The House by the Thames Read online

  Nicholas John Visscher was Dutch; his panorama appeared in 1616, though how well he knew London at first hand and how much he relied on other people’s depictions is not clear. To make his view more comprehensive he shows the Thames running straight, as it does in many people’s general image of London to this day but not in real life. This device allows him to depict a clear line of buildings along the south bank westwards from the Bridge. After St Saviour’s (here under its old name of St Mary Overy’s) comes the Bishop’s palace (Winchester House), the great hall prominent with its stone tracery windows dating from a rebuilding about 1400. Then comes a bridge over a stream – St Mary Overie’s Dock.2 Then come the pointed backs of the Bankside houses, with their chimneys, their back lean-tos and their garden hedges. The Globe Theatre appears, with a cluster of cloaked and hatted people beside it, and so does the Bear Garden. Not shown are the Rose, the Hope and the Swan theatres, which were also there at the date of the map, leading one to think Visscher must have been working from earlier sources. A little west of the Bear Garden is a surviving pike pond. One of the row of gables just to the left of that must represent the back of the Cardinal’s Hat Inn.

  Wenceslaus Hollar’s celebrated Long View of London was produced in Antwerp in 1648, but was based on drawings he made during a sojourn in England a few years earlier. A gifted Bohemian artist and pioneer etcher, Hollar was brought to London by Lord Arundel, and seems to have fallen in love with the place. Except for a few years in Amsterdam during the grimmest days of the Commonwealth, he spent the rest of his long life in his adopted city, and it is largely thanks to him, a foreigner, that we know what much of seventeenth-century London looked like. He never lived in Southwark, but it was the base for his views of London before and after the Great Fire. Unlike the other contemporary panoramas of London, his Long View manages to give the impression of being drawn from one identifiable vantage point: ostensibly this is the tower of St Saviour’s/St Mary’s, from which elevation Hollar had no doubt made sketches, but actually we are considerably higher up, as if Hollar were treading air like one of the baroque, celestial figures he places above the busy boats on the Thames.

  One has the impression that Hollar embarked on this, his greatest work, with the intention of recording London on the opposite bank in the traditional manner, but got carried away by a naturalism and a passion for detail that changed the bird’s-eye convention back into a genuine landscape study. The sweep of the south bank in the foreground, curving as in real life, predominates; one’s eye is drawn to it as if this were the real subject and the City were a less important backdrop. We see right down into people’s yards and gardens. There is a tide-mill near the bridge with sacks of grain on a platform and a deep bed of chaff, then a ferrymen’s landing stage with oars laid out on the shore, then a large inn with a round-arched gateway from an alley behind and a rider just setting off. A little further is the dark water of St Mary Overie’s Dock, with people walking on a built-up path beside it just as they do today where the Golden Hind is berthed. Then comes the very recognisable Winchester House, but with Hollar we are not being invited to admire the elevation but rather to take a walk in its carefully laid-out gardens where some people are already promenading two by two.

  This is a final glimpse of the palace and its grounds near the end of its grandeur, for the Bishop was dispossessed under the Commonwealth and his palace was divided up for renting. At the Restoration the Bishop preferred to go elsewhere; the park was leased for building. The approximate spot where Hollar shows the people walking lies today beneath the railway viaduct from Cannon Street where it curves eastward towards London Bridge station.

  Next in Hollar’s View comes a huddle of houses with high, old roofs on which you can count the tiles. Several of them have small cabins tacked to the back of them, which I suspect of being ‘necessary houses’ placed over one of Bankside’s many ditches. There is another large house with several chimneys right on the river, probably an inn, with another berthing place for ferries nearby. Then the Globe Theatre and the bear-baiting ring – whose names Hollar has transposed, no doubt because he was making his final drawing in Antwerp and could not check from there which building was which. He has the Globe nearer the river, whereas in fact it was the other way round. The building further from the river is the one with a roofed ‘tiring house’ on top, the actors’ changing place, which a bear pit would not need. Horses graze in an adjacent meadow.

  After this, the houses retreat along the shore line in diminishing perspective. We are no longer on top of them so cannot look down into their intimate world. If only Hollar had chosen a vantage point a little further west along Bankside. Then we could have seen with his wonderfully detailed, microscopic vision right into the back yard of the Cardinal’s Hat with its barrels of beer, and its waterfront with boats tied up, and the narrow lane leading from one to the other just as it runs today.

  It must have been quite a substantial building: Browker, who did business deals with the most respected citizens of Southwark, would hardly have erected anything shoddy, and we know from the house that sits in its footprint today that it had capacious cellars. Houses in the Elizabethan period were still constructed predominately of timber rather than stone or brick, but the new prosperity was favouring larger buildings in which there were more fixed fireplaces and therefore more chimneys. In the following century the Cardinal’s Hat was assessed for hearth tax at seven hearths, which implies a good number of rooms – though not as many as the Falcon Inn up river, which was said in its heyday to have twenty-nine rooms. The Cardinal’s Hat certainly would have had glass in its windows rather than the old-style coverings of horn or simply wooden lattice, for glass was now being produced much more cheaply, some of it to hand in Southwark, and windows were correspondingly bigger.

  For reasons that will become clear when we enter 49 Bankside, I believe that the main door to the inn was probably from the side alley, so that customers came into the middle of the building facing the staircase, with the kitchen on one side and the dining and tap-room on the other side overlooking the river. If the inn let lodgings, which it apparently did, the furnishings would have been more comfortable than the old straw pallets and wooden benches of medieval and Tudor days: a late-Elizabethan cleric3 noted that there were many more chairs and hangings than in his youth, and that chaff or wool mattresses or feather beds, previously ‘thought meet only for women in childbed’, were now much favoured. A decent inn’s customers had pewter tankers now for their ale rather than horn ones and pewter plates rather than wooden trenchers, while wooden spoons were replaced with tin.

  After John Raven’s tenancy of the inn there was a John Powell and then a Thomas Mansell or Mansfield. After that, from 1627 to 1674 the place was continuously in the occupation of the memorably named Melchisedeck Fritter: it sounds as if he (like Dekker the playwright) was of Flemish origins, but by the seventeenth century the family was clearly well established in the parish. Fritter, like his predecessor Mansell, laid on dinners for members of the parish vestry, and he had the right to produce his own ha’penny tokens – in effect, to mint his own small change – which argues that he was a well-respected local citizen. We seem quite far here from ‘the women of the stews’.

  Because of the connection with Shakespeare, Bankside’s identity as the place where Londoners went to the theatre tends to shine disproportionately large and bright in the panorama of remembered history. In reality, this phase was relatively brief; barely fifty years elapsed between the building of the first proper theatre and the suppression of all of them in 1642 in the run-up to the Civil Wars, and Shakespeare himself was only associated with the theatres for about fifteen years. Though the Wooden O of Shakespeare’s Henry V, or the imaginary ‘cloud capp’d towers and gorgeous palaces’ of his The Tempest, is the way we like to think of the theatres at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the truth is that the playhouses of Bankside were born out of the bull- and bear-baiting rings that were already w
ell established before the theatres came, and which reappeared there after the Restoration when the theatrical world had moved off elsewhere. On Bankside, the same building was sometimes used for both plays and bloodsports on separate days, and the most celebrated Bankside impresario of the time, Philip Henslowe, was just as keen to be recognised master of fights between dogs and bears as he was to give stage-room to Ben Jonson and Marlowe.

  Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has been re-created by the riverside in our own day with loving care for authenticity, but I hardly think that an equally authentic ring in which blind bears were whipped or horses baited to death would be acceptable as an historical tourist attraction. Intimations of love or charity from the distant past still have the power to cheer us: in the same measure, the irremediable nature of long-ago cruelties of any kind weighs on our hearts. It comes as something of a relief to find that a sixteenth-century commentator too4 thought that bear baiting was ‘a full ugly sight’ attracting ‘most fools all’ who could have put their pennies to better use, and that was over a hundred years before both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn expressed a civilised disgust at the sport in their respective diaries. Foreign visitors usually settled for describing the whole experience deadpan, as they did the plays they saw: such entertainments were just another English curiosity, along with characteristic eating habits: ‘They do not generally put fruit on the table, but between meals one sees men, women and children always munching through the streets, like so many goats, and yet more in the places of public entertainment.’5 National quirks change surprisingly little over the centuries.

  While the presence of this entertainment industry on Bankside must have increased business for the Cardinal’s Hat, none of the four theatres (Rose, Globe, Hope and Swan) was immediately near it. Stow refers to two Elizabethan animal baiting rings on Bankside; one was on a site further east that carries the name Bear Gardens to this day. From the Agas map and from another reference it seems possible the other one was near the Great Pike Garden, a little to the west of the inn, but, if so, it later moved from there. This was probably just as well, since another foreign visitor to England at the end of Elizabeth’s reign (Thomas Platter) remarked of the dog kennels adjoining the ring: ‘And the place was evil smelling because of the lights and meat on which the butchers feed the said dogs.’ The stench must have been strong to provoke a comment, for our ancestors walked through perpetual smells. Whiffs of fish would, for a long time, have been associated with the stewside, competing with the river breezes and the pleasant aroma of woodsmoke. Pig-keeping generated pungent scents, but general stable smells were not disagreeable – and they were so universally present in populated areas during the two-thousand-year dominance of the horse that few people would even have registered them. The same is probably true for human waste, some of which would have been consigned to underground cess-pits at this period, but much casually added to open manure heaps here, there and everywhere. Official attempts to keep it out of the drainage ditches that criss-crossed the south bank are a constant theme up to the nineteenth century, though the objection seems to have been not so much that faecal matter was unhealthy as that it choked the ditches and prevented water from running away.

  ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’ (actually the creation of the actor-manager Richard Burbage) rises again today on the south bank. It is a near-unique example of the distant past returning, but its presence obfuscates detailed facts of that past. Descriptions and drawings of the original theatres are not numerous, but it is almost certain that the new Globe, conforming to modern ideas of safety and comfort, is both higher and more solid than the Elizabethan and Jacobean structures, since they could be dismantled and re-erected elsewhere rather as open-air concert arenas are today.

  Nor is the new Globe on the site of the original, whose exact location several hundred yards to the east was finally established in the twentieth century, and is marked today by a ring of distinctive cobbles in the courtyard of modern flats in Park Street. The new Globe is not, either, on the site of the Rose Theatre nearby, whose forgotten foundations right by Southwark Bridge Road were revealed by chance in 1989 when a Victorian warehouse was demolished. There lay hidden, sleeping, a perfect O, the original floor beneath layers of later dirt still strewn with the nutshells dropped by munching spectators.

  This happy discovery gave further impetus to the actor Sam Wanamaker’s campaign to resurrect the Globe. Indeed, so useful was the uncovered Rose for publicity purposes that the popular impression today is that the new Globe is built in the foundations of the old one, thus conflating two different theatres and three sites into one archetypal whole. So a pretend Shakespearean playhouse for our own time has now, by commemorating the original theatres, also superceded them. And for the first time ever the plot on which 49 Bankside sits finds itself with a playhouse right at its elbow.

  Burbage’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, was originally set up by his father, James, in Shoreditch which, like Bankside, was just outside the City jurisdiction. But, with no river to act as a barrier, it was uncomfortably close to the City and therefore subject to interference. The City Corporation disapproved of playhouses, which they regarded as the resort of undesirable people including thieves, horse-stealers, pimps, fraudsters and (rather oddly) rabbit catchers and those likely to commit treason. Actors were still by tradition ‘rogues and strolling vagabonds’, though a new generation of players, aristocratic patronage and fixed places for performance were making this designation obsolete. By 1598 James Burbage, a joiner by trade, was in dispute with the ground landlord, who was unwilling to renew the lease but was laying claim to the theatre’s fabric. At Christmastide, while this City grandee was known to be celebrating the holy day in the country, the Burbage father and sons dismantled the theatre plank by plank, took all the material over on a series of boat-trips to the south bank, and re-erected it there as the Globe.

  This location was no doubt influenced by the fact that the Rose was already on Bankside, erected there some ten years earlier by the moving spirit of the other leading company, the Admiral’s Men. This was Philip Henslowe, theatrical manager, pawn broker, dyer, ruff-starcher, Groom of the King’s Chamber, Master (after 1604) of the King’s Bears, landlord, vestryman, and an emblematic Southwark citizen of his time. He later built a second Rose and the Hope Theatre, married his step-daughter to the leading actor, Edward Alleyn, and thus became indirectly part-responsible for the benevolent founding of Dulwich College (Alleyn’s Gift). He was the son of a game warden of the Royal Ashdown Forest in Sussex: the family also had iron-ore mining and smelting interests in the forest. He came to London as an apprentice in the dyers’ trade; evidently he knew how to make his mark, and when his employer died he married the widow. His busy and variegated life exemplifies the first period in London when entrepreneurial energy could win fortune and near-gentlemanly status, and Southwark, lacking the august dignitaries of London proper, was the ideal place for such a man to thrive. He stands as the first in a long line of them.

  Because Henslowe wrote a wildly phonetic English, bought and sold second-hand clothes and lent money at interest to actors, later generations have tended to write him off as a vulgarian and a predator. However, his role with the actors was more like that of banker and he put up the money for production costs and costumes. It is clear that he was loved and respected by his son-in-law Alleyn, and was sufficiently honoured in his parish of St Saviour’s to become a churchwarden and eventually one of the governors of the Free Grammar School. He had no children of his own, but tried to do his best by assorted orphaned nephews and nieces, not all of whom were grateful or as hard working as he was. When he died in 1616 he was worth a substantial amount of money, and owned the leases of much property in Paris Garden and on Bankside, including some in the Great Pike Garden, and several inns.

  It has sometimes been asserted that Henslowe owned the Cardinal’s Hat. Documentation would suggest that he did not, nor even that he owned a lease on it, but one can tell from the add
resses on family letters that both he and Alleyn and their respective wives lived on Bankside. One letter from 1592, before his Rose was constructed, indicates Henslowe (‘hinslo’) ‘dwelling on the bank sid right over against the clink’, which would suggest a house on the waterfront very near the Bishop’s palace. But I think that later Henslowe or Alleyn or both may have moved much nearer to the Cardinal’s Hat. In the Southwark archive collection is a nineteenth-century Deed of sale, plus earlier documents, relating to a parcel of land which, by then, represented numbers 44, 45 and 46 Bankside, plus a considerable amount of land to the back of them where other houses were built. The location of this sixty-six-foot frontage on the river, just two more house-widths east of number 49, is thus clear – by coincidence, it is roughly the stretch occupied by the Globe today. The oldest extant Deed in the bundle relating to this particular plot of land is dated 1698, but this one recapitulates, on durable parchment, the earlier history of the plot, going back to 1604, when a ‘gentleman’ called Devonish Rymen sold it to Philip Henslowe, complete with several ‘messuages’ (houses). The next sale occurred in 1616, which is the year Henslowe died.

  So the Cardinal’s Hat would have been conveniently near to hand, and that the family were good customers is undoubted. The year after Henslowe’s death, Alleyn’s engagement-diary-cum-accounts records several dinners there, one for local vestrymen, for he, like his late father-in-law, was on the parish council: ‘December 12. I went to London [from Dulwich, where he had a country retreat] and supped at the Cardinalls Hatt wt. Mr Austen Mr Archer and Mr Ordes. 4.0 shillings. Dec 17. Dinner at Cardinalls Hatt wt. Vestry men. 3.0 shillings. Supper ther wt. Mr Austen etc. 2s.6d.’ In a world in which a working man was doing well if he made twenty pounds in a year (four hundred shillings), and a skilled artisan, shop-keeper or clergymen only perhaps two or three times that, it will be seen that dinner bills counted in shillings indicate a certain standard of prosperous comfort in both inn and diners. People transacted business now in inns, in a haze of newly popular tobacco; it had become customary to erect high-backed settles like screens at each table to create a degree of privacy. Fourteen years later the Cardinal’s Hat was clearly still the good inn where theatre people went; there is a record of them dining John Taylor, the waterman-poet, there at their expense.