The London Gazette of 1 October 1666 announced that two days previously,
by a Warrant from his Majesties principal Secretary of State, the Person of Valentine Knight was committed to the custody of one of His Majesties Messengers in Ordinary, for having presumed to publish in Print certain Propositions for the rebuilding the City of London, with considerable advantages to His Majesties Revenue by it, as if His Majesty would draw a benefit to himself, from so publick a Calamity of his people, of which His Majesty is known to have so deep a sence, as that he is pleased to seek rather by all means to give them ease.Footnote 1
Some chronicles of Charles II's reign and antiquarian accounts of London history recycled this announcement,Footnote 2 but Knight's broadside, Proposals of a new Modell for Re-building the City of LONDON, received little scholarly attention until the early twentieth century, when both Walter Bell and Elbert Peets described it alongside the other schemes for rebuilding the city. Bell also reproduced the plan which was on a version he owned (figure 1).Footnote 3 Subsequent histories of the Great Fire have mentioned Knight's proposal and have used this image as an illustration.Footnote 4 It has gained a walk-on part in longue durée histories of planned urban form.Footnote 5 But in the last eighty years, no scholar has explicated this episode. Its capacity to illuminate the complex relationship between the story of post-Fire reconstruction and the longer-term development of print culture has thus been overlooked.
Valentine Knight's proposals as reproduced in Walter G. Bell, The Great Fire of London in 1666 (London, 1920), 240. Author's copy.
This is somewhat surprising. The history of the Great Fire and of London's rebuilding in brick has been told time and time again. These accounts always include descriptions of the unrealized plans for a new city with a radically different street pattern that were drawn up immediately after the conflagration, before the less ambitious framework for reconstruction was enacted in 1667. One reason that Knight's misadventure has been treated cursorily may be that most of these retellings are heavily indebted to the rich historiography on the topic written between the 1920s and the 1940s, a period when British architecture's historical relation to print culture excited little interest and less analysis.Footnote 6 Indeed, his fate appeared “ludicrous” to Bell, a career journalist who celebrated Fleet Street in his historical writing, and odd to the democratically minded city planner Peets, who commented wryly that jailing was “a form of discouragement the modern town planner is usually spared.”Footnote 7 Theirs was an era when the Town Planning Review aspired to be “a general mart to which all may come” in order to discuss city design, and when “popular support” was reckoned to be key to the success of initiatives in urban planning.Footnote 8
As we see below, Knight was incarcerated precisely because his recommendations entered the “general mart” of print and thereby became the most widely disseminated (and potentially “popular”) proposal for rebuilding the city. His experience reveals the tacit rules governing the promotion of ideas about the future shape of the capital, attests to how Charles II's government restricted discussions of civic planning, and brings out the limits placed upon the world of print in Restoration England. Furthermore, it has wider implications for how we might conceptualize this world. In recent decades, historians of mid− and late−seventeenth-century England have emphasized that print, especially cheap print, transformed news and political culture, leading, many have argued, to the emergence of a public sphere.Footnote 9 Most of this literature sets itself up in opposition to previous revisionist trends in early modern English political history. Its horizons are generally confined to the political, narrowly defined, and do not address the broader (more Habermasian) understandings of the public sphere to be found in cultural histories of the eighteenth century.Footnote 10 It does not, for example, explore how far aesthetic judgments were articulated with reference to notions of the public or the extent to which the printing press was the medium by which to debate the state of metropolitan architecture.Footnote 11
Knight's Proposals was, I show, republished in the 1730s and in the 1740s, a period when urban improvements were beginning with increasing frequency to be “examined … in print, in newspaper columns and pamphlets, graphic satire and view-making”.Footnote 12 Around the same time, Christopher Wren's and John Evelyn's 1666 manuscripts were engraved and published; they became widely known. Theirs and Knight's proposals for the post-Fire city served both as antiquarian visualizations of the past and as points of reference in the debates about public taste that studies of eighteenth-century cultural criticism see as constitutive of the polite public sphere.Footnote 13 They were also regularly invoked in books, articles, and pamphlets arguing about how to improve the shape of London's street pattern and the state of its environment. Although as Matthew Craske has noted, the “history and standards” of architecture became “a matter of public debate” in the 1730s, most studies have focused on the 1760s and, above all, on the work of the architect and city planner John Gwynn. In particular, Miles Ogborn has pointed out how Gwynn's London Improved (1766) used Wren's 1666 plan to frame its claim for architectural authority in a new market-oriented world in which “everyone was a critic.”Footnote 14 Tracing the publication and reception history of Knight's broadsheet from the 1660s to the 1750s not only shows that there is more to be discovered about the Fire and its aftermath––topics that sometimes seem to have been exhaustively researched––but also offers a lens through which to explore some of the material texts by and in which metropolitan public space was imagined and reimagined over this period.Footnote 15
The Preposterous Proposal
First, let us first sort out the Proposals’ bibliography. The English Short Title Catalogue lists five versions of the broadside, all with a publication date of 1666.Footnote 16 In fact, only three survive from that year. One was printed by Thomas Leach, another by Henry Brugis (also known as Bridges). Both were published by the London stationer, Samuel Speed.Footnote 17 The third was printed in York by Stephen Bulkley for the bookseller Francis Mawbarne.Footnote 18 A mid-eighteenth-century republication of Knight's broadside was wrongly given a Wing number; this has caused confusion.Footnote 19 The 1666 Proposals is an unillustrated single-sheet broadside setting out the advantages that “will accrew” from the scheme (figure 2). The illustration that scholars regularly describe as “Knight's” was done and engraved for the eighteenth-century republication. Its draftsman clearly knew the final ground plan of St. Paul's and represented the other churches in their post-Fire form (figure 3). Its upper caption states, “This was … printed 20th September 1666. without any Draught or Delineation” and describes the plan as “this Sketch now done.”Footnote 20
Valentine Knight, Proposals of a new Modell for Rebuilding the City of LONDON (London, 1666). By permission, Guildhall Library, City of London.
Valentine Knight, Proposals of a new Model for Rebuilding the City of LONDON (c. 1749–50). © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Knight's Modell … to be forthwith set out by his Majesties and the City Surveyors proposed that a row of substantial four-story buildings “built Uniform with stone or brick” be built along the Thames, set back from the high-water mark to create a wide riverfront wharf, with behind them another row facing north. “[B]etween every two houses” was to be “a Shore [sewer] … to the Thames, over which shall be to each house … an house of Office [privy].” An “open Newell” or light well, “6 foot wide and 20 foot long” was to be inserted between every four properties “to give light to their several Stare Cases” and houses of office. Knight also put forward a new street layout. Two thoroughfares, each sixty feet wide, and twenty-two more, each thirty feet wide, were to run across the City from west to east. Intersecting with these, and creating a rough grid in the western and central districts, were to be six sixty-foot and six thirty-foot streets running down to the river. On both sides of all thirty-six thoroughfares there was to be “a Peyatsoe [arcade] … paved with free stone for people to walk dry and easy.” A sewer (as big as six feet deep and four feet wide in the larger ones) was to run down the middle of every street. There was also to be a thirty-foot wide “Cutt” dug through the City “from Billingsgate” “to Holborne-bridge” lined with wharves “for the Thames to run in, and Barges to swim in at high water.” It would connect with another canal running along the River Fleet to the Thames (figure 3).
Knight further addressed financing this whole undertaking. “The Owners of all the Ground,” he declared somewhat opaquely, would “have their proportions [presumably the dimensions of their land] … set out as near the place where it was, as may be.” They were “to be enjoyned to lett the same to build” at a permanent annual rate of 3s. “for every foot in the front.” (House lots were to be twenty-five feet deep). The builders of each property was to be paid “8 per Cent” of the money they laid out, secured in perpetuity upon a rent charge on what they erected. Knight concluded by confidently itemizing what all this would cost and what each property should be let for. The 891 houses on the widest streets and by the Thames would each cost “but 250l.” to build; the 6,206 on the thirty-foot thoroughfares “but 200l.” The former would be let on twenty-one year leases for £70 p.a. with a £70 entry fine; the latter for £50 p.a. with a £50 fine “and not for more or less.” The ground rent for each of the properties would be £4 10s (thirty times 3s.); the builders would receive twenty or sixteen pounds a year (eight per cent of the £250 or £200 they had expended). The “Remainder”—£45 10s and £29 10s depending on the house and its location––“with all the Fines, shall be paid to the King, his Heirs, and Successors, towards the maintenance of his Forces by Sea and Land, out of which shall be first paid … to every person that hath lost by the Fire such a proportion as the Parliament shall think fit.” This, Knight stated with alluring exactitude, would produce a windfall of £372,670 and provide a perpetual annual revenue of £223,517 10s. for the army and navy. These were amounts far exceeding the total hearth tax revenue.Footnote 21
Dated 20 September, fourteen days after the end of the Fire, and seven after Charles II's declaration promulgating his desire for “a much more beautiful City,” Knight's Proposals had been put together swiftly.Footnote 22 However, his was by no means the first plan for a new metropolis. These began to be devised while the ashes were still warm. A letter of 8 September reported that “Men begin now everywhere to … think of repairing ye old and rebuilding a New City,” adding that the City “had sent to ye King to desire a New Modell.”Footnote 23 On 10 September the City established a committee to consider its “recovery out of the … deplorable ruins,”Footnote 24 and Henry Oldenburg, secretary to the Royal Society, wrote to Robert Boyle that he had attended “many meetings of ye principals Cittizens … who … discoursed almost of nothing, but of a survey of London, and a dessein for rebuilding … wth Bricks, and large Streets.” Oldenburg hoped that Royal Society members “will signalize themselves in this Survey and Dessein, wch when done to the satisfaction of the king, may by his Majty be offered and recommended to the Parlement.”Footnote 25 Three days later, the diarist, John Evelyn, brought to court his “Plot for a new Citty, with a discourse on it.” He found that Wren had discussed the shape of a new city with the king two days earlier.Footnote 26 On the same day, 13 September, Charles II issued his declaration, which promised that with the assistance of the Mayor and aldermen a design would be set out in “a short time.”Footnote 27 Plans developed apace. On 19 September, the day before Knight's broadsheet, Robert Hooke presented “his model for rebuilding the city” to the Royal Society. As the Mayor and aldermen preferred it “very much” to the one drawn up the City surveyor, Peter Mills, the Royal Society recommended it to the king.Footnote 28 Francis Lodwick, merchant, friend of Hooke, and writer on language systems, drew up one that may have been passed around in Royal Society circles.Footnote 29 The Somerset gentleman surveyor Richard Newcourt sent his plan for the new city up to the capital.Footnote 30 Most of these figures had relevant experience: Newcourt had already mapped London and could draw his “Modell” for a new street layout “by the selfe same Scale;”Footnote 31 Evelyn and Wren had advised on the reconstruction of St. Paul's; Hooke and Mills had carried out extensive surveying work; Wren, Hooke, and Mills were appointed by king and City to survey the ruins. But who was Valentine Knight? What led him to offer these apparently unsolicited suggestions? And how did Knight's Proposals compare with the others?
The Projector's Life
Previous accounts have provided no details of Knight's life. The Proposals are signed “Val. Knight,” but both Bell and Peets described him as “Captain.” Subsequent scholars continue to give him this rank, although none has referred to any source to justify this claim.Footnote 32 He was indeed a captain. When the Privy Council considered his petition for release, its register styled him “Captain Valentine Knight.”Footnote 33 This title derived from his former position in Royalist armies. He can be found in the 1663 List of “truly-loyal” officers,Footnote 34 and shortly after the Restoration, “Captain Valentine Knight” was thought suitable for the Order of the Royal Oak, an honor intended for men with a record of particular service to the crown.Footnote 35 Around this time he outlined his Cavalier credentials in a petition to the king. He had raised a troop of horse for Charles I and had been imprisoned at the end of the first Civil War; undaunted, he had raised another troop at the time of the 1648 Kentish Rising and had been locked up once more; escaping, he had attended Charles II before the battle of Worcester in 1651; thereafter he had “been upon all occasions, aydeing, assisting and p[ro]moteing” the king's interest. As he now had “a convenient Brewhouse” near Westminster, he asked to be made the King's Brewer.Footnote 36
This brewery lay in St. Andrew Holborn, in a block of property that Knight owned and began to develop in c. 1659.Footnote 37 This caused problems for his neighbors: in 1662 the Middlesex sessions found Knight guilty of dumping forty cartloads of clay on the highway.Footnote 38 In June 1666 the benchers of Gray's Inn petitioned the Privy Council, complaining that Valentine Knight had not only erected an alehouse near Gray's Inn Lane but was about to build “twenty or thirty tenements” there. The houses, they claimed, would be “onely convenient to receive Highway men, thieves, [and] dissolute Persons.” Even worse, Knight was intending to burn bricks there. This would cause “unwholesome Ayres,” “much inconvenient to the primacy and sweetness” of Charles's private way to Newmarket.Footnote 39 Knight's building work generated other conflicts.Footnote 40 He borrowed money for it; his failure to repay these loans led to law suits and time in prison.Footnote 41 According to the widow of a man who leased him a brewery, inn, and other tenements, Knight did substandard repairs, ripped out fittings and took the lead from the gutters so that few tenants could “lye drye in theire beds;” furthermore, he subdivided them into habitations “fitt onely for poore indigent p[er]sons” and packed them with homeless people after the Fire. Indeed, he allegedly tried to burn down the inn; when the widow extinguished the fire, he not only threatened to kill her, but fired a pistol at her.Footnote 42 It is unexpected to find that the author of the Proposals, which prescribed fine piazzas and greater cleanliness, had been convicted of causing pollution and apparently engaged in shoddy building projects.
Other factors besides experience in questionable property development spurred Knight to formulate his recommendations and advance them in the way he did. His focus on cost and profit was not aimed at personal enrichment. Rather, the scheme's intended contribution to the “maintenance” of royal “Forces by Sea and Land” reflected a pugnacious martial commitment to the crown.Footnote 43 Knight may have been emboldened by his position on the fringe of court and his contacts in the Privy Council, and, as we will see, by a record of making suggestions about public affairs through the medium of a printed broadside. He was acquainted with Henry Guy, a friend of the king during his exile and a future treasury minister, and Sir William Pulteney, a Westminster JP and, like Knight, former captain in the Cavalier army.Footnote 44 In May 1662 Charles considered granting Pulteney, Guy, and Knight the licensing of hackney coaches under the terms of a recent Act of Parliament.Footnote 45 Although he did not do so, Pulteney and Guy were made commissioners for hackney coaches and Knight became overseer of the hackney coachmen.Footnote 46
This post and this Act of Parliament provide a context for Knight's interest in the condition of London. The statute established a commission to oversee the coachmen. This included Roger Pratt, who would be appointed by Charles II to supervise the rebuilding of the capital.Footnote 47 But the Act dealt with more than hackney coaches. It was drawn up immediately after John Evelyn's denunciation of London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, and was recommended to Parliament by the king and Privy Council. It deplored how highways in and around London and Westminster had become “noisom dangerous and inconvenient,” and established a commission for highways and sewers with an annual income of £2,000 from coach license fees.Footnote 48 This latter body was empowered to remove nuisances and irregular buildings and to require new paving and other improvements. Its remit extended throughout Westminster and the City of London (infringing the rights of many civic bodies).Footnote 49 Its first members included not only Evelyn but also Sir John Denham and Hugh May, the master and paymaster of the King's Works, respectively, as well as the political arithmetician William Petty, the poet Edmund Waller, and important court figures like Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans. (Evelyn, Petty, and St. Albans were all dropped in 1663.) In July 1666 both Pratt and Christopher Wren were made commissioners.Footnote 50 Through work for the hackney coach commission, liaising with commissioners for highways and sewers, Knight was therefore involved in attempts to bring greater order and salubrity to the streets of the metropolis. Indeed he could have had contact with all three of the surveyors for rebuilding the city nominated by the king: Pratt, May, and Wren.Footnote 51
Designed, as it must have been, to curry favor as well as to influence policy, it is not surprising that Knight's Proposals repeated elements of Charles's declaration of the week before, and resembled other (now more celebrated) plans for the reconstruction of London. His emphasis on brick or stone construction was shared by other schemes. His Thamesside row echoes the king's call for “a … Key or Wharf on all the River side” lined with “fair Structures,” Wren's design for a “spacious” quay, Evelyn's for a riverside embankment free from “stairs, bridges,” and warehouses, and Newcourt's for “One straight goodly Row of Noble buildings” facing the river.Footnote 52 Knight's arcades imitated Inigo Jones's Covent Garden, a model cited by other schemes.Footnote 53 His street widths were in line with Charles's, Wren's, and Evelyn's rebuilding projects.Footnote 54 Architectural historians generally pass over sanitary provision in their treatments of urban design, but the captain's attention to privies was not an eccentric violation of decorum. Keeping streets “sweet and clean” and the eradication of stench were common aims of early modern urban Utopias.Footnote 55 In 1666 Evelyn hoped for a city which was “sweeter for health.” Newcourt condemned the “noysomenes” of metropolitan “houses of Office.” Lodwick recommended relocating slaughterhouses, candle- and soap-making “for the sweetnes of the Citty.”Footnote 56 Knight's six-foot sewers would have made sense to contemporaries––such watercourses were an important part of urban environmental regulation.Footnote 57 The captain's plans for a canal may strike the modern reader as absurd because they make no reference to the city's gradients, but the construction of inland waterways, sometimes through unpromising terrain, was a recurrent theme in seventeenth-century projects for economic improvement.Footnote 58 In 1666 Petty wondered whether “certaine Rivrs … may wth profitt be made navigable if the Citty be vigourously rebuilt, wch before could not;” Evelyn and Wren recommended and attempted the canalisation of the River Fleet to permit the passage of barges.Footnote 59
While much of the content of Knight's proposals was similar to others, its form was quite different. First, it is far briefer than John Evelyn's Londinum Redivivum or Richard Newcourt's “opinion for the modelling” of London, both of which are quite long essays.Footnote 60 Secondly, as we have already seen, whereas other schemes remained in manuscript, Knight's was printed.Footnote 61 Thirdly, unlike most of the others, it contained no plan.Footnote 62 Wren's, Hooke's, and Evelyn's designs were graphic or geometrical: they invited and expected mental comparison with the plans of ideal cities illustrated in Vitruvius. Knight's imagination and representation of the new city, by contrast, was numeric and financial. It specified how many houses would be built and at what cost; it tabulated fiscal benefits to the crown.Footnote 63
In so doing, it conceptualized the reconstruction of London as a logistical exercise and an economic challenge and opportunity. Some other contemporaries addressed these themes, rather than answering Thomas Sprat's call for “better models, for Houses, Roofs, Chimnies, Conduits, Wharfs, and Streets.”Footnote 64 William Petty set about calculating how much money was needed to rebuild the capital and “The proportions in measure weights and price of all the … Materialls.” A month after Knight's imprisonment, Roger L'Estrange, Charles's Surveyor of the Press, licensed the Experimented Proposals of Sir Edward Ford, water-company proprietor and advocate of herring fishing and farthing tokens, which outlined how paper bills of credit based upon future tax revenue could fund the rebuilding of London.Footnote 65
Because architectural historians have viewed Knight's Proposals in relation to the canon of town planning, they have not appreciated how closely it resembled the advice papers and lobby documents on public policy, statecraft, and fiscal matters drawn up, circulated and sometimes printed in mid- and late-seventeenth-century England.Footnote 66 In Francis Lodwick's library it was bound with works on trade, money and taxes, such as John Bland's Trade Revived (1659) and Thomas Firmin's Some Proposals for the Imploying of the Poor (1678), not with architectural manuals like Balthazar Gerbier's Counsel and Advice to all Builders (1663).Footnote 67 This similarity becomes even clearer if one examines Knight's other piece of printed political advice, a broadsheet which has hitherto escaped scholarly attention. In late 1661 or early 1662 “Capt Val. Knight” authored Reasons for Passing of the Bill for the Ease of SHERIFFS in Passing their Accompts in the EXCHEQUER.Footnote 68 Printed, like the 1666 Proposals, on one side with numbered heads or paragraphs, this was designed to assist the progress of what became the “Act for Preventing the Unnecessary Charge of Sheriffes and for Ease in Passing theire Accounts,” legislation which aimed to reduce the expenses incurred by those appointed to the shrievalty.Footnote 69
Given that Knight moved in the orbit of Privy Councilors and had made policy suggestions before, his imprisonment seems even more surprising. It is unlikely that his temporary incarceration was simply due to Knight's suggestions for how the crown might benefit from the disaster. Baptist May, the keeper of the King's Privy Purse, openly rejoiced that the City was now stripped of its defenses and could no longer threaten the crown.Footnote 70 The Great Fire led William Petty to develop distinctly authoritarian thought experiments: “Supposeinge all the ground and Rubish were some one mans who had ready mony enough to carry on ye worke together wth a legislative power to cut all Knots.”Footnote 71 Nor was it necessarily beyond the pale to think of using metropolitan (re)developments for income generation. In 1657 Parliament passed an Act fining the owners or tenants of all buildings constructed in the metropolitan area since 1620.Footnote 72 Similar measures received serious consideration in the 1670s and 1680s.Footnote 73 Knight's travails stemmed less from what he proposed, than from the manner of the Proposals’ dissemination.
The Perils of Publicity
His “humble Peticon” “craving Pardon” was considered by the Privy Council on 17 October 1666, when he had been in prison for just over a fortnight. Missed by Walter Bell and all those writing in his wake, it reveals that it was publication, not printing per se, that had got him into trouble. Shortly after the Great Fire, Knight had, he explained, “shewen Proposalls by him drawne for rebuilding of the City, to several of his Maties most Honoble Privy Councell.” They, apparently, “seemed to like the same.” Knight “was thereby encouraged to Print some of them for his ffreinds.” He was not, he assured the Privy Council, “intending to publish them.” “But Mr Speed a Stationer unadvisedly did.”Footnote 74 Knight was probably telling the truth. The Privy Council accepted his account, and released him.Footnote 75 And although many historians still assume that every early modern printed broadside or pamphlet once sat on booksellers’ stalls or in peddlers’ packs, recent scholarship has shown that the printing press was often used to produce works for specific and limited circles.Footnote 76 It is thus plausible that Knight intended a defined and circumscribed readership for the Proposals.Footnote 77 His earlier Reasons for Passing of the Bill has no details of imprint and only survives in the Clarendon MSS in Oxford's Bodleian Library, suggesting that it had the restricted circulation that Knight claimed to have intended in 1666.Footnote 78 Minute examination of the two versions of the Proposals printed for Speed reveals that although they bear the names of different printers, they are otherwise typographically identical, with the same inverted letter, “Aun” for “Ann” in point VII, indicating that the form was transferred between the two presses, possibly so that one could run off additional copies for sale.
However it came about, publication ran contrary to the government's strenuous efforts both to manage reports of and responses to the Great Fire, and to restrict discussions of the future shape of the capital. Sir Joseph Williamson, who was the driving force of the king's intelligence system and of his secretariat, enlisted the power of the press to promulgate an official narrative of the disaster, its origin, and the nature of the response.Footnote 79 On 10 September the London Gazette, with its print run of between 13,000 and 15,000, disseminated the official account of the conflagration. This described how Londoners, seeing the king and the Duke of York assisting the firefighters, “forgot their own misery, and filled the Streets with their Prayers for his Majesty, whose trouble they seemed to compassionate before their own.”Footnote 80 A few days later the king's emollient declaration was published. This went far beyond the usual proclamations for fasts in times of adversity: it expressed Charles's “great and constant affection … for … Our Native City,” and remitted seven years’ hearth tax on all houses rebuilt according to the agreed plans.Footnote 81 Such political spin went hand in hand with the suppression not only of inflammatory rumors that it had been started by conspirators and dangerous claims that it was a punishment from God, but also, it seems, of all unauthorized reports of the inferno.Footnote 82 In York in October 1666 Bulkeley and Mawburne were arrested by a royal messenger, and held until they entered into bonds not to print, publish, or sell “unlicenced, scandalous, or seditious Books.” Copies of their republication of Knight, of Londons Lamentation, Or its Destruction by a Consuming Fire, a febrile broadsheet announcing that “the Dutch, french and Jesuite are the formentors in this treacherous design,” and of their thoroughly loyalist reprint of the official account of the Fire in the London Gazette were all seized.Footnote 83 The following year the Privy Council's desire to ensure that its narrative remained the sole version of these events, led it to order the public burning of the pamphlet setting forth the evidence presented to the Commons’ inquiry into the causes of the Fire.Footnote 84 The captain's release went unreported in the Gazette.
It is easy to see how the publication of Knight's scheme caused hackles to rise. The Proposals may have aimed to re-edify London “for use and beauty” and may have offered the crown a massive windfall, but it contradicted the conciliatory tone of Charles's declaration, which emphasized the extent of the king's losses by the Fire and his solicitude for the city.Footnote 85 In particular, Knight's ideas for revenue generation would have intensified Londoners’ concern that Charles might expropriate land. On 13 September, the lawyer, Sir Nathaniel Hobart, touched on this in a letter to his friend Sir Ralph Verney. “The rebuilding,” he wrote, “will not bee soe difficult as the satisfying all interests, there being so many p[ro]prietors[;] some say the King will purchase the whole land and looke upon it as a thing of noe great difficulty for the Streetes and all the grounds that have bin encroacht upon are his already.” In October James Broderick told the Duke of Ormonde of a proposal for an astonishingly arbitrary division of the burnt area: “the genll Estimate dividing ye whole 312 Acres into three parts … 1/3 the Kings, in Highwayes, Waste, & Incroachments, 1/3 belonging to ye City, yt is, to ye Chamber of London, the Companyes & Hospitalls, 1/3 to perticular Proprietrs.” However, he continued, “this Calculacon is uncertayne.”Footnote 86
In fact, Charles II trod carefully. The Restoration regime had made determined efforts to “instil confidence that the king would not sacrifice economic well-being to the whims and pockets of his courtiers,” emphasizing its concern with public good.Footnote 87 But Charles I's London building regulations were still remembered as an avaricious project to mulct the nation.Footnote 88 In 1666, in the midst of an expensive and unsuccessful war, triggering heavy taxes, many of which were farmed out, the regime worried about its legitimacy. It was especially sensitive to suggestions that it might profit from the fire. No wonder that it turned to the London Gazette to announce to as many people as possible that Charles II had repudiated Knight's “Propositions” and in order to reiterate just how acutely he appreciated the enormity of this “publick … Calamity.”Footnote 89
The Privy Council's concern about Knight's broadsheet may have been more acute because its printers and publishers had come to the government's attention before. In 1663 Leach was arrested and examined in connection with the printing of a narrative of the trial of the Regicides, John Barkstead, Miles Corbet, and John Okey; Henry Brugis's premises were searched for unlicensed books in 1664.Footnote 90 In 1663 Speed's name appeared in a list of printers and stationers alleged to be producing seditious books; in May 1666 he was arrested and charged in connection with the republication of a Protectorate law text.Footnote 91 In August of the same year Stephen Bulkley was indicted at York assizes for infringing the Licensing Act.Footnote 92 However, commercial opportunism probably lay behind the Proposals’ publication. As we saw above, Bulkley and Mawburne brought out divergent accounts of the Fire. Secretary of State Williamson's York informant, the deputy postmaster, Jonas Mascall, vouched for their loyalty. Bulkley was “well beloved amongst the ould Cavaliers;” Mawburne was “a quiet man.”Footnote 93 Both, however, were in economic difficulties. Not long before the Fire, the Stationers Company had fined Mawburne £95 for publishing and selling almanacs.Footnote 94 Neither the books available at Speed's shop, nor his publications, suggest a hostile attitude towards the monarchy.Footnote 95 His arrest occurred because he had inadvertently offended the government by republishing Cromwellian legislation within a work on manor courts. His losses then and in the Great Fire caused him spiraling financial difficulties which led him into infringements of other printers’ licenses, law suits, and debtors’ prison.Footnote 96
Knight's broadsheet must have seemed vendible. There was a national appetite for news and representations of the scale, cause, and meaning of the Fire,Footnote 97 which proclamations, sermons, and fast day books did not sate.Footnote 98 There was surely a market for publications about the future shape of the metropolis. Knight's Proposals were, after all, republished in York. Writing from Weymouth in October 1666, one John Pocock asked James Hickes, the Senior Clerk in the Post Office, to send him “ye Modll of the New Citty if in print.”Footnote 99 Pocock's desire could not be satisfied. Although Sir Positive At-All in Thomas Shadwell's The Sullen Lovers announced that he had devised “seventeen Modells of the City of London of my own making,” and Evelyn wrote in late September 1666 that “Every body brings his Idea,”Footnote 100 deliberations about such plans largely took place behind more-or-less closed doors, in City, Privy Council and parliamentary committees, at the Royal Society, among courtly coteries, and in meetings between the City surveyors and the Royal Commissioners for Rebuilding. They were not reported in the London Gazette. Parties to this process took some care not to release any interim conclusions to wider audiences.Footnote 101 The Court of Aldermen was very irritated when Alderman Richard Ford presented to the House of Commons committee “as proposalls from this Court for rebuilding the City,” papers “which were only in preparacon and not Agreed on nor ordered to be preferred to the … Committee or otherwise publiquely produced.” Ford was sternly dispatched to recover them; the former Lord Mayor, Sir John Lawrence, was sent to the Lord Chancellor to “excuse the preposterous delivery of the same proposals.”Footnote 102 Such texts were certainly not printed and published.
Although the reconstruction of the city ultimately involved a considerable range of social actors, it was court centered in conception. Charles presented decision making as an imperiously top-down process pursued “with a gracious impatience.” He declared that once the burnt-out area of the city had been surveyed, “We shal cause a Plot or Model to be made for the whole building through those ruined places.” This “being wel examined by all those persons who have most concernment as wel as experience … We make no question but all men wil be wel pleased with it, and very willingly conform to those Orders and Rules which shal be agreed for the pursuing thereof.”Footnote 103 The printing press was regularly used to promulgate such orders and rules. The Privy Council prohibition of new building without surveys was “Printed and Published;” the 1667 Act of Common Council listing the streets and lanes that were to be widened was “Printed and Published in all convenient places” in London.Footnote 104 The city commissioners for sewers commanded that their “Rules and Directions” “be forthwith imprinted and dispersed in all convenient places.”Footnote 105 The reconstruction of both city and St. Paul's was partly funded by collections orchestrated by the printed prayers for the October 1666 fast and through the use of thousands of printed briefs and letters sent into the country.Footnote 106 Print was thus used to disseminate regulations for metropolitan planning. As Knight learned, and as the reporting of his case underlines, it was not, and was not to be, used to debate the city's future shape or the organization and funding of its reconstruction. The situation changed considerably by the reign of George II.
Old Plans, New Times
Urban historians have shown how the provisions and the phraseology of the 1667 Statute for Rebuilding were a blueprint for English town planning for the next century.Footnote 107 Architectural historians have demonstrated how the more ambitious, unrealized 1666 plans for rebuilding London were commonly invoked in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, the texts of these schemes had disappeared into muniment rooms, libraries, and archives. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the process by which they re-emerged and gained a wider readership. In 1735 The Grub Street Journal reprinted Knight's proposal; fifteen years later it was republished as a broadside. Engravings of Wren's 1666 plan for London were produced in 1721 to 1724 and in 1744. Between 1748 and 1750 prints showing both Wren's and Evelyn's plans for post-fire London went on sale. In the process they all gained a much greater currency and took on new meanings as aesthetic objects, antiquarian curiosities, relics of skilled artists, and admonitory maps of architectural paths not taken.
The way in which Knight's Proposals acquired a wholly different resonance when it was republished on 8 May 1735 illuminates the nature of this transformation.Footnote 108 The Grub Street Journal was a weekly periodical full of often sardonic cultural commentary. It exemplified the textual spaces and cultural institutions which had sprung up in the decades since the Spectator and the Tatler. Its two thousand subscribers were used to reading about questions of aesthetic and literary merit.Footnote 109 (Knight shared a page with verses on Handel.) When its editors decided that republishing Knight's scheme would “not be unacceptable” to its readers, they were responding to a skirmish in the culture wars of Grub Street. In 1733–35 these focused not only on literature and painting but also on architecture.Footnote 110
Between October 1733 and April 1734 the Weekly Register, apparently seeking a distinctive place in the market, ran a lengthy polemical survey of London's buildings and funeral monuments.Footnote 111 Its author, James Ralph, the journal's editor, then turned it into a book, Critical Review of the Publick Buildings, Statues and Ornaments In, and about London and Westminster, adding a dedication to Lord Burlington.Footnote 112 Ralph's commentary was profitably controversial. It critiqued buildings across the capital, declaring that “No nation can reproach us for want of expence in our publick buildings, but all nations may for our want of elegance and discernment in the execution.”Footnote 113 No dwelling was too grand to escape censure. Marlborough House was an “instance of great expence, but no taste;” the Monument was “the noblest modern column in the world,” but “Nothing … can be more ridiculous than its situation.”Footnote 114 The Critical Review provoked something of a storm.Footnote 115 Rivals in the febrile and intensely self-referential world of the periodical press attacked Ralph, a “low writer” in Pope's opinion, as unqualified to make his confident assertions, seizing with malice and pretension-puncturing delight upon apparent lapses in logic or expression.Footnote 116 Much sport was had when this “MAN OF TASTE” lamented that London lacked an “octangular square”—how within the laws of geometry could a quadrangle have eight sides?Footnote 117 Such was the heat of this controversy that between November 1733 and February 1734 the satirical weekly, The Hyp-Doctor, temporarily renamed itself The Free-Mason in order to exploit architecture's sudden topicality.Footnote 118
The Grub Street Journal, a bitter rival of the Weekly Register, ran the most prolonged response. In July 1734 it carried the proposals of VITRUVIUS GRUBEANUS. Until March 1735 virtually every subsequent issue of the Grub Street Journal contained an acerbic and sniping commentary on metropolitan architecture and the Critical Review.Footnote 119 Written by the architect Batty Langley under the pseudonym Hiram, it matched Ralph in self-confidence and acerbity. Unlike the Critical Review, Langley championed indigenous British architectural expertise, the Gothic, and the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor. For example, Ralph dismissed the latter's St. Anne's Limehouse as one of London's “Gothique heaps of stone, without form or order.” Langley hailed it as “a most surprising beautiful structure.”Footnote 120
The Grub Street Journal reprinted Knight's Proposals just as Hiram's survey ended. It had apparently been sent in by a gentleman with “a large Collection of such curiosities.” Intriguingly, the editors wrote that the captain's scheme related “to the same subject” as Langley and the Critical Review.Footnote 121 In so doing they repackaged––for a general readership and “a publick” stirred up to give “attention” to debates about architecture and taste––a fiscally minded broadside originally addressed to king and surveyors.Footnote 122 By May 1735 this was perhaps a tired controversy, but the editors’ claim for Knight's relevance had some plausibility. A number of voices had begun to describe the unrealized schemes of 1666 as exemplifying the standards that the metropolis should adopt in order to hold its head up on the international stage. Ralph's Critical Review recounted how over the previous century England had become the center of architectural innovation and excellence. It characterized Wren as the genius who awoke “the spirit of science” in architecture, a man whose “glorious scheme” for the capital had been stymied by “the calamities of … circumstance” and by “the hurry of rebuilding.”Footnote 123 Seven years earlier Nicholas Hawksmoor had lamented how “if the Citizens had been capable of Advice, and pursued the Plan … prepared by that incomparable Architect Sir Christopher Wren,” then London would have been “regular, uniform, convenient, durable and beautiful’Footnote 124 ” Hawksmoor had extensive personal knowledge of Wren and his drawings,Footnote 125 and a few of his readers may have been able to look at engravings of the latter's plan for the capital, published in small numbers in the early 1720s and again in 1744.Footnote 126
That the Grub Street Journal reprinted Knight's Proposals in its entirety, including the financial sections with no conceivable relevance to contemporary debates, underscores how in the early eighteenth century the texts of these schemes for rebuilding London had antiquarian as well as architectural value. From its outset the Society of Antiquaries was concerned with the recording of buildings, objects and manuscripts, and its members were keen to have depictions of them.Footnote 127 Much of the pre-Fire city had disappeared almost as completely as its Roman antecedent; antiquaries were therefore fascinated by records of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London and by documents relating to the conflagration. George Vertue, for instance, produced a version of the “Agas” map of Elizabethan London, presented the Society with a lengthy account of Wenceslaus Hollar's mid-seventeenth-century long view of the city, and engraved John Leake's survey of the post-Fire city.Footnote 128 And after its vice president, Sir John Evelyn, brought in some of his grandfather's papers, the Society of Antiquaries sponsored the publication of two prints of post-fire proposals in 1748. Engraved by Vertue, one shows two of John Evelyn's plans for London, the other shows Wren's and a third plan of Evelyn's (figure 4).Footnote 129 These works artfully combined the documentary and the decorative. They included few allegorical figures and eschewed the image of a Phoenix to be found on the 1724 and the 1744 engravings of Wren's plan. Unlike the latter, which quoted Psalm 48: “walk about Sion, and go about her; and tell the towers thereof. / Mark well her bulwarks, set up her houses: that ye may tell them that come after,” they gave no religious gloss.Footnote 130 They closely followed Evelyn's manuscripts, rendering extramural streets with irregular dots, and adding no explanatory key when the original had none. However, Vertue wittily added acanthus leaves, architectural pediments, flames, and billows of smoke to provide elegant frames for these sketches. The Georgian gentleman could now hold a facsimile of these precious relics and reflect on what might have been. For the first time a wider (moneyed) public could compare the various proposals.
Plan of London, Designed by John Evelyn after the Fire of 1666, and a Plan for Rebuilding the City as Designed by Christopher Wren (London, Society of Antiquaries, 1748). © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Not long after this, the antiquary Richard Rawlinson extended the possibilities for such antiquarian and architectural comparison. He had found the “design of Knight” among Samuel Pepys's papers, and in 1749 he oversaw its engraving by Vertue.Footnote 131 That November, he showed the Society of Antiquaries “a proff Print”; the following March he presented them with “a Print of Dr. Knights Proposals.”Footnote 132 Although starker and less decorated, this is the same size as the Society's prints of Wren's and Evelyn's designs and renders lines in a similar fashion. Vertue included (and presumably did) the “Sketch” reconstruction of how London would have looked if Knight's scheme had been followed. Whereas, as we have seen, in the late seventeenth century Lodwick bound the Proposals with financial works, the format and the illustration of this new edition of Knight's work were, as its caption explained, designed to facilitate an easy comparison “with other Designs printed.” Its original grubbily fiscal dimension was silently passed over in favor of visual and aesthetic assessment.Footnote 133
The kind of a sustained and attentive inspection, alert to details and to differences between engraved designs, that this caption evoked and invited depended on visual and connoisseurial skills fostered by developments within the graphic culture of Augustan England. By the 1700s there was a healthy demand for engravings of metropolitan street scenes and city churches; views of significant buildings had become an important part of the newly expanded English print market.Footnote 134 But prints also enabled travel into the realm of unrealized architecture. By looking at them one could examine the image of a possibility, and contemplate an edifice before its completion, or after its potential form had been altered irrevocably by the appointment of a different architect. Such visualizations could be practical: schemes for public buildings in Oxford, Cambridge, and London were engraved in order to assist discussion of their proposed appearance by interested parties.Footnote 135 They could also be used to solicit favor or to gain political support for a project. Between 1701 and 1703 the commissioners for St. Paul's produced reams of engravings of the designs and prospects of the cathedral and sent them to members of Parliament.Footnote 136 But engravings could also facilitate purely imaginary journeys. Prints of Wren's 1666 plan, for instance, permitted those who could afford them to explore, admire, and evaluate the cityscape that might have been.Footnote 137 Demand for such images overlapped with the growing interest in, and market for, engravings of the drawings and designs of important artists and architects. This market depended in part upon the value attributed to the expressions of the designer's mind and pencil even if the designs were unrealized or unrealizable. Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus reproduced “original Designs of … Architects” as well as engravings of actual houses; 1727 saw William Kent's Designs of Inigo Jones; three years later Foudrinier, Vertue, and Isaac Ware were involved in producing Fabbriche Antiche, the sumptuous engraved facsimile of Palladio drawings owned by Burlington.Footnote 138
Boosted by the status of their names, Evelyn's and Wren's plans went on to have a wide circulation as book illustrations and separate prints.Footnote 139 Wren's, in particular, was frequently used in order to lambast the shortcomings of contemporary metropolitan architecture and the poor taste of the mercantile interest.Footnote 140 In 1749 the strongly monarchist John Gwynn brought out a version with a lengthy “Explanation” celebrating Wren's “Union of Beauty with Conveniency” and lamenting (like Hawksmoor) how this visionary scheme had been frustrated. Even though it was full of “Advantages that must at the first Glance strike every curious Eye,” the proposal had been “defeated by narrow spirited Contests” and by the “absolute Defect of Judgement and Taste, which prevail'd in the Reign of Charles II.”Footnote 141 In 1750 Parentalia, the volume of texts collected by Wren's son, and published by his grandson, Stephen, told how the architect's design, offering “the Opportunity … of making the new City the most magnificent, as well as commodious for Health and Trade of any upon Earth,” was thwarted by the “obstinate Averseness of great Part of the Citizens [sic].”Footnote 142
Evidently targeted at antiquarians, the 1750 version of Knight's Proposals sparked no such pungent commentary.Footnote 143 However, the history of the broadsheet's successive editions is a useful index of the changing ground rules governing the publication of propositions for London's built environment in this period. Although John Evelyn wrote polemical pamphlets linking architectural irregularity and political disorder in 1659 and 1662, such themes were generally not debated in the Restoration press.Footnote 144 Knight's punishment underlines the limits placed upon discussions about the reconstruction of London in 1666. However, by going to the trouble to announce the captain's imprisonment in the London Gazette, Charles II's regime also revealed an acute sensitivity to wider perceptions of its policies and a striking willingness to exploit and intervene in the world of public print which had expanded so dramatically during the 1640s and 1650s. The history of Knight's and others’ proposals in mid-Georgian England, by contrast, underlines how far Grub Street and the periodical press transformed the communities which adjudicated architectural questions. It suggests that a “critical public sphere” emerged after a political one––the exact opposite of Habermas's model. When early modern British historians debate the timing of the emergence of a public sphere, they are therefore addressing a question mal posée. A focus on the imagined, actual and––in Knight's case––inadvertent audiences of particular debates, particular texts, and particular cultural practices will ultimately be more productive.
