who even by this early date constituted a considerable economic and social constituency in the kingdom. In consequence, Charles II backed down from his order and revoked it within eleven days, on January 8, 1676, citing the king’s “princely consideration and royal compassion” as the basis for the recission, although he omitted to explain why his empathy had not been operative a week and a half before.

Coming from his pen, the prohibition of coffeehouses had been, in any case, a particularly incongruous edict. Among others, Sir William Coventry had, from the first, spoken out against the measure, stating that it was well known that many of the king’s early supporters had rallied in the coffeehouses during the Commonwealth, forums where they spoke more freely “than they dared to do in any other,” and it was justly remarked that he might never have come to the throne but for the revolutionary fervor of the gatherings that occurred there. Perhaps the king had never been in earnest in promulgating the brief ban, for, as Coventry also remarks, he was one of England’s foremost beneficiaries of coffeehouse operations. Evelyn observes that his financial dissipation forced Charles II to rely upon the personal dissipation of his subjects for revenue, in that the king found the taxes on tobacco, alcoholic drinks, and coffee, chocolate, and tea indispensable to his support, and we know that the last three were served almost exclusively in the institutions his edict would have abolished.
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