London: The Biography полностью

A view of Lambeth Palace, painted in the 1680s, reveals a distant prospect of Westminster and the Strand. It is altogether a model of elegance, with the spires of St. Clement Danes and St. Giles-in-the-Fields clearly visible together with stately representations of Durham House and Salisbury House. If the artist had turned his eyes only slightly to the east he would have seen, within the newly built city, the tower of the re-erected Royal Exchange which, as the financial centre of London, was naturally graced with the very first of the brand-new steeples. The great steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow had also been rebuilt, and was followed by that of St. Clement Eastcheap and St. Peter upon Cornhill, St. Stephen Walbrook and St. Michael Crooked Lane, as well as those of forty-seven other churches designed by Wren and his colleagues.

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In Wren’s visionary design of London, the great cathedral of St. Paul had been the central point from which the streets were to be extended, and he tried to hold fast to his original conception of its grandeur and immensity. He had found the old cathedral in ruins where, Pepys noted, “strange how the very sight of the stones falling from the top of the steeple do make me sea-sick.” As late as 1674, eight years after the Fire, the ancient edifice had been neither replaced nor restored. London was still in part a ruined city. But Wren then began the task of demolishing the old walls with gunpowder and battering rams, and the first stone was laid in the summer of 1675. Thirty-five years later Wren’s son, in the presence of his father the master architect, placed the highest stone of the lantern upon the cupola of the cathedral in order to mark its completion. “I build for eternity,” Wren had said. Yet in that sentiment he was pre-empted by the poet, Felton, who predicted that nothing would last as long as the stones of Newgate.

A London hanging evoked by Rowlandson; the children in the crowd seem delighted by the spectacle, and a mother carries her infant without the least disquiet. It was often said, by foreigners, that Londoners did not fear death.

Within four years of the Great Fire Newgate Prison was near to completion, rebuilt with a design which the London Encyclopaedia describes as one of “great magnificence” and “sumptuousness.” It was, in a sense, the very symbol of London. It had stood on the same site since the twelfth century and was, almost from its beginning, an emblem of death and suffering. It became a legendary place, where the very stones were considered “deathlike,” and it has inspired more poems, dramas and novels than any other building in London. Its role as gateway also created elements of myth, since it was the threshold from which prisoners left the earthly city and were dispatched to Tyburn or Smithfield or the gallows just beyond the walls of Newgate itself. It became associated with hell, and its smell permeated the streets and houses beside it.

In the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries Newgate Prison had begun to decay and to collapse upon itself; sixty-four prisoners died in an epidemic of “gaol fever” in 1419, while the various keepers were regularly charged with afflicting torture and unjust punishment upon the inmates. Jews falsely accused of circumcising Christian children, clippers and coiners, and murderers, were placed within deep underground dungeons where they were loaded with chains or confined in stocks. A bequest of money by Richard Whittington ensured that the prison was completely rebuilt in 1423 but it soon reverted to its natural state of gloom and horror. Approximately three hundred prisoners were confined within the space of half an acre, in a building divided into three sides-the Master’s side for prisoners who could pay for food and drink, the Common side for impecunious debtors and felons, and the Press Yard for “prisoners of note.” It can be inferred, then, that the Common side was the site of hardship and indignity.