Free Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution by Peter Ackroyd

known to his sovereign as ‘Steenie’, a babyish rendition of St Stephen; the reference was to the fact that those who looked upon the face of the saint declared it to be the countenance of an angel. The angel would soon be in charge.

6
     
    The vapours
     
    The most colourful and compelling account of early Jacobean London can be found in The Seven Deadly Sins of London , published in 1607. It is a work, little more than a pamphlet, written by Thomas Dekker in a period of seven days with all the vivacity and immediacy of swift composition. Dekker himself was a playwright and pamphleteer of obscure life and uncertain reputation, but in these respects he does not differ from most writers of the time.
    He announces, to the city, that ‘from thy womb received I my being, from thy breasts my nourishment’; in which case London must be judged a harsh nurse or mother. He complains that of all cities it is ‘the wealthiest, but the most wanton. Thou hast all things in thee to make thee fairest, and all things in thee to make thee foulest.’ At the time of James’s accession it had been the ‘only gallant and minion of the world’ but ‘hadst in a short time more diseases (than a common harlot hath) hanging upon thee’.
    He paints the scene of the capital at midday where
     
in every street, carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran on wheels: at every corner, men, women and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down. Besides, hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water tankards running at tilt in a fourth: here are porters sweating under burdens, there merchants’ men bearing bags of money, chapmen (as if they were at leap-frog) skip out of one shop into another, tradesmen (as if they were dancing galliards) are lusty at legs and never stand still: all are as busy as country attorneys at an assizes.
    Yet the city takes on a different aspect at night. Dekker has a vision of London by candlelight, the companion ‘for drunkards, for lechers, and for prodigals’. This was the time when ‘mercers rolled up their silks and velvets: the goldsmiths drew back their plate, and all the city looked like a private playhouse when the windows are clapped down, as if some nocturnal or dismal tragedy were presently to be acted before all the tradesmen’. The bankrupt and felon had kept indoors for fear of arrest but, at night, ‘began now to creep out of their shells, and to stalk up and down the streets as uprightly, and with as proud a gait, as if they meant to knock against the stars with the crowns of their heads’.
    The prosperous citizen who in the day ‘looked more sourly on his poor neighbours than he had drunk a quart of vinegar at a draught’ now sneaks out of doors and ‘slips into a tavern where either alone, or with some other that battles their money together, they so ply themselves with penny pots [of ale] … that at length they have not an eye to see withall, not a good leg to stand upon’. They reel into the night, have an altercation with a post on the way and end up in the gutter. Their apprentices, despite the oath of their indentures, ‘make their desperate sallies out and quick retires in’ with their pints. The three nocturnal pursuits of the city are drinking, dancing and dicing.
    The prose of Thomas Dekker is crisp, strenuous and elliptical. He observes the Londoners at a bookstall in St Paul’s Churchyard ‘looking scurvily (like mules chomping upon thistles) on the face of a new book, be it never so worthy: and go (as ill favouredly) mewing away’. He notices the fact that the brothels of London have painted posts before them, and that their keepers always serve stewed prunes to their customers. He reports that the lattices for the windows of the alehouses are painted red. He observes the hackney men of Coleman Street, the